OMG! Ubuntu!
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Now Playing Card shows media info for multiple apps at a time
Now Playing Card is an extension for GNOME Shell that can show playback info and media controls from multiple sources at the same time. You're reading Now Playing Card shows media info for multiple apps at a time , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
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Ubuntu 26.10 flavours bring plenty of changes
Alongside the main edition, Ubuntu 26.10 brought new releases of community flavours, including Kubuntu, Xubuntu and a welcome return of Ubuntu MATE. All of Ubuntu’s official flavours share the same foundations as the main release, with the Linux 7.3 kernel, Mesa 26.2 graphics drivers, updated tooling and support for installing snap packages from the Snap…
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Microsoft Defender for Linux desktops enters public preview
Microsoft Defender is now available for Linux desktops. Shocked? In 2026, you shouldn’t be. Microsoft’s down with the penguins these days: there’s a Linux kernel in Windows, it owns GitHub and makes Edge for Linux (not that too many people use it). Why not some rootin’-tootin’, threat-detectin’ n’ virus-protectin’ software on top, eh? Name: Microsoft…
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Ubuntu 26.10 released – here’s what’s new
Ubuntu 26.10 has been released, with a faster way to tile windows, passkey sign-in at the login screen and a full set of Rust-based core utilities. The newest interim release, supported for the next 9 months, ships GNOME 51, Mesa 26.2 and the Linux 7.3 kernel. Plus, a more capable App Center, new desktop ISOs for RISC-V hardware and expanded TPM-backed…
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KDE Plasma 6.8 released to celebrate 30 years of project
KDE Plasma 6.8 has been released, arriving on the 30th anniversary of the free, open-source desktop environment’s founding. Changes are, as you’d expect, varied across the stack. A new backup tool, Kup, is included as part of Plasma 6.8 to make automated backups to external media easier, while Spectacle, the screenshot and screen capture tool, is now able…
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ONLYOFFICE 10.0 is a ‘fully rebuilt app’ with expanded AI tools
A new version of free, open-source productivity suite ONLYOFFICE is out, bringing more than a thousand bug fixes and an expanded set of AI features. ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors v10.0 is billed as a “fully rebuilt app”, and its developers warn those who will upgrade from earlier versions that not all of their settings and preferences will transfer over. AI…
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Linux Mint 27 “Adrien” is on course for a Christmas release
Linux Mint shook up its release schedule this year and now it’s shaking up its versioning scheme as well – the next major release won’t be Linux Mint 23, but Linux Mint 27. Releases will now be numbered by year. Linux Mint 27 will be followed by v28, and so on. The release also sees the start of a new series of release codenames. Mint has traditionally used…
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NexPhone, the multi-OS smartphone, delayed until 2027
The multi-OS NexPhone went up for pre-order at the start of 2026, 14 years later than initially planned. Fitting, then, to hear the handset’s arrival has been delayed until 2027. Nex Computer CEO Emre Kosmaz says devices won’t begin shipping until March 2027 because of issues with antenna placement and casing issues. Given that it took 14 years for this to…
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Ubuntu 27.04 codename revealed as ‘Tenacious T-Rex’
Canonical has confirmed the codename of next year’s Ubuntu 27.04 release as Tenacious T-Rex. It follows Ubuntu 26.10 Stonking Stingray, which is out on 15 October, both sequentially and alphabetically. The previous T release was Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr. Quite a contrast in creature between the two, no? As you likely know, every Ubuntu release has an…
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Ubuntu announce tech preview of AI voice dictation feature
Canonical has announced that Myna, its new AI-powered speech-to-text tool for Ubuntu desktop, is now available as a technology preview. Myna uses a local, offline automatic speech recognition (ASR) AI model to let you dictate into any text field on the Ubuntu desktop, be it a word processor, web browser or even the terminal. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, 26.04 LTS and…
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Firefox 158 released with JPEG XL support
Firefox 158 is now available to download, providing out-of-the-box support for JPEG XL images. JPEG XL is said to have better compression than other image formats, including WebP, PNG and regular ol’ JPEG. It supports wider colour gamut, HDR and high bit-depth, as well as animation, alpha channels and lossless and progressive encoding. Mozilla has spent…
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Ubuntu’s App Center now supports installing media codecs
Ubuntu 26.10’s new Add-ons page in App Center now install restricted media codecs as well as hardware drivers. An opt-in setting to “install restricted codecs” is shown in the Ubuntu OS installer. Not everyone thinks they need to select it at install time or, if installing without an active internet connection, the box is greyed out since the packages can’t…
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Ubuntu now has official desktop images for RISC-V
Installing the Ubuntu desktop on RISC-V hardware is made easier with 26.10, as Canonical is now building official riscv64 desktop images. Experimental versions of the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release are out for testing on a SpacemiT K3 – the board Canonical has been working on with SpacemiT. One ISO ships the standard GNOME desktop, and the other is built…
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The Document Foundation gets its own logo after 16 years
The Document Foundation, the non-profit steering the development of LibreOffice, has unveiled a new logo. The change means that, for the first time since its inception in 2010, TDF no longer shares the same logotype and wordmark as LibreOffice. “The Document Foundation” is now the sole wordmark, written in a different font, Inter, and a refreshed set of…
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Calibre can now read ebooks aloud without sounding like a robot
A new update to the Calibre ebook manager is out and it brings more natural sounding text-to-speech (TTS) voices, as well as AVIF image support and better handling of PDFs that put text in columns. Calibre v9.16 adds support for Kokoro, an open-weight TTS model, to its Read Aloud feature (which to state the bleedin’ obvious, will read the content of books…
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PhotoCraft is an open-source, AI-built clone of Photoshop
It was only a matter of time before someone would point AI coding tools Photoshop and get it to build a copy. PhotoCraft is that copy – an open-source, cross-platform image editor written in Rust. The app is part of several creative tools created by the ArtCraft project, lead by Brandon Thomas, the former CEO of storyteller.ai. ArtCraft bill the app as…
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Ubuntu websites offline due to ‘sustained’ DDoS attack
Canonical report a 'sustained distributed denial of service attack' on its websites, leading to outages. It says its teams are working to get them back online. You're reading Ubuntu websites offline due to ‘sustained’ DDoS attack , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
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A pair of flashy-looking weather extensions for GNOME Shell
I revised my list of the best Linux weather apps recently, but I know most people prefer to use panel applets to glean current conditions and future forecast data. There’s no drought in weather extensions for GNOME Shell. All kinds – some like Weather or Not show a simple label on panel, others dish out reams of meteorological data in a dropdown of varying…
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Ubuntu 26.10 drops Btrfs, XFS and ZFS /boot support under Secure Boot
Canonical has made a major change to the way Ubuntu boots on devices with Secure Boot enabled to reduce the attack surface of the boot process. Ubuntu 26.10 uses a signed build of GRUB that no longer supports /boot on Btrfs, XFS, ZFS, LVM, LUKS encryption or software RAID other than RAID1. HFS+, Apple partition table support and JPEG and PNG image loading…
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Scrcpy now supports hardware decoding
Scrcpy, the open-source tool for viewing and controlling your Android phone from your desktop, added support for zero-copy hardware decoding in its latest release. The feature, new in v5.0, uses your computer’s hardware to decode the video stream sent from your Android screen to mirror to your desktop (via a USB cable or over IP/TCP). This improves…
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Firefox GNOME theme updated to work with Nova
The unofficial GNOME theme for Firefox has been updated to work with the Firefox 157 release and its newer, rounder Nova theme. It is not a traditional Firefox theme (like the ones you can install from the Mozilla Add-ons site) but, to quote its GitHub page, a “bunch of CSS code to make Firefox look closer to GNOME’s native apps” – an excellent job it does…
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Hylki is a modern, Rust-based email client for GNOME
Hylki is a Rust-based email client designed for the GNOME desktop with an incredibly amount of customisation packed in. Like Postcard, Convey and Letters, Hylki is another of the new(ish) Linux mail clients ostensibly there to assume the role of a modern Geary-like tool. GTK4/libadwaita interface? Check. 3 column vertical layout? Built around conversations?…
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Play Roblox on Linux without Wine, using Sober
Roblox does not officially support Linux, but Linux users can run using Sober, an unofficial third-party ‘port’ that works without Wine (hence the name). I know; this isn’t a ‘game’ most of you are itching to play. Roblox users are mostly under 16, access it via mobiles and have an unhealthy interest in Robux, the in-game virtual currency. But you may – as…
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Development has ended on Orion for Linux
Kagi has announced it is ending development of its Orion web browser for Linux to focus on the macOS and iOS versions. A native GTK Linux port of Orion was announced in 2025 and a public beta launched earlier this year. The goal had been to offer feature parity with the macOS version. While recent updates have edged closer, it seems that’s where it’ll…
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A 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 now costs 50% more than it did at launch
Raspberry Pi has announced further price increases for its single-board computers driven, of course, by the ongoing cost of memory components. The cost of a 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 or Raspberry Pi 5 jumps by $12.50 (£12) from 1 October, 2026: Model Launch price Old price New price Raspberry Pi 4 (2GB) $45 $55 $67.50 (£64.80) Raspberry Pi 5 (2GB) $50 $65 $77.50…
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Linux App Release Roundup (September 2026)
Autumnal vibes may be blowing in (for the top-half of the globe, at least) but Linux app developers aren’t minded to hunker down. Aa varied set of Linux app updates were released in September 2026. Big releases to merit a full write up included the redesigned Audacity 4.0 and gThumb 4.0 releases (the former overdue, the latter looking like a new app…
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Ubuntu 26.10 Beta released with Linux 7.3 & GNOME 51
The beta release of Ubuntu 26.10 (Stonking Stringray) is now available for download – a week later than planned. Ubuntu 26.10 Beta runs on the Linux 7.3 kernel (release candidate) and ships the GNOME 51 desktop. Lower-level changes include a complete set of Rust core utilities and better handling of low-memory situations. Beta builds are not final or…
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Ubuntu 26.10 ships with a Rust-based OpenPGP
Ubuntu 26.10 adds a new Rust-based OpenPGP implementation called Sequoia (sq) alongside GnuPG tool, which it plans to 'phase out'. You're reading Ubuntu 26.10 ships with a Rust-based OpenPGP , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
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Ubuntu 26.10 supports more Snapdragon X laptops
Canonical has released a test build of Ubuntu 26.10 with early support for laptops using Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 chips. The new preview ISO is built on the Ubuntu 26.10 Beta and Canonical’s Tobias Heider says the aim is to find bugs in the upcoming release early and get feedback from users. He expects ‘most’ of the work will be present in the final…
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New open-source browser Blanc offers a different UI
Blanc is a new open-source browser that replaces the traditional, always-visible tab strip and address toolbar with a minimal ‘island’. This pill floats over the web page to show the current site address, common actions like back/forward and bookmark and to relay page security information. It expands as-needed to let you open, manage and switch between…
