OMG! Ubuntu!

I updated by list of the best Linux weather apps recently, but panel applets and extensions seem a more popular way for people prefer to get their weather reports. Now, there’s no drought in meteorological applets for GNOME Shell. Some options like Weather or Not show a label on the labels on the panel, others serve up concise lists in a dropdown. You’ve probably your own favourite, or a confused look wondering why so many people obsess about tracking minor fluctuations in temperature.

Canonical has made a major change to the way Ubuntu boots on devices with Secure Boot enabled to reduce the attack surface of the boot process. Ubuntu 26.10 uses a signed build of GRUB that no longer supports /boot on Btrfs, XFS, ZFS, LVM, LUKS encryption or software RAID other than RAID1. HFS+, Apple partition table support and JPEG and PNG image loading is also removed. It still supports /boot on ext4, FAT and ISO9660 (uses for booting CD/DVDs), as well as, naturally, squashfs for snaps.

Scrcpy, the open-source tool for viewing and controlling your Android phone from your desktop, added support for zero-copy hardware decoding in its latest release. The feature, new in v5.0, uses your computer’s hardware to decode the video stream sent from your Android screen to mirror to your desktop (via a USB cable or over IP/TCP). It improves performance; benchmarks show up to a 10x drop in CPU usage on the host device.

The unofficial GNOME theme for Firefox has been updated to work with the Firefox 157 release and its newer, rounder Nova theme. It is not a traditional Firefox theme (like the ones you can install from the Mozilla Add-ons site) but, to quote its GitHub page, a “bunch of CSS code to make Firefox look closer to GNOME’s native apps” – an excellent job it does at it too.

Hylki is a Rust-based email client designed for the GNOME desktop with an incredibly amount of customisation packed in. Like Postcard, Convey and Letters, Hylki is another of the new(ish) Linux mail clients ostensibly there to assume the role of a modern Geary-like tool. GTK4/libadwaita interface? Check. 3 column vertical layout? Built around conversations? Check. Oh, and wouldn’t exist without AI coding tools? Check – I’ll come to that in a bit.

Roblox does not officially support Linux, but Linux users can run using Sober, an unofficial third-party ‘port’ that works without Wine (hence the name). I know; this isn’t a ‘game’ most of you are itching to play. Roblox users are mostly under 16, access it via mobiles and have an unhealthy interest in Robux, the in-game virtual currency. But you may – as I do – have snotty relatives who demand to play it on your laptop because their tablet needs charging.

Kagi has announced it is ending development of its Orion web browser for Linux to focus on the macOS and iOS versions. A native GTK Linux port of Orion was announced in 2025 and a public beta launched earlier this year. The goal had been to offer feature parity with the macOS version. While recent updates have edged closer, it seems that’s where it’ll remain – for now.

Raspberry Pi has announced further price increases for its single-board computers driven, of course, by the ongoing cost of memory components. The cost of a 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 or Raspberry Pi 5 jumps by $12.50 (£12) from 1 October, 2026: ModelOld priceNew price Raspberry Pi 4 (2GB) $55 $67.50 (£64.80) Raspberry Pi 5 (2GB) $65 $77.50 (£74.40) For context, the Raspberry Pi 4 2GB model launched at $45 in 2019, was reduced to $35 in 2020, increased back to $45 in 2021 and rose by $10 in February.

Autumnal vibes may be blowing in (for the top-half of the globe, at least) but Linux app developers aren’t minded to hunker down. Aa varied set of Linux app updates were released in September 2026. Big releases to merit a full write up included the redesigned Audacity 4.0 and gThumb 4.0 releases (the former overdue, the latter looking like a new app entirely). I also covered Calibre’s wave of (peculiar) AI feature integrations, if reading books isn’t what you want to do.

The beta release of Ubuntu 26.10 (Stonking Stringray) is now available for download. Ubuntu 26.10 runs on the Linux 7.3 kernel (release candidate) and ships the GNOME 51 desktop, while lower-level changes include a full set of Rust core utilities and better handling of low-memory situations. Beta builds are intended as a preview to help with testing, with users and developers alike able to report any bugs they find ahead of the final, stable release of Ubuntu 26.10 due on 15 October 2026.