Ubuntu 26.10 to Preinstall Rust-Based Sequoia PGP, With GnuPG Replacement as a Future Goal
Ubuntu 26.10 will ship with Sequoia PGP preinstalled as Canonical works toward eventually replacing GnuPG as the distribution's default OpenPGP toolchain, though the switch has not yet happened.
GnuPG remains the default in this release. The Ubuntu 26.10 release notes describe default status for Sequoia PGP as a future goal, and Canonical has not said when, or whether, the replacement will be completed.
The preinstallation follows a pattern at Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, which has been selectively replacing C-based system components with equivalents written in Rust, generally without changing what the software does. The OpenPGP implementation is the latest part of the stack to be addressed.
Sequoia PGP was started in 2017 by three former GnuPG developers who chose to write a new OpenPGP implementation in Rust rather than keep evolving GnuPG's existing codebase. Unlike GnuPG, which is distributed primarily as a command-line tool, Sequoia is designed as a library that other software can call directly. Sitting on top of that library, sq handles encryption, decryption, signing and key management, while sqv performs signature verification, filling the roles that gpg and gpgv play in GnuPG.
The two implementations also follow different standards tracks. Sequoia implements RFC 9580, the 2024 revision of the OpenPGP standard. GnuPG has continued from the RFC 4880 branch, pursuing its own newer extensions and the LibrePGP specification rather than adopting RFC 9580 as its primary standard.
Because Sequoia arrives preinstalled rather than as the default, Ubuntu 26.10 users will have both toolchains available on the system, with GnuPG continuing to handle the tasks it has performed by default. The account of the change comes from It's FOSS, which reported the release notes and the plan to make Sequoia the eventual default.