News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
Free open-source software updates and Linux news
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.
Papers entered GNOME Incubator about a year ago, expects to replace Evince as default PDF and Document viewer. Now it’s made into Debian (Unstable) and Ubuntu (25.04) repository for choice, and it’s expected to be default perhaps later this year according to this thread.
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
LibreOffice, the popular free open-source office suite, rolls out the new 25.2.0 release! LibreOffice 25.2 is the third release series after switched to date-based version numbering system. The official Flatpak package has been updated for all Linux users, 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.
The first alpha release of GNOME 48 is out today! See what’s new in the desktop environment that will be default in next Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora Workstation 42.
First, GNOME 48 introduced new core app called Decibels. It’s a simple audio player that features playback speed adjustment, easy seek controls, and shows the waveform of the track.
GNOME 48
Wine, the popular free open-source compatibility layer for running Windows apps/games in Linux/Unix, announced new 10.0 major release on Tuesday!
The new release features Hi-DPI scaling support. Instead of exposing high-DPI sizes to applications that don’t expect it, it now automatically scale non-DPI aware windows.
Oracle announced new Virtualbox 7.1.6 release this Tuesday with various bug-fixes, performance improvements, and minor new features.
VirtualBox had heavy screen tearing and flickering issue in Linux VMs running with recent Kernel and Wayland for a period of time, that’s why I switched to QEMU/KVM.
Since the last 7.1.4, VirtualBox greatly improved the flickering, black screen and other screen update issues. In the new release, it also fixed issue with Linux guest screen flickering when guest was using VMSVGA graphics adapter.
Meaning now recent Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation and other Linux with Wayland work great again in VirtualBox virtual machines!
screen tearing and flickering issue finally fixed
Linux Kernel 6.13 is released! Linus Torvalds announced it in lkml.org on Sunday:
So nothing horrible or unexpected happened last week, so I’ve tagged and pushed out the final 6.13 release.
It’s mostly some final driver fixes (gpu and networking dominating – normal), with some doc updates too. And various little stuff all over. The shortlog is appended for people who want to see the details (and, as always, it’s just the shortlog for the last week, the full 6.13 log is obviously much too big).
The new kernel introduced many new drivers, performance improvements, new & updated hardware support!
For AMD, it features new AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver, for Ryzen X3D CPUs with larger 3D V-Cache to help optimize performance, supports PCIe TPH that is found with new AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” servers, and uses AMD P-State driver as default in these CPUs.
