News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
Mozilla announced the new 136.0 release of its Thunderbird email client on Tuesday! It’s NOT ESR, but desktop release channel that updates every month!
As you may know, Mozilla’s Firefox web browser has a rapid release channel that updates every 4 weeks, and ESR channel releases major updates every year. Now, it uses the similar policy for Thunderbird!
Thunderbird 136.0 is the first release in the new official channel. And, there’ll be 137.0 in next month, 138.0 in May, and so forth.
FFmpeg, the popular free open-source multimedia library, released new 7.1.1 version few days ago. Here are the changelog and Ubuntu PPA for Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04, and Ubuntu 24.10.
FFmpeg is a maintenance released with more then 2 hundreds of changes, which are primarily bug-fixes and improvements.
Ubuntu has some snap apps (e.g., Firefox and AppCenter) pre-installed in recent releases. The snap apps auto-generate a snap folder in user’s home directory to store app data, caches, and configuration files.
If you don’t want to see that folder, you may hide it or move to another location. And, here’s how to do the trick step by step in Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04, and Ubuntu 24.10.
Firefox web browser 136.0 is out today with many new features!
The new release introduced a new setting option, allowing to add sidebar toggle button in top-left, to quickly show/hide the side-bar. Where, you can quickly access the AI chatbox, history, tabs from other devices, and settings.
This tutorial shows how to block ads, trackers, and malware domains system-wide in Ubuntu and other Linux desktop using hBlock.
hBlock is a free open-source script that collects a large list of domains that serve ads, tracking scripts and malware from multiple sources. It blocks them by mapping all those domain names to 0.0.0.0 using hosts file, thus it works system-wide.
For GnuCash users who prefer the native .deb package format, here I made a new unofficial PPA for all current Ubuntu releases.
GnuCash is a popular personal and small-business financial-accounting software. It’s available in the Ubuntu system repositories, but always old.
I’ve written about how to install the most recent GnuCash 5.10 in Ubuntu in different ways. For those who prefer the .deb package, here’s a new PPA available for choice.
Fish shell, the popular free open-source command line shell, release new major 4.0 version yesterday.
Shell is a program that interprets and executes the commands you type in the terminal. Linux has different type shells, e.g., Bourne Shell (sh), GNU Bourne-Again Shell (bash), and C Shell (csh). And, current Ubuntu releases default to bash shell.
NVIDIA announced the new 570.124.04 stable driver yesterday as the latest production branch version for Linux users.
Compare to the last 570.86.16 Beta driver, this release added new conceal_vrr_caps parameter to the nvidia-modeset kernel module. Which, allows to enable features on displays (such as ULMB) that are incompatible with variable refresh rate (VRR).
Just a week since the last release, KDE announced the second maintenance update for the Plasma 6.3 Desktop.
Plasma 6.3.2 added support for fractional scaling with denominator of 120. According to this page, the appropriate denominator for the scale is 120. However, Display Configuration previously only allowed 5% increments. In the new release, it supports setting a scale of e.g., 174.167% (209/120).
Emacs text editor released new major 30.1 version a few days ago. For Ubuntu users who prefer the classic .deb package, here’s unofficial PPA updated for all current Ubuntu releases.
Emacs 30.1 features Android port, improved touchscreen support, new trusted-content option, native JSON support, default app for ‘org-protocol’, ability to set toolbar to bottom, new packages, and more. See the NEWS page for details.
