If you installed Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and noticed video and music files werenât showing image thumbnails in the file manager, a packaging oversight was to blame, not anything you did. It turns out that Ubuntuâs default âminimalâ install wasnât pulling in the gst-audio-thumbnailer and gst-video-thumbnailer packages which generate media thumbnails when you open a folder full of compatible files. A metapackage doesnât contain software itself, just a list of the packages that need to be installed for, in this case, an Ubuntu desktop experience. Confusingly, both thumbnailers were present in the full installâs meta file, so if you picked the [âŚ]
June was sweltering, but the heat didnât seem to affect developers. A slew of updates to popular open-source Linux software made it out last month, some highlights of which I share in this roundup. Last month also saw Firefox 152 released with a new-look settings page, media converter HandBrake wrangled its WebM handling on Linux, and the Audacity 4.0 beta serve up its new modern UI for public scrutiny. Those werenât the only releases of note, as the following roundup shows. Cine adds Watch History I spotlighted the Cine Linux video player earlier this year. Itâs an MPV-based player with [âŚ]
June was sweltering, yet the heat didnât affect developers too badly as a slew of updates to popular open-source Linux software made it out last month. We saw Firefox 152 released with its new-look settings page. The media converter HandBrake wrangled its WebM handling on Linux. And the Audacity 4.0 beta made its brand-new design available for public scrutiny â mainly of the âfinally, it doesnât look badâ variety. But scores of smaller, minor and maintenance updates made it out too. Cine gained Watch History I spotlighted the Cine Linux video player earlier this year. Itâs an MPV-based player with [âŚ]
Firefox is adding hardware-accelerated Vulkan Video decoding, saving Nvidia users on Linux the hassle of manually configuring the nvidia-vaapi-driver package. The change will be included in Firefox 153, out July 21, but it will not be enabled by default â not to start with. Instead, users will be able to flip a pair of preferences in about:config to try it out, with the awareness that there may be hiccups and edge cases (especially on devices with hybrid graphics, mentioned further down). Given that Nvidia GPUs are capable (understatement klaxon), I was surprised to hear that this didnât already work. Turns out, Firefoxâs [âŚ]
As you will know, Ubuntu is adding AI features this year, and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth hopes the distro will become the OS for the âagenticâ era. But big ambitions begin with a small seed, and the first is planted is a speech-to-text tool dubbed Myna. Name: Myna. Age: Minus 4 months (itâll debut in Ubuntu 26.10, out in October). Appearance: A keyboard shortcut you press to avoid using your keyboard for typing. Whatâs this about? A âlightweight speech-to-text applicationâ powered by AI. You press a hotkey to activate it, talk at your computer and, like magic, your words appear on screen. Canonicalâs VP [âŚ]
Every wondered what GIMP looked like in 1996, before GTK? Well, now you can. Developer balooii has packaged GIMP 0.54 as a Flatpak that runs on modern 64-bit Linux desktops with Wayland. Itâs apparently the earliest version of the app with the source code still available to build. Itâs not an official GIMP effort, but an enthusiast project hosted on the GNOME GitLab. Itâs also something of a work-in-progress package of an ancient work-in-progress beta release, with the maintainer promising more plugins and tutorials in time. Before we get to the install bit, there is a bit of trivia-laden history [âŚ]
Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 2 is available to download, the second of four snapshots planned for the âStonking Stingrayâ development cycle ahead of a stable release in October. As with the first snapshot, thereâs not a lot ânewâ stuff to see or test out, so unless youâre a developer or an avid bug hunter thereâs little reason to rush off and try it. Canonicalâs Utkarsh Gupta, announcing the release on Ubuntuâs developer mailing list, warns of a âbreaking changeâ â donât panic: itâs not in the image itself, but the URL itâs accessed from. Over the past few weeks the Ubuntu [âŚ]
New GTK4/libadwaita app Whisp is positioning itself as the note-taking app for people fed up with note-taking apps (the best one is always the next one, right?). Scratch that; Whisp pitches itself as âthe anti-note for GNOMEâ, a riff on Antinote, a macOS app with a similar look and feature set. Developer Tanay Bhomia describes it as âa fluid, gesture-driven scratchpad designed for absolute speedâ. The website takes shots at the complexity of Obsidian and Notion, though Whisp isnât out to compete with either. Itâs there as a foil to complex databases, folder hierarchies and the corkboard-and-red-string complexity of obsessively cross-referenced notes. I [âŚ]
Canonical has brought Livepatch to Arm64 devices for the first time, allowing Ubuntu systems on Arm hardware to apply critical kernel security patches without a full reboot. Livepatch is one of Ubuntuâs best hidden security features â itâs not enabled by default, requires Ubuntu Pro â as it allows kernel security updates to be applied in memory while your system is running. Normally, a restart is needed. Perfect if youâre a bit lazy running a task or workload you donât want interrupted. Livepatch is now available on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Ubuntu Core 26 running on Arm64 devices for the first time [âŚ]
Open-hardware manufacturer Pine64 has launched a $50 smart speaker that runs open-source software on a RISC-V chip. PineVoice (previously known as PineVox) is built around a Bouffalo Lab BL606P RISC-V SoC with integrated Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0 and Zigbee radio interfaces. Itâs equipped with dual microphone array and speaker with support for âlocal wake word detectionâ, and top-mounted buttons allow you to mute (with LED indicator), start/stop and adjust volume. The factory-shipped firmware is built on Alibabaâs open-source YoC platform and runs the Wyoming Satellite protocol, which turns the device into a local microphone and speaker for a self-hosted Home Assistant [âŚ]
A new update to System76âs COSMIC desktop is now rolling out with a new system monitoring tool and a fresh set of fixes and fine-tuning. COSMIC Epoch 1.1.0 also sees the developers behind the Rust-based desktop opting to â[increment] the minor version regularly in order to allow for mid-release patch versions if necessaryâ. The biggest new feature is COSMIC Monitor, a native system monitoring tool built using the same Iced toolkit and widget set the rest of the desktopâs core apps are built in. It will replace the GTK-based GNOME System Monitor in Pop!_OS 24.04, but users can continue to [âŚ]
A new version of miracle-wm, the Wayland compositor built on Mir with an i3/Sway style tiling window manager, has been released. Developer Matthew Kosarek, an engineer at Canonical who develops the keyboard-driven UX in his free time, says the new v0.10.0 release delivers more improvements to the plugin system introduced in the April 2026 release, said to be âgetting better and better everydayâ. Plugins can now be used to set a blur effect on individual unfocused windows using a two-pass separable Gaussian blur shader. This helps set a visible cue that might help you focus more. A new nightlight plugin uses [âŚ]
BudsLink is a Linux app giving you more control over Bluetooth earbuds from the likes of Apple, Sony, Samsung and Nothing â battery levels, active noise cancellation (ANC) and more, all without needing to use a mobile app. Most Bluetooth audio devices âjust workâ on Ubuntu and other Linux distributions for listening to audio, but thatâs about it. Pair AirPods or Galaxy Buds with your desktop and youâll find you canât adjust all of the on-device features you paid for. BudsLink is a GTK4/libadwaita app which can. It lets you control earbud features on your Linux desktop, no need to [âŚ]
Ubuntu has announced an âimportant policy updateâ, making beta releases mandatory for all Ubuntu flavours, no exceptions. Most flavours already hit the beta milestone every six months without issue. But until now a flavour that missed the deadline could still be granted a one-off exception. During the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle, thatâs what happened with Ubuntu Kylin, the Chinese-orientated spin that uses the UKUI desktop. It missed the Beta window but still made the final release. That wonât happen again. To get an official stable release, a flavour now must have a beta release out the same time as every [âŚ]
Audacity 4âs first public beta arrived this month with the biggest design change the iconic open-source audio editor has seen in decades. The audio editorâs interface, built on wxWidgets since the project began, now runs in Qt. However, the audio engine which handles file I/O, project storage and the built-in effects, uses the older codebase, wired up to the new frontend via a module called au3wrap. In a sense, Audacity 4 is a new look atop the same core engine, although the Github changelog choose to frame it as a âground-up rewriteâ in Qt, that appears to be only relate [âŚ]
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