Anthony Enzor-DeMeo has finally taken up his role as CEO of Mozilla Corporation, publishing a blog post to celebrate in which he spells out the company’s “next chapter”. The headline news? He says Firefox will remain an “anchor” for the company, but confirms it is to “evolve into a modern AI browser” — to unlock new revenue opportunities for the company. Enzor-DeMeo’s post is refreshingly light on the GPT-isms most of Mozilla’s recent public output is full of, suggesting that a human wrote it. But the vision laid out within reads like one where revenue matters more than users do. My […]
A second GIMP 3.2 release candidate (RC) is now available for testing, should you fancy sampling the various changes on course for the upcoming stable release. GIMP 3.2 iterates on the huge GIMP 3.0 release that landed earlier this year, which took more than 7 years to get in to shape. No lengthy gap for GIMP 3.2 or successors as the team switches to an accelerated development cycle. Below I run through what’s changed since GIMP 3.2 RC1. That build, along with the GIMP 3.1.2 & 3.1.4 dev releases, added lots of new features. There are no new features here, as the point […]
Ever wondered how secure the apps you install from the Snap Store are? A new website from Ubuntu alumnus Alan Pope makes it easy to find out. The Snapscope website uses Grype, an open‑source vulnerability scanner, to vet packages on the Snap Store for known security vulnerabilities (critical, high, medium, low, actively exploited) which could affect them (and their users). You can “search for any snap package, see its security posture, and dig into the CVEs”, with its maker noting that the site presents “no judgement, just facts”. Snapscope make it easy to see: : Alan shares a video walkthrough […]
The second Ubuntu 26.04 snapshot is ready to download, making testing of 'Resolute Raccoon' ahead of next April's stable release easier. Details inside.
Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS is available for download, the first version of the Ubuntu-based Linux distribution to use System76’s all-new Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment. It’s been a “long ride” to get here (building an entirely new Linux desktop, compositor, widget toolkit, and suite of first-party apps is no mean feat). System76 announced plans to build COSMIC in 2021, and a series of alpha and beta builds followed. Now, it’s out in orbit, joining the constellation of Linux distros (cheesy, eh). Carl Richell, Founder and CEO of System76, says the company is “proud of this contribution to the open source ecosystem”, and […]
MZLA Technologies Corporation has released Thunderbird 146, the latest monthly update for its famed open-source email client. Changes this month may sound less flashy compared to last month, which saw Thunderbird 145 add Microsoft Exchange support (albeit with some caveats, carveouts and a couple of capabilities still be added). Plus, work on readying Thunderbird Pro, the paid-for subscription-based webmail, appointment and file sending service excepted to cost upwards of $9/m, for a soft-launch continues. Those services are about to enter community testing. What’s New in Thunderbird 146? MZLA say logins are migrated to a more modern AES encryption standard in […]
Changes are afoot for Ubuntu’s opt-in, anonymous system telemetry gathering , including greater transparency with the open-sourcing of the server it’s sent to. Ubuntu 25.10 introduced Ubuntu Insights, a newer, more modern hardware metrics reporting service that is preinstalled alongside the distro’s existing Ubuntu Report tool. The former is used by those who upgrade to 25.10, the latter on new installs. With 26.04 LTS coming, Canonical would like to make Insights the default for all users, including those coming from versions with Ubuntu Report (i.e., Ubuntu 24.04 LTS), and re-seek consent. Telemetry makes folks twitchy so, lest anyone brandishes a […]
Not all of Ubuntu’s flavours have applied for long-term support status in next year’s 26.04 release. Per the outcome of a recent Ubuntu Technical Board meeting, only 7 of the 10 official offshoots are designated LTS releases: — Oh, and the ‘oh yeah, that’s a flavour’ flavour: (No shade; I just always forget about little ol’ Kylin). However, two Ubuntu flavours did not apply for LTS status for 26.04: No Ubuntu Unity LTS? Expected in light of challenges facing the distro (there was no Ubuntu Unity 25.10 release) because the incumbent project lead is, reportedly, now busy with higher education. […]
Ubuntu’s desktop is about to look more like upstream GNOME than it has in years — but lest you panic, we’re not talking majorly. The Yaru theme team — try saying that several times in a row — has embarked on a refactor of its GNOME Shell theme ahead of the next long-term support release, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Instead of maintaining a separate, customised stylesheet based on Adwaita, the idea is take a simpler approach: use Adwaita directly, but apply minimal., Ubuntu-specific tweaks on top. Thought they were already doing that? Not quite. Currently, Ubuntu’s ‘Shell’ theme is based on Adwaita (GNOME’s […]
Canonical is adding AMD’s ROCm to the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS repos, making it faster for developers to install GPU-accelerated AI and HPC libraries for AMD Instinct and Radeon GPUs. The news mirrors September’s NVIDIA CUDA announcement, when Canonical said it would package CUDA tools in the official Ubuntu repositories, negating multi-step installation hurdles for developers to get up and running with GPU-accelerated AI/ML tasks on Ubuntu. Now, AMD already provide ROCm for Ubuntu directly via its own website/repo. What this news means is packaging and maintenance duties shift over to Canonical, which has created a dedicated engineering team to shoulder the […]
Mozilla Firefox 146 is out, adding a final flurry of features to round off what’s been an interesting year for the open source browser – but is there anything good in the update? Arguably, the ‘headline’ change for Linux users is Firefox now fully supports fractional-scaling under Wayland by default. The change, Mozilla say, makes “rendering more effective” (i.e., text, icons, menus and cursors appear non-blurry, position correctly and render at the right size). ‘Fully’ is an important qualifier as Firefox already scaled well, but a parts didn’t (e.g., AI link previews would show oversized on my laptop @ 150% […]
Proton has launched Sheets, an encrypted spreadsheet app available to use in any browser with CSV/XLS import, real-time collaboration and more – for free!
Firefox looks decent enough on Ubuntu, right? But it doesn’t look very colourful by default, which is where add-ons and themes come in — one I was tipped to recently is certainly eye-catching. And it’s not a theme-theme. Ambient theme by Site Colour is an open-source Firefox add-on that dynamically re-colours the tab bar and toolbar based on the dominant colour from the web page being viewed. If you’ve tried Vivaldi web browser you may have noticed it does something similar. When you switch between different tabs… the colour changes. The add-on’s settings allow you to add sits to exclude […]
Firefox looks decent enough on Ubuntu, right? But it doesn’t look very colourful by default, which is why many of us turn to add-ons and themes to — one I was tipped to recently is certainly eye-catching. And it’s not a theme-theme. Ambient theme by Site Colour is an open-source Firefox add-on that dynamically re-colours the tab bar and toolbar based on the dominant colour from the web page being viewed. If you’ve tried Vivaldi web browser you may have noticed it does something similar. When you switch between different tabs… the colour changes. The add-on’s settings allow you to […]
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