OMG! Ubuntu!

LightDM returns from the dark with first release in 4 years

Joey Sneddon — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 16:16:04 +0000

LightDM, Ubuntu’s former display manager, has had its first new release in four years – and the first under a new set of maintainers. LightDM v1.33.0 is a ‘catch up’ release that adds Qt6 support (Qt5 still works, don’t worry) and clears a backlog of fixes that had built up since the previous release in 2022. There shouldn’t be any breaking changes either, per the release notes. While it might sound like a sudden revival of a legacy effort, LightDM is still widely used by Linux distributions and desktops. LightDM: what is it? LightDM is a backend that handles logging […]

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GNOME 51 brings a floating search overlay to the Shell

Joey Sneddon — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 23:33:46 +0000

GNOME 51, due out in September, could include a redesigned search experience. Presently, when you trigger a search from the GNOME Shell overview, a dedicated search results screen replaces the one you were looking at, either the workspaces or app picker. But a change targeted for GNOME Shell in v51 plans to change that. Modern GNOME Shell is designed around a ‘semantic’ model, where elements visibly enter and exit from a specific place (with animations providing cues) so you know how one screen relates to the next. Under this model, search results would appear in an overlay that ‘spawns out […]

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ChatGPT desktop app is now available for Linux (in preview)

Joey Sneddon — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:33:19 +0000

OpenAI has announced a preview release of the official ChatGPT Desktop app for Linux. Compared to using ChatGPT in a browser tab, the GUI desktop app can run Codex in your local repos, hook into and control other apps via extensions, handle ChatGPT Work-related tasks and probe your local files without you having to upload things elsewhere. In an email, OpenAI said that ‘Linux has been one of the most-requested platforms’ for its desktop app, and with this launch it’s finally available on all major operating systems. ChatGPT desktop app for Linux joins Anthropic’s Claude desktop app for Linux, which entered […]

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Linux Mint will delete your old kernel versions automatically

Joey Sneddon — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:50:25 +0000

Linux Mint has announced an overhaul in its kernel management features, and will automatically delete old kernels once a week to free up space. In current versions of the distro, kernel package tools are included in the Update Manager, but are being moved into the System Administration tool on both standard and LMDE versions. The distro will also now track kernels by series, rather than individual releases. You’ll get to choose which kernel series are tracked and how many older kernels within each series the system should keep (in addition to the one you’re booted on; it doesn’t yank out […]

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Linux Mint 22.3 HWE released with Linux kernel 7.0

Joey Sneddon — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:38:18 +0000

A refreshed Linux Mint 22.3 (Zena) OS installer is available for download, powered by Linux kernel 7.0. The distro made the first Linux Mint 22.3 HWE ISO available in March, with an installer that boots Linux 6.17 by default. That image remains available to download alongside the newest one, which boots Linux 7.0, and the original Linux Mint 22.3 (Zena) ISO that boots Linux 6.14. The Linux Mint HWE images provide the same core Linux Mint 22.3 experience, still based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, but it all sits on top of a refreshed hardware stack. Existing Mint users don’t need […]

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Windows 11’s Weather app uses ~1GB RAM, Linux apps a fraction

Joey Sneddon — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 17:09:43 +0000

I was flummoxed to read a report on how much memory Microsoft’s Weather app uses on Windows 11 – more than 1GB just to render what is, ostensibly, a fancy table of stats. Less surprising is that the GNOME Weather app does the same job for under a fifth of the reported Windows figure, while Mousam, my go-to weather app, uses around a third of Microsoft’s effort (and with a nicer design, too). Not everyone on Windows 11 is seeing memory usage as high as the 1.1GB figure given in Windows Latest viral post. But when I check on my […]

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Orion for Linux beta update adds private browsing and link previews

Joey Sneddon — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 02:49:24 +0000

Kagi has released a new beta of Orion for Linux, a WebKitGTK-based port of its popular browser for macOS and IOS. Orion for Linux v0.4.1 builds on the v0.3.0 public beta, released in May, adding more features found on its macOS and iOS versions and improving existing ones. The new beta adds working private windows, a functional (if bare-bones) download manager and a toolbar overflow menu. The overflow menu lets you hide buttons out of the way but without making them hard to reach. Orion’s link preview feature also makes its way to Linux. This isn’t the ‘AI summary’ sort […]

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Dynamic Music Pill adds word-by-word lyrics highlighting

Joey Sneddon — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 02:44:51 +0000

An updated version of Dynamic Music Pill, the GNOME Shell extension to put now playing track info and lyrics in your panel or dock with animated flourishes, is out. If you’re prone some desk-side crooning, Dynamic Music Pill v1.3.0 brings two new lyrics provider APIs, BetterLyrics and BiniLyrics, with TTML parsing to provide word-by-word karaoke-style highlighting. If there’s word-level synced lyrics for the track being played, the extension shows them in the applet controller (click on the album art inside of to access the lyrics view) or the panel, depending on how you’ve configured it: Dynamic Music Pill can show […]

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Calibre 9.13 fixes broken ebook search in the content server

Joey Sneddon — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:07:51 +0000

A new bug-fix release of Calibre, the open-source e-book manger, view and converter, is available for download. Calibre 9.13 fixes a number of PDF-related issues, including a conversion error that could occur on Linux distributions shipping an ‘ancient’ version of the libxml2 library, which is mainly older Debian installs. The cause was a clash between Qt’s GPU detection and Calibre’s PDF parser, which both need different versions of libxml2. Calibre now preloads the version it needs before Qt’s check can interfere, per the commit message. A regression in the Calibre 9.x series was causing internal links in PDF documents to […]

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Resources (Linux system monitor) adds new PowerPC, NPU stats

Joey Sneddon — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 23:43:43 +0000

Resources 51 beta, the system monitor Ubuntu now uses, adds AMD NPU stats, PowerPC CPU temps and alternative memory-usage metrics.

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Rhythmbox 3.5 lets you sync your podcast listening across apps

Joey Sneddon — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:22:14 +0000

Rhythmbox 3.5.0 is out and it now lets you sync podcast subscriptions and listening progress across apps – the standout feature in the music player’s first major release in nine months

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Papirus icon set gets first update in over a year with 80+ new icons

Joey Sneddon — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:54:11 +0000

Fans of the Papirus icon theme will be pleased to hear there’s a new update – the first since May 2025. Papirus’s first update in 2026 (the tardiness of which its maintainer, Serhii Yeremenko, apologises for) brings more than 80 new or updated icons spanning applications, games and user-interface icons, plus new file-mimetypes and revised symlinks. Frequent updates are why Papirus icons are popular with Linux users, and they have been for many years. Often, Linux icon packs debut with a big bang; launch momentum fuels a couple of revisions, but then things go quiet as people and maintainers move on. Papirus […]

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Dropbeat is yet another flashy music controller for GNOME Shell

Joey Sneddon — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 23:31:15 +0000

Dropbeat is a new riff on an old tune, a panel-based music applet for GNOME Shell that gives you an alternate way to pause, play and skip tracks in MPRIS-friendly Linux media players. Applets of this ilk are legion, and this panel applet doesn’t do anything that different to ones you may have tried in the past or currently use. But it does do some things differently. When installed, it adds a button to your panel that, when clicked, “shows a cool card to control your media player”, to quote the project’s GitHub. Dropbeat uses imagemagick to generate the blurred […]

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Ubuntu’s turning another system Deb package into a snap

Joey Sneddon — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 21:56:12 +0000

Ubuntu is moving hwctl from Deb package to snap-only distribution, a change Canonical says improves security and desktop integration.

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Curl dropped from Ubuntu 26.04 minimal cloud images by mistake

Joey Sneddon — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:34:37 +0000

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS’s minimal cloud images have been missing curl – accidentally, it turns out, so Canonical has put it back. Curl is a commonly-used command-line tool for fetching files from remote servers. It’s called on in countless install scripts, CI pipelines and one-liners you’ve no doubt pasted into your terminal without thinking twice about. But the package has been missing from the server-cloud-minimal images of 26.04 to date. That caught those running pared-back cloud installs unawares, breaking expected workflows, has it had been available in previous versions. The manual fix is to install curl from the repos which, in […]

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Linux App Release Roundup (July 2026)

Joey Sneddon — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 22:48:31 +0000

If you spent July dodging the summer heatwave, catch up on the best Linux app releases and updates you might have missed last month in this roundup. You likely already know about the Firefox 153 release, with its “new” container tabs confusing those who swear they’ve had ’em for ages. That update also enabled rounded window bottom corners on GTK-based Linux desktops, Ubuntu included. Slick system monitor Mission Center also dropped a big update, so if you like swotting over resource stats, don’t sleep on checking that out. Something you can safely sleep on: Anthropic’s Linux beta of its Claude […]

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Ubuntu’s ready for Alberta and Morocco time zone changes

Joey Sneddon — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 16:36:07 +0000

Times are literally changing and Ubuntu’s keeping pace – well, kinda. In November, most of Canada will turn its clocks back an hour, but the Western Canadian province of Alberta won’t. It’s decided to stay on daylight saving time permanently rather than fall back to standard time. Meanwhile, in September, Morocco is doing the reverse: after eight years of running an hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, it’s going back to GMT. So Ubuntu has updated its tzdata package so that users in either location – or anyone travelling to them – have systems in sync time-wise. The update refreshes the database […]

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Starling is a new Linux desktop built using AI in six months

Joey Sneddon — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Some Linux desktop environments were developed over decades, others in just a few years. Starling, which made the rounds online this week, claims to have been built by just one person in six months using AI coding tools. What’s more, a preview build is available as a .deb to install on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Yup, this isn’t a ChatGPT mockup but a real working demo. According to the project’s GitHub and website, a developer used AI to rewrite Flutter’s framework layer from Dart to Swift, and left its C++ rendering engine unchanged. A traditional desktop uses a windowing system but […]

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