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 […]
You’ll 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 “AI” coded applications and automated submissions going forward. A change to the store’s policy note says “applications containing AI-generated or AI-assisted code, documentation, or other content are not allowed”. It’s not a blanket ban; there’s carve out for “mature, well-maintained projects”. Those can contain AI assisted code and use AI for store descriptions and updates. Existing AI-coded apps available […]
May 2026 delivered a sizeable set of Linux software updates, including the set I’ve 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 Kagi’s 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. […]
Canonical has released the first monthly snapshot of Ubuntu 26.10 ‘Stonking Stingray’. 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 Ubuntu’s engineers to fine-tune new, automated build processes. Snapshots are useful jump-on points that help users test the next release, but […]
Google announced at Google I/O that Canonical is now the new lead maintainer and ‘strategic steward’ of Flutter desktop for Windows, macOS and Linux. “[The Flutter] desktop experience has reached a new level of maturity this year, driven by our incredible engineering partnership with Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu”, says Kate Lovett, Engineer Manager on the Flutter Framework team at Google. “This progress is fuelled by Canonical’s dedication to ensuring that Flutter delivers on every desktop” she adds. Canonical made Flutter its ‘default choice’ for developing new Ubuntu apps in 2021. Since then the distro has created a variety of […]
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 project’s .workshop/ folder. The definition file […]
The Raspberry Pi 6 is unlikely to be released until 2028 and it won’t feature an onboard NPU for AI compute when it arrives – two details shared by the company’s 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 […]
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 “accommodate the differences between CSD (Client Side Decoration) and SSD (Server Side Decoration) windows” 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 isn’t pretty. The new tool can take app window screenshots with […]
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 “infrastructure modernization and migration project”. Ubuntu Pastebin, which works similarly to GitHub’s 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 […]
Daily builds of Ubuntu 26.10 ‘Stonking Stingray’ are now available for download, as development on the distro’s 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 October’s release in advance the ability to do so. However, because package updates can break the ability for a bootable image to be created, it’s 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 […]
GNOME Sushi fans, rejoice: the spacebar preview feature is being fixed in Ubuntu 26.04. If you’re 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. GNOME’s Sushi isn’t 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. —Well, except it doesn’t (or rather, […]
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 […]
A bold new look arrives in Vivaldi 8.0, the latest update to the Chromium-based web browser. Vivaldi 8.0 sees the browser’s 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. “Unified is not a visual refresh. It is a rethinking of how the Vivaldi interface works as a system” the company says in its press release (a suspiciously AI-sounding parallelism that falls apart when your brain moves past ‘that sounds impressive’ since er, it is actually a visual […]
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