A major update to open-vm-tools, a package that integrates Linux virtual machines with VMware hypervisors, is rolling out to users of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. âWithout SRUing the newer version users get issues running on more recent hypervisorsâ, Canonicalâs Lena Voytek explained in a backport request. Itâs a full backport from Ubuntu 26.04 LTS to support platform enablement to benefit those running 24.04 LTS. The open-vm-tool package goes from v12.3.5 to v3.0.10 (the same version in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS). VMwareâs open-vm-tools package enables clock sync with the hypervisor host, âgracefulâ power management for clean shutdowns, vSphere API, shared folder support, relays [âŚ]
A decades-old bug on Ubuntuâs Launchpad was marked as invalid at the weekend, and lead to an impromptu reunion for many of Canonicalâs former engineers. Bob Harvey filed bug #1589796 in 2016, having spent ÂŁ700 on Ubuntu phone and tablet hardware but, on visiting the official website, found no documentation on how to use them. Canonical axed the Ubuntu Phone project in 2017, leaving this bug (along with hundreds of others) resolved. Until now. This weekend, Adolfo Jayme Barrientos, a member of the Ubuntu bug triage team, marked #1599796 as invalid. When closing it, he mentioned to the original bug [âŚ]
Postcard is a new email client for GNOME that has echoes of Geary. The app is the work of a solo developer, gxanshu on GitHub, who is upfront about using AI coding tools to bring his âmodern mail clientâ to life. Postcard is built in Python with GTK4/libadwait. It uses imaplib and smtplib for networking, a local SQLite index for searching, WebKitGTK for rendering HTML and libsecret for keeping passwords safe. Postcard will look familiar to fans of Geary, another GTK email client, as it uses a similar multi-column design with folder in a (resizable) sidebar on the left, a message list [âŚ]
A new project file format is in the works for GIMP, as the existing one canât handle larger, complex projects. The famed FOSS image editor has used a binary .xcf format since 1997 for saving projects and allowing them to be opened elsewhere, for editing, with layers, effects and so on. But writing in a development update, the team said itâs aware of âmore and more limitationsâ with the format. And with major new features, like animation and multi-page documents, on GIMPâs near-term roadmap, a newer, more capable project file format is being developed. It will use a âzipped XMLâ structure, [âŚ]
You can bring Ubuntuâs clock, calendar and weather app icons to life with the Dynamic Calendar, Clocks and Weather Icons [Reborn] GNOME Shell extension â which has been updated with new icon styles. The extension already provided Yaru, Adwaita, Paprius, Big Sur and other icon styles, built-in (the dynamic versions donât depend on the icon sets themselves), so you can see real-time clock, date and weather info on app icons that look like their static equivalents. The latest update, v9, released this week (17 August 2026), adds two new icon styles, Stylish and Pure: In my screenshot above, you can [âŚ]
A big update to Tuba, the GTK4/libadwaita Fediverse client, has landed â along with an experimental version for Android. Tuba 0.11.0 is the first major update to the social app in a year and brings full support for Mastodon quotes. Quoting posts, whether others can quote your posts and revoking consent from those who have are all supported in the composer. While the app had offered it own approach to âquote tweetâ sharing of other peopleâs posts, adding support for Mastodonâs âconsent-basedâ version means you will quote whilst respecting the needs/wishes of other users on the decentralised social media service. [âŚ]
If youâve been eyeing up one of PINE64âs Linux-friendly single-board computers, phones or tablets, now is the time to buy one. The open-hardware company has announced it will stop âproducing more Linux devicesâ for the time being, and said it expects its existing stock of certain devices, including the PineNote and PineTab 2, to sell out in the next three months. Obviously, RAMaggeddon is to blame. The AI infrastructure boom continues apace, with demand for memory and storage chips continuing to reduce supply and drive up costs. If the price of even modest tech â $350 Raspberry Pi, anyone? â [âŚ]
Mozilla has released Firefox 154 with some small AI-related changes, an âimprovedâ full-page translations and up to 10x faster video seeking â only on macOS, that one. This also serves as the final monthly release of Firefox. The browser switches to a faster, twice-monthly release schedule early September. Youâll be back here, reading âFirefox 155 releasedâ in two weeks, rather than the usual four weeks. Enough of then; whatâs new now? Firefoxâs been expanding its range of address bar actions in recent releases. We got tab muting action in v152 and an colour picker in v153. Firefox 154 adds a [âŚ]
I recently re-encountered my favourite âerrorâ dialog in Ubuntu, which is thrown by the distroâs App Center (snap-store), which is the default GUI software management tool. I donât see it often, but when I do it (un)helpfully informs me: âSomething went wrong. Weâre sorry, but weâre not sure what the error is.â While I sympathise with its honesty and the general sense of unease in imparts â I say something similar, looking at the state of the world right now â isnât it the softwareâs job to know whatâs wrong? You can see the dialog in question here, in situ [âŚ]
They say never judge a book by its cover, and few do if said book is a dictionary â but what about desktop dictionary apps? I recently discovered Wordbook, a modern English-English dictionary powered by OpenEnglish WordNet and eSpeak for pronunciations, that works entirely offline. Wordbook is in GNOME Circle; the GTK4/libadwaita UI is a good fit for the desktop. Wordbook uses a lexical database, with words grouped into âsynsetsâ based on their meaning. It makes it easier to explore related words, distinguish between words that look similar (but have different meanings) and find different precise alternatives. A random word [âŚ]
Linux kernel 7.2 has been released, adding cache-aware scheduling, ext4 filesystem performance boosts and a slew of new and improved hardware drivers for laptops and peripherals. A merge-widow record was also set during the 9-week development cycle, with more than 2,100 individual contributors involved. AI, obviously, has helped. Commit-crunching by LWN found roughly 5% of commits in 7.2 have an âassisted-byâ tag, indicating AI usage. Not that the latest kernel update was all additions. More than 13,000 lines of code for legacy i486 CPU emulation were removed from Linux 7.2, as was a 40-year-old Hercules graphics card driver, AppleTalk networking [âŚ]
If you remember that desktop picture widget for GNOME I wrote about last year, but found it a bit too basic for your personalisation preferences, you werenât alone. Another user felt it could lacked enough flexibility, so forked and improved it. Picture Desktop Widget Remake improves on the original. It lets add multiple picture widgets to your Ubuntu desktop, and assign each one a different folder to pull images from, at random. Plus, you can set the size, position, border radius and aspect ratio of each widget individually. Each photo frame has its own on/off button in Preferences, so you [âŚ]
GeForce Nowâs native Linux app has exited beta after seven months of testing, with official support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and later. The app is a frontend for Nvidiaâs game streaming service, with over 4500+ PC titles running in the cloud on Nvidia servers. Users get GeForce RTX-class performance, ray tracing and DLSS without the need to own or buy the relevant hardware. In a blog post to announce its âgraduationâ from beta, Nvidia say the GeForce NOW for Linux has picked up âperformance, stability and polishâ improvements thanks to community feedback during the beta test period. The company also [âŚ]
LightDM, Ubuntuâs former display manager, has had its first new release in four years â the first under new maintainers. LightDM v1.33.0 is a âcatch upâ release that adds Qt6 support (Qt5 still works) and clears a backlog of fixes that had built up since the previous release. There shouldnât be any breaking changes either, per the release notes. LightDM is a backend that handles logging in to user sessions. A GUI âgreeterâ sits on top for user interaction. Ubuntu used the unity-greeter, but other distros and desktops roll their own. Linux Mint switched to LightDM in 2017 with slick-greeter [âŚ]
The next version of GNOME Shell, out in September, is likely to include a redesigned search experience. In current versions of the desktop, when you start a search from the GNOME Shell overview, a dedicated search results screen replaces the one youâre looking at, i.e., the workspace row and dash (aka dock) are obscured. GNOMEâs design team has long wanted to adopt a âsemanticâ layout, whereby search results appear in an overlay that âspawns out of the search entryâ box and sits over the screen that triggered it. This concept has been explored and detailed in various mockups over the [âŚ]
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