Looking for a download manager for Ubuntu, Fedora, or other Linux with GNOME Desktop? Try Varia!

There are quite a few downloading apps for Linux Desktop. And, uGet is one of them that I prefer, which is however not updated for a few years.

For GNOME, the default desktop in Ubuntu and Fedora Workstation, there’s now a new download manager called Varia. It’s based on aria command line download utility, which is lightweight, super fast (support downloading from multi-sources in parallel), and supports HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, SFTP, BitTorrent and Metalink.

Varia is written in Python programming language, and uses GTK4 + Libadwaita for its user interface, that’s modern and well integrated with GNOME Desktop.


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Loupe is the core image viewer app for GNOME since version 45, but it’s so far not made default in Ubuntu.

It’s a fully adaptive image viewer that supports mobile form factors. It’s touch-friendly that supports 2-finger swipe left/right to navigate, 2-finger pinch/stretch to zoom out/in, and 2-finger gestures to rotate images.

Other features of Loupe include fast GPU accelerated image rendering, tiled rendering for vector graphics, sandboxed image decoding, and more.

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Use Locate command to Find Files (with Examples)

Last updated: December 30, 2024 — 6 Comments

This tutorial shows how to use locate command to quickly find files in your Linux system.

In Ubuntu Linux, the locate command is provided by the plocate package. It’s very fast command line search tool, that can find all files in the system matching the given pattern. It rarely needs to scan through its entire database, and most I/O is done asynchronously, but the results are synchronized.

Most importantly plocate is easy to use! I regularly use it to search app icon images that are in use in most pages of this website.

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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).


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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:

  • Multi-cursor inline completions are previewed and applied at both the primary and the secondary cursor positions.
  • Rename suggestions from Copilot.
  • Pylance extension for Python support now has an Add Imports code action for adding missing imports.
  • Enable sticky scroll by defaul, and increase maximum display number from 10 to 20.
  • GitHub Copilot Chat suggests templates and features when adding dev container configuration files to a workspace
  • Side-by-side preview refactoring – Preview refactorings across files with multi diff editor.


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Prompt, the container-oriented terminal emulator, now is re-named to Ptyxis!

GNOME Developer Christian Hergert announced the Prompt terminal emulator a few months ago. It “marries the best of GNOME Builder’s seamless container support, the beauty of GNOME Text Editor, and the robustness of VTE.” described in the blog post.

Due to name confusion to other product, the terminal emulator now has a new name called “Ptyxis”, according to this postThe extremely nice people at Panic let me know they had a product that might be confused with Prompt and I agreed it could be confusing.

image from blogs.gnome.org


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This is a step by step beginner’s guide shows how to install OnlyOffice Desktop Editors office suite and keep it up-to-date in Ubuntu 22.04. Though the title said for Ubuntu 22.04, it also works in Linux Mint (exclude Snap) and Debian.

OnlyOffice, formerly TeamLab, is a free office suite. The Desktop Editors is offline version, that’s made up of Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation, and PDF Form. Though, it supports collaborative editing by connecting to a cloud service.

The desktop editors is free and open-source (AGPL-3.0-only license) software works in Windows, Linux, and macOS. There’ also mobile version for iOS and Android, though called OnlyOffice Documents. It’s compatible with MS Office (OOXML) and OpenDocument (ODF) formats and supports DOC, DOCX, ODT, RTF, TXT, PDF, HTML, EPUB, XPS, DjVu, XLS, XLSX, ODS, CSV, PPT, PPTX, ODP, DOTX, XLTX, POTX, OTT, OTS, OTP, and PDF-A.

The office suite is available to install in Ubuntu in 4 different ways. Choose any one that you prefer:

  • native .deb.
  • universal Flatpak
  • universal Snap
  • portable AppImage


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This is a step by step beginners guide shows how to install and setup OneDrive client in Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04 to sync files between local machine and Microsoft cloud.

OneDrive is a file hosting service by Microsoft. It so far does not have an official app for Linux, but there’s a popular free open-source client works in most Linux. And, here’s the basic how to guide for installing and using it in Ubuntu Linux.

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For users switching from Microsoft Windows, there’s now a new Linux Distribution with default theme looks like Windows 10 and/or Windows 11.

It’s Wubuntu (Windows Ubuntu), based on Ubuntu.

It so far includes 2 versions based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. One with Windows 11 theme on KDE Plasma 5 desktop, and another with Windows 10 theme on Cinnamon desktop.

Wubuntu with Windows 11 Theme

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