Canonical Declares That 2026 Is the Year of Ubuntu Linux on the RISC-V Desktop, Server, and More

Canonical has declared 2026 the year of Linux on the desktop — or, rather, the RISC-V desktop, claiming that we'll see a shift from lab- and enthusiast-focused trials into real mass-adoption of consumer products that combine the popular Linux kernel with processors built on the free and open source RISC-V instruction set architecture.

"If 2025 was all about readiness, 2026 will be about scale," Canonical's Ubuntu and hardware partnership teams predict in a joint announcement. "More RISC-V systems will move from labs and pilots into commercial products, from cloud to edge, and Canonical is ready to enable our partners and customers to leverage the best of open source technology and run it seamlessly on RISC-V. RISC-V's promise has always been about openness, choice and long-term innovation. Canonical is proud to play a long-term role as a builder, collaborator and steward of the RISC-V ecosystem."

RISC-V, pronounced "Risk Five," is a reduced instruction set computing (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) that aims to offer competition to proprietary incumbent ISAs like Arm and x86 at all levels — from ultra-low-power embedded systems all the way up to supercomputers. The core ISA is entirely free and open, while implementations can be open, like the Hazard3 cores found in the Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller, or proprietary, like the cores designed and sold by RISC-V pioneer SiFive.

Recent updates to the ISA have brought with it everything required for desktop- and server-class use, with the RVA23 specification having been picked by Canonical as a baseline for being supported by official Ubuntu Linux releases. "RVA23 was ratified by RISC-V International in 2024 to align with modern standards for computing architectures and ISA[s], providing a common feature set for the most demanding modern workloads," Canonical explains. "We knew that truly meaningful support for RISC-V meant that we had to keep in step with the latest RISC-V developments. That's why we made upgrading Ubuntu to RVA23 a priority in 2025 so that Ubuntu users could quickly take advantage of the latest features of RISC-V."

With RVA23 hardware now available, Canonical has declared that it's time for RISC-V to go mainstream — and, naturally, is pushing its own Ubuntu Linux as ideally positioned to drive that shift, building on existing partnerships between Canonical and hardware vendors. "What made these collaborations successful was not just that Ubuntu 'runs' on the hardware," the company explains, "but the fact that Canonical engineers work in partnership with leading hardware vendors to co-design solutions, validate platforms, and enable cutting edge use cases."

While RISC-V has enjoyed considerable success in the microcontroller field — with Espressif moving all its designs across to RISC-V from its previous proprietary Tensilica cores, NVIDIA having shifted vast numbers of its embedded microcontroller cores in graphics hardware to RISC-V, and WCH Electronics enjoying great success with its ultra-low-cost RISC-V chips — it has been a harder sell in the high-performance market. Whether Canonical is right and its time has finally come, then, remains to be seen.

More information is available in Canonical's blog post.