Linux Mint has announced it’s adding a native Night Light feature to the Cinnamon desktop. Earlier versions of Linux Mint included a third-party app called Redshift to provide similar ‘blue light’ filtering functionality. However, when the Mozilla location service shut down earlier this year the geo-location capabilities powering Redshift (which allowed the feature to automatically start at sunset for a user’s location) stopped working. Linux Mint’s developers felt asking its users to work-around the breakage by entering their location’s longitude and latitude coordinates manually in the app was a tough ask given its a distro focused on and famed for […]
System76’s COSMIC desktop environment continues to take shape, with a third alpha snapshot now available for testing. The first alpha brought the core essentials, the second alpha delivered stack of new features, and this third alpha fills in gaps, fixes issues, and finesses the user experience further. Of note, COSMIC now lets you set a custom system font (if Fira Sans isn’t your fave), and boosts accessibility with initial support for the Orca screen reader, albeit not in native COSMIC apps just yet – accessibility is a priority, so “soon” hopefully. Other things I noticed: COSMIC Files gains a hover […]
Python has overtaken JavaScript as the most-used language on GitHub, according to the code-hosting platform’s latest Octoverse report. The company attributes this momentum to a massive influx of “data science and machine learning on GitHub”, which has seen a 59% increase in the number of contributions to generative AI projects. With Python being heavily used across ML, data science, and related fields, the rise makes sense – it’s less that traditional software developers are switching to Python but more that developers working with AI-related projects are needing to use it. Plus, it’s good news for open source, with GitHub reporting […]
It’s hallowe’en, and there’s a frightfully good treat waiting for fans of the free, open-source racing game SuperTuxKart – a new beta! The first beta of SuperTuxKart 1.5 offers an array of improvements, touching everything from the underlying game engine to the user-interface through to networking features and score announcements during online multi-player races. No new tracks, karts, characters, or items included this time (those are planned for SuperTuxKart 2.0 along with a myriad of other major changes) but there is a new music track for the Das Luna Arena. Other SuperTuxKart 1.5 beta 1 changes: Naturally, there’s also a […]
The latest stable update to Google Chrome improves its Memory Saver with new controls that could, depending on your workflow and hardware, help reduce the browser’s memory footprint. And some would say it needs it. Google Chrome has a rep for being a memory hog. But is it deserved? Once upon a time, perhaps. Yet whenever people do tests they tend to find that Chrome’s RAM usage is less egregious than popular opinion would contend. Anecdotally, many users still say otherwise. Which is perhaps why the latest update to Google’s dominant web browser introduces 3 new options to control the existing […]
Ubuntu developers today announced that Ubuntu 25.04 ‘Plucky Puffin’ is officially open for development. There’s even a release date: Ubuntu 25.04 is out on April 17, 2025. Still, that’s a way off; there are 6 months of development stretching out ahead of us. But looking in to the distance one can’t help but wonder what new features Ubuntu 25.04 will offer. It’s too early in the release cycle to know, although GNOME 48, a newer Linux kernel (likely 6.14), and Snap app improvements are all-but a given. Still, would it be too much to hope that the Plucky cycle finally […]
Music makers, podcast producers, and amateur audio enthusiasts alike will be pleased to hear a new version of Audacity is out – and it fixes a lot of bugs. Audacity 3.7.0 marks a new series of maintenance releases which will fix flaws, balm bugs, and nix niggles in the current editions. Big new features are in the works for Audacity 4.0, but as the Audacity 3.6 series earlier this year wasn’t without issues, some breathing space to focus on getting timely fix ’em up releases out, to benefit users now, feels like a sound approach. Audacity 3.7.0: Key Changes As […]
Forget Amazon’s recent Kindle refresh, the most exciting e-ink device around is the PineNote from prolific open-source hardware makers Pine64. I reported last month that Pine64 had confirmed a new PineNote production run, the first in several years, now that it has a solid Debian-based OS to run. And now it’s begun taking pre-orders, with shipping expected to begin in mid-November. The PineNote has a 10.1-inch e-ink scratch-resistant display with up to 16 levels of greyscale at a resolution of 1404×1872 (227 DPI). Powered a quad-core RK3566 SoC with 4 GB RAM, 128GB storage, on-board Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a front-light, speakers, […]
Being a Linux nerd I rarely go outside —that’s a joke— but knowing what the weather is doing beyond my basement walls —still a joke— is useful – if only because it usually gives me an excuse to stay at my desk compiling my own kernel —not a joke. Scores of Linux weather apps, widgets, and add-ons exist. These put current temperature, conditions, and (usually) near-term forecasts within easy reach, or permanently on show. And honestly? That’s all the weather data most of us care to know. It answers ‘will I need a jacket?’, ‘will it rain today?’, ‘can I […]
A big update to ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors, a free, open-source office suite for Windows, macOS, and Linux is available to download. ONLYOFFICE 8.2 offers a clutch of new features, several performance gains, and a miscellany of smaller enhancements across the full suite, which is composed of a word processor, spreadsheet tool, presentation maker, form filler, and a PDF editor. For a lighter look, ONLYOFFICE 8.2 includes a new grey theme in its appearance settings. This is not enabled by default but can be applied to all apps in the suite from the main settings, or applied to just specific components, […]
