The Wellbeing controls available in Ubuntu 25.04 make it easy to get periodic prompts to move your butt or look away from your screen — you might not want them enabled all the time, though. Wellbeing controls were one of the flagship features of GNOME 48. As well as screen time monitoring (with controls to set a screen time limit, and turn the display greyscale when it’s reached), you can enable reminders to take a break and move. Alerts telling you to get up and move may be helpful during the day, but at nighttime when you’re, say, engrossed in […]
More details on the makeup of the upcoming Linux Mint 22.2 release have been revealed, including its new codename (for those who track those). Linux Mint 22.2 (due to be released in late July or early August) has been officially named ‘Zara’, so continuing distro lead Clem’s codename convention of choosing female names in (somewhat) alphabetical order for each new version. I only say somewhat since Linux Mint 22.1 release was dubbed ‘Xia‘, while Linux Mint 22.2 jumps straight to ‘Zara’. Even with my lackadaisical attention to letter ordering, I know a ‘Y’ comes between ‘X’ and ‘Z’. Perhaps Clem […]
Get early access to Ubuntu 25.10 'Questing Quokka' through official daily builds. Download, test and contribute to Ubuntu's development before its October release.
Huawei has unwrapped its latest Linux notebook, the MateBook X Pro 2024 Linux Edition — alas, it’s only available in China. The Windows-free MateBook X Pro 2024 uses the same hardware as the Windows version, but clocks in at CN¥300 cheaper thank to a lack of Windows license fee and a government subsidy discounting tech that, from what I can gather, use a domestic OS. Chinese consumers can reportedly claim an extra discount of CN¥2000 on the purchase price as part of a national subsidy to promote usage of homegrown tech in general. With US sanctions in play, Microsoft is reportedly not […]
Open source system cleaning app BleachBit has put out its first major update in more than a year, adding improved cleaning capabilities, security fixes, and stability buffs. For the benefit of those with dusty memories, BleachBit is a free, open source system cleaner for Windows and Linux, written in Python and GTK 3. Similar to other apps of its type, BleachBit helps free up disk space by cleaning out caches, cookies, and other transient cruft. It can also delete files securely, wipe unallocated disk space, and squeeze Firefox and Chrome’s SQLite databases to improve performance. BleachBit 5.0, released this week, expands its […]
Google’s search deal with Mozilla is such a sizeable portion of its overall income that without it, Firefox would struggle to compete – or even survive, say Mozilla. It’s no secret that Google has paid Mozilla handsomely for its search engine to be set default in the Firefox web browser for decades. Mozilla’s financial report for 2023 revealed that the amount of money accrued from its “search deals” that year made up roughly three quarters of its entire income (specific amounts and from whom is confidential; it’s lumped together). While that figure is a bit less than it used to be, […]
Linux system monitoring app Mission Center has put out its first update in 6 months – and it’s a big one! Mission Center 1.0 adds new hardware tracking, UI tweaks, and refactors its backend to provide palapble performance improvements, boost the app’s responsiveness and minimise ‘time deviations between refresh cycles’. The latter may sound a tad dry on the ‘excitement’ scale but, arguably, it’s a big thing: a real-time monitoring app is used for, well, real-time monitoring and those tweaks ensure hardware and system process info shown is more precise. For a closer lookout the “visible” changes in this release, […]
If you use the Papirus icon theme on Ubuntu, you’ll be pleased to hear a new version is available to download. Frequent updates are a major reason why the Papirus icon set is so popular with Linux users. After all, it’s annoying to switch to a stylish icon set that doesn’t have icons for most of your apps, ruining the vibe. Not so with Papirus. It’s perpetually expanding its coverage through regular updates. Papirus’s second update this year adds 69 new icons—nice—and 18 updated ones. It also includes packaging and DE changes, and deprecates its ePapirus variants since elementaryOS 8 […]
Canonical has announced the first official Ubuntu desktop image for the Qualcomm DragonWing platform. A beta image of Ubuntu 24.04 desktop compatible with Qualcomm Dragonwing QCS6490 and QCS5430 processors, and specifically tailored for the Qualcomm RB3 (Gen 2) Vision Kit and RB3 (Gen 2 Lite) Vision Kit is available for testing. Ubuntu 24.04 server images were previously available for the same model vision kits, so it’s the addition of desktop builds that is an interesting development. Canonical say marrying a full Ubuntu desktop experience married with “powerful AI acceleration with high-performance graphics” in the Dragonwing devices provides “a powerful development environment […]
Development today opened on Ubuntu 25.10 “Questing Quokka”, the next short-term release of Ubuntu, due for release in October. Canonical engineer Utkarsh Gupta fired the figurative starting pistol for developers in a post to the Ubuntu mailing list, announcing the opening, and the enabling of auto-sync. “As usual, we expect a large influx of builds and autopkgtests in this initial period, which will cause delays. Please help fixing any breakage that occurs,” Gupta adds. It’s only been a couple of weeks since the Ubuntu 25.04 release, but the dedicated devs who spent 6 months diligently shaping that release don’t get much time […]
April saw a solid set of software updates land for an slew of popular Linux apps. In this post, I run through a number of recent releases that didn’t get the “full article” treatment on this blog. Sometimes it’s a challenge to cover everything I want to (especially in an Ubuntu release month, as April was), and some updates are rather minor and hard to say too much about. Also, covering updates relies on me knowing they’re out in a timely fashion. I track as much as I can, as best as I can. But it’s easy for things to […]
Luna brings moon phases to your Ubuntu desktop with a simple GNOME Shell extension. Track current phase, illumination percentage, and upcoming changes right from your panel.
At long last, Mozilla Firefox has GUI profile management features – obvious, easy to use and don’t require poking around the browser’s backend and creating custom shortcuts. The feature, which begins rolling out in today’s Firefox 138 update, is the latest “big ticket” feature the browser has belatedly sought to add, following recent long-requested supported for vertical tabs and tab grouping capabilities. Last month’s Firefox 137 release added the aforementioned tab grouping features, give its address bar a chip-laden overhaul, and flipped the switch on HEVC video playback on Linux. Firefox 138 has a number of notable changes to match those […]
If you’re looking for an easy way to “scrobble” music on Linux, no matter which music player you use, check out a new app called Turntable — and even if you don’t scrobble you should! Before I go any further I should bring those unfamiliar with what a “scrobble” is, up to speed. “Scrobbling” is—no, not one of those old fashioned British words I’m fond of using—the term given to logging the music you listen to, as you listen to it, on services like Last.fm and Libre.fm. When you play a track in a media player connected to a compatible […]
Of note, Ubuntu 24.04 developer images are now available for the new OrangePi RV2 RISC-V single-board computer (SBC). The news underscores Canonical’s on-going interest in the fledgling, open-source architecture. Last year, DeepComputing released Ubuntu-powered RISC-V tablet and laptop, and Ubuntu Server 25.04 was released last month with support for a myriad of RISC-V SBCs. “At Canonical, we believe that it’s important to do our part to help RISC-V succeed and gain acceptance as an open standard. Ubuntu’s availability on the OrangePi RV2 is a testament to the continued collaboration between [us] and the broader RISC-V community,” the company says. Adding […]
System76 has just announced the 7th alpha release of its Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment. As with earlier alphas, the focus remains adding features and functionality earmarked for inclusion in the first stable release (dubbed Epoch 1). What should you expect from that first stable release? Promise. It makes me sound a bit of a party-popper to say that but it’s worth keeping expectations grounded. It’s unfair and unrealistic to expect the first sable release of COSMIC developed in just a couple of years to feature-match desktop environments developed over decades. Nor will COSMIC’s native core apps, capable though they are […]
If you installed Ubuntu 25.04 (or upgraded from 24.10 before the gate was closed due to various pernickety issues) you might have noticed that window buttons in GTK apps. Ubuntu user Cristiano Fraga G. Nunes certainly did, filing bug report to report that “…on Ubuntu 25.04, the window control buttons (minimize, maximize, close) appear at inconsistent sizes across different GTK applications.” As he notes, GTK4 apps like Nautilus and Text Editor use smaller window buttons than in GTK3 apps, like Terminal which uses larger buttons (the same size GTK4 apps did in Ubuntu 24.10): Why the discrepancy? Ubuntu uses Yaru […]
Time is nearly up on support for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, with standard software, bug fix and security updates coming to an end on May 29, 2025. Users on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS should consider upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (or newer) if possible, but if unable should enable Extended Support Maintenance (ESM) as soon as possible in order to continue receiving critical security patches. ESM for Ubuntu provides “10 years of vulnerability management for critical, high and selected medium [security issues] for all software packages shipped with Ubuntu.” Enabling ESM is a bit of a no-brainer since it’s free for regular […]
Ghostty terminal fans needn’t fear an upgrade to Ubuntu’s latest release, as a community packaging effort just added Ghostty DEB packages for Ubuntu 25.04. The Ghostty Ubuntu project was set up was the aim of providing “Ubuntu/Debian (.deb) packages for Ghostty” so users on supported Linux distributions, including Ubuntu-based distros like Linux Mint and ZorinOS, can download, install and use the app properly. To date, there’s no official snap or Flatpak version of Ghostty available, and although compiling it from source isn’t hard, it’s more hassle than most are willing to go through to try a new app — yes, […]
