Youâll have to sift through fewer vibe-coded apps on Flathub in future, as the store has announced a policy change on software made using AI tools. Flathub, the de-facto place to find and install Flatpak applications, is banning the use of âAIâ coded applications and automated submissions going forward. A change to the storeâs policy note says âapplications containing AI-generated or AI-assisted code, documentation, or other content are not allowedâ. Itâs not a blanket ban; thereâs carve out for âmature, well-maintained projectsâ. Those can contain AI assisted code and use AI for store descriptions and updates. Existing AI-coded apps available [âŚ]
May 2026 delivered a sizeable set of Linux software updates, including the set Iâve rounded up for your reading pleasure in this post. The month also saw a buffet of big browser updates, including Firefox 151 with new-look new tab page, Vivaldi 8.0 with a new-look generally and a new public beta of Kagiâs Orion. Elsewhere, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS support was added to VMware Workstation (and Fusion for macOS), while open-source system cleaner BleachBit debuted a TUI for interactive command-line based spring cleaning. Below, I run through a crop of other Linux app releases that landed in May and caught my eye. [âŚ]
Canonical has released the first monthly snapshot of Ubuntu 26.10 âStonking Stingrayâ. This is the first of 4 planned testing builds in the lead up to the final, stable release of Ubuntu 26.10 on 15 October, 2026. Utkarsh Gupta announced the release on the Ubuntu developer mailing list, noting that a couple of images are missing from the first snapshot but will return for Snapshot 2. Ubuntu monthly snapshots are not alpha builds. They exist as a way for Ubuntuâs engineers to fine-tune new, automated build processes. Snapshots are useful jump-on points that help users test the next release, but [âŚ]
Google announced at Google I/O that Canonical is now the new lead maintainer and âstrategic stewardâ of Flutter desktop for Windows, macOS and Linux. â[The Flutter] desktop experience has reached a new level of maturity this year, driven by our incredible engineering partnership with Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntuâ, says Kate Lovett, Engineer Manager on the Flutter Framework team at Google. âThis progress is fuelled by Canonicalâs dedication to ensuring that Flutter delivers on every desktopâ she adds. Canonical made Flutter its âdefault choiceâ for developing new Ubuntu apps in 2021. Since then the distro has created a variety of [âŚ]
Canonical has released Workshop, a snap package to create self-contained development environments from a single YAML configuration file. The same setup can be reproduced across different machines and hardware setups, reducing dependency headaches and configuration drift within teams. Environments are built from SDKs, packages that install languages, frameworks and tools. Most come from the SDK Store, which provides versioned channels like the Snap Store (which can be pinned for reproducibility). Canonical ships SDKs for Ollama, OpenCode, NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm at launch, but teams can create or define project-specific SDKs that are kept in the projectâs .workshop/ folder. The definition file [âŚ]
The Raspberry Pi 6 is unlikely to be released until 2028 and it wonât feature an onboard NPU for AI compute when it arrives â two details shared by the companyâs engineers in Reddit last week. Three Raspberry Pi engineers held an AMA (ask me anything) session on Reddit on 21 May, 2026. During it they provided some insight into their plans for the Pi 6 and when we can expect it to hit the market. Based on past launch dates, the gap between major Pi models (Raspberry Pi 2, 3, 4 and 5) is around 3-4 years. The Raspberry Pi 5 [âŚ]
Linux Mint developers are building a new screenshot utility for the Cinnamon desktop ahead of its next major release. The home-grown tool will give users more options when making screen grabs and âaccommodate the differences between CSD (Client Side Decoration) and SSD (Server Side Decoration) windowsâ to result in clearer screenshots. Currently, Cinnamon uses the GTK-based gnome-screenshot , but the tool fails to capture window shadows at all when taking app window screenshots. It does, however, leave clipped, dark pixel artefacts from window shadows beneath the rounded corners. Which isnât pretty. The new tool can take app window screenshots with [âŚ]
Canonical will decommission its long-running text-hosting service Ubuntu Pastebin on May 31. The company is pulling the plug as part of a broader âinfrastructure modernization and migration projectâ. Ubuntu Pastebin, which works similarly to GitHubâs Gist, albeit without the revision history, has been available to the community since late 2007 It originally launched under the paste.ubuntu.com domain before adding pastebin.ubuntu.com, which is live until the end of the month. The service was partly created to stop the official IRC support channels from being flooded with reams of terminal output from help-seeking users. It was also used by the community to share [âŚ]
Daily builds of Ubuntu 26.10 âStonking Stingrayâ are now available for download, as development on the distroâs next major release kicks in to gear. As the name suggests, new ISOs are produced from development code on a (mostly) daily basis, giving those keen to test Octoberâs release in advance the ability to do so. However, because package updates can break the ability for a bootable image to be created, itâs not unusual for there to be temporary gaps between new daily builds being available. Daily builds will continue to be produced for remainder of the Ubuntu 26.10 development cycle, right [âŚ]
GNOME Sushi fans, rejoice: the spacebar preview feature is being fixed in Ubuntu 26.04. If youâre not familiar with it, GNOME Sushi is a file preview tool similar to Quick Look on macOS. Select a file in Nautilus, press space and a floating preview window appears. It works with images, video and audio files, PDFs, plain text files and more. GNOMEâs Sushi isnât preinstalled in Ubuntu but many users install it themselves as it makes it easier to find specific files when rooting through folders filled with samey-seeming documents, audio files and video clip. âWell, except it doesnât (or rather, [âŚ]
A new version of ONLYOFFICE, the open-source productivity suite, is out with a small set of improvements. The new release lands nearly two months after ONLYOFFICE suspended its eight-year Nextcloud partnership over Euro-Office, a fork by a European consortium that ONLYOFFICE says violates its AGPLv3 licence terms. Totally unrelated (yes, sarcasm), ONLYOFFICE 9.4 updates its licensing to tighten language around attribution, copyright notices and the labelling of modified versions. Viva le fork; it still permits modifications, but is more sniffy about use of its trademarks. Features-wise, ONLYOFFICE 9.4.0 adds Croatian language translations across all editors and shuffles chart settings out [âŚ]
A bold new look arrives in Vivaldi 8.0, the latest update to the Chromium-based web browser. Vivaldi 8.0 sees the browserâs main UI elements (the bits that make a browser looks like a browser, so tabs, toolbars, panels, and content) drop their boundaries to form a continuous look. Hence the named Unified. âUnified is not a visual refresh. It is a rethinking of how the Vivaldi interface works as a systemâ the company says in its press release (a suspiciously AI-sounding parallelism that falls apart when your brain moves past âthat sounds impressiveâ since er, it is actually a visual [âŚ]
Canonical has released Ubuntu Core 26, a new long-term support (LTS) version of its immutable, snap-based OS. Among the changes Ubuntu Core 26 brings is smaller over-the-air updates, with download sizes reduced by up to 90% for most snaps thanks to a new snap-delta format. Updates to the Core base snaps specifically drop from 16 MB to 1.5 MB. Installation times are faster as the initramfs-based installer skips redundant reboots during provisioning. Core 26 also enables live kernel patching on ARM64 devices so that critical and high vulnerability kernel security fixes are applied without the need for a device reboot. [âŚ]
The new tab page has a (slightly) new look and a new name in Firefox 151, the latest update to Mozillaâs famous open-source web browser that rolls out this week (May 18). Now called Firefox Home, the new tab page has a ânew look and feelâ, to quote Mozilla. Itâs not quite that dramatic, but the rounded search bar (no longer sticky on scroll) draws from the upcoming Nova redesign. You can now also choose to show more shortcuts, up to a maximum of 4 rows. Stories stay put, but the button to follow a topic moves to the left-hand [âŚ]
Canonical has shared a new Ubuntu Concept image for the CIX P1, an Armv9 SoC powering single-board computers like the Radxa Orion O6 and Orange Pi 6 Plus. The image is based on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and ships with a Linux 7.0 kernel from CIXâs open-source GitHub tree using only open-source drivers. A set of patches sits on top of the mainline kernel, but the goal for them to be upstreamed too. Canonical is also targeting ACPI rather than Device Tree in the CIX P1 concept image. This is the same approach taken with its Snapdragon X Elite builds and [âŚ]
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