News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
Free open-source software updates and Linux news
GIMP image editor announced the third release candidate for the next major 3.0 series yesterday, with dozens of bug-fixes, requests, and translation updates.
The new release fixed crash and stability issues when working on Wayland. The new GIMP running with most recent GTK 3.24.48 fixed freeze with certain actions on KDE/Wayland, and crash when dragging layers and text glitches in certain widgets with Right-To-Left languages.
KDE Plasma announced new major 6.3 release today. See what’s new in the release of this popular Linux Desktop Environment.
First, the new Plasma 6.3 introduced “Clone Panel” option in panel configuration dialog, allowing to quickly make a copy of current panel with same settings and applets, and place in one of other 3 screen edges.
Plasma 6.3 Clone Panel
After almost a month of development, Kdenlive video editor released a new version with another dozen of bug-fixes.
It’s Kdenlive 24.12.2, the second maintenance release of the 24.12 series. As usual, the official announcement is not ready yet. But the source tarball is out and KDE has announced it as one in the KDE Gear 2024.2.
Kdenlive 24.12 in Ubuntu
Visual Studio Code announce new monthly 1.97 release! Here are new features in the IDE release.
VS Code 1.97 is the first release in 2025. It added two more models OpenAI’s o3-mini and Gemini 2.0 Flash to choose from when using Copilot.
It introduced new Copilot Next Edit Suggestions (Copilot NES) preview feature to help with edits. Which, can both predicts the location of the next edit you’ll want to make and what that edit should be.
OnlyOffice announced the new 8.3 release for its offline Desktop Editor apps yesterday.
The new release now is able to open and view files created in Apple iWork’s Pages, Keynote and Numbers, as well as Hancom Office’s .hwp and .hwpx file formats. However, for editing support they need to be converted to OOXML first, i.e. DOCX for text documents, XLSX for spreadsheets and PPTX for presentations.
As you may know, GNOME is moving to GTK4 + LibAdwaita in recent years. Core apps are either ported to the new frameworks or replaced with new ones.
GNOMOE Text Editor, GNOME Camera, GNOME Console, and Loupe replaced Gedit, Cheese, GNOME Terminal, and Eyes of GNOME as default text editor, camera app, terminal, and image viewer. And, it introduced Decibels as new core app for playing audio files.
Now Papers enters GNOME Incubator, expects to replace Evince as default PDF and Document viewer, perhaps later this year.
GNOME Papers
Mozilla Firefox announced new 135.0 release on Tuesday. See what’s new in this monthly release.
The new release enhanced some features to make them work for all users. AI Chatbot, the experimental feature that’s introduced since Firefox 130, now is available to all users.
Just go to Settings -> Firefox Labs, then select AI between Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, Le Chat Mistral, then you may chat with AI in sidebar after login.
Firefox AI Chatbot made available to all users
Besides AI, the new browser release also extended the credit card autofill feature to all users globally, made the refreshed New Tab layout to users in all countries where Stories are available.
And, the built-in translations now support translating Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. While Russian is now available as a target language to translated into.
New Tab layout now works in all countries support Stories
Firefox 135 includes safeguards to prevent sites from abusing the history API by generating excessive history entries. Which however make navigating back and forward buttons difficult by cluttering the history.
Other changes in the new browser release include:
The release also includes some web development changes. It introduced a new console command $$$ allows to search the page including within shadow roots. It added support for the WebAuthn getClientCapabilities() method, and a post-quantum key exchange mechanism (mlkem768x25519) for HTTP/3.
The release note and official packages are available at the link below:
For Ubuntu 22.04+ users with default Firefox Snap package, it will automatically update to the latest, though user may manually check updates via command:
sudo snap refresh firefox
For native DEB package, user can choose either the official apt repository or MozillaTeam PPA, and here’s a step by step tutorial talking about it.
NVIDIA released first Beta of the 570 driver series for Linux users a few days ago. See what’s new in this new driver.
NVIDIA Linux driver introduced VRR support for Wayland since 560 driver series. It’s a feature that adjust the monitor’s refresh rate on the fly, to match the frame rate of output signal from the graphics card.
The feature is useful for games to eliminate screen tearing and also lowers power consumption. And the new 570.86.16 driver enhanced it by supporting variable refresh rate (VRR) on systems with multiple monitors.
NVIDIA Settings 570
though the announcement is not ready yet at the moment. 
Shotcut video editor released new 25.01 version today. See what’s new in this monthly release and how to install guide for Ubuntu.
Shotcut 25.01 introduced built-in file browser that can be toggled on/off through either “View -> Files” menu or Ctrl+Shift+4 keyboard shortcut. In addition, there’s new “Show in Files” option in Properties and Jobs, to quickly locate the file in built-in file browser.
