News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
Ubuntu 25.10, code-name Questing Quokka was released! Here are some top things to do, after installed the new Ubuntu desktop release, to make it ready to use.
It’s been many years, GNOME still does NOT have a graphical option out-of-box to create new documents in file manager. Though, it’s easy to enable this feature by putting a file into user’s Template folder.
Ubuntu 25.10 no longer includes the “Startup Applications” utility! Here’s a beginner guide shows how to run apps, custom scripts or commands automatically at login through alternative methods.
Ubuntu has a “Startup Applications” tool, allowing to easily add, remove, and edit items that run at user login. Due to upstream (meaning GNOME) changes, it has finally been dropped in 25.10.
Startup Applications tool no longer available in 25.10
This is a step by step guide shows how to block certain app packages from Ubuntu local repositories, PPAs, or other apt repositories in Ubuntu 25.10 and higher.
Previously, we can set package pin-priority to prevent from or prior to installing certain app packages. Now, in Debian/Ubuntu with apt 3.1+, a new method is available to include/exclude packages for specified apt sources (repositories).
For user with NVIDIA graphics card, Ubuntu finally added official NVIDIA 580 driver packages for all current Ubuntu releases.
As you may know, NVIDIA 580 is so far the latest driver series for Linux, that was initially released one month ago. It’s a production branch driver qualified for enterprise and data center GPU use.
For GNOME users who don’t like the default workspace switch animation, here’s an extension that can help!
When switching workspace (virtual desktop), the transition acts like sliding the desktop wallpaper along with the apps. This is “Sliding Panel” effect that’s also (seems to be) default in Windows and macOS.
If you like, it’s easy to use Android/iOS style swipe left or right switching home screen pages animation. In the case, the wallpaper is static during transitions, it works like only switching the app windows on your desktop.
Euphonica, the modern GTK4 based MPD client, finally added official package for Linux. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu desktop.
For those who never heard of Euphonica, it’s a client app for Music Player Daemon (MPD) that provides a modern user interface for managing large local music collection (tens of thousands of songs).
This is a step by step guide shows how to manually compile & install FFmpeg 8.0 from source with NVIDIA GPU acceleration support through cuda-nvcc and enable-libnpp in Ubuntu 24.04 & 22.04.
FFmpeg 8.0 so far is the latest version of this popular multi-media library, that features APV and ProRes RAW decoders, hardware accelerated VP9 and VVC encoding, and new Vulkan compute-based codecs support for FFv1 (encoding and decoding).
Like the new Ptyxis terminal emulator introduced in Ubuntu 25.10, here’s how to install and set it as default in current Ubuntu 24.04 and 22.04 LTS.
Ptyxis is a modern terminal emulator designed for GNOME with first-class container integration, such as auto-discovery and option to launch a container in new tab, preferences profiles with container integration for Podman, Toolbox, Distrobox, and JHBuild.
The default Firefox browser (Snap version) in Ubuntu 24.04 is always failing to download or open files! Here’s why and how you can fix it.
Not only for Firefox, the issue also happens when read or write user files with other SNAP apps in both Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 LTSs.
Firefox cannot download or open files in Ubuntu 24.04
Modern GNOME apps do NOT support traditional themes, but you may change the look with custom color schemes!
As you know, GNOME has moved to use GTK4 + LibAdwaita for its applications and desktop components. And, so many apps use the LibAwaita library for their modern UI, which however do not support theming (see this thread).
GNOME with custom color scheme
