MZLA Technologies Corporation has released an update to its open-source desktop email client Thunderbird.

Thunderbird 141 adds a small set of improvements for users of the monthly feature releases. While the tweaks aren’t substantial enough to tempt Extended Support Maintenance (ESR) users to switch, they’ll be a welcome addition for current users.

The preceding Thunderbird 140 release made it possible to customise the actions shown in new mail notifications on the desktop. Thunderbird 141 expands on that by making it possible to show an Archive action, alongside Mark as Read, Delete, Mark as Starred, and Mark as Spam.

A warning is now shown in the Composer if your configured OpenPGP key is due to expire in the next 31 days, which you can choose to ignore (but as a reminder, it’s likely to be helpful).

Exchange support in Thunderbird adds support for on-premise password authentication. The feature remains early, experimental and incomplete experience and for email only (adding accounts, managing folders, and writing, sending and reading email).

Thunderbird 141 fixes plenty of bugs and quirks, ranging from startup crashes to async errors, mis-named emoji and issues creating an event or task from an e-mail if the mail was opened in a tab.

A crop of security vulnerabilities get patched, including a snafu which allowed circumventing CORS with DNS rebinding, and a flaw in the “Copy as cURL” feature that (potentially) could be used to trick a user into executing unexpected code.

You can download Thunderbird for Linux, Windows and macOS from the official website. The downloads default to the monthly releases, so that will get you Thunderbird 141 (and that will update to 142, 143, and so on).

Existing users of the monthly release—the Thunderbird snap in Ubuntu tracks ESR releases—can update through the method they installed from, which for the standalone binary build (linked above) happens in-app, automatically when it’s open.

You're reading Thunderbird 141 Adds ‘Archive’ Notification Action & Fixes, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Timur Kristóf as a contractor on Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team is known for his work on the RADV Vulkan driver and ACO shader compiler but recently he's been working on some improvements to the AMDGPU kernel driver. A big feat he's been tackling is enabling support for analog display connectors within the AMDGPU driver for the "DC" code. Besides a few supported older GPUs having DVI-I connections, this analog support is significant in that it's a milestone for unblocking the aging GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs from using the modern AMDGPU driver by default...

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Systemd 257 debuted last December and now finally systemd 258 is preparing to roll out... Systemd 258-rc1 was issued today as the first test release toward this next major release. It's a big one with more than 260 changes noted in the announcement, including multiple new tools and other additions...

GitHub (and thus its owner, Microsoft) is calling for a new EU tech fund to ensure critical open source software can be maintained.

Its proposal, detailed in a report, stresses that our the economy relies on open source software (OSS) for digital infrastructure, but that maintenance ‘continues to be underfunded, especially when compared to physical infrastructure like roads or bridges’.

GitHub’s research says 96% of all codebases contain open source code, and OSS contributes an estimated $8.8 trillion to the global economy.

Yet, most open source projects get little-to-no funding. A third of projects, many linchpin dependencies in billion-dollar operations, are maintained by just a single person. Others get by on drive-by donations and volunteer contributors – goodwill for the greater good.

Given how widely many OSS components are, and how vulnerable they are to developer burnout, abandonment, or socially-engineered hijacking, the costs in not ensuring open source is in a healthy states are, in a sense, greater.

Infrastructure underpinning day-to-day life, powering the modern economy, balances on precarious foundations. Sustainable open source maintenance will ensure ongoing improvements and all-important security diligence for everything resting on top.

A Sovereign Tech Fund for Europe

The solution, per Github’s report, is to scale up Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) to a pan-European level.

Regular readers will be familiar with the STF since it has, in recent years, provided money to fund important initiatives within the GNOME project, ranging from accessibility work to new privacy and wellbeing features on the desktop.

This proposed EU-STF would give cash to widely-used, critical components to help sustain and support open source maintenance.

GitHub’s report recommends a starting budget of €350 million carved out of the bloc’s 2028-2035 budget, and using the money to action 5 key areas:

1. Identifying the EU’s most critical open source dependencies
2. Investments in maintenance
3. Investments in security
4. Investments in improvement
5. Strengthening the open source ecosystem

The funding would require the creation of a new, centralised EU institution (a ‘moonshot model’), or a group of EU member states willing to provide initial funding and then seek further resources from the EU budget (a ‘pragmatic model’).

As GitHub itself puts it: “The flip side of everybody benefiting from this open digital infrastructure is that too few feel responsible for paying the tab.”

The proposed fund would be directed at the ecosystem’s most critical, underfunded dependencies

Cold hard cash is the answer, and GitHub thinks the European Union should step in to spend public money to fill in the OSS funding gap.

Others in the Linux community already take a more direct approach.

Canonical is donating £120,000 in 2025 to the smaller open source projects it relies on to maintain the infrastructure, tooling and triage mechanisms in Ubuntu and adjacent projects.

The GitHub Secure Open Source Fund (and formerly, Microsoft’s FOSS Fund) do similar things.

The proposed EU-STF fund would not be a free-for-all (you couldn’t pitch a desktop widget and expect a wedge of polymer in return). Rather, it’d be strategically directed at the ecosystem’s most critical, underfunded dependencies for maintenance, security and improvement.

Github suggests the EU-STF start with a €350 million pool, but adds that this amount “…would not be enough to meet the open source maintenance need”, merely “form the basis for leveraging industry and national government co-financing that would make a lasting impact.”

While €350 million is a huge portion of EU’s budget it is veritable chump-change if viewed against the profits that big tech companies—remember those stats from earlier—generate each year.

Funding is important, but so is who funds it

I don’t disagree with the idea of funding OSS with public money since it open source is a public good. And the idea that a co-ordinated, centralised and (ideally) transparent funding process is needed is, to my mind, the logical approach – no self-beneficial backhanders.

But the cynic inside me is giving this proposal some side-eye.

If open source gets funding from the EU, it must happen lock-step with the EU pushing for adoption of open source in the public sector

Microsoft, like all of the big tech giants, relies heavily on OSS to keep its own profits ever-inflating. The idea that national governments—i.e., taxpayers—must stump up “or else” is a little (pardon the pun) rich given the rich benefit from them doing so.

The Scrooge McDuck money pits were dug out with the labour of hundreds of thousands of open source developers, and each coin clattering down to fill it up part-earned in the same way.

Open source maintainers deserve monetary support. Absolutely. It is vital that valuable talent and critical software is rewarded. I worry the creation of an EU fund at the behest of big tech might be a way for big tech to offload its own responsibilities to fund OSS.

So if open source is to get sustainable funding from the EU, it should happen in lock-step with the EU pushing the use of open-source in the public sector. This fund shouldn’t act as a sleight-of-hand subsidy for big tech to coast on.

What’s interesting from its blog post is that GitHub (and Microsoft) is not paying lip service to this idea. It’s pushing for it. It plans to meet with EU legislators to advocate for such a fund, and warn of the risks of inaction in not creating one soon.

Something has to be done, and an EU Sovereign Tech Fund is one way to address it — but those who milk the community cow for profit ought to pay most for its feed.

You're reading GitHub Wants the EU to Fund Open Source, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

The Zed open-source code editor that is written in Rust, has begun supporting Linux rather well, and has continued tacking on new features to assist developer workflows has introduced another new feature: the ability to easily disable all AI features...

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Thunderbird 141 open-source email client is now available for download with a new 'Archive' action for email notifications and other changes. Here's what's new!

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Firefox 142 open-source web browser is now available for public beta testing with various new features and improvements. Here's what to expect!

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IPFire 2.29 Core Update 196 Linux firewall distro is now available for download with improvements to WireGuard support and console graphics stack.

The post IPFire 2.29 Core Update 196 Improves WireGuard Support, Console Graphics Stack appeared first on 9to5Linux - do not reproduce this article without permission. This RSS feed is intended for readers, not scrapers.

Fwupd 2.0.13 Linux firmware updater is now available for download with support for the HP USB-C 100W G6 dock and other changes. Here's what's new!

The post Fwupd 2.0.13 Linux Firmware Updater Adds Support for HP USB-C 100W G6 Dock appeared first on 9to5Linux - do not reproduce this article without permission. This RSS feed is intended for readers, not scrapers.

A big update to OBS Studio Snap package is available to test, with Canonical rebasing the screen recording and broadcasting software on top of a newer ‘core’ runtime.

The bump to the Snap core is needed as the latest OBS Studio 31.1 release drops support for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, as Canonical software engineer Vanda Hendrychová notes:

“Until now the snap has been running on core22; however, official builds of OBS Studio version 31.0 and subsequent releases are only available for Ubuntu 24.04 and later.We have upgraded the base snap to core24 in order to ensure close alignment with […] upstream.”

Additional, the OBS Studio Snap package is now built from the source code used by the official OBS Project PPA, and not built from code provided by the unofficial OBS Studio Portable project (which is not actively maintained).

This shift will make it easier to maintain the Snap, but it’s not without a caveat: OBS Studio Portable includes “popular third-party plugins out-of-the-box”. The updated version, being built from vanilla source code, does not.

Users can continue to install plugins in the Snap manually, but Hendrychová notes that “OBS Studio plugins are shared libraries, they must be built with the same library versions as those present in the snap”.

To workaround this, she suggests using an Ubuntu 24.04 LXD container for building custom plugins.

Better Intel GPU Support

Intel GPU acceleration is improved in the new build – and AI plugins are planned!

Intel GPU hardware acceleration is improved in this new version due to the inclusion of packages from the Intel Graphics PPA, which is also maintained by Canonical.

Additionally, AI plugins “optimized for Intel hardware” are reportedly going added in a later release. I expect these to be Intel OpenVINO plugins that Audacity offers.

Anyone with hardware able to make use of them should keep an eye out, as they includes features like noise suppression, audio ‘super resolution’, and music generation.

How to test the improvements

Community users are being asked to test the rebased, retooled OBS Studio Snap by installing it from the candidate channel. Those with a stable version installed can switch by running snap refresh obs-studio --channel latest/candidate.

Should testing go fine, the update will roll out to all user on the stable channel in the coming weeks.

The OBS Studio Snap package is, like many apps on the Snap Store, not maintained by its upstream developers, but Ubuntu community members who work under the umbrella of ‘Snapcrafters‘. The OBS Studio offer an official DEB and Flatpak on Flathub.

If you plan on testing this update, and you need or want to report issues you find, you should do so by opening an issue on the Snapcrafters GitHub page for the OBS Studio Snap package.

You're reading OBS Studio Snap App Gets a Major Upgrade – AI Plugins Inbound, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.