If you remember that desktop picture widget for GNOME I wrote about last year, but found it a bit too basic for your personalisation preferences, you weren’t alone. Another user felt it could lacked enough flexibility, so forked and improved it. Picture Desktop Widget Remake improves on the original. It lets add multiple picture widgets to your Ubuntu desktop, and assign each one a different folder to pull images from, at random. Plus, you can set the size, position, border radius and aspect ratio of each widget individually. Each photo frame has its own on/off button in Preferences, so you […]
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GeForce NOW’s native Linux app has exited beta after seven months of testing, with official support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and later. The app is a frontend for Nvidia’s game streaming service, with more than 4,500 PC titles running in the cloud on Nvidia servers. Users get GeForce RTX-class performance, ray tracing and DLSS without the need to own the relevant hardware. In a blog post to announce its ‘graduation’ from beta, Nvidia say GeForce NOW for Linux has picked up “performance, stability and polish” improvements thanks to community feedback during the beta test period. The company also touches on […]
Linux Mint has announced an overhaul in its kernel management features, and will automatically delete old kernels once a week to free up space. In current versions of the distro, kernel package tools are included in the Update Manager, but are being moved into the System Administration tool on both standard and LMDE versions. The distro will also now track kernels by series, rather than individual releases. You’ll get to choose which kernel series are tracked and how many older kernels within each series the system should keep (in addition to the one you’re booted on; it doesn’t yank out […]
A refreshed Linux Mint 22.3 (Zena) OS installer is available for download, powered by Linux kernel 7.0. The distro made the first Linux Mint 22.3 HWE ISO available in March, with an installer that boots Linux 6.17 by default. That image remains available to download alongside the newest one, which boots Linux 7.0, and the original Linux Mint 22.3 (Zena) ISO that boots Linux 6.14. The Linux Mint HWE images provide the same core Linux Mint 22.3 experience, still based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, but it all sits on top of a refreshed hardware stack. Existing Mint users don’t need […]
An updated version of Dynamic Music Pill, the GNOME Shell extension to put now playing track info and lyrics in your panel or dock with animated flourishes, is out. If you’re prone some desk-side crooning, Dynamic Music Pill v1.3.0 brings two new lyrics provider APIs, BetterLyrics and BiniLyrics, with TTML parsing to provide word-by-word karaoke-style highlighting. If there’s word-level synced lyrics for the track being played, the extension shows them in the applet controller (click on the album art inside of to access the lyrics view) or the panel, depending on how you’ve configured it: Dynamic Music Pill can show […]
Rhythmbox 3.5.0 is out and it now lets you sync podcast subscriptions and listening progress across apps – the standout feature in the music player’s first major release in nine months
Dropbeat is a new riff on an old tune, a panel-based music applet for GNOME Shell that gives you an alternate way to pause, play and skip tracks in MPRIS-friendly Linux media players. Applets of this ilk are legion, and this panel applet doesn’t do anything that different to ones you may have tried in the past or currently use. But it does do some things differently. When installed, it adds a button to your panel that, when clicked, “shows a cool card to control your media player”, to quote the project’s GitHub. Dropbeat uses imagemagick to generate the blurred […]
Ubuntu is moving hwctl from Deb package to snap-only distribution, a change Canonical says improves security and desktop integration.
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS’s minimal cloud images have been missing curl – accidentally, it turns out, so Canonical has put it back. Curl is a commonly-used command-line tool for fetching files from remote servers. It’s called on in countless install scripts, CI pipelines and one-liners you’ve no doubt pasted into your terminal without thinking twice about. But the package has been missing from the server-cloud-minimal images of 26.04 to date. That caught those running pared-back cloud installs unawares, breaking expected workflows, has it had been available in previous versions. The manual fix is to install curl from the repos which, in […]
If you spent July dodging the summer heatwave, catch up on the best Linux app releases and updates you might have missed last month in this roundup. You likely already know about the Firefox 153 release, with its “new” container tabs confusing those who swear they’ve had ’em for ages. That update also enabled rounded window bottom corners on GTK-based Linux desktops, Ubuntu included. Slick system monitor Mission Center also dropped a big update, so if you like swotting over resource stats, don’t sleep on checking that out. Something you can safely sleep on: Anthropic’s Linux beta of its Claude […]
Mozilla has released Firefox 153 with built-in containers, QR code generation and more quick actions in the address bar. This is the final “monthly” stable release before Mozilla moves to a faster release cadence, putting out new stable versions of Firefox every two weeks. On an unrelated note, Firefox has decided to resume activity on X (formerly Twitter) after a year of no activity. Like all updates, you can get this one for Windows, macOS and Linux, as well as for Android and iOS (mobile versions have different features and are not covered in this post). Containers now enabled by […]
The Desktop Icons NG (aka DING) GNOME Shell extension Ubuntu uses to put icons on your literal desktop, has been busy – it finished its port to GTK4, patched memory leaks and improved a few of its lesser-known features. The GTK4 port landed in v51.0.0, released this month, alongside early support for GNOME 51 (since that’s the GNOME version Ubuntu 26.10 will ship with in October). Prior to that, there were other, smaller in June with fixes for memory leaks and buffs to usability. DING’s GTK4 port – not to be confused with a separate GTK4 fork I covered back in […]
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is getting a fix for Nautilus that restores ‘Delete’ as the focused button in the trash confirmation dialog, undoing an accidental swap that made ‘Cancel’ the focused button instead. That ‘unintentional’ focus flip meant you could no longer hit enter to action file deletion for Trash since it instead cancelled it. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve assumed I emptied the trash since upgrading to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, only to find I hadn’t. My muscle memory has struggled to adapt to needing to explicitly click (or tab to) the delete button. Annoying, but thankfully not intentional. […]
Mozilla is changing Firefox’s release schedule from September, with new stable versions planned every two weeks instead of once a month. The faster release cadence will, Mozilla says, make the schedule more predictable and allow features and improvements which are ready to ship to do so sooner. But in its message to developers, Mozilla describes the change as an experiment, one it says it plans to “closely monitor” to make sure the impact is positive and, if needed, adjust the speed of releases. Firefox 154, due for release on 18 August, will be the final stable version released under the […]
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is prepping a bug fix update to Papers, the document viewer that replaced Evince in 25.04, resolving several annoyances – including internal PDF links that jumped to the wrong page. The internal link snafu only occurred in some PDFs, not all, and typically took you to a page one off the actual target. Annoying. The fix stops two separate bits of code that both tried to set the zoom level when links jumped to fit-width or fit-page view. A knock-on quirk also saw the alt + p shortcut (which will jump back to the previous page) wouldn’t […]
Night Light Scheduler is a new GNOME Shell extension that lets you control how warm your screen is throughout the evening (or day). GNOME’s built-in Night Light feature offers a customisable daily schedule, and lets you pick a colour temperature that’s more or less orange (which will reduce blue light emitted by your device’s display). But that temperature you set holds the entire time Night Light is switched on. It eases in and out at each end but it never changes in between. For most of us, the default behaviour is fine. It’s set-and-forget to a fixed schedule. But if […]
Linux Mint says Wayland support in its next release will no longer be considered experimental, but available as a fully-supported option. However, it will continue to provide and support X11, unlike other Linux distributions which have jettisoned the legacy Xorg/X11 display server from their default installations – Ubuntu dropped Xorg support in 25.10. “We worked really hard on Wayland and we got to the point where it feels solid and the experience is almost on par with X11”, Clement Lefebvre wrote in an update, confirming “both X11 and Wayland will be fully supported” in the next release. Whether Wayland will become […]
TUXEDO Computers is rebasing TUXEDO OS on Debian, moving away from Ubuntu. The German Linux hardware company launched TUXEDO OS in 2022, building on top of an Ubuntu long-term support (LTS) release to, chiefly, support its own hardware with customisations, though the distro is free to download and install on any machine. To keep things fresh, TUXEDO updates web browsers, GPU graphics drivers and the Plasma desktop continuously, but leaves the underlying Ubuntu LTS base intact. Now, after almost four years of taking that approach, TUXEDO’s had enough. Why TUXEDO OS is dropping Ubuntu TUXEDO list a number of reasons […]
If you installed Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and noticed video and music files weren’t showing image thumbnails in the file manager, a packaging oversight was to blame, not anything you did. It turns out that Ubuntu’s Default install option (aka minimal install) wasn’t pulling in the gst-audio-thumbnailer and gst-video-thumbnailer packages which generate media thumbnails when you open a folder full of compatible files. A metapackage doesn’t contain software itself, just a list of the packages that need to be installed for, in this case, an Ubuntu desktop experience. Confusingly, both thumbnailers were present in the full install’s meta file, so if […]