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 […]
Canonical announce Ubuntu Pro for WSL, bringing extended security coverage to users running Linux on Windows. As on desktop, it's free for personal use.
Linux Mint 22.3 ‘Zena’ is readying a beta release for testing, with the distro’s developers aiming to have it out in the first half of December. If it feels a bit “soon” for a new version of Linux Mint to be coming it’s because the release of Linux Mint 22.2 arrived much later than usual. As the distro’s developers don’t want their standard release schedule to slip, and many of the bigger changes planned have been in gestation for a while, there’s no reason to hold back for the sake of it. Amongst changes coming in Linux Mint 22.3 are […]
December’s here (“December’s here, December’s here…“ as the festive ear worm from New Found Glory goes) which means November is no longer here — ergo, it’s time for a Linux App Release Roundup! November was host to a number of big software updates, a few of which I did plan to cover properly but, for one reason or another, got away from me. I did cover Firefox 145 and Thunderbird 145 (out like clockwork), the Raspberry Pi Imager 2 released (redesigned), Mission Center 1.1 (better filtering), Fish 4.2 (multi-line suggests) and the GIMP 3.2 Release Candidate (improved text tool). Read […]
A new version of ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors, the free, open source productivity suite for Linux, macOS and Windows is out. ONLYOFFICE 9.2 includes a new AI agent across all editors in its stack, including Document Editor, Spreadsheet Editor, Presentation Editor and PDF Editor. Thus it is possible to quickly generate documents from prompts, analyse and ask questions regarding specific document contents, fill in PDF forms and, for those feeling brave, allow the AI Agent to do local file management. AI Agent in ONLYOFFICE was introduced in the v9.1 update as a beta plugin users needed to explicitly install. The release […]
A budget version of the Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer with 1GB RAM and costing $45 has been announced. The new Raspberry Pi 5 1GB is an affordable option, but it’s not as low-cost as it could’ve been owing to the rocketing cost of memory across the tech industry driven, largely, by demand and competition from the increase in AI data centres. But its lower price comparative to other models in the range is, arguably, never more important. Why? Because, alas, the cost of most other Pi models has risen due to the volatile (heh) memory market with price increase […]
Linux News