OMG! Ubuntu!

Ubuntu flavours now need a beta release to ship

Joey Sneddon — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:00:18 +0000

Ubuntu has announced an ‘important policy update’, making beta releases mandatory for all Ubuntu flavours, no exceptions. Most flavours already hit the beta milestone every six months without issue. But until now a flavour that missed the deadline could still be granted a one-off exception. During the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle, that’s what happened with Ubuntu Kylin, the Chinese-orientated spin that uses the UKUI desktop. It missed the Beta window but still made the final release. That won’t happen again. To get an official stable release, a flavour now must have a beta release out the same time as every […]

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Audacity 4.0 beta lets you test its new (nicer) Qt interface

Joey Sneddon — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 22:54:00 +0000

Audacity 4’s first public beta arrived this month with the biggest design change the iconic open-source audio editor has seen in decades. The audio editor’s interface, built on wxWidgets since the project began, now runs in Qt. However, the audio engine which handles file I/O, project storage and the built-in effects, uses the older codebase, wired up to the new frontend via a module called au3wrap. In a sense, Audacity 4 is a new look atop the same core engine codebase (albeit tightened and cleaned up). The Github changelog frames it as “ground-up rewrite” using Qt, but that only to […]

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Firefox 152 debuts with new-look Settings, odd way to mute tabs

Joey Sneddon — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:35:45 +0000

Mozilla has released Firefox 152 with revamped Settings and faster ways to share web content – plus, a peculiar way to mute noisy tabs. The update is available from today (15 June, 2026) on Windows, macOS and Linux, as well as for Android and iOS (mobile versions have different features and are not covered in this post). Firefox 152’s headline change is the revamped Settings page. We knew this was coming as Mozilla’s been teasing it for over a year. The company says the new look offers “streamlined organisation, clearer groupings, and improved navigation for easier customisation”. Since many users find […]

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KDE Plasma 6.7 release brings per-monitor desktops, revives Oxygen

Joey Sneddon — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:43:31 +0000

KDE Plasma 6.7 has been released, and it brings a feature many of its users have been requesting for decades: independent per-screen virtual desktops. The latest stable update also sees a classic KDE theme revived, supports simultaneous HDR and ICC profiles and packs in an assortment of usability, UI and performance tweaks. This release is dedicated to Eric Laffoon, a longtime KDE supporter who passed away in May 2026. Users of the Ubuntu-based KDE Neon and rolling-release distributions like Arch will be able to install Plasma 6.7 in the coming days. Kubuntu 26.04 LTS users should check the Kubuntu Backports […]

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Firefox’s free VPN lifts data limit, offers 28 server locations

Joey Sneddon — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 17:05:18 +0000

You can now use Firefox’s free built-in VPN without a monthly data limit – but only until August 31, 2026. Mozilla is also temporarily expanding the list of VPN server locations available to proxy your browsing traffic via, up from the current set of 5 locations to a more generous 28. The extra server locations during the promotion: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden and Thailand. The Firefox 151 release in May added the option to select from a list of VPN servers (though it’s […]

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Linux 7.1 brings new NTFS driver, Steam Deck OLED audio fix + more

Joey Sneddon — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:21:00 +0000

Linux 7.1 arrives with a rewritten NTFS driver, Apple Silicon battery reporting, and Steam Deck OLED audio fixes alongside massive legacy code removals.

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LibreOffice gives its Ribbon-style UI a pop of colour

Joey Sneddon — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:48:15 +0000

You’ll be able to customise the look of LibreOffice’s Tabbed UI in the free office suite’s next major release, which his due out in August 2026. LibreOffice 26.8’s Tabbed UI (also known as the Notebookbar and modelled after the Ribbon in Microsoft Office) can show a colourful background when application theming is enabled under Tools > Options > Appearance. A blue shade is used by default but you can pick or set any colour you like. In the ‘Customisations’ section, first selected the Writer, Calc, Impress or Data Notebookbar value, then use the dropdown to chance the colour. Click apply […]

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Microsoft brings Rust Coreutils to Windows – natively

Joey Sneddon — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:21:29 +0000

Microsoft has released Coreutils for Windows, allowing a stack of familiar “Linux-like” command-line utilities to run natively on Windows. The project is based on uutils, the Rust-based reimplementation of GNU coreutils that Ubuntu (mostly) has adopted in recent releases. Microsoft’s package bundles uutils’ coreutils and findutils as well as a GNU-compatible grep in a single binary. It offers tools like cat, cp, ls, mv and uptime. Commands that use POSIX-only features are excluded, meaning chmod, chown, kill and others aren’t included. What’s notable – *nix tools working their way into the Windows ecosystem is notable – is that this isn’t […]

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Firefox for Android’s Play Integrity check hits custom ROMs

Joey Sneddon — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:55:58 +0000

Mozilla has added support for Google’s Play Integrity API, known for blocking users of custom ROMs from accessing banking apps, to Firefox for Android. Per a resolved issue in Mozilla’s public tracker, a new lib-integrity-googleplay library was added to Firefox’s Android codebase. It requests a Play Integrity token which is then passed to Mozilla’s MLPA (Machine Learning Proxy) server. The token is used to access Firefox’s server-side AI tools, like Smart Window, for rate-limiting purposes, ensuring only unmodified, Play-installed copies of Firefox on Google-certified devices use Mozilla’s compute infra. Per documentation for the API, developers can: “…call the Integrity API […] to […]

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LibreOffice slams Euro-Office as ‘de facto ally’ of Microsoft

Joey Sneddon — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:02:48 +0000

Euro-Office launches its stable 1.0 release on June 9, billed as a ‘truly open’ sovereign alternative to Microsoft Office – a claim riling The Document Foundation, makers of LibreOffice. In an open letter published today, TDF’s Italo Vignoli takes issue with the upstart productivity suite’s pitch. He disputes Euro-Office’s marketing, which he says positions it as the first open-source office suite developed in Europe. It’s historically inaccurate as OpenOffice.org got there in 2001, followed by LibreOffice from 2010. But he calls out another issue. The European Union is making a big push for digital sovereignty, cutting down on how much […]

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Proton Drive client is (finally) coming to Linux

Joey Sneddon — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 22:04:00 +0000

Proton has confirmed it is working on a Proton Drive client for Linux desktops. The announcement slipped out as part of a broader platform update. Proton has rebuilt Drive around a new shared SDK, with a single codebase powering its official apps on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and web (rather than separate implementations as before). It’s this unified approach that makes it easier for the Swiss-based company to add new features and integrations across all its official apps – and make an official client for Linux, which is being build on the SDK “from the ground up”, they say. Not […]

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HandBrake fixes 2-pass encode crashes, WebM on Linux

Joey Sneddon — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 21:01:53 +0000

A new version of HandBrake, the open-source and cross-platform media conversion tool, is available to download. HandBrake 1.11.2 is a maintenance update in the current 1.11.x stable release, which was released in March 2026 and added DNxHR and ProRes encoder support, and an AMD VCN AV1 10-bit encoder compatible with the company’s 9000 series GPUs and newer. This update is focused on fixes and finesse. A pair of bugs affecting 2-pass operations are resolved: a crash during 2-pass lossless x265 encodes, and a memory leak that occurred during 2-pass MPEG-4, MPEG-2, VP9 and FFV1 encodes. On Linux, HandBrake adds WebM […]

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This dev’s personal website is a working GNOME 2 desktop

Joey Sneddon — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 14:18:00 +0000

Reliving the glory days of the GNOME 2 desktop is but a browser tab away – well, kinda. The personal website of Benny Powers, a software developer at Red Hat, is not a traditional vertical column of text. Nor is it a slop-soup of purple gradients, rounded glassy cards and monospaced datapoints (a ‘vibe-coded’ aesthetic everywhere right now). No, it’s an interactive GNOME 2 ‘desktop’. He built it after digesting an essay on how websites used to be weird and playful and unique. Looking at his own site, he decided it wasn’t nearly wacky enough, so restyled it to resemble […]

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New options land in Dynamic Music Pill GNOME extension

Joey Sneddon — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:32:15 +0000

Dynamic Music Pill, the blingy GNOME Shell extension that adds now playing track info, media controls and even real-time lyrics to your desktop, has gained some new options. “Like what?”, you ask… If you don’t want to see the name of the artists in the panel pill, you no longer have to: a ‘show artist’ toggle lets you hide it. The extension already has an option to dynamically hide artist labels if there’s not enough room to display it alongside the title. On that topic, when long artist names and track titles combine, the pill will scroll the labels from […]

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Ubuntu is adding AI-powered voice input to all text fields

Joey Sneddon — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:30:49 +0000

Ever wished you could talk in to a text field rather than type? Ubuntu 26.10 hears you – quite literally. Canonical’s VP of Engineer Jon Seager, at the Ubuntu Summit, said the distro will soon lets users “press a button and talk into any field that you could previously type in”. A small, on-device AI language parsing model like Whisper will power the feature. It’s part of a wider push to integrate AI features in Ubuntu this year, with founder Mark Shuttleworth aiming to position Ubuntu as the ‘OS for agentic AI’. AI features in Ubuntu will be shipped as […]

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Canonical’s Steam Snap for ARM64 is now stable

Joey Sneddon — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 20:15:01 +0000

Canonical has bumped its Steam Snap for ARM64 to the stable channel. First announced in January, the snap has been tested across ARM64 hardware including the NVIDIA DGX Spark, Radxa Orion O6 and Lenovo ThinkPad X13s, with Canonical now reporting ‘solid performance’ across many popular games. Valve doesn’t provide a native ARM Linux client (edit: they began quietly publishing Linux ARM builds in April, but these aren’t linked to on the main website). Canonical’s snap version of Steam uses the Intel/AMD Steam binary with the FEX emulator. This stable release of the Steam Snap for ARM exposes FEX’s configuration options to […]

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Play Catan in your terminal with El Poblador, a TUI clone

Joey Sneddon — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 23:09:47 +0000

El Poblador is a fully playable Settlers of Catan clone that runs entirely in your terminal. Written in Go by developer vicho, El Poblador is a compete rendition of the iconic competitive board game, which is all about resources, trading, building settlements and blocking your opponents. All of Catan’s core mechanics are accounted for, albeit free of the tactile joy of handling and placing tiny wooden blocks in the real game. It’s a game designed for 3-4 players, so you’ll want to huddle around a laptop or on a PC to play it. You use arrow keys to navigate the […]

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Flathub bans AI-coded apps – with some exceptions

Joey Sneddon — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:08:45 +0000

You’ll have to sift through fewer vibe-coded apps on Flathub in future, as the store has announced a policy change on software made using AI tools. Flathub, the de-facto place to find and install Flatpak applications, is banning the use of “AI” coded applications and automated submissions going forward. It’s not a blanket ban – mature projects with AI code are allowed A change to the store’s policy note says “applications containing AI-generated or AI-assisted code, documentation, or other content are not allowed”. A carve out will allow “mature, well-maintained projects” to include AI generated code and use AI tools […]

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