Linux

February 2026 delivered a fresh batch of Linux app releases, with updates to VLC, GIMP, Vivaldi, and VirtualBox among the many that filtered out. I covered some of the month’s biggest releases with fully-featured articles, like Firefox 148 with AI ‘kill switch’, a more capable ONLYOFFICE 9.3 productivity suite and... Read more

A new version of ONLYFFICE Desktop Editors, a open source office suite for Windows, macOS and Linux, is out with a fresh set of features and tools. ONLYOFFICE 9.3 adds more signature options for PDF forms, multipage view for documents, new solver tools and regex formulas in the spreadsheets and... Read more

Canonical’s engineers have announced the fourth and final monthly snapshot of Ubuntu 26.04, ahead of next month’s all important beta release. Ubuntu 26.04 Snapshot 4, like all other monthly snapshots, not a blessed build intended for mainstream usage. It’s a “throwaway artifact” that enables the distro’s engineers to fine-tune and... Read more

Name: Password feedback in sudo. Age: New, but it’s absence is over 40 years old. Appearance: ********. What’s this about? When you run a command in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS using sudo and enter your password, you now see asterisks appear as you type. Previously you’d see nothing but a gaping black void reflecting your own... Read more

Ubuntu has unveiled the default wallpaper that will grace millions of screen in the upcoming 26.06 LTS ‘Resolute Raccoon’ release. As is tradition, the new desktop background features mascot artwork in the middle of a rich purple gradient. I shared the official mascot art with you a week ago. I... Read more

The forecast is looking Qt for fans of open-source weather app Typhoon, the latest update to which swaps its GTK3 backend for a more modern Qt 6. Most interesting about the change is that it doesn’t have any impact on the UI. Typhoon still shows a colourful, borderless window with... Read more

Those testing Ubuntu 26.04 daily builds or monthly snapshots may have noticed that Showtime, GNOME’s spiffy new video player, is not preinstalled in the ‘extended selection’, despite being announced as a replacement for Totem. It’s especially confusing since Resources system monitor, announced as a software swap the same time as... Read more

Dynamic Music Pill is a GNOME Shell extension that embeds a pill-shaped media controller into your desktop panel. It shows album art, artist name and track title alongside an animated waveform visualiser. Unashamedly blingy, but there’s nothing wrong in that. The extension received an update today, which seem a good... Read more

The Firefox 148 update sees its stable release today, bringing with it a much-request ‘AI kill switch’ to easily disable all AI-powered features within the browser. Mozilla has said future updates to the browser will not re-enable AI features once disabled. Given that Mozilla now measures its success by how... Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS ‘Resolute Raccoon’ will use OpenJDK 25 as its default Java version. An expected change as OpenJDK 25 was released in September 2025 as a long-term support release, which Ubuntu 26.04 is. The bump brings feature and performance improvements to developers versus OpenJDK 21, which is the default... Read more