The short version: Ubuntu Summit 26.10 is on Thursday and Friday, 12 and 13 November 2026. It is free, online and streamed live from Canonical’s base in London. You can watch from home or join a local watch party, ask questions and follow along with the official timetable. Canonical is highlighting a talk on how local AI is transforming Ubuntu accessibility.
How to watch Ubuntu Summit 26.10
It is free and online: Canonical says the Summit is completely free to attend online, in keeping with the “remote first” format it has used since moving to two events a year, one around each Ubuntu release. This is the third Summit on that twice-yearly schedule. The physical event is in London, but you do not need to travel. The official page invites you to tune in to the London livestream from home, from an Ubuntu release watch party, or from anywhere else.
Register first: go to ubuntu.com/summit and use the Register for the Summit button. It takes you to the Ubuntu Summit category on Discourse. Graham Morrison’s announcement also ends with a free registration link.
During the event: remote attendees can ask questions, join interactive activities and take part in exclusive giveaways. If you would rather watch with other people, Canonical says local communities host watch parties and Summit Extended events around the world. Questions can also go to [email protected], or to the Summit room on Matrix at #summit:ubuntu.com.
Talks from the previous Summit are collected in this YouTube playlist. That is an archive of past sessions, not the 26.10 livestream. After this week’s event, recordings often follow the same pattern we saw in our Ubuntu Summit 26.04 recap.
Dates and times
Two days, streamed from London: the official timetable does not print a time zone label, but the event is broadcast from London. In November the UK is on GMT (UTC+0). South Africa Standard Time is two hours ahead, so add two hours for SAST. Afternoon slots on the timetable are written as 02:00 to 05:25 after a lunch break that starts at 12:20, so those are 14:00 to 17:25 UK time.
| Session | UK time (GMT) | SAST |
|---|---|---|
| Thursday coffee and chat | 08:30 | 10:30 |
| Thursday opening remarks (Jon Seager) | 09:30 | 11:30 |
| How Local AI is Transforming Ubuntu Accessibility | Thursday 11:30 | 13:30 |
| Thursday afternoon talks begin | 14:00 | 16:00 |
| Thursday lightning talks | 17:05 | 19:05 |
| Friday first morning session | 09:30 | 11:30 |
| Friday afternoon talks begin | 14:00 | 16:00 |
| Friday lightning talks | 17:00 | 19:00 |
| Closing remarks | Friday 17:20 | 19:20 |
Use that as a guide, and treat the official Ubuntu Summit 26.10 timetable as the last word if a slot moves.
What to expect
Fresh talks, not distant roadmaps: Morrison writes that the shorter cycle lets the Summit show what people are designing, developing and deploying now. The blog walks through the first Thursday morning sessions. Those confirmed talks are:
- Astra: an open-source observatory control software for exoplanet hunting (Peter Pihlmann Pedersen, 10:15 UK / 12:15 SAST). Open-source software used in observatories to detect and track exoplanets.
- ntfy: the joys of handling 4 million push notifications per day (Philipp Heckel, 10:40 UK / 12:40 SAST). An architectural look at scaling a high-throughput notification service.
- hax: AI coding agent as a lightweight Unix tool (Oleksandr Chekhovskyi, 11:05 UK / 13:05 SAST). How to fold large language models into traditional terminal workflows using Unix principles.
- How Local AI is Transforming Ubuntu Accessibility (Paul Geoghegan, 11:30 UK / 13:30 SAST). Canonical calls this its big news for Ubuntu: the integration of locally processed AI models to improve accessibility features on the desktop. The announcement does not say which features, what hardware is required, or when any of this might ship, so those details should come from the talk itself. If you already use local tools on Ubuntu, our guides to Myna speech-to-text and Lemonade local AI are a useful backdrop.
- Text to CAD: how I designed a robot with LLMs and open source tools (Jake Fitzgerald, 11:55 UK / 13:55 SAST). A practical look at using open-source tools and large language models in robotics design.
The rest of the two days: the official timetable also includes later talks on portable attestable VMs, building AI in the open, bringing Delta to the web with GPUI, Linux on Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 platforms, agentic computing on the CIX P1, Zephyr 26.04 LTS, attestation, time synchronization, profiling, NVIDIA Nemotron, and a Friday talk titled “Agentic Coding Without the Slop: 700K Lines in 7 Months.” Both days have lightning talks. We are not filling in descriptions that Canonical has not published; if a session matters to you, open its page from the timetable.
Ubuntu Summit 26.10 follows the 26.10 “Stonking Stingray” release cycle. For a recap of what landed in that desktop release, see Ubuntu 26.10 New Features.
Source: Ubuntu Blog: Ubuntu Summit 26.10, less than a week away.
