ConnexionCOSMIC Desktop Alpha 6 Released with Many Changes
A new alpha release of System76’s emergent Rust-based COSMIC Desktop environment is out with a clutch of important improvements, bug fixes, and new features in tow. Although COSMIC is very much a work-in-progress (i.e., unfinished, feature incomplete, and lacking polish) some intrepid folks already use it as their daily driver —though most folks eager to sample it will get a better impression from the upcoming COSMIC beta. Still, these monthly(ish) alpha milestones provide a an easy way to peer through the portal to see how the COSMIC desktop UI, UX, and burgeoning app ecosystem is shaping up. Below, I recap […]
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The Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS release is now available to download, albeit one week later than initially planned. Serving as the second point release in the current Ubuntu 24.04 LTS series, Ubuntu 24.04.2 compacts the slew of security, bug, and software updates pushed out to the Noble Numbat since the last point release ISO was spun in August 2024. Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS also brings an updated hardware enablement stack (HWE). This is composed of a newer Linux kernel and updated graphics drivers—Linux 6.11 and Mesa 24.2.8 respectively—back-ported from Ubuntu 24.10. Why do point releases exist? Ubuntu LTS versions are supported for a […]
Mozilla Corporation’s president, Mark Surman, today announced plans to tackle what he says are ‘major headwinds’ facing the company’s ability to grow, make money, and remain relevant. “Mozilla’s impact and survival depend on us simultaneously strengthening Firefox AND finding new sources of revenue AND manifesting our mission in fresh ways,” says Surman. To do this, Mozilla plans—no groaning—to ‘diversify’ its efforts. How? It will continue to invest in privacy-respecting advertising; fund, develop and push open-source AI features1 in order to retain ‘product relevance’; and will go all-out on novel new fundraising initiatives to er, get us all to chip in […]
A new version of the Mesa graphics library has been released. Mesa 25.0 features Vulkan 1.4 support, which the team bill as the ‘flashiest addition’ in this new development release as it spans Anv (Intel), Asahi (Apple), Lavapipe (software), NVK (NVIDIA), PanVK (Mali), RADV (AMD), and Turnip (Qualcomm). The OpenGL 4.6 API also sees implementation in Mesa 25.0 though the version reported will depend on the hardware driver in use since not all drivers support all features OpenGL 4.6 requires. AMD RDNA4 graphics sees initial support in the RadeonSI Gallium3D (OpenGL) and RADV (Vulkan) drivers is present, the former worked […]
A new version of the Power Profiles Daemon (PPD) was uploaded to the Plucky archives today, and should soon make its way out to Ubuntu 25.04 daily builds —but what’s changed? The power-profiles-daemon is what those of who run Ubuntu (or Linux Mint 22.1, which finally added PPD) interact with when we switch power mode on the fly, be it using a GUI button, setting, or toggle, or the command line. The latest 0.30 release adds a couple of notable changes, though nothing as substantive (to end-users) as the various AMD-targeted tune-ups the previous release delivered. Still, improvements are improvements. Some […]
This week sees the (belated) release of Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS, the first point release update in the noble series to bring an updated hardware enablement (HWE) stack with it. Ubuntu’s HWE backports newer1 Linux kernel and Mesa GPU drivers to LTS users to ensure the latest LTS release works with the latest hardware. Soon, HWE updates may bundle a wider range of Intel graphics driver updates. Canonical engineer Shane McKee this week put forward a proposal to expand Ubuntu HWE updates to loop in a broader set of graphics driver packages specifically supporting Intel hardware in LTS releases2. The move […]
When you log in to the Ubuntu 24.10 desktop an audio clip greets you —a lengthy audio clip slowly building to a plinky-plonky crescendo that you (and those around you) might tire of having to listen to! You can turn the Ubuntu startup sound off, or swap it for an audio clip more to your taste/amusement. For a sizeable part of Ubuntu’s early years musical startup and login sounds were a staple feature. The distro decided to disable them in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS following feedback that, actually, they can be rather annoying or even embarrassing at times! 12 years later, […]
A new version of Tiling Shell, the flexible window snapping assistant for GNOME Shell, is available. Tiling Shell v16.2 now surfaces nifty ‘Window Suggestions’, a feature introduced in last month’s v16.0 release, when using edge tiling. Edge Tiling (as no doubt you well know) is triggered by dragging a window to the sides of the screen. Ubuntu’s “Enhanced Tiling” feature shows a Tiling Popup when window snapping to make it faster to tile other open apps to the remaining tile spaces without needing to manually drag them to screen edges. Window Suggestions is the same idea, but arguably more useful: […]
Ever looked at Ubuntu’s default icon theme Yaru and found yourself thinking: “Eh, some of those icons look too big”? —No, can’t say I had either! But it turns out some of Yaru’s icons are marginally oversized. Yaru uses 4 different shapes across its app, folder and mimetype (file) icons, with the shape used based on what works best for whatever ‘design motif’ fits. (e.g., a vertical rectangle is used for document file icons as it is more analogous to a sheet of paper). The shapes are: Of the 4 shapes the most common in Yaru is the ‘square’ (with […]
If you were expecting Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS to drop February 13, I come bearing some a punch of awk news: the release has been delayed. Canonical’s Utkarsh Gupta reports that an ‘unfortunate incident’ resulting in some of the newly spun Ubuntu 24.04.2 images (for flavours) being built without the new HWE kernel on board (which is Linux 6.11, for those unaware). Now, including a new kernel version on the ISO is kind of the whole point of the second Ubuntu point release. It has to be there so that the latest long-term support release can boot on and support the […]
GNOME rolled out a huge revamp to its official website today, and I have to say: it’s a solid improvement over the old one. The official GNOME website has an important role, serving as both showcase and springboard for those looking to learn more about the desktop environment, the app ecosystem, developer documentation, or how to get involved and support the project. Arranging, presenting, and meeting all of those needs on a single landing page—and doing it in an engaging, encouraging way? Difficult to pull off—but GNOME has. The new design looks flashy and modern. It’s more spacious and vibrant, […]
A new version of the slick Clapper media player is out with several neat improvements Not newly new, I should say. I hadn’t run a flatpak update in Ubuntu I an age so I only jus noticed an update pending for this nifty little media player. But I figured I’d write about it since it’s been around 10 months since its last major release (save a bug fix release last summer). So what’s new? Well, Clapper 0.8.0 intros a new libpeas-based plugin system in its underlying Clapper library (which other apps can make use of to playback media, as Mastodon client […]
A new version of the KDE Plasma desktop environment is out and, as you’d expect, the update is packed with new features, UI tweaks, and performance boosts. KDE Plasma 6.3 is the fourth major update in the KDE Plasma 6.x series and it also marks the one-year anniversary of the KDE Plasma 6.0 debut – something KDE notes in its announcement: One year on, with the teething problems a major new release inevitably brings firmly behind us, Plasma’s developers have worked on fine-tuning, squashing bugs and adding features to Plasma 6 — turning it into the best desktop environment for […]
A new version of ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors, a free, open-source office suite for Windows, macOS, and Linux, is now available to download. ONLYOFFICE 8.3 brings a bunch of new features and nimble enhancements spread throughout the full suite, which is composed of word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, form, and PDF editing apps. Such as? Well, the headline feature is the ability to open and work with Apple iWork documents (.pages, .numbers, .key) and Hancom Office files (.hwp, .hwpx) . Opening these documents will convert them to OOXML to support editing. It’s not possible to edit the native files themselves, nor export/save edits back […]
Finding yourself annoyed at those ‘window is ready’ notifications which pop-up when you open some apps in GNOME Shell on Ubuntu? If so, you can disable them by installing a GNOME Shell extension. Now, notifications are helpful—heck, vital when they inform, alert, or indicate that something requires our immediate attention or actioning. But “app is ready” notifications? I don’t find them anything other than obvious. I’m not amnesic; I know the app is ready – I just opened it! They aren’t predictable either. Some apps show them, others don’t. It depends on the app’s metadata, how fast app initialisation is (you’ll see them more […]
A new version of Ghostty emerged this week and in this post I run-through the key changes. For those unfamiliar with it, Ghostty is an open-source terminal emulator written in Zig. It offers a “fast, feature-rich, and native” experience — doesn’t claim to be faster, more featured, or go deeper than other native terminals, just offer a competitive combo of the three. Given it does pretty much everything other terminal emulators do, fans faithful to more established terminal emulators won’t find Ghostty‘s presence spooks ’em into switching. It’s a passion project there to be used (or not) depending on need, taste, […]
LibreOffice 25.2 has been released, this year’s first major update to the leading open-source office software for Windows, macOS, and Linux. As you’d expect, the update delivers a sizeable set of changes spread throughout the productivity suite, including notable UI changes, accessibility improvements, and more important interoperability buffs to support cross-suite workflows. It’s important to remember that open-source software like LibreOffice doesn’t appear out of thin air; it’s made by humans, many unpaid, others paid to work on specific parts only. We all have personal wish-lists of features and changes we want our favourite open-source apps to add, but we […]
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) user? If so, you will be pleased to hear that Ubuntu is now available in Microsoft’s new tar-based distro format — no need to use the sluggish Microsoft Store. Canonical announced the news today, noting that “the new tar-based WSL distro format allows developers and system administrators to distribute, install, and manage Ubuntu WSL instances from tar files without relying on the Microsoft Store.” In not relying on the Microsoft Store for distribution, it’s less hassle for enterprises to roll out (and customise) Ubuntu on WSL at scale as images packaged in using the new […]
Right on schedule, a new update to the Mozilla Firefox web browser is available for download. Last month’s Firefox 134 release saw the New Tab page layout refreshed for users in the United States, let Linux go hands-on with touch-hold gestures, seeded Ecosia search engine, and fine-tuned the performance of the built-in pop-up blocker. Firefox 135, as is probably intuit, brings an equally sizeable set of changes to the fore including a wider rollout of its new New Tab page layout to all locales where Stories are available: It’s not a massive makeover, granted. But the new layout adjusts the […]
Do you use the official Spotify DEB on Ubuntu (or an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution like Linux Mint)? If so, you’ll be used to receiving updates to the Spotify Linux client direct from the official Spotify APT repo, right alongside all your other DEB-based software. Thing is: if you haven’t checked for updates from the command line recently you might not be aware the that security key used to ‘sign’ packages from the Spotify APT repo stopped working at the end of last year. Annoying, but not catastrophic as it—thankfully—doesn’t stop the Spotify Linux app from working just pollutes terminal output […]
Fans of the Papirus icon theme for Linux desktops will be happy hear a new version is now available to download. Paprius‘s first update in 2025 improves support for KDE Plasma 6 by adding Konversation, KTorrent and RedShift tray icons, KDE and Plasma logo glyphs for use in ‘start menu’ analogues, as well as an assortment of symbolic icons. Retro gaming fans will appreciate an expansion in mime type support in this update. Papirus now includes file icons for ROMs used for emulating ZX Spectrum, SEGA Dreamcast, SEGA Saturn, MSX, and Neo Geo Pocket consoles; and Papirus now uses different […]
GNOME has announced a change to its default UI and monospace fonts ahead of the upcoming GNOME 48 release — a typographic turnabout that won’t impact Ubuntu users directly, though. Should you feel a sense of deja vu here it’s because GNOME trialled a font switch last year, during development of GNOME 47. Back then, it replaced its home-grown Cantarell font with the popular open-source sans Inter font (trivia: used by Zorin OS). The change was reverted prior to the GNOME 47 due to various UI quirks, coverage issues, and compatibility (thus underlying the importance of testing things out prior […]
Want to find out if the text you’re reading online was written by an real human or spat out by a large language model (LLM) trying to sound like one? Mozilla’s Fakespot Deepfake Detector Firefox add-on may can help give you an indication. Similar to online AI detector tools, the add-on can analyse text (of 32 words or more) to identify patterns, traits, and tells common in AI generated or manipulated text. It uses Mozilla’s proprietary ApolloDFT engine and a set of open-source detection models. But unlike some tools, Mozilla’s Fakespot Deepfake Detector browser extension is free to use, does […]
Linux users hunting for a native client to stream music from TIDAL will want to keep an eye on a promising new open-source app called High Tide. High Tide is an unofficial but native Linux client for the TIDAL music streaming service. It’s written in Python, uses GTK4/libadwaita UI, and leverages official TIDAL APIs for playback. TIDAL, often positioned as the ‘pro-artist music streaming platform’, isn’t as popular as industry titan Spotify (likely because it doesn’t offer a ‘free’ ad-supported tier) but is nonetheless a solid rival to it in terms of features and catalogue breadth. Windows, macOS, Android and […]
The Thunderbird email client is making its monthly ‘release channel’ builds the default download starting in March. “We’re excited to announce that starting with the 135.0 release in March 2025, the Thunderbird Release channel will be the default download,” Corey Bryant, manager of Thunderbird Release Operations, shares in an update on the project’s discussion hub. Right now, users who visit the Thunderbird website and hit the giant download get the latest Extended Support Release (ESR) build by default. It gets one major feature update a year plus smaller bug fix and security updates issued in-between. The version of Thunderbird Ubuntu […]
Ubuntu’s key developers have agreed to switch to Matrix as the primary platform for real-time development communications involving the distro. From March, Matrix will replace IRC as the place where critical Ubuntu development conversations, requests, meetings, and other vital chatter must take place. Developers asked to ensure they have a presence on the platform so they are reachable. Only the current #ubuntu-devel and #ubuntu-release Libera IRC channels are moving to Matrix, but other Ubuntu development-related channels can choose to move –officially, given some projects were using Matrix over IRC already. As a result, any major requests to/of the key Ubuntu […]
A new beta release of open source graphics editing app Pinta is available for testing. Pinta 3.0 (beta) gives fans of this cross-platform raster image editor, which is directly inspired by the iconic Paint.NET Windows app, an early opportunity to try out the changes it brings — and there’s a fair few! The most impactful change in Pinta 3.0 is the most obvious one: it’s revamped UI. Newly ported to GTK4 and libadwaita, Pinta 3.0 swaps a traditional window frame and text-based menu bar for a button-based header bar. Long-time users may might themselves taking a bit of time to […]
Did you ever own (or covet) one of those e-ink Pebble smartwatches of yore? Well, good news if you did: Google today open-sourced the PebbleOS operating system it used (minus proprietary bits) having acquired Pebble’s assets when buying Fitbit in 2021 (and Fitbit bought Pebble in 2016, but more on that in a mo’.) More open source code in the world is good news, and it means anyone can reuse PebbleOS to build their own smartwatches, or learn from perusing the code how the former Pebble team tackled building a solid real-time OS on such limited hardware. What made Google […]
A new version of the Varia download manager was released at the weekend – an update described by its developers as probably the “biggest since the first release”. I’ve written about Varia before and, as I said then, I appreciate that the idea of using a dedicated download manager app on the desktop isn’t as obvious today as it was a decade ago. Most people have fast internet connections, meaning even large downloads complete in seconds, and the built-in download tools in web-browsers are sufficient. Plus, we all tend to use streaming media services these days thus negating the need […]
Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS is scheduled for release on February 13th – in time for Valentines Day, aww. Canonical’s Florent Jacquet shares the date on the Ubuntu Developer mailing list today along with a note to developers to be mindful of their package uploads to noble in the coming weeks. As a result, if you’re using the latest long-term support release you may notice a slightly drop-off in the number of non-essential updates Software Updater bugs you to install between now and February 13. This allow devs to create a snapshot and test it properly. Ubuntu point releases rarely deliver new […]
Vivaldi web browser has just released its first major update of the year – a corker it is, too! Fans of the Chromium-based browser—though Vivaldi Technologies doesn’t appear to be part of the new Linux Foundation-led Supporters of Chromium Browsers project—will discover a bunch of improvements to the Dashboard feature Vivaldi 7.0 delivered. A new weather widget can be added to see current conditions and hourly and weekly weather forecasts for custom locations, plus the ability to set a preferred temperate, precipitation and wind speed unit (celsius, mm, and mph ftw). Keeping things scandi-cool, the Norway-based browser makes use of […]
I won’t lie: it’s easy to add or remove startup apps, commands, and scripts in Ubuntu. Just open the Startup Applications tool, click ‘Add’, and away you go. But while Ubuntu’s utility is adequate, it’s not as user-friendly as similar tools available elsewhere. Sure, Startup Applications is equipped with the critical customisation fields a user will need to curate a set of software/services to start at login — SSH agent, VPN app, password manager, backup script, resolution tweaks, and so on — but it’s rather rote. Take the way you add an app to start at login: Ubuntu’s Startup Applications […]
VirtualBox 7.1.6 is out, the third maintenance release to the VirtualBox 7.1 stable series first released in September of last year. Headline offering in this update is initial support for the recently released Linux kernel 6.13 in Linux Guest Additions, plus improved support for the Linux 6.4 kernel to fix graphics freezing when using VBoxVGA adapter, and Linux 6.12 fixes for vboxvideo. Linux guest screens no longer flicker when using VMSVGA graphics adapters, Windows 11 24H2 guests no longer throw BSODs, and entering a custom proxy server in a guest OS’ settings will now take effect, which some will be […]
A fresh stable release of Wine — the open-source compatibility layer that makes it possible to run Windows apps and games on Linux and macOS — has been uncorked. More than 6,000 thousand changes were distilled in Wine 10.0, changes collected, collated, and curated over the past 12 months of Wine 9.x development releases. For those who’ve supped the dev cycle builds, the bulk of what’s new in Wine 10.0 will be familiar. Wine is not the ‘everyday essential’ it was in years past. Back then, web-based services weren’t as capable, so folks were wedded to specific pieces of Windows software, […]
Ubuntu is mulling a switch to Matrix from IRC to handle real-time development discussion. Canonical’s Robie Basak has begun a discussion on the Ubuntu Developer Mailing list regarding a potential switch, in an effort to find consensus for or against such a move. But he urges devs in favour not to abandon Ubuntu IRC channels just yet. “First let’s discuss, and if we decide to move, then we can pick a date to move the “official” place for realtime Ubuntu developer conversation,” he writes. If Ubuntu’s development discussions — that is, discussions between approved Ubuntu developers, Canonical engineers, etc — […]
A clutch of new customisation and configuration options were added to Refine, a GTK4/libadwaita app in the vein of GNOME Tweaks (but better), over the weekend. Refine is compelling due to its goal of offering the “convenience to add or remove options without touching a single line of source code” — though for a GUI option to exist it must be hooking into a variable within GNOME, i.e., it can’t magic up a toggle to make it rain glitter! A brief bit of turbulence ensnared those attempting to run the tool on Ubuntu after I covered it in early January […]
The first new kernel release of the year has arrived — yes, Linux 6.13 has gone stable. Linux kernel 6.13 adds, as ever, a vast array of improvements, from an updated Raspberry Pi graphics driver promising speed gains, to lazy preemption logic, expanded Rust support and new drivers for a host of hardware, peripherals and digital doohickeys. Plus, as with all new kernel releases there’s ongoing work to support new and upcoming CPUs and GPUs from industry titans Intel and AMD. Linus Torvalds quietly confirmed the Linux 6.13 release in an email to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), noting that as […]
A major new release of Linux Mint is now available to download. Linux Mint 22.1 is the first update in the Linux Mint 22.x series and, like that version, is built on top of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and uses Linux Kernel 6.8 (though the distro plans to release newer kernel updates more often by opting-in to the Ubuntu HWE). Being based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS means Linux Mint 22.1 receives on-going updates until July 2029. Though it features few foundational changes, Linux Mint 22.1 brings improvements to what sits on top – a new version of the Cinnamon desktop, Wayland-friendly features, new […]
Doing anything right now? Oh, you’re reading this – appreciated – but once you’re done go and install the pending update to Rsync, pushed out to all supported versions of Ubuntu desktop and server this week. Rsync is a command-line tool preinstalled in all versions and flavours of Ubuntu. It’s used for data-efficient copying and synchronising of files between locations, be it local or remote. You might not (knowingly) use it (it’s not a GUI app) it’s there, on your system. And the fact it’s there is important. This week, security researchers at Google disclosed major vulnerabilities in the Ubuntu […]
When GNOME 48 is released in March it will debut with a brand-new audio player. Per a recent merge request, Decibels graduates from GNOME Incubator to GNOME Core Apps as part of GNOME 48, making the software something GNOME recommends downstream Linux distributions include to give users a fully-featured GNOME experience. You may be familiar with or even using Decibels already. I wrote about the app in late 2023, and it’s been available to install from Flathub for almost as long. For anyone not familiar with it, Decibels is a no-frills audio player designed for the GNOME desktop (but can […]