OMG Ubuntu

You’ll be able to customise the look of LibreOffice’s Tabbed UI in the free office suite’s next major release, which his due out in August 2026. LibreOffice 26.8’s Tabbed UI (also known as the Notebookbar and modelled after the Ribbon in Microsoft Office) can show a colourful background when application theming is enabled under Tools > Options > Appearance. A blue shade is used by default but you can pick or set any colour you like. In the ‘Customisations’ section, first selected the Writer, Calc, Impress or Data Notebookbar value, then use the dropdown to chance the colour. Click apply […]

Microsoft has released Coreutils for Windows, allowing a stack of familiar “Linux-like” command-line utilities to run natively on Windows. The project is based on uutils, the Rust-based reimplementation of GNU coreutils that Ubuntu (mostly) has adopted in recent releases. Microsoft’s package bundles uutils’ coreutils and findutils as well as a GNU-compatible grep in a single binary. It offers tools like cat, cp, ls, mv and uptime. Commands that use POSIX-only features are excluded, meaning chmod, chown, kill and others aren’t included. What’s notable – *nix tools working their way into the Windows ecosystem is notable – is that this isn’t […]

Mozilla has added support for Google’s Play Integrity API, known for blocking users of custom ROMs from accessing banking apps, to Firefox for Android. Per a resolved issue in Mozilla’s public tracker, a new lib-integrity-googleplay library was added to Firefox’s Android codebase. It requests a Play Integrity token which is then passed to Mozilla’s MLPA (Machine Learning Proxy) server. The token is used to access Firefox’s server-side AI tools, like Smart Window, for rate-limiting purposes, ensuring only unmodified, Play-installed copies of Firefox on Google-certified devices use Mozilla’s compute infra. Per documentation for the API, developers can: “…call the Integrity API […] to […]

Euro-Office launches its stable 1.0 release on June 9, billed as a ‘truly open’ sovereign alternative to Microsoft Office – a claim riling The Document Foundation, makers of LibreOffice. In an open letter published today, TDF’s Italo Vignoli takes issue with the upstart productivity suite’s pitch. He disputes Euro-Office’s marketing, which he says positions it as the first open-source office suite developed in Europe. It’s historically inaccurate as OpenOffice.org got there in 2001, followed by LibreOffice from 2010. But he calls out another issue. The European Union is making a big push for digital sovereignty, cutting down on how much […]

Proton has confirmed it is working on a Proton Drive client for Linux desktops. The announcement slipped out as part of a broader platform update. Proton has rebuilt Drive around a new shared SDK, with a single codebase powering its official apps on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and web (rather than separate implementations as before). It’s this unified approach that makes it easier for the Swiss-based company to add new features and integrations across all its official apps – and make an official client for Linux, which is being build on the SDK “from the ground up”, they say. Not […]

A new version of HandBrake, the open-source and cross-platform media conversion tool, is available to download. HandBrake 1.11.2 is a maintenance update in the current 1.11.x stable release, which was released in March 2026 and added DNxHR and ProRes encoder support, and an AMD VCN AV1 10-bit encoder compatible with the company’s 9000 series GPUs and newer. This update is focused on fixes and finesse. A pair of bugs affecting 2-pass operations are resolved: a crash during 2-pass lossless x265 encodes, and a memory leak that occurred during 2-pass MPEG-4, MPEG-2, VP9 and FFV1 encodes. On Linux, HandBrake adds WebM […]

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 […]

Dynamic Music Pill, the blingy GNOME Shell extension that adds now playing track info, media controls and even real-time lyrics to your desktop, has gained some new options. “Like what?”, you ask… If you don’t want to see the name of the artists in the panel pill, you no longer have to: a ‘show artist’ toggle lets you hide it. The extension already has an option to dynamically hide artist labels if there’s not enough room to display it alongside the title. On that topic, when long artist names and track titles combine, the pill will scroll the labels from […]

Ever wished you could talk in to a text field rather than type? Ubuntu 26.10 hears you – quite literally. Canonical’s VP of Engineer Jon Seager, at the Ubuntu Summit, said the distro will soon lets users “press a button and talk into any field that you could previously type in”. A small, on-device AI language parsing model like Whisper will power the feature. It’s part of a wider push to integrate AI features in Ubuntu this year, with founder Mark Shuttleworth aiming to position Ubuntu as the ‘OS for agentic AI’. AI features in Ubuntu will be shipped as […]

Canonical has bumped its Steam Snap for ARM64 to the stable channel. First announced in January, the snap has been tested across ARM64 hardware including the NVIDIA DGX Spark, Radxa Orion O6 and Lenovo ThinkPad X13s, with Canonical now reporting ‘solid performance’ across many popular games. Valve doesn’t provide a native ARM Linux client (edit: they began quietly publishing Linux ARM builds in April, but these aren’t linked to on the main website). Canonical’s snap version of Steam uses the Intel/AMD Steam binary with the FEX emulator. This stable release of the Steam Snap for ARM exposes FEX’s configuration options to […]

El Poblador is a fully playable Settlers of Catan clone that runs entirely in your terminal. Written in Go by developer vicho, El Poblador is a compete rendition of the iconic competitive board game, which is all about resources, trading, building settlements and blocking your opponents. All of Catan’s core mechanics are accounted for, albeit free of the tactile joy of handling and placing tiny wooden blocks in the real game. It’s a game designed for 3-4 players, so you’ll want to huddle around a laptop or on a PC to play it. You use arrow keys to navigate the […]

You’ll have to sift through fewer vibe-coded apps on Flathub in future, as the store has announced a policy change on software made using AI tools. Flathub, the de-facto place to find and install Flatpak applications, is banning the use of “AI” coded applications and automated submissions going forward. It’s not a blanket ban – mature projects with AI code are allowed A change to the store’s policy note says “applications containing AI-generated or AI-assisted code, documentation, or other content are not allowed”. A carve out will allow “mature, well-maintained projects” to include AI generated code and use AI tools […]

May 2026 delivered a sizeable set of Linux software updates, including the set I’ve rounded up for your reading pleasure in this post.  The month also saw a buffet of big browser updates, including Firefox 151 with new-look new tab page, Vivaldi 8.0 with a new-look generally and a new public beta of Kagi’s Orion. Elsewhere, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS support was added to VMware Workstation (and Fusion for macOS), while open-source system cleaner BleachBit debuted a TUI for interactive command-line based spring cleaning. Below, I run through a crop of other Linux app releases that landed in May and caught my eye. […]

Canonical has released the first monthly snapshot of Ubuntu 26.10 ‘Stonking Stingray’. This is the first of 4 planned testing builds in the lead up to the final, stable release of Ubuntu 26.10 on 15 October, 2026. Utkarsh Gupta announced the release on the Ubuntu developer mailing list, noting that a couple of images – including the ubiquitous Intel/AMD64 build most of us use – are missing from the first snapshot. Those will return in time for Snapshot 2. Ubuntu monthly snapshots are not alpha builds. They exist as a way for Ubuntu’s engineers to fine-tune new, automated build processes. […]

Google confirmed at Google I/O 2026 that Canonical is the new lead maintainer and ‘strategic steward’ of Flutter desktop for Windows, macOS and Linux. The announcement of an expanded partnership with Canonical came during the ‘What’s new in Flutter’ presentation at Google I/O 2026, where Kate Lovett, Engineer Manager on the Flutter Framework team at Google, touched on their existing work: “[The Flutter] desktop experience has reached a new level of maturity this year, driven by our incredible engineering partnership with Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu”. She later confirmed that Canonical’s ‘deep technical expertise’ will now oversee maintenance of Flutter […]

Canonical has released Workshop, a new open-source tool to create reproducible development environments with a single command. Using YAML files, the same development setup can be reproduced across different hardware and devices, reducing dependency headaches and configuration drift. Environments in Workshop are built from SDKs (packages that install languages, frameworks and tools). Most of these come from the SDK Store, which supports versioned channels similar to the Snap Store so that projects can define specific SDK versions to use. Canonical offers SDKs for Ollama, OpenCode, NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm at launch, but users can create and define project-specific SDKs […]

The Raspberry Pi 6 won’t be released before 2028 and it won’t feature an onboard NPU to handle AI compute tasks. Insight into plans for the Pi 6 were shared by three of the company’s key engineers and leaders in an AMA (ask me anything) session on Reddit on 21 May, 2026. Based on past launches the gap between major Pi models (Raspberry Pi 2, 3, 4 and 5) is around 3-4 years. The Raspberry Pi 5 launched in 2023. That should put the Pi 6 on course for launch in 2026 or 2027. But Raspberry Pi co-founder and CEO […]

Linux Mint developers are building a new screenshot utility for the Cinnamon desktop, ahead of its next major release. The home-grown tool will give users more options when taking screenshots and will “accommodate the differences between CSD (Client Side Decoration) and SSD (Server Side Decoration) windows” to provide ‘cleaner’ looking screenshots. Currently, Cinnamon rolls with the GTK-based gnome-screenshot. That tool works fine, but it doesn’t render shadows in windowed app screenshots on Cinnamon. It does, however, include pixel artefacts around the corners of windows, caused by the drop shadow bleeding through: It’s not super pretty, and as someone who works […]