OMG! Ubuntu!

Resources beta adds PowerPC temp, AMD 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.

You're reading Resources beta adds PowerPC temp, AMD NPU stats, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

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

You're reading Rhythmbox 3.5 lets you sync your podcast listening across apps, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

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 […]

You're reading Papirus icon set gets first update in over a year with 80+ new icons, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

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 […]

You're reading Dropbeat is yet another flashy music controller for GNOME Shell, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

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.

You're reading Ubuntu’s turning another system Deb package into a snap, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

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 […]

You're reading Curl dropped from Ubuntu 26.04 minimal cloud images by mistake, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

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 […]

You're reading Linux App Release Roundup (July 2026), a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

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 […]

You're reading Ubuntu’s ready for Alberta and Morocco time zone changes, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

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 […]

You're reading Starling is a new Linux desktop built using AI in six months, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Mosaic adds automatic window tiling to GNOME Shell

Joey Sneddon — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 22:26:51 +0000

Mosaic brings automatic tiling to GNOME Shell, but without asking you to use it permanently. Turn it on when you want windows to arrange themselves, turn it off when you want floating windows back. The extension works with GNOME 45 and up, adding a toggle to Quick Settings to enable the auto-tiling mode. When off, you’re in floating mode (which still has tiling features). Expand the toggle to access more options or get at Mosaic’s settings. It’s the easy on-demand nature that makes Mosaic different to similar extensions that exist. When the auto-tiling mode is active (the toggle is turned […]

You're reading Mosaic adds automatic window tiling to GNOME Shell, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Ubuntu 26.04 virtualization HWE stack offers newer QEMU & libvirt

Joey Sneddon — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:53:00 +0000

Ubuntu’s hardware enablement (HWE) effort has expanded to include backports of newer virtualisation tech to users of the current LTS release. The virtualization HWE stack from Canonical will let users benefit from newer versions of QEMU, libvirt and related firmware on top of their exiting LTS install, refreshed every 6 months for 2 years, without the need to seek out via third-party repos. Or, to quote Canonical’s Ijlal Loutfi, it gives companies “the operational confidence of an LTS release, with a path to newer virtualization capabilities when they need them”. If you’re not familiar with the HWE, it’s what brings newer […]

You're reading Ubuntu 26.04 virtualization HWE stack offers newer QEMU & libvirt, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

We finally revived our Firefox add-on (10 years late)

Joey Sneddon — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 10:28:57 +0000

The official OMG! Ubuntu add-on for Firefox is back – albeit far later than planned (sorry about that). If you’ve used our Chrome extension over the last decade, this add-on will be familiar as it’s the same thing, just in Firefox. Same look and (almost) the same features because it’s the same code (albeit with API name swaps and manifest tweaks). This isn’t the first time this blog has offered a Firefox add-on. Our old one broke in 2017 and though we intended to fix it, a decade happened to fly straight past us. Like the Chrome version, it provides […]

You're reading We finally revived our Firefox add-on (10 years late), a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Mission Center adds battery, partition and power draw info

Joey Sneddon — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:46:51 +0000

A new version of Linux system monitoring app Mission Center is available for download, adding new hardware stats, first-run setup prompt and bug fixes. Mission Center 1.2.0 adds a new Battery page in the Performance tab, surfaces per-partition usage details on the Disk page with free and used space and adds a graph to the bottom of the CPU page that can optionally show temperature, power draw or CPU frequency. If you aren’t on a laptop you may still see a Battery page as it can report battery information for peripherals too (albeit with the usual gotcha that power information […]

You're reading Mission Center adds battery, partition and power draw info, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Google Chrome arrives on Arm64 Linux, Widevine DRM included

Joey Sneddon — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 20:42:28 +0000

Google Chrome now has an official Arm64 Linux build, including for the Raspberry Pi, available via Google's Debian and RPM repos with Widevine DRM support.

You're reading Google Chrome arrives on Arm64 Linux, Widevine DRM included, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Firefox’s new tab page adds AI-powered daily crossword widget

Joey Sneddon — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 15:45:22 +0000

More widgets are coming to Firefox’s New Tab page, including an interactive crossword puzzle powered by the AI news reader Particle. The mini crossword game is updated daily, with puzzles based around recent content Particle‘s AI has ingested and summarised that day, and links to articles you can read to help deduce crossword answers. You click on a square to activate the row or column (clicking on it again switches between “Across” and “Down”). You read the clue at the bottom, and then you type in your answer. Use the hint button if you get stuck. If you just want […]

You're reading Firefox’s new tab page adds AI-powered daily crossword widget, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Codeberg members vote to ban AI-generated code

Joey Sneddon — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 21:51:23 +0000

Codeberg, the nonprofit alternative to GitHub used to host FLOSS projects, will no longer host software that’s “mostly” AI-generated. A vote closed yesterday (22 July, 2026), passing 358 to 144 with 14 abstentions on roughly 50% turnout to stop hosting software that’s largely vibe-coded. A second motion, also passed, commits Codeberg to never training AI models on hosted code or user data. Not that it was ever likely to. A Terms of Use amendment now prohibits projects that “mostly consist of code written by” generative AI tools. In a blog post, Codeberg explains the economic need for a ban, explaining […]

You're reading Codeberg members vote to ban AI-generated code, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Why Ubuntu 26.04 is hiding update notifications [Fixed]

Joey Sneddon — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:00:05 +0000

If Ubuntu 26.04 LTS hasn’t nagged you about pending updates in a while, there’s a reason for that. A Launchpad bug report and related discussion on the Ubuntu Discourse noticed that the distro’s update-manager no longer notifies when updates are pending unless the update notification tray icon is enabled. The rub? That tray icon as turned off in Ubuntu 26.04 (with no toggle in Settings to turn it back on). It’s not as “risky” as it sounds, though. Ubuntu ships with unattended-upgrades enabled by default, which installs security updates in the background – you’re just not told about them. Turn […]

You're reading Why Ubuntu 26.04 is hiding update notifications [Fixed], a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Raspberry Pi launch 10-inch Touch Display 2 for $80

Joey Sneddon — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:41:01 +0000

Raspberry Pi has launched a 10-inch version of its Touch Display 2 with a 1200×1920 resolution and 10-point captive touchscreen for $80/£77. 5-inch and 7-inch variants of the Touch Display 2 have been available for a while, but Raspberry Pi’s Gordon Hollingworth says the new version gives makers a larger, higher resolution screen to use in their projects. Like the smaller versions, the 10.1″ Touch Display 2 uses a portrait orientation by default, where the displays are often used for home automation dashboards, kiosks, digital signage, control panels, etc. It can be used in landscape by changing the orientation in […]

You're reading Raspberry Pi launch 10-inch Touch Display 2 for $80, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.