OMG! Ubuntu!

Canonical joins the Open Secure AI Alliance

Joey Sneddon — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 01:02:37 +0000

Canonical recently joined the Linux Foundation’s Open Secure AI Alliance to help make open-source security tools for AI systems and autonomous agents. The alliance formed in July 2026 in response to the security breach at Hugging Face, when OpenAI models undergoing a safety test broke out of their sandbox to access Hugging Face’s systems – aided by config errors rather than super-intelligence. Commercial AI models refused to help in assessing attack logs due to their guardrails, so Hugging Face engineers had to run an open-weight model on their own infrastructure to complete their analysis – and underscore the need for […]

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Arduino’s Ubuntu-powered $299 edge AI board just sold out

Joey Sneddon — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 18:08:36 +0000

Arduino's VENTUNO Q went up for pre-order priced from $299. The development board runs Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is built around Qualcomm's Dragonwing IQ8 platform.

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LibreOffice 26.8 set a new first-week download record

Joey Sneddon — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:15:46 +0000

LibreOffice 26.8 was download more than 1 million times in its first week of release, which The Document Foundation say is the highest first-week figure of any release of the free office suite. Released on 26 August, LibreOffice 26.8 saw 1,031,162 downloads from the official website, which provides installers for Windows, macOS and Linux, during the first seven days. As many Linux users update via other sources, like the Snap Store, Flathub and PPAs, the real figure will be even higher than that. “This is the highest number of downloads in the first week of any LibreOffice release”, The Document […]

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Linux App Release Roundup (August 2026)

Joey Sneddon — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 22:18:27 +0000

August saw a number of slew of notable Linux app updates, and in this post I roundup a few that might have passed you by. But unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock you’ll have already heard about Firefox 153, the big OpenShot 4.0 release with colour grading and the latest update to the ebook manager Calibre letting you generate new book covers using online generative AI. August also saw the Mastodon client Tuba pick up a stack of new features and LibreOffice 26.8 debuted a new paragraph composer engine. We also saw NVIDIA GeForce NOW app leave beta while […]

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Firefox 155 brings AI-powered Smart Window to more countries

Joey Sneddon — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 02:34:22 +0000

Mozilla Firefox 155 is released, making Smart Window available in USA, Canada & France. Plus, blocked tracker counts, container reordering and Linux fixes.

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Ubuntu’s IRC support channels to be ‘sunset’, some aren’t happy

Joey Sneddon — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 22:25:00 +0000

Getting is planning to ‘sunset’ IRC as an official support method, and some long-time users aren’t happy. The recently Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS release announcement didn’t include a link to the Ubuntu Support IRC channel under its “if you have a question” section – though, from looking, the last announcement to list IRC was the one for Ubuntu 24.10). That led to questions on if the Ubuntu support IRC channel is still an official community support option (the Help app in Ubuntu 26.04 still has links to pages which mention IRC). Aaron Rainbolt, an Ubuntu Community Council member, said the omission […]

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Why Ubuntu 26.04 upgrades from 24.04 are delayed (until Sept)

Joey Sneddon — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 14:33:00 +0000

If you’re wondering why you can’t do a directly upgrade to Ubuntu 26.04 from 24.04 yet, despite the Resolute Raccoon’s first point release being live, there is a reason. Canonical’s Oliver Reiche said in the mailing list announcement for Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS that upgrades will be delayed by a few weeks to allow couple of backports to land. These will “address regressions in a recent version of rust-coreutils”. Users on Ubuntu 25.10 are not affected by this; upgrades from 25.10 went live in April. Unlike the ISOs, which target a fixed release date, upgrades don’t. When the ISO drops that doesn’t mean […]

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OpenShot 4.0 adds colour grading, recording dock and Qt 6 support

Joey Sneddon — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 22:39:47 +0000

OpenShot 4.0 sees the open-source video editor add colour grading tools, a recording dock for audio and screen capture and new AI effects.

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Calibre ebook manager lets you generate AI book covers

Joey Sneddon — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 22:59:40 +0000

Calibre, the open-source ebook manager, now lets you generate AI ebook covers for content in your library, using genre prompts or custom ones.

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Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS is now available to download

Joey Sneddon — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 23:06:40 +0000

Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS downloads are out. The first point release to the 'Resolute Raccoon' sees an ISO refresh with fixes, like disk encryption PIN skipping.

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Chrome moves a step closer to an official Flatpak

Joey Sneddon — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 22:50:37 +0000

If you’ve installed Chromium or Google Chrome as a Flatpak, you’ve installed an unofficial, community-maintained package done independently of the search giant – that could be about to change. Chromium’s build system is now able to generate Flatpak packages of the browser itself, though its developers caution that the change does not mean official Flatpak support is coming. A commit made by Google’s Tom Anderson this week adds the necessary packaging scripts and a build flag (enable_flatpak) to produce a .flatpak package rather than a .deb or .rpm, but that flag is off by default (for now). If enabled, Google’s […]

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First Look: Ubuntu’s new AI voice typing feature ‘Myna’

Joey Sneddon — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 15:33:24 +0000

AI-powered voice typing is coming to Ubuntu in Myna, a speech-to-text feature that lets you talk into any valid text field. It’s still a work in progress, but I grabbed an early build to see how it’s shaping up. With Ubuntu 26.10 now entering its freeze, the user-facing pieces of myna are falling in to place. This week, a new GNOME Shell extension was added to default installs to provide an on-screen indicator when myna is listening and recording. To be clear: Myna is not a GNOME Shell extension. It’s an orchestrator that loads an AI model, handles hot-key activation, […]

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LibreOffice 26.8 brings paragraph layout changes, draft view + more

Joey Sneddon — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:07:42 +0000

The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 26.8, a major new version of the open-source office suite for Windows, macOS and Linux. Among the changes is a new Paragraph Composer. This improves the way Writer handles justified text. In many word processors, justified text is stretched to create straight edge on both sides of the page, but this can look uneven. Some lines packed tight, others gappy. But with LibreOffice 26.8’s new Paragraph Composer, spacing gets balanced several lines at once, rather than one at a time, which can result in a better overall look: Other typography changes in LibreOffice 26.8 include native […]

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A hidden Ubuntu feature that stacks desktop icons, macOS-style

Joey Sneddon — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:02:12 +0000

Ubuntu’s Desktop Icons NG (DING) extension has a little-known way to bring order to a chaotic desktop: stacks. Stacks groups multiple files of the same type in a collapsible icon, e.g. images in one stack, PDFs in another and so on. Folders don’t get grouped, and if there is only one of a type of file on the desktop, it is not stacked. Expanding a stack by clicking on it reveals all files in the stack (other file icons bump out of the way). Multiple stacks can be expanded or collapsed at the same time, and stacks can be left […]

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Ubuntu 26.10 ‘Stonking Stingray’ hits feature freeze

Joey Sneddon — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 01:07:09 +0000

Ubuntu 26.10, codenamed ‘Stonking Stingray’, entered feature freeze on 20 August – though the formal announcement arrive later than usual. From this point onwards, development focus shifts from landing major changes to improving them, along with the rest of the package set, ahead of the final, stable Ubuntu 26.10 release in October. “Ideally, you should all now be focusing on bug fixing rather than getting new features into the release”, said Paride Legovini, engineer at Canonical, in a post on the Ubuntu developer mailing list on 24 August, 2026. However, the final makeup of Ubuntu 26.10 – set to offer […]

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Ubuntu 24.04 gets a big open-vm-tools update

Joey Sneddon — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 15:39:00 +0000

A major update to open-vm-tools, a package that integrates Linux virtual machines with VMware hypervisors, is rolling out to users of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. “Without SRUing the newer version users get issues running on more recent hypervisors”, Canonical’s Lena Voytek explained in a backport request. It’s a full backport from Ubuntu 26.04 LTS to support platform enablement to benefit those running 24.04 LTS. The open-vm-tool package goes from v12.3.5 to v13.0.10 (the same version in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS). VMware’s open-vm-tools package enables clock sync with the hypervisor host, ‘graceful’ power management for clean shutdowns, vSphere API, shared folder support, relays […]

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10-year-old bug action triggered an Ubuntu Phone dev reunion

Joey Sneddon — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 21:27:01 +0000

A decades-old bug on Ubuntu’s Launchpad marked as invalid at the weekend led to an impromptu reunion for many of Canonical’s former engineers. Bug #1589796 was filed in 2016 by a user who’d spent £700 on Ubuntu phone and tablet hardware but, on visiting the official website, found no documentation to tell him how to use them. Canonical axed the Ubuntu Phone project in 2017, leaving this bug unresolved. Until now. Adolfo Jayme Barrientos, on the Ubuntu bug triage team, marked the bug invalid this weekend, closing it with a comment to explain (nearly a decade late) that phone “efforts […]

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Postcard is a new email client for GNOME, built with AI

Joey Sneddon — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 02:05:38 +0000

Postcard is a new email client for GNOME sporting a modern design reminiscent of Geary. The app is the work of a solo developer, gxanshu on GitHub, who is upfront about using AI coding tools to bring this “modern mail client” to life. Postcard is written in Python with GTK4/libadwaita. It uses imaplib and smtplib for networking, a local SQLite index for searching, WebKitGTK for rendering HTML and libsecret for keeping passwords safe. It’s also open source, so the code is inspectable. Visually, Postcard should look familiar to fans of the Geary email client, as it uses a similar multi-column design: folders […]

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