News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
KeePassXC password manager announced the new 2.7.7 release this Sunday! Here are the new features and how to install instruction for Ubuntu.
The new KeePassXC 2.7.7 features official support for Passkeys. It’s a type of login credential, that provides a faster, easier, and more secure ways to login to websites and services without having to enter a password.
image from keepassxc website
After almost 2 years, Cozy audiobook player, finally announced new 1.3.0 release days ago.
Cozy is a free open-source application for Linux, allows to listen to your DRM free mp3, m4b, m4a (aac, ALAC, …), flac, ogg and wav audio books.
The new release ported the UI to GTK4 plus LibAdwaita. It now looks more native, well integrated in Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux with recent GNOME Desktop, and automatically switch to dark mode when system switched to dark style.
Other changes include:
HexChat, the popular free open-source IRC chat client, discontinued!
HexChat is a IRC chat client forked from XChat. It’s a GTK app written in mostly C programming language. Features include customizable interface, Windows and Linux support, scripting support with Lua, Python, and Perl, multi-network with auto-connect, join, and identify, and more.
By announcing the 1.6.2 release today, the developer TingPing finally discontinued working on the project, after almost 12 years of development.
“This will be the last release I make of HexChat. The project has largely been unmaintained for years now and nobody else stepped up to do that work.“
Zorin OS, the popular Ubuntu based Linux Distribution, announced v17.1 this Thursday!
Like Linux Mint, Zorin OS is based on Ubuntu LTS. The latest 17.x release series is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, but features GNOME 43 desktop with custom layout.
It provides an elegant and user friendly desktop appearance targets to users who are switching from Microsoft Windows. And, features 3 editions: Pro (cost $48), Core, and Education.
Pithos, the free open-source client for Pandora Radio, released new 1.6.2 version a few days ago.
Pithos is a native app for Linux desktop, allowing to listen to free music through Pandora music streaming service. It’s much more lightweight than the Pandora.com web client, and well integrated with Linux desktop that features media keys, notifications, and the sound menu.
The Pithos 1.6.2 version was released a few days ago with only few bug-fixes. They include:
Nothing else!
After 3 alpha and 3 beta releases, Kodi media center 21, finally announced its first RC release this Thursday.
Kodi 21 is the next major release that’s still in development. The release features upstream FFmpeg 6.0, adds support for NFSv4, support M3U8 playlist files, AVIF images, HDR10 for Android.
The developer team asks users to try out the new development release and report issues to help to make it better. And, in the current RC1 release, changes include:
Hotkeycontroller for media keys on macOS
GNOME 46, the default desktop for Ubuntu 24.04 and Fedora 40, will finally have the option to enable Variable Refresh Rate.
Variable Refresh Rate, VRR in short, is a feature for TV, monitor, and other displays, allowing to adjust refresh rate on the fly to match the frame rate of the graphics card. Which, is useful for smoother viewing experience, and reducing screen tearing.
GNOME has the feature request for VRR support 3 years ago. It’s finally merged and planned for GNOME 46, which will be released later this month!
According to this request, it’s an experimental feature. User needs to enable it first either via Dconf Editor or gsettings tool via the command:
gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['variable-refresh-rate']"
Then, log out and back in. Gnome Control Center, aka Settings, will have the option in “Displays” panel, when you click expand the “Refresh Rate”.
image from gitlab.gnome.org
Once enabled the feature, and selected your preferred value, the Refresh Rate will be displayed as “Variable (up to xxx.xx Hz)”.
Ubuntu has a few offline games out-of-the-box. Now, the developer team is going to remove them from the installer in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
Since Ubuntu 23.10, Ubuntu Desktop no longer provides ‘Minimal installation‘ option in the installer. Instead, it’s “re-named” to “Default installation” with just the essentials, web browser and basic utilities. User can choose “Full installation” option for the office, media player, games, and other app packages that’s previously installed by default in old Ubuntu releases.
Just a few days ago, the desktop team proposed to remove the games from full installation, then made the decision with wider support.
Meaning that the game packages may be completely removed from the iso image, though they are still available to install in Ubuntu Software (App Center).
Visual Studio Code announced version 1.87 as the new February 2024 release!
The release features voice dictation support in editor. With VS Code Speech extension installed, user can use voice to dictate directly into the editor.
It can be started by pressing Ctrl+Alt+V on keyboard, and stop via Escape key. Or, press and hold the key combination (Ctrl+Alt+V) to enable walky-talky mode, that the voice recognition stops as soon as the keys released.
The VS Code Speech extension now has 26 supported languages support. Each language comes as its own extension. And user can choose between them using accessibility.voice.speechLanguage setting.
Other changes in the release include:
SDDM, the Simple Desktop Display Manager, announced new 0.21.0 released a few hours ago.
It’s a free open-source display manager, aka login manager, for the graphical interface of Linux login screen. While, GNOME (Ubuntu/Fedora) uses GDM as default, and MATE/Cinnamon (Linux Mint) uses LightDM, SDDM is usually the default login manager for KDE Plasma and LxQT desktop environments.
SDDM aims to be fast, simple and beautiful. It’s extremely themeable, and supports using video background in login screen.
