Your mouth can say things faster than your hands can type them, yet voice typing is rarely used as a primary input method on desktop (most of us think nothing of it on mobile). That’s despite speech-to-text being available on desktop OSes for decades, natively and through dedicated apps. It never caught on because it was inaccurate and slow (and because what you do at a keyboard is less efficient to speak, but that’s a separate point). Then came Whisper, the speech recognition model released by OpenAI in 2022 and built solely to convert audio to text. It’s proven hugely […]
Thunderbolt is a new open source AI client from the Mozilla-owned MZLA Technologies aimed at enterprises who want to run self-hosted chatbots on their own infrastructure. MZLA Technologies is the for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that develops and maintains the Thunderbird email client. It says Thunderbolt was created with the support of a grant from Mozilla. Terrible name aside (and skipping over the fact that Intel owns a trademark for ‘Thunderbolt’), the AI MZLA Technologies used to write their press release describes Thunderbolt as a “sovereign AI client” that lets organisations run and control AI infrastructure. Companies can pick whichever AI model they fancy, be […]
Linux Mint has confirmed it is switching to a longer development cycle, in order to give the team more time to ‘fix bugs and improve the desktop’. As a result, the Linux Mint 23 release is now slated to launch in December 2026. It will, among other planned changes, use the same installer as LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) as this offers better OEM install, SecureBoot and LVM/LUKS support. Project lead Clement Lefebvre intimated that upending the distro’s standard twice-yearly release model was needed in February, noting that “…one of our strengths is that we’re doing things incrementally and changing […]
The first point release to Zorin OS 18 is now available for download, arriving six months and some 3.3 million downloads after the original launch. Zorin OS 18.1 is a point release update. It’s still based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS-based but adds a variety of desktop refinements, updated software and a new kernel (courtesy of the recent Ubuntu HWE from Canonical). A new Zorin OS Lite also launches today. This nimble edition is aimed at older, lower-spec hardware and is based around a customised Xfce desktop rather than the GNOME Shell desktop the main edition uses. If you already run […]
Installing Opera GX on Linux is now easier, with official packages available on the Canonical Snap Store and Flathub. Opera GX made its debut Linux release in March 2026, with the gaming-centric web browser porting over many of the novel features that have helped to make it a modest hit on Windows and macOS. That includes CPU, RAM and network controls provided, background sounds, themes and eye-candy like web shaders. A ‘Hot Tabs Killer’ feature automatically nukes tabs which use excessive resources (other browsers have similar features with more tactile names like ‘tab sleep’). You can install Opera GX on […]
Ever wondered what a GTK4/libadwaita version of Linux music player Rhythmbox might look like? A new app in development imagines just that. Tributary is billed a “high-performance, Rhythmbox-style media manager written in pure Rust with GTK4 and libadwaita”. It’s more than a way to play local audio files, too. Tributary can access and stream music from Jellyfin, Plex, DAAP/iTunes shares, internet radio stations and Subsonic/Navidrome setups as well – all from a UI that looks uncannily like a real GTK4 Rhythmbox. Explaining his decision to create ‘yet another music player’ (no longer a historical meme either, as a glut of […]
Quick Lofi is a GNOME Shell extension that puts a lofi radio player in your top bar. If you’ve ever opened a new browser tab to load a “lofi beats to study to” stream on YouTube — lofi girl, perhaps – to act as an ambient backdrop to work to, the appeal will be evident. If not, all you need to know is that mellow, lyric-free, low-tempo sounds are reputedly ideal for focus. A wedge of research backs up the benefits of playing background music (or ambient noise or frequencies, including binaural beats) when studying. A 2022 study showed students who […]
Linus Torvalds has released Linux 7.0, the kernel version that Ubuntu 26.04 LTS runs on. Linux 7.0 includes a new standardised filesystem error reporting system, faster swap memory and zram performance and hardware video decoding for a set of Rockchip ARM64 single-board computers. On the quirky additions side, Rock Band 4 Bluetooth controller support is included. The shiny new version number does not, however, signify anything special. Linus has always been upfront that kernel version numbers tick up when the minor number gets a tad unwieldy, not because a ‘milestone’ has been reached. That said, there is plenty in this […]
The Ghostty terminal is now packaged in the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS repositories – meaning for those on the new long-term support release, it’s only an apt install away. Ghostty is a fast, open-source terminal emulator for macOS and Linux (Windows support is seemingly trapped between planes), made by Mitchell Hashimoto. It’s picked up millions of users since its launch in December 2024, and has been available on Ubuntu via a community-maintained PPA, DEB and Snap packages for a while. This is its first appearance in the Ubuntu repos proper. What makes Ghostty different? “Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform […]
Amazon is dropping support for Kindle older models from 20 May, 2026, meaning owners of pre-2013 models will be unable to download new books or set up a device that has been factory reset — deregistering a device will effectively ‘brick’ it. While no company can support all of their products forever (one could argue a company the size of this one could, mind), most of the devices impacted, listed below, have not received firmware updates for over a decade, and most lost on-device access the Kindle Store. The following 2012 or earlier Kindles are affected, as of 20 May, […]
A new version of Miracle-wm, a tiling window manager built around the Wayland compositor Mir, has been released with a new WebAssembly plugin system and Rust API. Developer Matthew Kosarek, an engineer at Canonical who created miracle-wm as a personal side project, says the new plugin system in v0.9 release will allow for greater window management, animation and configuration, thus making miracle-wm “truly hackable”. He also shared a video overview of the changes in the latest update: A new Rust API for writing plugins is supported in Miracle 0.9, with documentation available for fans of the memory-safe language to swot over; […]
A clutch of new features are available in Dynamic Music Pill, the slick now playing and media controller extension for GNOME Shell. The “big” new addition is lyrics support. When you listen to a track with synced lyrics in a compatible player, you can view those lyrics by opening the applet controller and clicking on the album art inside of it: The lyrics are shown in a freely scrollable widget, with the active line bolder in white for more emphasis. You can scroll up and down whilst tracks are playing. If you click a lyric line, your music player jumps […]
A Linux version of Little Snitch, the iconic network monitoring and firewall tool for macOS, has been released. Little Snitch for Linux is written in Rust and uses eBPF for kernel-level traffic interception (which lets sandboxed code run inside the Linux kernel without modifying it). The tool lists processes on your machine making network connections, with options to block them. Its creator, Christian Starkjohann at Austrian software company Objective Development, says he created the Linux port out of personal necessity. He’d installed Linux on some old hardware, and immediately felt exposed without it. While Linux has alternatives, not least in […]
Firefox recently added a free built-in VPN to its desktop browser, but access to the feature is rolling out gradually. I got the prompt on my Ubuntu machine last night, so here’s a rundown of what it actually does, what it doesn’t, and how to set it – assuming you have it. If you’re waiting for it to roll out to you, there’s no special update or download to look out for as this is a progressive rollout feature – Mozilla enables it remotely, in stages. There was no fanfare when it arrived for me, the toolbar button just appeared. […]
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS makes it easier to enable Ubuntu Pro, Canonical’s opt-in (but free for home users) subscription that extends security update to more packages in the wider Ubuntu repos, straight after installation. An Enable Ubuntu Pro step has been added to the distro’s Welcome tool (package namegnome-initial-setup, with Ubuntu-specific modifications). This tool pops up to new users the first time they login after installing the OS. The usual post-install tweaks, like turning on location services, choosing to share system report and crash reports with developers (the ‘telemetry’ trigger word) and setting a UI accent colour, remain. But now the […]
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