As part of every GNOME release (spanning GNOME Shell, Mutter, core apps, etc) is an official set of GNOME Shell extensions. This is non-default package is “acollection of extensions providing additional and optional functionality to GNOME Shell” that are developed and maintained by GNOME developers. Ubuntu, like other Linux … [Read more...]

A new version of Qt-based music player Amarok is available to download. Amarok 3.1 lands three months after Amarok 3.0, which was the first release in nearly 6 years and saw the audio player’s developers complete their port to Qt 5 (which receives further polish here, in 3.1). But with Qt 6 now out work to port Amarok to Qt 6 and KDE … [Read more...]

The latest Firefox Nightly build provides a feature that dramatically improves how its picture-in-picture (PIP) feature works — and I’m totally digging it! In current stable versions of Firefox you pop-out video content from (supported) websites like YouTube and Amazon Prime manually, by clicking a button. Doing this enables you to continue … [Read more...]

Google has announced a clutch of new AI-powered features have begun rolling out to users of Chrome on Windows, macOS, and —for once!— Linux. Chrome’s Vice President Parisa Tabriz unveiled the trio of AI features, which are all powered by the latest Google Gemini AI models, on The Keyword blog today, saying: – We’re making it even … [Read more...]

AppImages are great: a single runtime containing all of the dependencies needed for an app to run in a double-click binary that can be run from anywhere on your system. And therein lies the rub. When I download an AppImage for software like Audacity, Kdenlive, etc., it’s usually to my Downloads folder, or sat on a USB stick or external SSD. … [Read more...]

JetBrains users wondering when Wayland support might land should check out the latest ‘Early Access Program’ (EAP) builds released earlier this month – Wayland preview, ahoy! At present, all of JetBrains’ IntelliJ-based IDEs on Linux run in a Wayland session use XWayland (the X server compatibility mode for software lacking native … [Read more...]

Last May, Canonical announced that a hardware-accelerated version of the Chromium snap was available for testing on Intel (7th-gen and later) hardware. And that news was welcome. Hardware acceleration + the modern web = a good time had by all. VP8, VP9, H.264, and AV11 codecs are widely used, and modern GPUs (both integrated and discrete) have … [Read more...]

If you plan on trying the new Linux Mint 22 release in a virtual machine, why not double-up the fun by taking it for a spin in the VirtualBox 7.1 beta, which slipped out last night. Don’t tune out—most VirtualBox updates are fairly modest, I know. But the upcoming release of VirtualBox 7.1? It’s being billed by Oracle as a ‘major … [Read more...]

And we’re go – Linux Mint 22 ‘Wilma’ has been officially released and made available to download. This major update is the first to be based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS This major update is built on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and sees Linux Mint 22 inherit big updates to underlying packages, libraries, tooling, and core technology stacks. … [Read more...]

Love the idea of tinkering around with a small, single-board computer (SBC) but need something more powerful than most ARM-based offerings provide? If so, the new Radxa X4 from Radxa may be of interest. Powered by an Intel N100 CPU with Intel UHD graphics, the Radxa X4 delivers better performance in CPU and GPU tasks than a Raspberry Pi 5, at a … [Read more...]

Course set: the first alpha of Pop_OS 24.04 is scheduled for release on August 8th. So if you’ve been counting the days until you can try the new COSMIC desktop environment first hand… Well, keep counting until then! 😅 Pop!_OS 24.04 will based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, and inherit much of the foundational improvements Canonical’s … [Read more...]

FBReader 2.1 has been released for Windows, macOS, and Linux, with the team behind the eBook reading app calling it “a major update for desktop platforms”. If you’re not familiar with FBReader (the name stands for ‘Favourite Book Reader’) it’s a Qt-based ebook reader with customisation options, an ebook library, … [Read more...]

If you’ve tried the Tiling Shell GNOME extension you’ll know how easy it makes it to tile application windows in GNOME Shell, from simple to more complex. The latest update, which began rolling out through the GNOME Extensions website this weekend, adds yet another intuitive way to tile windows as you work. First it provided a slide-in … [Read more...]

I recently rediscovered my Amazon Kindle (a geriatric model from 2012, nothing fancy) and figured, as it still works, I’ll use it, and set about downloading a freely available EPUBs of classic (and not-so-classic – I’m a pulpy-kinda guy) literature. They say never judge a book by its cover – but it is useful to be able to … [Read more...]

Were you excited by news GNOME plans to replace the Totem media player in its core software set with a new, modern, and actively maintained app called Showtime? If so, you may be just as excited to hear that it’s now available to install from Flathub. This means you no longer need to set-up the GNOME Nightly repo (and then tussle with endless … [Read more...]

OBS Studio, the open-source leader in cross-platform screen-casting and streaming software, put out a new release this week. OBS Studio 30.2 adds Linux support to the native NVENC encoder, plus Linux shared texture support to the NVENC, QuickSync, and VA-API encoders. And as of this update, PipeWire window/display capture is combined into a single, … [Read more...]