OpenAI has announced a preview release of the official ChatGPT Desktop app for Linux. Compared to using ChatGPT in a browser tab, the GUI desktop app can run Codex in your local repos, hook into your other apps (via extensions) for ChatGPT Work related tasks and probe your local files without you having to upload anything elsewhere first. ChatGPT desktop for Linux joins Anthropicâs Claude desktop app for Linux, which entered beta last month. This announcement is about an official version of its full-fat desktop GUI app. Youâve no doubt seen plenty of unofficial wrappers around ChatGPT before now, and command-line [âŚ]
Linux Mint has overhauled kernel management and will now automatically delete old kernels once a week. Kernel management has also moved out of Update Manager and into the System Administration tool on both standard and LMDE versions, and the now tracks kernels by series rather than individual versions. You get to choose which kernel seriesâ are tracked and how many older kernels within each series the system should keep (in addition to the one youâre booted on; it doesnât yank out the rug under its own feet). Updates for tracked seriesâ kernels continue to appear in Update Manager as before, [âŚ]
A new Linux Mint 22.3 HWE ISO is available for download, powered by Linux kernel 7.0. The distro issued the first Linux Mint 22.3 HWE ISO in March with Linux 6.17. That image remains available to download alongside this, the latest. Those default download for Linux Mint 22.3 (Zena) is the regular ISO that boots from Linux 6.14. All of the Linux Mint HWE ISOs installs Linux Mint 22.3, which is based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, just with a newer hardware stack than the one found in the standard image. Canonical began rolling out the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Hardware Enablement [âŚ]
I flummoxed to read a report about how much memory Microsoftâs Weather app uses on Windows 11 â more than 1GB just to render what is, ostensibly, a fancy table of stats. I was less flummoxed to check the memory usage of Mousam, my current go-to weather app on Linux. It the same job for under a third of the Windows figure and, in my opinion, has a much nicer design too. Not everyone running Windows 11 will spot memory usage as high as that reported by Windows Latest, but on my low-power Chuwi laptop (the same one I checked [âŚ]
Kagi has released a new Linux beta of Orion, its GTK WebKit-based web browser. The v0.4.1 beta builds on the v0.3.0 public beta release in March with more features available on its macOS and iOS versions. Private windows, a working (if still bare-bones) download manager and an overflow menu on the toolbar (which you can use to keep buttons out of sight without making them inaccessible) are present and functional in this beta. Orionâs link preview feature also makes it debut on Linux. This does what it says: previews link â not the AI summary sort, thankfully. Think macOS âQuick [âŚ]
An updated version of Dynamic Music Pill, the GNOME Shell extension that shows track info and lyrics in your panel or dock with more animated flourishes than your average now-playing applet, is out. If youâre prone to a bit of desk-side crooning, Dynamic Music Pill v1.3.0 adds two new lyrics provider APIs, BetterLyrics and BiniLyrics with TTML parsing to provide word-by-word karaoke-style highlighting. If one of these new lyrics providers has word-level timing for the track youâre listening to, you get it, but, if not, it falls back to line-by-line as before (or plain static text if nothing synced is [âŚ]
A new bug-fix release of Calibre, the open-source e-book manger, view and converter, is available for download. Calibre 9.13 resolves a number of PDF-related issues, including one for Linux distributions that ship an âancientâ version of the libxml2 library. To avoid errors that could cause when converting PDFs on Linux, Calibre now preloads its html5-parser library. A comment in the file explains: âQtWebEngineProcess on some ancient Linux systems probes for GPU backends which loads swrast_dri.so which links against system libxml2, which overwrites or global libxml2 symbols. So we preload lxml and html5_parser as a workaround. Thankfully this is basically only [âŚ]
A new beta of Resources, the system monitor tool Ubuntu 26.04 LTS ships with by default, is out with expanded AMD NPU stats and temperature reporting for PowerPC CPUs. Users with Ryzen 7040, 8040 and Ryzen AI 300/400-series chips can glean utilisation, power and performance metrics for their onboard neural accelerators. A reassuring way to tell if an AI workload is actually using the NPU rather than quietly frying your CPU. You might cock an eyebrow at hearing âPowerPCâ mentioned. Resourceâs support for PowerPC CPU temps uses the ibmpowernv hwmon driver, which covers POWER8 and newer chips and not the oldie, [âŚ]
Rhythmbox 3.5.0 is out and it now lets you sync podcast subscriptions and listening progress across apps â the standout feature in the music playerâs first major release in nine months. A new podcast plugin ties into the gpodder.net API so your subscriptions and play counts carry over between Rhythmbox and other compatible clients via a self-hosted sync server like oPodSync or PinePods. The podcasts page itself is has also undergone a refresh, with the episode list now showing what youâve already listened so youâre not ending up with a sense of deja vu. The v3.5.0 changelog also notes that [âŚ]
Fan of the the Papirus icon theme will be pleased to hear there a new update â the first since May 2025. For Papirusâs first update in 2026 (the tardiness of which its maintainer, Serhii Yeremenko, apologises) brings over 80 new icons or updated icons spanning apps, games and user-interface icons, plus new file mimetypes and revised symlinks. Frequent updates are why Papirus icons are popular with Linux users, and have been for such a long time. Often, Linux icon packs debut with a big bang, the momentum fuels a few revisions but then things go quiet as people and maintainers move [âŚ]
Dropbeat is a new riff on a old tune, a panel-based music applet for GNOME Shell that gives you an alternate way to pause, play and skip tracks in MPRIS-friendly Linux media players. Applets of this ilk are legion, and this panel applet doesnât do anything that different to ones you may have tried in the past or currently use (for all the bells and whistles, try the Dynamic Music Pill extension instead). But it does do some things differently. When installed, it adds a button to your panel that when clicked âshows a cool card to control your media [âŚ]
Ubuntu is transitioning another of its core system Deb packages to the sandboxed snap format, a move it says will improve security and allow for better desktop integration. The package in question is hwctrl, a small command-line tool preinstalled on Ubuntu desktop and server as part of Canonicalâs rust-hwlib hardware API set. Canonical engineer Sergio Costas explained in a package change that due to âplanned architecture changes for integration of hwctl with gnome-control-center and other front-ends, and for increased security, the HWCTL package will be snap-only from now onwardâ. If youâre on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, you will be automatically moved [âŚ]
Ubuntu 26.04 LTSâs minimal cloud images have been missing curl â accidentally, it turns out, so Canonical has put it back. Curl is a commonly-used command-line tool for fetching files from remote servers. Itâs called on in countless install scripts, CI pipelines and one-liners youâve no doubt pasted into your terminal without thinking twice about. But the package has been missing from the server-cloud-minimal images of 26.04 to date. That caught those running pared-back cloud installs unawares, breaking expected workflows, has it had been available in previous versions. The manual fix is to install curl from the repos which, in [âŚ]
Check in for a roundup of the hottest Linux app release that landed in July 2026 (and not just hot because of the temperatures last month). Major updates last month included the Firefox 153 release, with container tabs confusing those whoâve had them for ages. It also finally rounded window bottom corners on GTK-based Linux desktops, Ubuntu included. But the slick system monitor Mission Center also dropped a big update. I recommend checking that out, especially if youâve longed for a way to swot over power stats. Anthropic delivered a Linux beta of its Claude Desktop app, easily installed on [âŚ]
Times are changing and Ubuntuâs keep pace â literally. In November, most of Canada will turn its clocks back an hour, but the Western Canadian province of Alberta wonât. Itâs decided to stay on daylight saving time permanently rather than fall back to standard time as usual. Meanwhile, in September, Morocco is doing the reverse: after eight years of running an hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, itâs going back to GMT. Users of Ubuntu in either of these locations need their system to be in sync, which is what a new update to the tzdata package does. It refreshes the database [âŚ]
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