Linux 7.3 lands Sunday after its release candidates caught a silent data-loss bug

On October 12, 2026, Linus Torvalds released the seventh and likely final release candidate of Linux 7.3, with the stable release expected October 18. This RC cycle surfaced a bug that had been silently dropping writes since Linux 6.6; if you are on an LTS kernel, stay there — 7.3 is not a long-term kernel.