OMG Ubuntu

If Ubuntu 26.04 LTS hasn’t nagged you about pending updates in a while, there’s a reason for that. A Launchpad bug report and related discussion on the Ubuntu Discourse noticed that the distro’s update-manager no longer notifies when updates are pending unless the update notification tray icon is enabled. The rub? That tray icon as turned off in Ubuntu 26.04 (with no toggle in Settings to turn it back on). This is not as “risky” as it might sound, though. Ubuntu ships with unattended-upgrades enabled by default, which installs security updates in the background – you’re just not told about […]

Raspberry Pi has launched a 10-inch version of its Touch Display 2 with a 1200×1920 resolution and 10-point captive touchscreen for $80/£77. 5-inch and 7-inch variants of the Touch Display 2 have been available for a while, but Raspberry Pi’s Gordon Hollingworth says the new version gives makers a larger, higher resolution screen to use in their projects. Like the smaller versions, the 10.1″ Touch Display 2 uses a portrait orientation by default, where the displays are often used for home automation dashboards, kiosks, digital signage, control panels, etc. It can be used in landscape by changing the orientation in […]

Wondering if your laptop or desktop PC is Ubuntu Certified? Ubuntu 26.10 is adding a new way to check from the Settings app. A new row in Settings > System > About reads “check if this computer is Ubuntu Certified”. Clicking it opens a new page that will read the local/cached status from the com.ubuntu.hwctl service (the Canonical hardware API introduced in 2025). Ubuntu’s has had a command-line way to check certification for a while, using hwlib. In 26.10 (Stonking Stingray), you’ll be able to check it via Settings rather than through terminal command. The statuses which can be shown: There’s also an […]

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 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 default […]

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 […]

The official Discord desktop app supports Linux but it doesn’t make much effort to fit in, which is why alternative clients are popular – not least because they can be themed. Discord GNOME Theme by developer ~ricewind012, is so named because, basically, that’s what it is: a custom theme that restyles Discord to look more like Adwaita and follow the GNOME HIG (well, as close as Discord’s CSS allows). A reminder: Ubuntu’s Yaru theme is based (heavily) on upstream Adwaita, so while this theme won’t give an exact match on Ubuntu, it’s closer than stock. As it’s all CSS, it […]

When Flathub banned AI-coded app submissions last month, some critics warned the platform was denying the future by dismissing a new wave of “vibe-coded” software as out-and-out “slop”. Well, new data suggests otherwise, as nearly three-quarters of the rejected apps are already dead, existing only a few months. Linux developer Evangelos Paterakis, developer of Tuba, Turntable and others, did the digging, looking at 120 code repositories whose pull requests for inclusion on Flathub were rejected because of their heavy AI usage and given an “AI Slop” tag. Of those rejected, 88 are no longer under active development, many having deleted their […]

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 […]

AppImages are designed to be simple. Download one, make it executable and run it. On Ubuntu, though, there’s an extra step: Ubuntu ships FUSE 3 by default, but many AppImages still rely on FUSE 2, so one has to install libfuse2t64 first. Not so with AppManager, a new(ish) GTK4/Libadwaita app. It fixes that particular annoyance by mounting AppImages through uruntime, replacing the standard AppImage runtime so apps can launch without you needing to install the libfuse2t64 package. It also handles regular SquashFS-packed AppImages, as well as the newer DwarFS-packed ones. Once the manager is installed, you can double-click an .AppImage file – no longer needing […]

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 […]

Ubuntu 26.10 is replacing its D-Bus implementation for the first time since 2004, swapping dbus-daemon for dbus-broker – a change end-users are unlikely to notice. Processes on your desktop talk to each other and to the host system using D-Bus, a ‘message’ bus. This is what the Ubuntu Dock uses to show unread-count badges for apps, what tells your desktop a USB drive has been plugged in, and so on. Two buses are in play. There’s aa system bus, shared across the whole device, handling hardware and background services, and a user session bus to handle desktop and app integrations […]

Anthropic has released a beta of its Claude desktop app for Linux, launching alongside an apt repo Ubuntu users can add for ongoing updates. According to the official docs, Claude desktop for Linux offers “the same Chat, Cowork, and Claude Code experience as macOS and Windows: parallel sessions, visual diff review, an integrated terminal and editor, and live app preview”. However, not all of the app’s features are yet available. The Linux beta lacks Computer Use, which lets Claude control apps directly, and voice dictation, both present on macOS and Windows. Anthropic says Computer Use support is coming to Linux […]

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 […]

Support for Ubuntu 25.10 “Questing Quokka” ends 9 July 2026 – which is this week. If you’re still using it, you can upgrade to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS directly to keep receiving updates. Ubuntu 25.10 was released in October 2025. As an ‘interim release’ the desktop edition it receives only 9 months of ongoing updates. Ubuntu’s Long-Term Support versions get 5 years of updates on desktop, plus a further 5 years through an Ubuntu Pro subscription. Nothing dramatic happens when a release goes end of life. Your install keeps working. What stops is the flow of high-impact security updates and critical bug fixes […]

Canonical wants ntpd-rs, a Rust rewrite of NTP (Network Time Protocol), to become Ubuntu’s default time sync client. To help get there, Canonical has become a Gold Sponsor of the Trifecta Tech Foundation, the non-profit behind ntpd-rs, committing €40,000 a year to help fund its memory-safe software projects. The goal is to make the Rust-based version the default time sync client and server in Ubuntu 27.04, and it will be made it available for testing in Ubuntu 26.10, out in October. Eventually, it’ll also replace chrony, linuxptp and gpsd for time-syncing use cases, according to Jon Seager, Ubuntu VP of Engineering at Canonical. Your Ubuntu system keeps […]