Linux handhelds are having a moment of late, yet few wear their geek cred as proudly as the Mecha Comet, a new open source, palm-sized computer crowdfunding on Kickstarter. The Mecha Comet is not a phone and it isnāt aiming to replace your your laptop. Instead, itās a modular Linux device designed to beā¦ Well, Whatever you need it to be, when you need it to be: adaptability is the USP [thatās enough āeeesā ā ed]. Three magnetic snap-on attachments change how the device functions. A gamepad panel provides familiar gaming input. A 40-pin GPIO header with I/O breakout caters [ā¦]
A new GNOME extension lets you add your own custom toggles to the Quick Settings menu, making it easier to run commands, scripts or service actions when you want. Custom Command Toggle lets you add up to 6 bespoke triggers to the Quick Settings menu, where they sit alongside regular system toggles. You can assign custom labels and icons, the latter pulled from the Adwaita or Yaru icon sets, for each button you add. The extensionās preferences provide plenty of control. You can define separate commands to run when toggling on and off, and choose whether an indicator icon appears when [ā¦]
FOSDEM 2026 takes place at the end of this month (January 31 to February 1), as a flock of FOSS enthusiasts, engineers and established companies descend on Brussels, Belgium to chat about all things open-source and Linux. Running annually since 2000, FOSDEM (āFree and Open Source Software Developersā European Meetingā) seems to grow in popularity each year. This year sees over 1000 speakers, 1000s, 100s of stands and as many 10,000 attendees. FOSDEM is free to attend, you just turn up as no registration is required, an open approach for an event thatās all about open collaboration. Talks at FOSDEM [ā¦]
Tonearm is a new GTK4/libadwaita TIDAL client that delivers what the streaming service itself doesnāt: a native Linux app with solid desktop integration ā albeit unofficially, of course. Itās the third unofficial client for Linux Iāve covered, joining High Tide and the Electron-based Tidal-Hifi. All exist as TIDAL doesnāt provide a Linux app itself, leaving users with the option of the web player. The web app works fine, but it means keeping a browser tab open and losing out on system-side niceties like media controls and keyboard shortcuts. Thankfully, TIDAL offer a robust API that, with a bit of open-source [ā¦]
Something has changed in my browsing habits of late, and Iām not sure I like it. I used to be a āif I donāt need it, close itā guy. Now? 25 tabs open ā a mix of news articles, code repos, drafts and random stuff I swore Iād revisitā¦ only I donāt remember why. But it seems Firefox has a fix for my forgetfulness in the works: Tab Notes. As the name suggests, Tab Notes are small text notes you can attach to any tab. This should act as an alibi for my intent, surfacing much needed answers for the all-too-frequent [ā¦]
The NexPhone is finally available for pre-order, some 14 years after it was first announced (but āavailableā is be a tad generous since manufacturing is yet to begin). Created by Nex Computer, the company behind the NexDock laptop shells (think a premium version of the terrific CrowView Note devices), the NexPhone aims to deliver what Canonicalās Ubuntu Phone ultimately didnāt: convergence. The tech scene has changed dramatically since the NexPhoneās 2012 crowdfunder pitch. Back then, this phone was aiming to run Ubuntu Phone as its primary OS. As that didnāt last long, the 2026 NexPhone runs Android, Debian and Windows [ā¦]
System76 has updated the COSMIC Desktop with window shadows and consistent corner sizing across all applications, a change available on Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS right now and coming to users on other Linux distributions soon. Both features apply the effects consistently, meaning that apps in different toolkits (Qt, GTK, Iced, etc) match better (if not perfectly) than they did before. Controls for applying roundness and shadowing in floating and tiled modes is userāadjustable. Prior, only GTK windows running on COSMIC had drop shadows. Native COSMIC apps, and Qt ones, appeared flat. This often made it hard(er) to tell which app was [ā¦]
Intelās Core 3 (Wildcat Lake) chips are on the way aiming to replace the Intel N100 ā but to be the next budget computing champ theyāll need to match it on price, not just beat it on performance. At CES in January, Intel barely mentioned its budget chips. This was presumably so all attention and headlines were given to its powerful and pricey āPanther Lakeā chips, like the ones powering the revived Dell XPS 14 with Ubuntu (also announced as CES). Of course, the N100ās popularity was a happy accident anyway, and hawking decently performing budget chips that are as [ā¦]
The lack of Adobe creative software on Linux is an oft-mentioned drawback by those who would use Linux full-time, but canāt wean themselves off a software that forms part of their professional or creative workflow. You can already run Photoshop on Linux through Wine if you are willing to faff about. Older versions like Photoshop CS4 work well, while the latest āCreative Cloudā versions can be installed too ā albeit with a catch: you need to install Photoshop on Windows or virtual machine first, then copy the files over to your Linux Wine prefix. And then hope the best. Using [ā¦]
A dock is a dock, right? A line of icon shortcuts for quick access to your apps. The Multi-Column Dock extension for GNOME 45-47 takes that simple idea, but adds organisational features. A GitHub description describes this as: āa customizable multi-column dock for GNOME Shell Keep your apps neatly organized with grouping, smooth scrolling, easy drag-and-drop reordering, auto-hide, and full multi-monitor support.ā The main draw is that you can group related applications together in the dock, give each grouping a label and background colour and then collapse or expand them on the fly. If youāve often use a bunch of [ā¦]
Looking to run .NET 10 on Noble Numbat? The .NET 10.0.1 update is now available for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Latest SDK and runtime improvements ā an apt command away.
A Linux version of Opera GX is in the works, according to a tweet posted to the official X account. The company announced the plans via a snarky post linking to news article on Microsoft adding an AI sidebar to Windows 11ās file manager, writing: āIs this a good time to announce that we are working on the Linux version of Opera GX?ā. As good a time as any, Iād say. Opera GX isnāt New Opera GX is a gaming-centric version of the regular Opera web browser that pairs the web with a variety of gaming related extras, like Razer [ā¦]
A new version of the Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ has been released with enough grunt to run popular generative AI (GenAI) models, including Qwen and DeepSeek. The first generation Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ add-ons were designed for on-device acceleration of vision-based neural network models, but wasnāt powerful enough to run more generalised large-language models (LLMs) ā something the new AI HAT+ 2 solves. Described as the companyās āfirst AI product designed to fill the generative AI gapā, the Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2 packs in a Hailo-10H NPU with 40 TOPS (INT4) of inferencing performance and is paired with 8GB [ā¦]
An alpha release of Orion for Linux, a Webkit-based web browser developed by the search engine Kagi is out for testing ā though only for paid Orion+ subscribers. Not a subscriber? Donāt worry; an Orion for Linux beta release is reportedly coming as early as next month (February) to allow people who registered their interest in the Linux launch via a newsletter signup to help test it. Announcement of announcements aside, Kagi recently shared a progress update on how Orionās Linux build is shaping up. Iāll get to whatās been added in a moment, but first I want to recap [ā¦]
If you run Ubuntu 26.04 development builds as your daily driver and have noticed a glut of updates in recent days, donāt get excited: there arenāt reams of new features heading your way ā at least, not ones you can see. Ubuntu engineers recently began a āmass rebuild of all source packagesā, re-compiling them from scratch to ensure that they have the right tooling and hardware compatibility features enabled. This wholesale task ensures that the majority of apps, libraries and tools spanning the entire resolute archive are using the distroās preferred baselines where applicable ā yup, even those dusty libraries [ā¦]
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