Reliving the glory days of the GNOME 2 desktop is but a browser tab away – well, kinda. The personal website of Benny Powers, a software developer at Red Hat, is not a traditional vertical column of text. Nor is it a slop-soup of purple gradients, rounded glassy cards and monospaced datapoints (a ‘vibe-coded’ aesthetic everywhere right now). No, it’s an interactive GNOME 2 ‘desktop’. He built it after digesting an essay on how websites used to be weird and playful and unique. Looking at his own site, he decided it wasn’t nearly wacky enough, so restyled it to resemble […]
You're reading This dev’s personal website is a working GNOME 2 desktop, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
If Canonical hadn’t burned through cash and goodwill during its smartphone detour in the mid-2010s, Ubuntu would likely still ship with the Unity desktop today – albeit in an evolved form. What would that form actually look like? Well, you don’t have to shut your eyes and imagine, thanks to Ubuntu community member Muqtxdir, who’s experiment in “re-building ubuntu’s unity shell in a wayfire session through gtk4-layer-shell and libadwaita widgetry” (sic) gives us a sideways glimpse. Muqtxdir, who help maintain and develop Ubuntu’s Yaru theme and contributes to the immutable Vanilla OS Linux distribution, recently shared a video of his […]
Sad news from Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth today: longtime Ubuntu and Debian contributor Steve Langasek has passed away. In a touching post on the Ubuntu Discourse, Mark Shuttleworth shares: “Steve passed away at the dawn of 2025. His time was short but remarkable. He will forever remain an inspiration.” “Judging by the outpouring of feelings this week, he is equally missed and mourned by colleagues and friends across the open source landscape, in particular in Ubuntu and Debian where he was a great mind, mentor and conscience.” As a former Debian and Ubuntu release manager, and a long-term Canonical employee, […]
A new Ubuntu LTS is on the way, and so too is a wallpaper contest to select backgrounds for it. But is it time Ubuntu took wallpapers more seriously? 