LibreOffice 25.2 has been released, this year’s first major update to the leading open-source office software for Windows, macOS, and Linux. As you’d expect, the update delivers a sizeable set of changes spread throughout the productivity suite, including notable UI changes, accessibility improvements, and more important interoperability buffs to support cross-suite workflows. It’s important to remember that open-source software like LibreOffice doesn’t appear out of thin air; it’s made by humans, many unpaid, others paid to work on specific parts only. We all have personal wish-lists of features and changes we want our favourite open-source apps to add, but we […]
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) user? If so, you will be pleased to hear that Ubuntu is now available in Microsoft’s new tar-based distro format — no need to use the sluggish Microsoft Store. Canonical announced the news today, noting that “the new tar-based WSL distro format allows developers and system administrators to distribute, install, and manage Ubuntu WSL instances from tar files without relying on the Microsoft Store.” In not relying on the Microsoft Store for distribution, it’s less hassle for enterprises to roll out (and customise) Ubuntu on WSL at scale as images packaged in using the new […]
Right on schedule, a new update to the Mozilla Firefox web browser is available for download. Last month’s Firefox 134 release saw the New Tab page layout refreshed for users in the United States, let Linux go hands-on with touch-hold gestures, seeded Ecosia search engine, and fine-tuned the performance of the built-in pop-up blocker. Firefox 135, as is probably intuit, brings an equally sizeable set of changes to the fore including a wider rollout of its new New Tab page layout to all locales where Stories are available: It’s not a massive makeover, granted. But the new layout adjusts the […]
Do you use the official Spotify DEB on Ubuntu (or an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution like Linux Mint)? If so, you’ll be used to receiving updates to the Spotify Linux client direct from the official Spotify APT repo, right alongside all your other DEB-based software. Thing is: if you haven’t checked for updates from the command line recently you might not be aware the that security key used to ‘sign’ packages from the Spotify APT repo stopped working at the end of last year. Annoying, but not catastrophic as it—thankfully—doesn’t stop the Spotify Linux app from working just pollutes terminal output […]
Fans of the Papirus icon theme for Linux desktops will be happy hear a new version is now available to download. Paprius‘s first update in 2025 improves support for KDE Plasma 6 by adding Konversation, KTorrent and RedShift tray icons, KDE and Plasma logo glyphs for use in ‘start menu’ analogues, as well as an assortment of symbolic icons. Retro gaming fans will appreciate an expansion in mime type support in this update. Papirus now includes file icons for ROMs used for emulating ZX Spectrum, SEGA Dreamcast, SEGA Saturn, MSX, and Neo Geo Pocket consoles; and Papirus now uses different […]
GNOME has announced a change to its default UI and monospace fonts ahead of the upcoming GNOME 48 release — a typographic turnabout that won’t impact Ubuntu users directly, though. Should you feel a sense of deja vu here it’s because GNOME trialled a font switch last year, during development of GNOME 47. Back then, it replaced its home-grown Cantarell font with the popular open-source sans Inter font (trivia: used by Zorin OS). The change was reverted prior to the GNOME 47 due to various UI quirks, coverage issues, and compatibility (thus underlying the importance of testing things out prior […]
Want to find out if the text you’re reading online was written by an real human or spat out by a large language model (LLM) trying to sound like one? Mozilla’s Fakespot Deepfake Detector Firefox add-on may can help give you an indication. Similar to online AI detector tools, the add-on can analyse text (of 32 words or more) to identify patterns, traits, and tells common in AI generated or manipulated text. It uses Mozilla’s proprietary ApolloDFT engine and a set of open-source detection models. But unlike some tools, Mozilla’s Fakespot Deepfake Detector browser extension is free to use, does […]
Linux users hunting for a native client to stream music from TIDAL will want to keep an eye on a promising new open-source app called High Tide. High Tide is an unofficial but native Linux client for the TIDAL music streaming service. It’s written in Python, uses GTK4/libadwaita UI, and leverages official TIDAL APIs for playback. TIDAL, often positioned as the ‘pro-artist music streaming platform’, isn’t as popular as industry titan Spotify (likely because it doesn’t offer a ‘free’ ad-supported tier) but is nonetheless a solid rival to it in terms of features and catalogue breadth. Windows, macOS, Android and […]
The Thunderbird email client is making its monthly ‘release channel’ builds the default download starting in March. “We’re excited to announce that starting with the 135.0 release in March 2025, the Thunderbird Release channel will be the default download,” Corey Bryant, manager of Thunderbird Release Operations, shares in an update on the project’s discussion hub. Right now, users who visit the Thunderbird website and hit the giant download get the latest Extended Support Release (ESR) build by default. It gets one major feature update a year plus smaller bug fix and security updates issued in-between. The version of Thunderbird Ubuntu […]
Ubuntu’s key developers have agreed to switch to Matrix as the primary platform for real-time development communications involving the distro. From March, Matrix will replace IRC as the place where critical Ubuntu development conversations, requests, meetings, and other vital chatter must take place. Developers asked to ensure they have a presence on the platform so they are reachable. Only the current #ubuntu-devel and #ubuntu-release Libera IRC channels are moving to Matrix, but other Ubuntu development-related channels can choose to move –officially, given some projects were using Matrix over IRC already. As a result, any major requests to/of the key Ubuntu […]
A new beta release of open source graphics editing app Pinta is available for testing. Pinta 3.0 (beta) gives fans of this cross-platform raster image editor, which is directly inspired by the iconic Paint.NET Windows app, an early opportunity to try out the changes it brings — and there’s a fair few! The most impactful change in Pinta 3.0 is the most obvious one: it’s revamped UI. Newly ported to GTK4 and libadwaita, Pinta 3.0 swaps a traditional window frame and text-based menu bar for a button-based header bar. Long-time users may might themselves taking a bit of time to […]
Did you ever own (or covet) one of those e-ink Pebble smartwatches of yore? Well, good news if you did: Google today open-sourced the PebbleOS operating system it used (minus proprietary bits) having acquired Pebble’s assets when buying Fitbit in 2021 (and Fitbit bought Pebble in 2016, but more on that in a mo’.) More open source code in the world is good news, and it means anyone can reuse PebbleOS to build their own smartwatches, or learn from perusing the code how the former Pebble team tackled building a solid real-time OS on such limited hardware. What made Google […]
A new version of the Varia download manager was released at the weekend – an update described by its developers as probably the “biggest since the first release”. I’ve written about Varia before and, as I said then, I appreciate that the idea of using a dedicated download manager app on the desktop isn’t as obvious today as it was a decade ago. Most people have fast internet connections, meaning even large downloads complete in seconds, and the built-in download tools in web-browsers are sufficient. Plus, we all tend to use streaming media services these days thus negating the need […]
Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS is scheduled for release on February 13th – in time for Valentines Day, aww. Canonical’s Florent Jacquet shares the date on the Ubuntu Developer mailing list today along with a note to developers to be mindful of their package uploads to noble in the coming weeks. As a result, if you’re using the latest long-term support release you may notice a slightly drop-off in the number of non-essential updates Software Updater bugs you to install between now and February 13. This allow devs to create a snapshot and test it properly. Ubuntu point releases rarely deliver new […]
