A new version of miracle-wm, the Wayland compositor built onMir with an i3/Sway style tiling window manager, has been released. Developer Matthew Kosarek, a Canonical engineer developing this keyboard-driven UX in his free time, says the new v0.10.0 release sees the plugin system introduced in the April 2026 release “getting better and better … [Read more...]

BudsLink is a Linux app giving you more control over Bluetooth earbuds from the likes of Apple, Sony, Samsung and Nothing – battery levels, active noise cancellation (ANC) and more, all without needing to use a mobile app. Most Bluetooth audio devices ‘just work’ on Ubuntu and other Linux distributions for listening to audio, but … [Read more...]

Ubuntu has announced an ‘important policy update’, making beta releases mandatory for all Ubuntu flavours, no exceptions. Most flavours already hit the beta milestone every six months without issue. But until now a flavour that missed the deadline could still be granted a one-off exception. During the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle, … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

Mozilla is added support for Google’s Play Integrity API, known for blocking users of custom ROMs from accessing banking apps, to Firefox for Android. According to a resolved issue in Mozilla’s public tracker, a newlib-integrity-googleplaylibrary has been added to Firefox’s Android codebase. It requests a Play Integrity token, … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]