Firefox’s new AI-powered ‘Smart Window’ feature is taking shape in development builds – I gave it a hands on in the latest v149.0b7 beta (on macOS). Although Firefox 148 added an AI Switch, Mozilla is all-in on AI in now it’s part of its double-bottom line and a way to generate money. Firefox’s upcoming Smart Window is key to this, as it makes AI the primary interface for browsing. What follows is a hands-on with Smart Window in Firefox 149 beta, how it works, how it’s activated and why its ‘memory’ feature gave me the ick. Firefox’s new Smart Window […]

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Qualcomm subsidiary Arduino has announced the VENTUNO Q, a new single-board computer that ships with Ubuntu pre-installed. This isn’t a board aimed at casual makers or tech tinkerers bored with their Raspberry Pi, but catering to the demands of AI workloads at the edge: robotics, industrial automation, computer vision. The Ventuno Q is built around Qualcomm’s Dragonwing IQ-8275 processor with CPU, GPU and NPU, which delivers 40 TOPS of AI compute to run large language models, visual language models and computer vision workloads on-device. It comes with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM – double what you get on the comparable Jetson Orin […]

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A big update to Ghostty terminal emulator has dropped, delivering a raft of new features like scrollback search, native scrollbars and and process completion notifications. Ghostty 1.3.0 packs in 6 months of development effort: 2,800+ commits from 180 contributors. That means hundreds of performance tweaks, bug fixes and platform optimisations for those using it on macOS, Linux and FreeBSD (Ghostty isn’t available on Windows). But since it’s the new features that most of you care about, and this update to the Zig-based open-source terminal adds a couple of long-requested ones. Ghostty 1.3.0: Highlights Text search/match You can now search your […]

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HandBrake, the free and open-source video transcoder, has just dropped its first major release of 2026 – adding new professional encoders, MOV output container and a considered clutch of Linux changes. Those of you who work to production standards will find the DNxHR and ProRes encoder support in HandBrake 1.11.0 the star addition. Both offer a range of presets, including standard, high-quality, and proxy variants at resolutions up to 4K. The new ProRes and DNxHR encoders, listed as “Production ProRes” and “Production DNxHR”, can output in a MOV container, new with this release. ProRes is most associated with Apple and, […]

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Several Intel NPU fixes land in the latest update to Resources, which Ubuntu is making the default system monitor in 26.04 LTS. Resources is a GTK4/libadwaita tool that shows more system usage, processes and hardware details than GNOME System Monitor, which it is replacing as Ubuntu’s default in the new LTS. The Resources v1.10 release at the start of February added (among other changes) support for AMD Neural Processing Units (NPUs). The app has supported usage for Intel NPUs since its v1.7.x release in late 2024. The v1.10.2 changelog resolves what is described as “implausible” usage values in Intel NPU […]

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Pigeon Email Notifier is a GNOME Shell extension that does one thing: show a desktop notification when new mail arrives in your Gmail, Microsoft Outlook or IMAP webmail account. If you don’t want to leave a webmail tab open in Firefox, the overhead of a desktop email app like Thunderbird, or your provider doesn’t offer a desktop Linux app (like Fastmail and Proton Mail now do), Pigeon provides a set-and-forget way to still get new mail alerts. Desktop email notifiers have been around for a long time. I’ve written about many standalone tools, like Unity Mail, Popper and Mail Nag over […]

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Ubuntu 26.04 LTS ships with two new extensions installed and active by default, both adding new search capabilities to the GNOME Shell Overview. The first new extension is Web Search Provider. This lets you initiate a web search on Google straight from the GNOME Shell Overview. ‘Initiate’ is the important term here as search terms made in GNOME Shell are not sent anywhere directly. Before you raise an eyebrow: this is not a revival of the Shopping Lens furore. That saw local file and app searches typed in Ubuntu’s then-Unity desktop piped off to third parties (anonymised, but still dodgy […]

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A new-look Firefox is on the way, with Mozilla designers working on a ‘Nova’ redesign that introduces more curves and colour. First reported by tech blogger Söeren Hentzschel, who published several internal design mockups, Nova gives Firefox a more rounded appearance: tabs and the address bar sport uniform radii, and sit in a segmented, floating island UI element. Everything nestles neatly. Elements like hover effects in the menu and parts of the New Tab Page are similarly rounded. If you look closely at the image above you’ll also spot a set of refreshed icons that (surprise!) are also less angular […]

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Linux Mint is working on a redesigned screensaver and lock screen for the Cinnamon desktop. Based on our first look, it’s a solid improvement. If the word “screensaver” conjures flying star fields or photo slideshows, that’s fair, but in Cinnamon it also acts as the ‘screen locker’. In 2026, ‘saving’ the screen is less of a concern than ‘locking’ it, but many users enjoy seeing a pretty ‘idle’ display. Cinnamon’s new lock screen will, based on designs shared by Linux Mint, convey more information without you needing to unlock. Battery level, time and date, media player controls and unread notifications […]

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If you take handwritten notes on Linux, chances are Xournal++ is something you’ve tried as its solid feature set and stylus support has earned it a loyal following amongst those who’d rather annotate PDFs or sketch equations than type. One criticism that follows it around is its interface. It’s rather pointer-led; lots of menus, buttons and tiny hit targets in toolbars. It doesn’t prevent you from doing what you opened the app to do – write, draw, scrawl and markup – but it’s not ideal. Well, that’s what a new tablet mode toolbar configuration recently merged in Xournal++‘s development builds […]

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Is the classic image meme dead, or buried under an avalanche of AI slop? Memerist, a new(ish) native meme generator for Linux, emerged on Flathub recently to help dig them out. Memerist is a native (GTK4/libadwaita) app for Linux desktop. It is technically an image editor with a focused set of features, geared to those who want a convenient, local tool to quickly create and share popular memes. While the primary use case is for making memes, Memerist will open any image file. You can use it to add text and simple effects to anything – pursuit of a LOL […]

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GIMP 3.2 RC3 is now available for testing, giving users an opportunity to try the image editor’s upcoming features ahead of the stable release. As this is the third (and likely final) release candidate before GIMP 3.2 launches, the focus is on refinement. The developers say RC3 delivers “a number of bug fixes and final polishes”, improving on the new features added in earlier dev and beta builds. The changes I’ve pilled out below were made between RC2 to RC3. If you’ve not tracked this cycle’s development, don’t come away thinking this is an overview of what’s new in GIMP […]

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February 2026 delivered a fresh batch of Linux app releases, with updates to Ardour, Lutris and Bazaar among the many that filtered out during the month. I covered some of the month’s biggest releases with full-length features, including Firefox 148’s new AI ‘kill switch’, the ONLYOFFICE 9.3 and LibreOffice 26.2 productivity suite updates, and Linux weather app Typhoon’s Qt 6 port. But they weren’t the only software updates to slip out. Below, I run through a fleet of other app updates February played host to. Some updates were of the modest maintenance variety, while others saw more substantial changelogs. Ardour’s […]

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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 support for animated GIFs in presentation slides made with the suite’s PowerPoint equivalent. But there’s a less-obvious change lurking within that may have a more appreciable impact on day-to-day document editing. For a closer look at the changes this update brings, read on. ONLYOFFICE 9.3: Highlights ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors provide […]

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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 hone a new automated build system. Compared to the January release of snapshot 3, there’s more ‘of note’ packed inside of this one, like the Linux 6.19 kernel and more GNOME 50 beta components (Mutter, Files, Settings), though the new Showtime video player is not included – but is coming. […]

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Ubuntu 26.04 will show asterisks when you type your sudo password, as Canonical adds a patch to its Rust-based sudo-rs. Here's what changed and why.

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Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 'Resolute Raccoon' has a new default wallpaper. It keeps the purple gradient but drops the sharp geometric angles. Download a high-res copy.

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The forecast is looking Qt for fans of open-source weather app Typhoon, the latest update to which swaps its creaking GTK3 backend for a lithe Qt 6 one. What’s interesting about this change in Typhoon 1.7.x is that it doesn’t impact the UI in any noticeable way. The app still uses a colourful, borderless window with optional transparency, and conveys weather forecast data via stark white text and glyphs. Archisman Panigrahi, Typhoon’s developer, says the Qt port was needed since GTK3 is being deprecated, but that rewriting the app in GTK4 was a non-starter given it ‘does not play well […]

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Showtime video player looks set to make it into Ubuntu 26.04 LTS after a package update fixed a dependency issue that was blocking its inclusion. Totem's days are numbered.

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Add animated media controls to your GNOME panel or dock with Dynamic Music Pill, a slick GNOME Shell extension showing album art, waveforms and track info.

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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 much revenue it makes from AI features in its products, Firefox included, that’s a reassuring stance. To disable AI features in Firefox go to Settings > AI Controls. Slide the ‘Block AI Enhancements’ toggle to turn off ChatGPT and other chatbots in the sidebar, AI link previews, the (supposedly) smart […]

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Ubuntu 26.04 LTS ‘Resolute Raccoon’ will use OpenJDK 25 as its default Java version. An expected change as OpenJDK 25 is a long-term support release, as Ubuntu 26.04 is, the bump brings various feature and performance improvements to developers over OpenJDK 21, the default version used in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS through 25.10. On Ubuntu, Java isn’t installed out of the box, but when you install default-jdk or default-jre (directly or indirectly as a dependency needed by other software) those meta-packages point to whichever OpenJDK version Canonical has blessed as current. In Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, that will be OpenJDK 25. Version 25 of OpenJDK, the […]

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Ghostty's most-thumbed feature request is finally being answered. Yup, scrollbar support is finally coming in Ghostty 1.3 for Linux and macOS.

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The world isn’t short on keyboard-based Linux launchers. Albert, Ulauncher, rofi and GNOME Do (if you’re old enough to remember that one) are among those I’ve written about in the past. Rudra is a new spin on this old staple – albeit without the extensibility dedicated quick launchers provide. What’s different here is that it’s implemented as a GNOME Shell extension, not a standalone app. The developer of Rudra, Nark Agni, describes it as a “lightning-fast, keyboard-centric launcher […] designed for power users”. Though inspired by Mac apps like Alfred and Raycast, it is far less capable than those. To […]

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