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OMG! Ubuntu

Focus blur, nightlight added to Miracle-wm desktop

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 “getting better and better everyday”. 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 […]

LWN.net

GIMP 0.54.1 in a Flatpak

The GIMP project reports that GNOME contributor "balooii" has worked to package GIMP 0.54.1—released in 1996—as a Flatpak that will build and run on modern 64-bit Linux systems. This is a Motif-based version, and the same version that was used by Larry Ewing to create Tux. While not likely to be useful for serious graphics work today, it should be interesting for users who would like to see what a 30-year-old version of GIMP was capable of.

OMG! Ubuntu

Control AirPods & Galaxy Buds on Ubuntu with ‘BudsLink’

BudsLink is a Linux app giving you more control over Bluetooth earbuds from the likes of Apple, Sony, Samsung and Nothing – battery levels, active noise cancellation (ANC) and more, all without needing to use a mobile app. Most Bluetooth audio devices ‘just work’ on Ubuntu and other Linux distributions for listening to audio, but that’s about it. Pair AirPods or Galaxy Buds with your desktop and you’ll find you can’t 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 […]

LWN.net

[$] Free-threaded Python: past, present, and future

Probably the biggest change for Python over the last five years or so is the advent of the "free-threaded" version of the language, which removes the global interpreter lock (GIL) and allows multiple threads to run in parallel in the interpreter. At PyCon US 2026, held in Long Beach, California in mid-May, longtime CPython core developer (and current steering council member) Thomas Wouters gave a talk about the feature. He looked at the motivation behind the GIL-removal efforts, some history, the current status of the free-threaded interpreter, and provided a prediction on where it all leads.