Those using Ubuntu on Windows through the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) may be interested to know that ‘significant updates’ are on the way. In a blog post to recap things discussed as the recent Microsoft BUILD event the company’s senior product manager for the Windows developer platform Craig Loewen runs though what’s coming down the pipe for WSL users. Several experimental WSL features Microsoft announced last year have started to make their way to stable/default builds. Among them, automatically releasing stored memory in WSL back to Windows. Device with limited memory will benefit most from this, but so too […]

You're reading Microsoft Announce WSL Updates, Including New Settings App, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Few computer keyboards are as iconic, as influential, or as beige as the IBM Model-M — no surprise then that it’s been given a modern reimagining by 8BitDo. Following on from their Nintendo NES and Famicom and Commodore 64 homages, 8BitDo has unveiled its latest retro-inspired mechanical keyboard. This one pays tribute to a true computing classic: the IBM Model-M keyboard. Lest anyone familiar with the real thing™ getting too excited I’ll mention up front that 8BitDo’s Keyboard-M is a mechanical keyboard, using Kailh Box V2 white switches (swappable, of course) and not the buckling spring mechanism synonymous with the […]

You're reading IBM’s Iconic Model-M Keyboard Reimagined by 8BitDo, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

This month’s Firefox 126 release brought with it a modest set of improvements for Linux users — as well as an annoying bug which temporarily breaks drag and drop actions in the browser. And that bug was easy to trigger: select some text or an image on a web page, then ‘drag’ it out but release (something I inadvertently do when browsing web pages quite often). Then, next time to you try to drag something out of a web page it no longer works. Restarting the browser (or perform a convoluted workaround involving external apps) would thaw the flaw, but […]

You're reading Mozilla Firefox 126.0.1 Fixes Drag and Drop Quirk on Linux, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Ubuntu 24.04 is now available for the Milk-V Mars RISC-V single board computer (SBC). RISC-V is an open-source processor specification, allowing anyone to access its design to create their own chips without paying licensing fees or royalties. Much like a Linux distro, people are able to collaborate, contribute, and build on RISC-V to improve it. And while ARM (which I’m sure you’ve heard of) and RISC-V fall under the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) umbrella, RISC-V touts a unique, modular architecture. Its base instruction set is extensible, allowing it to be tailored or optimised for specific uses. Given these open-source synergies, […]

You're reading Ubuntu 24.04 Arrives on Mars – the Milk-V Mars (RISC-V Computer), a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Day Progress is a new GNOME Shell extension that does something appreciably simple: display a progress bar in the top panel to convey how much of the day has passed. “A clock does that?”, you say — you’re not wrong my friend. But for some the visual cue it provides may be more motivating — though in my case, it underscores how much time I waste browsing Vinted for ‘schweet gharms’ (as the ‘yoof’ say). It offers a more abstract approach to time tracking, de-burdened the specificity of needing to attribute tasks to minutes and seconds, lessening the cognitive math […]

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Cascadia Code is an open-source monospaced font created by Microsoft, first released in 2020. It’s used as the default font in the official Windows Terminal app. Similar to Intel’s One Mono, JetBrains’ Mono and IBM’s Plex, Cascadia Code is a clear, legible, modern monospaced font designed for terminal use and code editing, with a wide range of programming ligatures provided. Earlier this month, the font received its first update in nearly 3 years. And per the release announcement it delivers a sizeable uplift that more than makes up for the wait! Existing users will likely upgrade anyway, but what about […]

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Rufus, a popular open-source tool for making bootable USB drives on Windows, just released an update that includes a ‘fix’ for working with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS ISOs. A truly versatile tool, Rufus is able to create bootable Windows installers from ISO files and disk images as well as Linux installers and, more pertinent to this news, persistent Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Debian USB installers. Rufus 4.5, released this week, includes support for persistence in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Additionally, this update also fixes issues when creating persistent Linux Mint 21.x USBs too. Creating persistent Ubuntu USBs in Rufus isn’t new (the […]

You're reading Rufus Fixes Creation of Persistent Ubuntu 24.04 USBs, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Stop by the Snap Store website today you’ll see it’s undergone a revamp – the second design rejig to the online storefront in the past 12 months but more substantive than the first. The search bar is now shorter and incorporated into the header section (which also drops the “Search thousands of snaps used by millions of people across 41 Linux distributions” strap line its shown since 2019). The “Featured snaps” section remains at the top of the content area but is no longer topped by a featured banner graphic. Icon, title, uploader, and description for each of featured snap […]

You're reading Snap Store Website Redesign Goes Live – And It Looks Good, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

It’s finally possible to upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS from earlier versions officially, using the standard GUI updater – no command-line developer flag required. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS released on April 25 but distro devs delayed direct upgrades to the new release due to bugs, one rather serious. While those issues don’t affect everyone (lots of folks who upgraded manually from the command-line did so successfully) the risk was there. But with those quirks addressed —one hopes!— Canonical has enabled upgrades to the Noble Numbat by adding Ubuntu 24.04 LTS to the meta-release file that older versions of the distro probe […]

You're reading Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Upgrades Now Officially Enabled, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Wondering what sort of nifty new features the Firefox web browser will get in future updates? Well, wonder no more as Mozilla has shared a roadmap outlining its near-term priorities on new features, performance, compatibility, and general enhancements, some of which are already available for early-bird testing it the browser’s preview channels. So be excited, be-be excited because a flurry of new features are mentioned in the roadmap, including long-awaited vertical tabs, new tab grouping options, and more personalisation options (like those new tab wallpapers I mentioned a few weeks back). Mozilla also talks about how it plans to approach […]

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If you use Slack on Ubuntu and were frustrated that screen sharing under Wayland was only showing a black screen (or crashing the entire app entirely), you’ll be pleased to hear those issues are now fixed. I’m not a Slack user —who’d I talk to, myself?!— and while I hear that this popular chat platform works best in a Chromium-based web browser these days (some features don’t work in Mozilla Firefox, sob) the Slack desktop app for Linux still has its conveniences. But over the past 12 months or so I’ve seen a fair few folks who use Slack on […]

You're reading Slack Linux App Fixes Screen Sharing Under Wayland, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Of the (many) handy new features in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is the ability to access OneDrive files through the Nautilus file manager as a remote mount. This is made possible by the msgraph package, a new Gvfs backend that Nautilus can use, account integration with GNOME Online Accounts (GOA), and Microsoft giving the GNOME project the relevant permissions, nods, and approvals. And while this cloud file access feature isn’t obvious to set up it is easy once you know how. It works with both regular Microsoft OneDrive accounts and OneDrive accounts provided for and/or managed by an organisation such as […]

You're reading Microsoft 365 Account Issues in Ubuntu 24.04? Here’s a Fix, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

There are plenty of things you can do on a Nintendo Switch: you can throw your hat at sentient creatures in Super Mario Odyssey; plaster people in colourful ink in Splatoon 2; and lose your grip on reality thanks to a blue shell in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Oh, and you can also run Ubuntu. Switchroot is an open-source project that allows Android and Linux-based distros like Ubuntu to run on the Nintendo Switch —absolutely not something Nintendo approves of much less supports, endorses, or encourages, etc! I covered the loophole that made this possible back in 2018. Back then […]

You're reading Ubuntu 24.04 Now Runs on the Nintendo Switch (Unofficially), a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Ubuntu first switched to Wayland as its default display server in 2017, before reverting the following year. It tried again in 2021 and has stuck with it since. But while Wayland is what most of us now use after installing Ubuntu (aware of it or otherwise) anyone doing so on a PC or laptop equipped an NVIDIA graphics card will instead log-in to an Xorg/X11 session. Why? Because NVIDIA’s proprietary graphics drivers (which many people, especially gamers, choose to use for the best performance and full access to hardware capabilities) haven’t supported Wayland as well as as they (arguably) could’ve. […]

You're reading Ubuntu 24.10 to Default to Wayland for NVIDIA Users, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

VMware has made its pro virtual machine software free to use on Windows, macOS, and Linux — albeit only for personal use, though. This change means you can download VMware Workstation Pro 17 and use it without a license key or ongoing subscription cost on Windows and Linux, or if you’re on a macOS system download, install, and use the equivalent VMware Fusion Pro 13 for free. Virtualisation software like VMware allows you to run “guest” operating systems on a “host” operating system with cross-system integration like shared clipboard, the ability to drag and drop files, access USB devices, and leverage […]

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Mozilla Firefox 126 is now available download, and in-app updates beginning to roll out to existing users on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android. As Firefox updates go the 126 release is rather light on user-facing goodies, especially versus last month’s release which intro’d clipboard paste suggestions in the address bar, colourful highlighting tools to the PDF editor, and activity indicators in Firefox View. The only real user-facing change in Firefox 126 is a toggle to turn-off the vertical split pane feature in the the web inspector. While a tap of the esc key can show/hide split-pane at will some folks […]

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Linux kernel 6.9 has been released after several months of attentive development. Linux founder Linus Torvalds announced the final release on the Linux Kernel Mailing List in his usual relaxed, laissez faire style. He notes that while kernel contributors have reported “a few regression fixes that haven’t made it to me yet […] none of them look big or worrisome enough to delay the release for another week. We’ll have to backport them when they get resolved and hit upstream.” “So 6.9 is now out.” Nice — if you get it, you get it — but what’s new? Overview of […]

You're reading Linux Kernel 6.9 Released — And It’s Packed with Improvements, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

The recent Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release has garnered plenty of praise for its great performance on Intel/AMD hardware, both does the latest version runs as well on the ARM-based Raspberry Pi? I’m pleased to say it does. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for Raspberry Pi is available in both server and desktop builds. Both offer the majority of what’s found in the equivalent 64-bit Intel/AMD version. For desktop users that means GNOME 46, the latest Linux kernel 6.8, and Mesa 24.0.5 graphics. But because Ubuntu’s Raspberry Pi builds are ‘preinstalled images’ they don’t include the Flutter-based installer. Instead, user account set-up and configuration […]

You're reading Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Runs Brilliantly on the Raspberry Pi 5, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Let’s go, folks — Ubuntu 24.10 daily builds are available for download. Ubuntu 24.10 ‘Oracular Oriole’ officially opened for development earlier this week following the reveal of the official codename (more than window dressing the codename is a critical part of infrastructure setup) and a draft Ubuntu 24.10 release schedule. As development has only just started there’s no compelling need to download an Ubuntu 24.10 daily build right now. The beginning of each Ubuntu development cycle is primarily made up of package churn with little “new” to enthuse over. Of course, there’s certain to be a slow of new features […]

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I regularly receive messages from readers who tell me that the Disqus comments section is no longer loading in Firefox, or ask why I keep turning the comments section on and off every few months. This shouldn’t the case; comments are auto-enabled for all articles published on this blog. If comments are manually disabled on an article (which happens, albeit rarely) you can tell: a comment count will not show in the ‘meta’ area beneath the headline on the article page (as the comment count is an anchor link to the comments section). So what is causing Disqus comments to […]

You're reading Disqus Comments Not Loading? It’s Not Me Bro, It’s Firefox, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

If you use Ubuntu 22.04 LTS or later and want to access the Google Gemini AI chatbot straight from your desktop outside of a web browser, you’re in luck! The Gemini AI ChatBot GNOME Shell extension (unaffiliated with Google; it’s not an official thing) gives you quick, on-demand access to Google Gemini at any time, direct from the applet it adds to the top panel — no need to open a web browser or launch a standalone app. Gemini (previously known as Bard) is a generative AI developed by Google to rival ChatGPT, Microsoft CoPilot and large language models. Like […]

You're reading Use Google Gemini AI on Ubuntu with this GNOME Extension, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.