August saw a number of slew of notable Linux app updates, and in this post I roundup a few that might have passed you by. But unless youâve been sleeping under a rock youâll have already heard about Firefox 153, the big OpenShot 4.0 release with colour grading and the latest update to the ebook manager Calibre letting you generate new book covers using online generative AI. August also saw open-source Mastodon client Tuba pick up a stack of new features, LibreOffice 26.8 debuted a new paragraph composer engine (makes sense, promise). We also saw NVIDIA GeForce NOW app leave [âŚ]
Firefox 155 is out, the first to arrive as part of the browserâs new twice-monthly release schedule. This update brings Firefoxâs AI-powered Smart Window browsing mode to users in the USA, Canada and France. Itâs still opt-in (for now), and is powered by your choice of AI model from Alibaba, OpenAI and Google. Mozillaâs also added changes to entice you to chat more (âpersonalised resume conversation startersâ), made the assistant faster at responding with Exa web search citations and made the Smart Window Organise Tabs better at grouping related tabs. If none of that floats your boat, you can remove [âŚ]
Getting is planning to âsunsetâ IRC as an official support method, and some long-time users arenât happy. The recently Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS release announcement didnât include a link to the Ubuntu Support IRC channel under its âif you have a questionâ section â though, from looking, the last announcement to list IRC was the one for Ubuntu 24.10). Even so: it led some to ask what the status of the #ubuntu-support channel on IRC Aaron Rainbolt, an Ubuntu Community Council member, said the omission was likely âaccidentalâ in a reply posted to a followup discussion on Ubuntuâs Discourse, titled âKeep [âŚ]
If youâre wondering why you canât do a directly upgrade to Ubuntu 26.04 from 24.04 yet, despite the Resolute Raccoonâs first point release being live, there is a reason. Canonicalâs Oliver Reiche said in the mailing list announcement for Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS that upgrades will be delayed by a few weeks to allow couple of backports to land. These will âaddress regressions in a recent version of rust-coreutilsâ. Users on Ubuntu 25.10 are not affected by this; upgrades from 25.10 went live in April. Unlike the ISOs, which target a fixed release date, upgrades donât. Enabling upgrades from one release to the [âŚ]
OpenShot 4.0 has been tagged for release with a Qt 6 interface, colour grading tools and a new video and audio recording interface among its changes. The Qt 6 migration has been in the works for a while and while it doesnât directly alter the way OpenShot looks â more on other visual changes further down â the backend bump does bring improved Wayland support and reliable fractional scaling. On the features front, OpenShot 4.0 debut with a new colour grading effect and a dedicated work view: This offers scopes for colour assessment, curve editing and colour wheels for corrections, [âŚ]
More AI features have landed in the latest update to the open-source ebook manager Calibre. Calibre 9.14, released this week If you you find yourself looking at your ebook library in Calibre thinking âthis would look better with a different coverâ, the latest update lets you generate new ones using AI. A strange feature? Perhaps, and it does require you to plumb in an AI provider (with API key) capable of image generation to use it. But Calibre say it lets you generate book covers using AI âwith different cover styles such as romance, sci-fi, pulp fiction etcâ. Most ebooks [âŚ]
Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS is now available to download, the first of 5 point releases scheduled for the âResolute Raccoonâ in the 3 years. The release doesnât add new features, but brings a refreshed installation image (.iso) that includes all of the bug fixes, security patches and package updates released since the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release back in April. No new hardware enablement stack is included since thereâs not been a newer Ubuntu release to backport a kernel and graphics driver set from. Next yearâs Ubuntu 26.04.2 LTS release will bring the Linux kernel and GPU drivers that ship in Ubuntu [âŚ]
If youâve installed Chromium or Google Chrome as a Flatpak, youâve installed an unofficial, community-maintained package done independently of the search giant â that could be about to change. Chromiumâs build system is now able to generate Flatpak packages of the browser itself, though its developers caution that the change does not mean official Flatpak support is coming. A commit made by Googleâs Tom Anderson this week adds the necessary packaging scripts and a build flag (enable_flatpak) to produce a .flatpak package rather than a .deb or .rpm, but that flag is off by default (for now). If enabled, Googleâs [âŚ]
AI-powered voice typing is coming to Ubuntu in Myna, a speech-to-text feature that lets you talk into any valid text field. Itâs still a work in progress, but I grabbed an early build to see how itâs shaping up. With Ubuntu 26.10 now entering its freeze, the user-facing pieces of myna are falling in to place. This week, a new GNOME Shell extension was added to default installs to provide an on-screen indicator when myna is listening and recording. To be clear: Myna is not a GNOME Shell extension. Itâs an orchestrator that manages loading the AI model, listening for [âŚ]
The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 26.8, a major new version of the open-source office suite for Windows, macOS and Linux. Among the changes is a new Paragraph Composer. This improves the way Writer handles justified text. In many word processors, justified text is stretched to create straight edge on both sides of the page, but this can look uneven. Some lines packed tight, others gappy. But with LibreOffice 26.8âs new Paragraph Composer, spacing gets balanced several lines at once, rather than one at a time, which can result in a better overall look: Other typography changes in LibreOffice 26.8 include native [âŚ]
Ubuntuâs Desktop Icons NG (DING) extension has a little-known way to bring order to a chaotic desktop: stacks. Stacks groups multiple files of the same type into a collapsible icon. Images in one stack, PDFs in another and so on. Folders arenât grouped, and your files donât get moved anywhere; this is visual grouping, not relocating. If there is only one of a type of file on the desktop, it is not stacked. Expanding a stack by clicking on it reveals all files in the stack (other file icons bump out of the way). Multiple stacks can be expanded or [âŚ]
Ubuntu 26.10, codenamed âStonking Stingrayâ, has now entered feature freeze. From this point onwards, development focus shifts from landing major changes to improving them, along with the rest of the package set, ahead of the final, stable Ubuntu 26.10 release in October. âIdeally, you should all now be focusing on bug fixing rather than getting new features into the releaseâ, said Paride Legovini, engineer at Canonical, in a post on the Ubuntu developer mailing list â albeit a few days after the fact. However, the final makeup of Ubuntu 26.10 â which is set to offer GNOME 51, more Rust [âŚ]
A major update to open-vm-tools, a package that integrates Linux virtual machines with VMware hypervisors, is rolling out to users of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. âWithout SRUing the newer version users get issues running on more recent hypervisorsâ, Canonicalâs Lena Voytek explained in a backport request. Itâs a full backport from Ubuntu 26.04 LTS to support platform enablement to benefit those running 24.04 LTS. The open-vm-tool package goes from v12.3.5 to v3.0.10 (the same version in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS). VMwareâs open-vm-tools package enables clock sync with the hypervisor host, âgracefulâ power management for clean shutdowns, vSphere API, shared folder support, relays [âŚ]
A decades-old bug on Ubuntuâs Launchpad was marked as invalid at the weekend, and lead to an impromptu reunion for many of Canonicalâs former engineers. Bob Harvey filed bug #1589796 in 2016, having spent ÂŁ700 on Ubuntu phone and tablet hardware but, on visiting the official website, found no documentation on how to use them. Canonical axed the Ubuntu Phone project in 2017, leaving this bug (along with hundreds of others) resolved. Until now. This weekend, Adolfo Jayme Barrientos, a member of the Ubuntu bug triage team, marked #1599796 as invalid. When closing it, he mentioned to the original bug [âŚ]
Postcard is a new email client for GNOME that has echoes of Geary. The app is the work of a solo developer, gxanshu on GitHub, who is upfront about using AI coding tools to bring his âmodern mail clientâ to life. Postcard is built in Python with GTK4/libadwait. It uses imaplib and smtplib for networking, a local SQLite index for searching, WebKitGTK for rendering HTML and libsecret for keeping passwords safe. Postcard will look familiar to fans of Geary, another GTK email client, as it uses a similar multi-column design with folder in a (resizable) sidebar on the left, a message list [âŚ]
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