OMG! Ubuntu!

GIMP 3.2.8 released with improved text tool, performance

Joey Sneddon — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 21:59:26 +0000

GIMP 3.2.8 is out, the fourth maintenance update in the current stable series, which first launched in March 2026. No shiny new features ship, as fixes and fine-tuning are the primary focus. Major work is happening alongside maintenance efforts, but that work is targeted at the next major series. What’s changed since the v3.2.6 update in September? GIMP 3.2.8 offers better initial positioning of dialogs, makes the Preferences page load faster and allows the creation of colourful semi-transparent borders via the Add Border filter. This update also bolsters the text tool’s support for right-to-left (RTL) languages. Arrow keys behave correctly and direction […]

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Canonical adds FIDO2 hardware key support to Launchpad

Joey Sneddon — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 17:05:51 +0000

Developers who use Launchpad can now use a USB FIDO2 security key to restrict API access, which makes any stolen login details useless without it. Launchpad is, as I’m sure you know, where Canonical builds Ubuntu’s package, hosts code, PPAs and many other things that end up on a users’ system. Developer tools, like lp-shell and ubuntu-archive-tools, log in with a saved token, normally kept as a text file or in the desktop keyring on the developer’s machine. Anyone who gets hold of it, malware included, could act as them, with the permissions it carries. Canonical’s Jürgen Gmach says “for most people that […]

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Affinity is coming to Linux (but there’s no ETA yet)

Joey Sneddon — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 03:33:52 +0000

Affinity, the free design suite made by Canva, is coming to Linux. No release date yet, but the company say the port is already in 'active development'.

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Linux Mint is ‘bringing back’ hibernation to laptops

Joey Sneddon — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 00:00:03 +0000

Linux Mint’s next release will offer a hibernation mode, so you can close your laptop mid-session and not worry about returning to a drained battery. A new Sleep Modes page in the System Administration tool in Linux Mint 27, out this December, makes it easy to enable hibernation and ensure it’s setup the way you need. Current versions of Linux Mint suspend when you close the laptop lid. Though snoozing, the device continues to use some power. If the battery runs out while sleeping, the suspended session is kaput – an outcome “worse than a normal shutdown”, say Mint. Hibernation […]

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Raspberry Pi announce another eye-watering price hike

Joey Sneddon — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 16:51:25 +0000

Hot off the back of price rises it announced in October, the Raspberry Pi Foundation today said the cost of its Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computers is going up again. From November 2026, the Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB RAM rises by $80, now priced at $385 from approved resellers. The model launched at $120 back in 2025, rose to $205 in early 2026, and later incremental increases got it to $305. And it’s not the only model whose price tag will be making wallets wince. A $40 price hike hits the Raspberry Pi 5 Compute Module (CM5) with […]

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Linux App Release Roundup (October 2026)

Joey Sneddon — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 23:59:00 +0000

October’s Linux app releases brought plenty of treats, a couple of tricks and mercifully few frights. In this post, I recap the updates that landed last month. There were other spooks in the shadows with a spotlight. October gave us a double-whammy of Firefox and Calibre updates, with JEPG XL support added in the former and AI reading voices in the latter – among other changes in both. It also delivered a ‘fully rebuilt’ ONLYOFFICE 10.0 with optional AI tools and KeePassXC 2.8, which added its long-awaited support for Wayland auto-type. System cleaning tool BleachBit fixed issues with admin cleaning […]

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Enlightenment desktop 0.28 released with better networking

Joey Sneddon — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 19:18:50 +0000

Enlightenment 0.28 has been released, the first major update to the open-source desktop environment since early 2025. Given the time between this and the previous 0.27 release, the changelog is suitably lengthy. Networking and audio stack enhancements, UI and UX tweaks and, of course, plenty of bug fixes are listed – no jaw-dropping UI changes, though. v0.28 adds a new Network Manager module. This supports connecting to and managing wireless, wired and Bluetooth networking connections, as well as VPNs. It plays signal strength, security and other connection details. On the audio side, a native PipeWire mixer is available alongside the […]

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Sanket lets you redesign GNOME’s date menu and Quick Settings

Joey Sneddon — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 20:51:16 +0000

Sanket is a GNOME Shell extension that lets you rejig how the desktop’s date menu, calendar, notifications and Quick Settings look and behave – and then some. It can put notifications beneath the Quick Settings menu in a floating island, or embedded inside of it. Quick Settings toggles can shrink to dots when space is tight, and expand again as and when needed, Android-style. As well as shrinking Quick Settings pills to dots, other menu tweaks let you show up two rows of controls and choose if volume and brightness sliders remain visible in compact mode. An ‘edit’ mode lets […]

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Ubuntu 27.04 ‘Tenacious T-Rex’ opens for development

Joey Sneddon — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 21:15:12 +0000

Development on Ubuntu 27.04, codenamed ‘Tenacious T-Rex’, has officially begun. The tenacious archive is now open (30 October 2026), with auto-sync from Debian set to pull in a tranche of updated packages since the Ubuntu 26.10 release. Over the course of the next six months, those will be tested, set and form the basis of the final, stable release. Ubuntu 27.04 is scheduled for release on 22 April 2027, with a beta preceding it on 1 April (not a joke). Ubuntu 26.10 saw its beta delayed by a week, but hopefully the new development cycle has fewer hiccups. What to […]

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This app lets you manage Nothing & CMF earbuds on Linux

Joey Sneddon — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 03:15:04 +0000

Adjusting active noise cancellation (ANC) on Nothing or CMF earbuds means taking out your phone, opening the official mobile app and twiddling a setting there. EarA, a new open-source tool, aims to nix that palaver. It’s a GTK4 app (with a CLI for those who prefer the terminal), and lets you change settings on earbuds like the Nothing Ear (a) and CMF Buds 2, from your Linux desktop. Noise control/ANC levels can be switched with a click. There are toggles to disable personalised ANC and in-ear detection and use low latency. Gesture behaviours (on supported devices) can be set as […]

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We added a manual dark mode toggle to the site (cos you asked)

Joey Sneddon — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 01:01:00 +0000

You may have noticed OMG! Ubuntu looking a little cleaner lately. Earlier this month, Sam and I finally rolled out a refreshed site backend, along with some changes to the bits you look at when you come here. Boring stuff to read about, I know. But a few of the changes were done because readers asked for them, so I wanted to quickly mention them. Firstly, the mobile homepage is now info-dense. Recent posts appear in a compact list; you can see more of the latest articles at a glance rather than needing to scroll (and scroll, and scroll, etc) […]

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Gelly is a GTK desktop music player for Jellyfin and Navidrome

Joey Sneddon — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 23:22:00 +0000

If you run your own music streaming server using Jellyfin or Navidrome/Subsonic, and you want a solid desktop player to browse and stream your library in, Gelly is worth a look. It bills itself as a “native, lightweight music player” for the aforementioned streaming servers (along with compatible ones). It’s written in Rust and GTK4/libadwaita and, as any good player should, it lets you browse, play and control music playback. And it does all of that with a modern design and layout. Having recently set up Jellyfin on my Raspberry Pi 4 (to replace its ageing installation of dust and […]

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Ghostty 1.4 brings big Linux improvements

Joey Sneddon — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 04:08:04 +0000

A major new release of Ghostty, the open-source terminal emulator, is out. Ghostty 1.4.0 brings a varied set of changes after seven months of development. There are welcome performance optimisations on Linux and macOS, a more capable SSH implementation and an easier way to rearrange tab splits – dragging them! This update to the Zig-based app offers complete Kitty graphics protocol support (including animation and relative placements) – the first terminal besides Kitty to do so. If you use TUI tools or script to render images in the terminal, this is a major feat. Devs say performance is improved hugely […]

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Ubuntu Core Desktop ‘accelerating’ development ahead of 27.04

Joey Sneddon — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 19:38:29 +0000

Canonical has announced it’s ‘accelerating’ development of Ubuntu Core Desktop, its immutable, snap-based version of its desktop OS. Ubuntu Core Desktop was announced in 2023 and made available in preview for enthusiasts to try. But a lack of of obvious progress and direction (not to mention up-to-date builds) had left many wondering if Canonical was running cool on the idea. Now, things are finally kicking up a gear, says Jon Seager, VP of Engineering at Canonical. A newly-formed Ubuntu Core Desktop team within the company will work on bringing Ubuntu Core Desktop into shape, with builds available ahead of the […]

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Ubuntu plans firmware HWE to prevent issues on older kernels

Joey Sneddon — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 23:15:24 +0000

Ubuntu is planning a new linux-firmware-hwe package, in an effort to reduce the risk of firmware updates for newer kernels causing problems for users running older ones. On Ubuntu long-term support (LTS) releases, you can stick with the standard (GA) kernel it was released with for the duration of its support period, or you can install the HWE update, which brings newer Linux kernel versions to existing Ubuntu LTS releases. Right now, both kernels share the same firmware package, which means firmware updates designed to work with HWE kernels can cause problems for users who stick with the GA kernel. Ubuntu developer Juerg Haefliger noted that a firmware backport for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, intended for its Linux 7.0 […]

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Firefox 159 released with Wayland Linux fixes

Joey Sneddon — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 01:28:51 +0000

Firefox 159 is out, with a fresh set of improvements and some Linux-specific fixes. Now that Mozilla’s browser hews to a faster release cadence, with two releases a month rather than one, some changelogs may look minor on their own, as they’re smaller, if more frequent slices. So what’s changed? The Passwords tool in the browser sidebar (added as an option in Firefox 145) is now shown by default. This lets you find credentials in the same window as a web page, no mousing through menus or juggling with floating dialogs. It’s also a smidgen easier to search your open […]

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Trash talking Ubuntu’s confusing British bin labels

Joey Sneddon — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 23:58:00 +0000

Every operating systems needs somewhere to put the files you delete (and give you chance to rummage through to find the ones you want to keep). But, if you’re a Brit using Ubuntu, the name of that place varies based on where you look. It seems Ubuntu’s UK English translation team don’t agree on what to call a bin. The dock hover label says Trash. That opens a Rubbish Bin in the file manager, and that show an action bar button to Empty Wastebasket… Right-click on a file in the tr… Er, file holding area, and you have the choice […]

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Ubuntu users can now file bugs against specific Launchpad PPAs

Joey Sneddon — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 23:41:00 +0000

Launchpad now offers bug tracking for personal package archives (PPAs), making it easier for users to report issues specific to software within a PPA. Why does that matter? Well, not all PPAs are maintained by their upstream counterparts – folks who, frankly, aren’t always minded to care about quirks in their software that might be down to someone else’s packaging methods. Plus, PPAs are often used to provide newer or experimental versions of software that the version in the standard Ubuntu repositories, and different PPAs can distribute different versions of the same software. With the new tracking support, users can […]

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