Mozilla has released Firefox 152 with revamped Settings, new privacy controls and faster ways to share web content – plus a peculiar new way to mute tabs. The update is available from today (15 June, 2026) on Windows, macOS and Linux, as well as for Android and iOS (those versions have different feature sets and are not covered here). The new-look Firefox Settings page shouldn’t come as a huge shock given it’s been been teased plenty over the past year or so. Mozilla says the revamp offers “streamlined organisation, clearer groupings, and improved navigation for easier customisation”. For many, rifling through […]
KDE Plasma 6.7 has been released, and it brings a feature many of its users have been requesting for decades: independent per-screen virtual desktops. The latest stable update also sees a classic KDE theme revived, supports simultaneous HDR and ICC profiles and packs in an assortment of usability, UI and performance tweaks. This release is dedicated to Eric Laffoon, a longtime KDE supporter who passed away in May 2026. Users of the Ubuntu-based KDE Neon and rolling-release distributions like Arch will be able to install Plasma 6.7 in the coming days. Kubuntu 26.04 LTS users should check the Kubuntu Backports […]
You can now use Firefox’s free built-in VPN with no data limits until August 31, 2026. Mozilla is also temporarily expanding the list of VPN server locations you can proxy traffic through, up from the current set of 5 locations to 28. The Firefox 151 release in May added the option to select from a list of VPN servers (though it’s a feature yet to be enabled for everyone), which is handy when location matters more than speed (Firefox VPN selects the fastest VPN server by default, typically the one closest). The extra server locations during the promotion: Australia, Austria, Belgium, […]
Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 7.1 with a rewritten NTFS filesystem driver, battery reporting for Apple Silicon devices and a Steam Deck OLED audio fix. Other notable changes include improved power-management switching on AMD CPUs, performance gains for Intel Arc Battlemage graphics and, unusually, a big set of legacy hardware removals that saw over 140,000 lines of code dropped. The loss of legacy hardware drivers has a purpose: a leaner kernel is a more maintainable kernel, and its developers no longer carry the burden of having to fix security flaws found by AI models in obsolete drivers to support […]
You’ll be able to customise the look of LibreOffice’s Tabbed UI in the free office suite’s next major release, which his due out in August 2026. LibreOffice 26.8’s Tabbed UI (also known as the Notebookbar and modelled after the Ribbon in Microsoft Office) can show a colourful background when application theming is enabled under Tools > Options > Appearance. A blue shade is used by default but you can pick or set any colour you like. In the ‘Customisations’ section, first selected the Writer, Calc, Impress or Data Notebookbar value, then use the dropdown to chance the colour. Click apply […]
Microsoft has released Coreutils for Windows, allowing a stack of familiar “Linux-like” command-line utilities to run natively on Windows. The project is based on uutils, the Rust-based reimplementation of GNU coreutils that Ubuntu (mostly) has adopted in recent releases. Microsoft’s package bundles uutils’ coreutils and findutils as well as a GNU-compatible grep in a single binary. It offers tools like cat, cp, ls, mv and uptime. Commands that use POSIX-only features are excluded, meaning chmod, chown, kill and others aren’t included. What’s notable – *nix tools working their way into the Windows ecosystem is notable – is that this isn’t […]
Mozilla has added support for Google’s Play Integrity API, known for blocking custom ROMs and rooted device from accessing banking apps, to Firefox for Android. According to a resolved issue in Mozilla’s public tracker, a new lib-integrity-googleplay library has been added to Firefox’s Android codebase. It requests a Play Integrity token, which is then passed to Mozilla’s MLPA (Machine Learning Proxy) server. The token gates access to Firefox’s server-side AI tools, like Smart Window, for rate-limiting purposes. It means Mozilla can ensure that only unmodified, Play-installed copies of Firefox on Google-certified devices can use its compute resources. It will not mean Firefox […]
Euro-Office launches its stable 1.0 release on June 9, billed as a ‘truly open’ sovereign alternative to Microsoft Office – a claim riling The Document Foundation, makers of LibreOffice. In an open letter published today, TDF’s Italo Vignoli takes issue with the upstart productivity suite’s pitch. He disputes Euro-Office’s marketing, which he says positions it as the first open-source office suite developed in Europe. It’s historically inaccurate as OpenOffice.org got there in 2001, followed by LibreOffice from 2010. But he calls out another issue. The European Union is making a big push for digital sovereignty, cutting down on how much […]
Proton has confirmed it is working on a Proton Drive client for Linux desktops. The announcement slipped out as part of a broader platform update. Proton has rebuilt Drive around a new shared SDK, with a single codebase powering its official apps on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and web (rather than separate implementations as before). It’s this unified approach that makes it easier for the Swiss-based company to add new features and integrations across all its official apps – and make an official client for Linux, which is being build on the SDK “from the ground up”, they say. Not […]
A new version of HandBrake, the open-source and cross-platform media conversion tool, is available to download. HandBrake 1.11.2 is a maintenance update in the current 1.11.x stable release, which was released in March 2026 and added DNxHR and ProRes encoder support, and an AMD VCN AV1 10-bit encoder compatible with the company’s 9000 series GPUs and newer. This update is focused on fixes and finesse. A pair of bugs affecting 2-pass operations are resolved: a crash during 2-pass lossless x265 encodes, and a memory leak that occurred during 2-pass MPEG-4, MPEG-2, VP9 and FFV1 encodes. On Linux, HandBrake adds WebM […]
Reliving the glory days of the GNOME 2 desktop is but a browser tab away – well, kinda. The personal website of Benny Powers, a software developer at Red Hat, is not a traditional vertical column of text. Nor is it a slop-soup of purple gradients, rounded glassy cards and monospaced datapoints (the ‘vibe-coded website’ aesthetic everywhere right now). No, it’s an interactive GNOME 2 ‘desktop’. He built it after digesting an essay on how websites used to be weird and playful and unique. Looking at his own site, he decided it wasn’t nearly wacky enough, so restyled it to […]
Dynamic Music Pill, the blingy GNOME Shell extension that adds now playing track info, media controls and even real-time lyrics to your desktop, has gained some new options. “Like what?”, you ask… If you don’t want to see the name of the artists in the panel pill, you no longer have to: a ‘show artist’ toggle lets you hide it. The extension already has an option to dynamically hide artist labels if there’s not enough room to display it alongside the title. On that topic, when long artist names and track titles combine, the pill will scroll the labels from […]
Ever wished you could talk in to a text field rather than type? Ubuntu 26.10 hears you – quite literally. Canonical VP of Engineer Jon Seager, speaking at the Ubuntu Summit in May, said the distro aims to let you “press a button and talk into any field that you could previously type in […] by default on every Ubuntu machine”. Speech to text will be powered by a small language parsing model like Whisper, turning any text entry point on the desktop to offer optional speech input. This means you could bark “Firefox” in the GNOME Shell overview rather […]
Gaming on Ubuntu on modern ARM-based devices just got a boost, as Canonical has announced that its Steam Snap for Arm64 devices is now ‘stable’. The effort has been in beta since it was announced in January. Since then, Canonical says it has “received great feedback” from users kicking the tyres on those early builds, across a varied range of Arm64 platforms and devices. Issues raised in the testing phase have been ironed out, with Ubuntu’s maker touting “solid performance across many popular games” on devices like the NVIDIA DGX Spark and Radxa Orion O6, as well as Snapdragon laptops […]
El Poblador is a fully playable Settlers of Catan clone that runs entirely in your terminal. Written in Go by developer vicho, El Poblador is a surprisingly compete rendition of the competitive board game, which is built around collecting resources, building settlements and blocking your opponents. All of those core mechanics are accounted for, albeit shorn of the tactile joy of handling tiny wooden tokens and constantly shuffling cards. Like the real-deal it’s a game designed for 3-4 players. You can gather resources, build settlements and buildings, and everything else the physical version does. Huddle around a laptop or on […]
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