ConnexionLinux App Release Roundup: May 2025
May has been and gone — but delivered another sizeable set of Linux app updates for us to enjoy, including a big update to system monitor tool Mission Centre and long-awaited version bump to system cleaner BleachBit. We also got new versions of web browsers Mozilla Firefox and Vivaldi; and the NordVPN Linux app gained a long-awaited GUI — but those weren’t the only releases of note in May 2025. Which is why I do these Linux app release roundups: I like to highlight app updates that didn’t warrant a headline of their own, but are still worth knowing about. […]
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Ubuntu 25.10 will replace the sudo command with sudo-rs, a new Rust rewrite designed to improve memory safety and security. What does this mean for users?
The final issue of Linux Format, the UK's best selling monthly Linux magazine, has gone on sale. The first issue launched in May 2000.
Ubuntu's announced new monthly snapshot releases. The development builds use new automated release processes, but won't replace stable releases.
A fix to Ubuntu's Software Updater tool is rolling out, resolving an issue where the 'install' button would disappear (and not return) until closed. 
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS users can make use of the Intel Graphics Preview to unlock support for newer Intel GPU features, like faster ray tracing and ML.
SuperTuxKart developers announce the first release candidate of SuperTuxKart 1.5, the next major version of the popular, open-source racing game.
Ubuntu Summit 2025 will be hosted in London, UK as Canonical makes big changes to the nature of the event, focusing more on remote participation.
Firefox 139 adds custom New Tab wallpapers, improved HTTP/3 performance, and AI-powered link previews, but nothing flashy - for the first time in a while.
Flexbar, a crowdfunded Touch Bar clone, has begun shipping to backers. Better yet: the team has added Linux support too, which is great to see.
Linux 6.15 kernel released with new NVIDIA Rust driver, major exFAT performance gains, controversial fwctl subsystem, and more hardware support.
No need to hunt through GNOME Settings to adjust Night Light temperature intensity as this nifty extension adds an intensity slider control in the Quick Settings menu.
Pocket, the popular "read it later" service Mozilla bought in 2017, is shutting down on July 8. Users have until October to export data. Why? Well… 
Canonical's kernel team has confirmed that Ubuntu 25.10 will run on the Linux 6.17 kernel - expected, following the distro maker's kernel cadence change.
GNOME is looking to jettison X11 session support - as soon as this year, which may impact Ubuntu's plans for its next long-term support release.
High Tide, an unofficial TIDAL client for Linux, now offers background playback, audio normalisation, synced lyrics and various visual improvements.
Fender Studio is a new free cross-platform DAW for Linux, backed by the iconic instrument maker. Learn what it can do and where to download.
Well here’s a turn up: Microsoft just released the source code for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), making the nifty tech open-source nearly a decade after development began. The tech giant announced the news at this year’s BUILD event, where it made some other open-source related announcements, including its own CLI text editor called Edit. Source code for WSL was quickly made available on the Microsoft GitHub. For those not familiar with it, WSL is a specialised virtualisation setup that lets Windows users run Linux distributions (like Ubuntu) inside of Windows, with tight system, software and hardware integration. Microsoft says […]
A new version of the Vivaldi web browser is available to download, carrying changes said to make our collective “everyday browsing smoother, faster, and just a little more delightful.” How does Vivaldi 7.4 make browsing the increasingly gamified, algorithmically manipulative and AI slopified modern web more ‘delightful’? Shortcuts. More specifically, Vivaldi 7.4 gives you the ability to “fine-tune” how shortcuts behave on a per-site basis. If you want a website’s shortcuts to take priority over Vivaldi’s, you can. “It’s about putting you in control, making sure your shortcuts work where and when you need them most”, says Jon von Tetzchner, […]
The elementary OS 8.0.1 release back in March brought an appreciable set of improvements with it, including a much-improved Files app, but as ever in development: the work never stops! Project founder, Danielle Foré, recently recapped a few smaller features that have been issued to users of the Ubuntu-based Linux distribution as software updates, including: If you run elementary OS 8.x, install your updates and eat your greens, you should be benefitting from the changes listed above (if you don’t have them, go update to get ’em). But Danielle also gave us an early-look at an exciting new app and […]
Ubuntu 25.10 'Questing Quokka' will ship Loupe and Ptyxis as default image viewer and terminal apps in the upcoming October release.
A number of new personalisation features have been added to the Firefox New Tab page in the past year, including the ability to pick a background image from a small set of hand-picked pics and solid colours. Pleasant though those curated images are, they’re not to everyone’s tastes. This is why Mozilla’s engineers have been beavering away on a few enhancements to provide greater customisation — you can “test” them in the latest stable release, which is Firefox 138 at the time I write this. The big change is that you can now “upload your own image” to use as […]
Canonical commits to donating $120k to the open source developers building the projects and tools that help power the Ubuntu ecosystem.
NordVPN has announced a major update to its Linux app, adding a much-requested GUI front-end that makes it easier to control, configure and monitor secure connections. Linux users have been able to use an official, comprehensive command-line interface for NordVPN for many years. The addition of a graphical user-interface (which can be used alongside the command-line one) should help the company broaden access to its services by making it easier to use NordVPN without needing to look up commands and type them in. NordVPN say the Linux GUI provides “visually rich elements and ease of use without compromising advanced features. […]
If you’ve been itching to do an in-place upgrade to Ubuntu 25.04 from 24.10, your patience has paid off — upgrades have been re-enabled. For those unaware, Ubuntu was forced to halt upgrades to the new Ubuntu 25.04 release a few hours after its release on April 17 after major bugs were reported, affecting users across different Ubuntu flavours were discovered. Users were left with broken desktops (environments, that is – upgrading didn’t smash motherboards); had third-party packages removed that shouldn’t have been, and users on Qt-based flavours couldn’t upgrade using the GUI tool due to missing dependencies. Less Plucky, […]
A few months back I reported that Kagi, the company behind the paid, private and privacy-focused search engine of the same time, is porting its Orion web browser to Linux – now we have our first look at how its Linux GUI is shaping up. A recent development screenshot of Orion’s WIP Linux build was shared by Kagi devs—pictured in the hero image above—and it reveals that Orion for Linux will use GTK4/libadwaita for its GUI. A logical (and expected) choice: GTK4 is a modern, widely-used toolkit across Linux distros, with consistency at its core. And libadwaita provides widgets and […]
If you’re running Kubuntu 25.04 and want the latest fixes the KDE Plasma 6.3.5 release, you can use the Kubuntu backports PPA to get ’em. KDE Plasma 6.3.5 popped out a few weeks back, serving as the fifth and (likely) final bug-fix release prior to the next major release, KDE Plasma 6.4. Over the weekend, Kubuntu developers announced that the Kubuntu backports PPA has added the requisite packages for Kubuntu 25.04. Thus, Kubuntu users can add (or enable) the PPA to get the update now, rather than wait for the update to filter out through the usual software channels. The […]
Ubuntu is one of the leading Linux distributions for RISC-V hardware thanks to Canonical’s strategic partnerships with companies like DeepComputing – who just announced a powerful new RISC-V AI PC running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The DC-ROMA RISC-V AI PC—apologies for the caps, it’s how it’s stylised—is built around the company’s new RISC-V Mainboard II, which is designed for use in the Framework 13″ and 14.2″ laptops. Though designed for Framework laptops, owning one isn’t a requirement. A nifty enclosure allows this mainboard to be used as a regular PC you connect to a monitor, keyboard and mouse. The board itself […]
Roll credits on Totem, roll camera on Showtime — GNOME developers have officially cast a new video player in GNOME 49, out in September. Per an upstream merge, GNOME has formally replaced the aged GTK3 Totem video player with the newer, fresher and all-the-more modern GTK4/libadwaita app Showtime in its Core Apps1 lineup. Like its predecessor, Showtime’s user-facing name in GNOME 49 will be changed to the generic moniker of Video Player (I’d wager most of us will continue to call it by its codename, the same way we refer to Files as Nautilus). Showtime may be new in GNOME’s Core Apps, but it’s […]
The Wellbeing controls available in Ubuntu 25.04 make it easy to get periodic prompts to move your butt or look away from your screen — you might not want them enabled all the time, though. Wellbeing controls were one of the flagship features of GNOME 48. As well as screen time monitoring (with controls to set a screen time limit, and turn the display greyscale when it’s reached), you can enable reminders to take a break and move. Alerts telling you to get up and move may be helpful during the day, but at nighttime when you’re, say, engrossed in […]
More details on the makeup of the upcoming Linux Mint 22.2 release have been revealed, including its new codename (for those who track those). Linux Mint 22.2 (due to be released in late July or early August) has been officially named ‘Zara’, so continuing distro lead Clem’s codename convention of choosing female names in (somewhat) alphabetical order for each new version. I only say somewhat since Linux Mint 22.1 release was dubbed ‘Xia‘, while Linux Mint 22.2 jumps straight to ‘Zara’. Even with my lackadaisical attention to letter ordering, I know a ‘Y’ comes between ‘X’ and ‘Z’. Perhaps Clem […]
Raspberry Pi has reduced the price on all 4GB and 8GB Compute Module 4 boards by $5-10, making embedded projects more affordable to try out.
Huawei has unwrapped its latest Linux notebook, the MateBook X Pro 2024 Linux Edition — alas, it’s only available in China. The Windows-free MateBook X Pro 2024 uses the same hardware as the Windows version, but clocks in at CN¥300 cheaper thank to a lack of Windows license fee and a government subsidy discounting tech that, from what I can gather, use a domestic OS. Chinese consumers can reportedly claim an extra discount of CN¥2000 on the purchase price as part of a national subsidy to promote usage of homegrown tech in general. With US sanctions in play, Microsoft is reportedly not […]
Open source system cleaning app BleachBit has put out its first major update in more than a year, adding improved cleaning capabilities, security fixes, and stability buffs. For the benefit of those with dusty memories, BleachBit is a free, open source system cleaner for Windows and Linux, written in Python and GTK 3. Similar to other apps of its type, BleachBit helps free up disk space by cleaning out caches, cookies, and other transient cruft. It can also delete files securely, wipe unallocated disk space, and squeeze Firefox and Chrome’s SQLite databases to improve performance. BleachBit 5.0, released this week, expands its […]
Google’s search deal with Mozilla is such a sizeable portion of its overall income that without it, Firefox would struggle to compete – or even survive, say Mozilla. It’s no secret that Google has paid Mozilla handsomely for its search engine to be set default in the Firefox web browser for decades. Mozilla’s financial report for 2023 revealed that the amount of money accrued from its “search deals” that year made up roughly three quarters of its entire income (specific amounts and from whom is confidential; it’s lumped together). While that figure is a bit less than it used to be, […]
Linux system monitoring app Mission Center has put out its first update in 6 months – and it’s a big one! Mission Center 1.0 adds new hardware tracking, UI tweaks, and refactors its backend to provide palapble performance improvements, boost the app’s responsiveness and minimise ‘time deviations between refresh cycles’. The latter may sound a tad dry on the ‘excitement’ scale but, arguably, it’s a big thing: a real-time monitoring app is used for, well, real-time monitoring and those tweaks ensure hardware and system process info shown is more precise. For a closer lookout the “visible” changes in this release, […]
If you use the Papirus icon theme on Ubuntu, you’ll be pleased to hear a new version is available to download. Frequent updates are a major reason why the Papirus icon set is so popular with Linux users. After all, it’s annoying to switch to a stylish icon set that doesn’t have icons for most of your apps, ruining the vibe. Not so with Papirus. It’s perpetually expanding its coverage through regular updates. Papirus’s second update this year adds 69 new icons—nice—and 18 updated ones. It also includes packaging and DE changes, and deprecates its ePapirus variants since elementaryOS 8 […]
Canonical has announced the first official Ubuntu desktop image for the Qualcomm DragonWing platform. A beta image of Ubuntu 24.04 desktop compatible with Qualcomm Dragonwing QCS6490 and QCS5430 processors, and specifically tailored for the Qualcomm RB3 (Gen 2) Vision Kit and RB3 (Gen 2 Lite) Vision Kit is available for testing. Ubuntu 24.04 server images were previously available for the same model vision kits, so it’s the addition of desktop builds that is an interesting development. Canonical say marrying a full Ubuntu desktop experience married with “powerful AI acceleration with high-performance graphics” in the Dragonwing devices provides “a powerful development environment […]
Development today opened on Ubuntu 25.10 “Questing Quokka”, the next short-term release of Ubuntu, due for release in October. Canonical engineer Utkarsh Gupta fired the figurative starting pistol for developers in a post to the Ubuntu mailing list, announcing the opening, and the enabling of auto-sync. “As usual, we expect a large influx of builds and autopkgtests in this initial period, which will cause delays. Please help fixing any breakage that occurs,” Gupta adds. It’s only been a couple of weeks since the Ubuntu 25.04 release, but the dedicated devs who spent 6 months diligently shaping that release don’t get much time […]