Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), was released on 29 October 2009 and is Canonical's eleventh release of the distribution and will be supported until April 2011.

In an announcement to the community on 20 February 2009, Mark Shuttleworth explained that 9.10 would focus on improvements in cloud computing on the server using Eucalyptus, further improvements in boot speed as well as development on the Netbook Remix.

The initial announcement of version 9.10 indicated that this release might include a new theme, however the project has been moved forward to 10.04, and only minor revisions have been made to the default theme. Other graphical improvements include a new set of boot up and shutdown splash screens, a new login screen that transitions seamlessly into the desktop, and greatly improved performance on Intel graphics chipsets.

In June 2009 Canonical created the One Hundred Paper Cuts project, focusing developers to fix minor usability issues. A paper cut is defined as: "a trivially fixable usability bug that the average user would encounter on his/her first day of using a brand new installation of the latest version of Ubuntu Desktop Edition."

The desktop installation of Ubuntu 9.10 includes, among other programs, GIMP 2.6, GNOME 2.28, Mozilla Firefox 3.5, OpenOffice.org 3.1, Linux 2.6.31, X.Org 7.5 and Empathy Instant Messenger instead of Pidgin. The default filesystem is ext4, and the Ubuntu One client, which interfaces with Canonical's new online storage system, is installed by default. It also debuts a new application called the Ubuntu Software Center that unifies package management. Canonical intends for this application to replace Add/Remove Programs (gnome-app-install) in 9.10 and possibly Synaptic, Software Sources, Gdebi and Update Manager in Ubuntu 10.04. Karmic Koala also includes a slideshow during the installation process (through ubiquity-slideshow) that highlights applications and features in Ubuntu.