When you log in to the Ubuntu 24.10 desktop an audio clip greets you —a lengthy audio clip slowly building to a plinky-plonky crescendo that you (and those around you) might tire of having to listen to! You can turn the Ubuntu startup sound off, or swap it for an audio clip more to your taste/amusement. For a sizeable part of Ubuntu’s early years musical startup and login sounds were a staple feature. The distro decided to disable them in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS following feedback that, actually, they can be rather annoying or even embarrassing at times! 12 years later, […]
A new version of Tiling Shell, the flexible window snapping assistant for GNOME Shell, is available. Tiling Shell v16.2 now surfaces nifty ‘Window Suggestions’, a feature introduced in last month’s v16.0 release, when using edge tiling. Edge Tiling (as no doubt you well know) is triggered by dragging a window to the sides of the screen. Ubuntu’s “Enhanced Tiling” feature shows a Tiling Popup when window snapping to make it faster to tile other open apps to the remaining tile spaces without needing to manually drag them to screen edges. Window Suggestions is the same idea, but arguably more useful: […]
Ever looked at Ubuntu’s default icon theme Yaru and found yourself thinking: “Eh, some of those icons look too big”? —No, can’t say I had either! But it turns out some of Yaru’s icons are marginally oversized. Yaru uses 4 different shapes across its app, folder and mimetype (file) icons, with the shape used based on what works best for whatever ‘design motif’ fits. (e.g., a vertical rectangle is used for document file icons as it is more analogous to a sheet of paper). The shapes are: Of the 4 shapes the most common in Yaru is the ‘square’ (with […]
If you were expecting Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS to drop February 13, I come bearing some a punch of awk news: the release has been delayed. Canonical’s Utkarsh Gupta reports that an ‘unfortunate incident’ resulting in some of the newly spun Ubuntu 24.04.2 images (for flavours) being built without the new HWE kernel on board (which is Linux 6.11, for those unaware). Now, including a new kernel version on the ISO is kind of the whole point of the second Ubuntu point release. It has to be there so that the latest long-term support release can boot on and support the […]
GNOME rolled out a huge revamp to its official website today, and I have to say: it’s a solid improvement over the old one. The official GNOME website has an important role, serving as both showcase and springboard for those looking to learn more about the desktop environment, the app ecosystem, developer documentation, or how to get involved and support the project. Arranging, presenting, and meeting all of those needs on a single landing page—and doing it in an engaging, encouraging way? Difficult to pull off—but GNOME has. The new design looks flashy and modern. It’s more spacious and vibrant, […]
A new version of the slick Clapper media player is out with several neat improvements Not newly new, I should say. I hadn’t run a flatpak update in Ubuntu I an age so I only jus noticed an update pending for this nifty little media player. But I figured I’d write about it since it’s been around 10 months since its last major release (save a bug fix release last summer). So what’s new? Well, Clapper 0.8.0 intros a new libpeas-based plugin system in its underlying Clapper library (which other apps can make use of to playback media, as Mastodon client […]
A new version of the KDE Plasma desktop environment is out and, as you’d expect, the update is packed with new features, UI tweaks, and performance boosts. KDE Plasma 6.3 is the fourth major update in the KDE Plasma 6.x series and it also marks the one-year anniversary of the KDE Plasma 6.0 debut – something KDE notes in its announcement: One year on, with the teething problems a major new release inevitably brings firmly behind us, Plasma’s developers have worked on fine-tuning, squashing bugs and adding features to Plasma 6 — turning it into the best desktop environment for […]
A new version of ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors, a free, open-source office suite for Windows, macOS, and Linux, is now available to download. ONLYOFFICE 8.3 brings a bunch of new features and nimble enhancements spread throughout the full suite, which is composed of word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, form, and PDF editing apps. Such as? Well, the headline feature is the ability to open and work with Apple iWork documents (.pages, .numbers, .key) and Hancom Office files (.hwp, .hwpx) . Opening these documents will convert them to OOXML to support editing. It’s not possible to edit the native files themselves, nor export/save edits back […]
Finding yourself annoyed at those ‘window is ready’ notifications which pop-up when you open some apps in GNOME Shell on Ubuntu? If so, you can disable them by installing a GNOME Shell extension. Now, notifications are helpful—heck, vital when they inform, alert, or indicate that something requires our immediate attention or actioning. But “app is ready” notifications? I don’t find them anything other than obvious. I’m not amnesic; I know the app is ready – I just opened it! They aren’t predictable either. Some apps show them, others don’t. It depends on the app’s metadata, how fast app initialisation is (you’ll see them more […]
A new version of Ghostty emerged this week and in this post I run-through the key changes. For those unfamiliar with it, Ghostty is an open-source terminal emulator written in Zig. It offers a “fast, feature-rich, and native” experience — doesn’t claim to be faster, more featured, or go deeper than other native terminals, just offer a competitive combo of the three. Given it does pretty much everything other terminal emulators do, fans faithful to more established terminal emulators won’t find Ghostty‘s presence spooks ’em into switching. It’s a passion project there to be used (or not) depending on need, taste, […]
LibreOffice 25.2 has been released, this year’s first major update to the leading open-source office software for Windows, macOS, and Linux. As you’d expect, the update delivers a sizeable set of changes spread throughout the productivity suite, including notable UI changes, accessibility improvements, and more important interoperability buffs to support cross-suite workflows. It’s important to remember that open-source software like LibreOffice doesn’t appear out of thin air; it’s made by humans, many unpaid, others paid to work on specific parts only. We all have personal wish-lists of features and changes we want our favourite open-source apps to add, but we […]
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) user? If so, you will be pleased to hear that Ubuntu is now available in Microsoft’s new tar-based distro format — no need to use the sluggish Microsoft Store. Canonical announced the news today, noting that “the new tar-based WSL distro format allows developers and system administrators to distribute, install, and manage Ubuntu WSL instances from tar files without relying on the Microsoft Store.” In not relying on the Microsoft Store for distribution, it’s less hassle for enterprises to roll out (and customise) Ubuntu on WSL at scale as images packaged in using the new […]
Right on schedule, a new update to the Mozilla Firefox web browser is available for download. Last month’s Firefox 134 release saw the New Tab page layout refreshed for users in the United States, let Linux go hands-on with touch-hold gestures, seeded Ecosia search engine, and fine-tuned the performance of the built-in pop-up blocker. Firefox 135, as is probably intuit, brings an equally sizeable set of changes to the fore including a wider rollout of its new New Tab page layout to all locales where Stories are available: It’s not a massive makeover, granted. But the new layout adjusts the […]
Do you use the official Spotify DEB on Ubuntu (or an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution like Linux Mint)? If so, you’ll be used to receiving updates to the Spotify Linux client direct from the official Spotify APT repo, right alongside all your other DEB-based software. Thing is: if you haven’t checked for updates from the command line recently you might not be aware the that security key used to ‘sign’ packages from the Spotify APT repo stopped working at the end of last year. Annoying, but not catastrophic as it—thankfully—doesn’t stop the Spotify Linux app from working just pollutes terminal output […]
Fans of the Papirus icon theme for Linux desktops will be happy hear a new version is now available to download. Paprius‘s first update in 2025 improves support for KDE Plasma 6 by adding Konversation, KTorrent and RedShift tray icons, KDE and Plasma logo glyphs for use in ‘start menu’ analogues, as well as an assortment of symbolic icons. Retro gaming fans will appreciate an expansion in mime type support in this update. Papirus now includes file icons for ROMs used for emulating ZX Spectrum, SEGA Dreamcast, SEGA Saturn, MSX, and Neo Geo Pocket consoles; and Papirus now uses different […]
GNOME has announced a change to its default UI and monospace fonts ahead of the upcoming GNOME 48 release — a typographic turnabout that won’t impact Ubuntu users directly, though. Should you feel a sense of deja vu here it’s because GNOME trialled a font switch last year, during development of GNOME 47. Back then, it replaced its home-grown Cantarell font with the popular open-source sans Inter font (trivia: used by Zorin OS). The change was reverted prior to the GNOME 47 due to various UI quirks, coverage issues, and compatibility (thus underlying the importance of testing things out prior […]
Want to find out if the text you’re reading online was written by an real human or spat out by a large language model (LLM) trying to sound like one? Mozilla’s Fakespot Deepfake Detector Firefox add-on may can help give you an indication. Similar to online AI detector tools, the add-on can analyse text (of 32 words or more) to identify patterns, traits, and tells common in AI generated or manipulated text. It uses Mozilla’s proprietary ApolloDFT engine and a set of open-source detection models. But unlike some tools, Mozilla’s Fakespot Deepfake Detector browser extension is free to use, does […]
Linux users hunting for a native client to stream music from TIDAL will want to keep an eye on a promising new open-source app called High Tide. High Tide is an unofficial but native Linux client for the TIDAL music streaming service. It’s written in Python, uses GTK4/libadwaita UI, and leverages official TIDAL APIs for playback. TIDAL, often positioned as the ‘pro-artist music streaming platform’, isn’t as popular as industry titan Spotify (likely because it doesn’t offer a ‘free’ ad-supported tier) but is nonetheless a solid rival to it in terms of features and catalogue breadth. Windows, macOS, Android and […]
The Thunderbird email client is making its monthly ‘release channel’ builds the default download starting in March. “We’re excited to announce that starting with the 135.0 release in March 2025, the Thunderbird Release channel will be the default download,” Corey Bryant, manager of Thunderbird Release Operations, shares in an update on the project’s discussion hub. Right now, users who visit the Thunderbird website and hit the giant download get the latest Extended Support Release (ESR) build by default. It gets one major feature update a year plus smaller bug fix and security updates issued in-between. The version of Thunderbird Ubuntu […]
Ubuntu’s key developers have agreed to switch to Matrix as the primary platform for real-time development communications involving the distro. From March, Matrix will replace IRC as the place where critical Ubuntu development conversations, requests, meetings, and other vital chatter must take place. Developers asked to ensure they have a presence on the platform so they are reachable. Only the current #ubuntu-devel and #ubuntu-release Libera IRC channels are moving to Matrix, but other Ubuntu development-related channels can choose to move –officially, given some projects were using Matrix over IRC already. As a result, any major requests to/of the key Ubuntu […]
