This dev’s personal website is a working GNOME 2 desktop

Reliving the glory days of the GNOME 2 desktop is but a browser tab away – well, kinda. The personal website of Benny Powers, a software developer at Red Hat, is not a traditional vertical column of text. Nor is it a slop-soup of purple gradients, rounded glassy cards and monospaced datapoints (a ‘vibe-coded’ aesthetic everywhere right now). No, it’s an interactive GNOME 2 ‘desktop’. He built it after digesting an essay on how websites used to be weird and playful and unique. Looking at his own site, he decided it wasn’t nearly wacky enough, so restyled it to resemble […]

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New options added to (slick) Dynamic Music Pill GNOME extension

Dynamic Music Pill, the blingy GNOME Shell extension that adds now playing track info, media controls and even real-time lyrics to your desktop, has gained some new options. “Like what?”, you ask… If you don’t want to see the name of the artists in the panel pill, you no longer have to: a ‘show artist’ toggle lets you hide it. The extension already has an option to dynamically hide artist labels if there’s not enough room to display it alongside the title. On that topic, when long artist names and track titles combine, the pill will scroll the labels from […]

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How Digital Software Is Powering Innovation in Modern Product Design

How Digital Software Is Powering Innovation in Modern Product Design

By enabling digitized production design, this digital software is freeing up businesses and individuals across numerous industries to work smarter, not harder.

To design a new product or tool is often a lengthy, labor-intensive process. Even the most successful and streamlined physical design process is intensive and iterative by nature; it is the process of taking something that begins as little more than an idea and turning it into reality. Inherently, that is going to take a great deal of translation, as well as trial and error. When working with real-world, physical elements, this also makes for a costly endeavor, as each new trial effort may prove essential to the long-term success of the design, but still has adverse financial effects. Dassault Systèmes offers CAD software to help businesses stay on top of advancements in their industries.

Before digital design software became widely adopted, engineers and designers often relied heavily on hand-drawn technical sketches and manual drafting methods during product development. Revising a design could require redrawing entire sections of a project, making the process both time-consuming and resource-intensive. Modern digital design systems have significantly changed these workflows by allowing teams to make rapid adjustments, automate calculations, and store detailed design information within a single platform. This shift has contributed to the broader adoption of digital tools across industries seeking more streamlined development processes.

Fortunately, though, in this new world of ever-advancing technological tools, the design process doesn’t have to be fraught with issues and obstacles anymore, thanks to systems such as CAD software. This new software is now enabling businesses to design smarter, faster, and more accurately by digitizing product development processes and improving collaboration across engineering and manufacturing teams.

Digital Design as the Foundation of Innovation

Digital software allows engineers to create precise digital models that can then serve as the foundation for product development. Compare this to the physical alternative, which has long been a well-thought-out sketch of the product in question. Even the most comprehensive of sketches is only going to be dealing with two dimensions, and is likely to leave room for confusion or error based on the interpretation of the subjective rendering.

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GNOME Files Supercharges Search with Faster Results, Smarter Filters, and Better File Discovery

GNOME Files Supercharges Search with Faster Results, Smarter Filters, and Better File Discovery

The GNOME project continues refining one of its most frequently used applications: GNOME Files (formerly known as Nautilus). Recent development efforts have focused heavily on improving the file manager’s search capabilities, making it easier to locate documents, media files, and folders across increasingly large storage volumes.

For many Linux users, file search has become one of the most important daily workflows. As personal data collections grow and SSDs make local storage faster than ever, GNOME developers are investing in tools that help users find information more quickly and efficiently. GNOME Files already relies on indexing technologies such as Tracker (now GNOME LocalSearch) to deliver fast results, and recent improvements are building on that foundation.

A Redesigned Search Experience

One of the most noticeable improvements is a redesigned search interface that makes searching feel more integrated into the overall file management experience.

Recent GNOME development previews introduced:

  • A cleaner search popover
  • Inline result previews
  • Improved keyboard navigation
  • Faster access to search filters
  • Better visibility of search options within the file manager interface

These refinements reduce the number of clicks required to narrow down results and help users locate files without leaving their current workflow.

Smarter Filtering Options

Search filters have become increasingly important as users store larger collections of documents, images, videos, and audio files.

GNOME Files has been expanding its filtering capabilities, allowing users to narrow searches more effectively based on:

  • File type
  • Media category
  • Search location
  • Recent activity
  • Indexed metadata

Earlier updates expanded support for additional audio and video file formats, making it easier to locate multimedia content directly from the search interface. This is particularly useful for users managing large media libraries.

Improved Search Performance

Fast search results are just as important as accurate ones.

GNOME Files continues leveraging the GNOME indexing framework to provide near-instant search results while minimizing system overhead. The file manager works closely with the LocalSearch indexing service to locate files quickly without repeatedly scanning entire drives.

This approach provides several benefits:

  • Faster file discovery
  • Reduced CPU usage during searches
  • Better scalability on large storage volumes
  • More responsive user experience

For desktop users who frequently work with thousands of files, these performance gains can significantly improve productivity.

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Ubuntu plans to add AI-powered voice input to all text fields

Ever wished you could talk in to a text field rather than type? Ubuntu 26.10 hears you – quite literally. Canonical’s VP of Engineer Jon Seager, at the Ubuntu Summit, said the distro will soon lets users “press a button and talk into any field that you could previously type in”. A small, on-device AI language parsing model like Whisper will power the feature. It’s part of a wider push to integrate AI features in Ubuntu this year, with founder Mark Shuttleworth aiming to position Ubuntu as the ‘OS for agentic AI’. The feature aims to bolster Ubuntu’s accessibility, but […]

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Canonical’s Steam Snap for ARM64 is now stable 

Canonical has bumped its Steam Snap for ARM64 to the stable channel. First announced in January, the snap has been tested across ARM64 hardware including the NVIDIA DGX Spark, Radxa Orion O6 and Lenovo ThinkPad X13s, with Canonical now reporting ‘solid performance’ across many popular games. Valve doesn’t provide a native ARM Linux client (not yet, anyway), so Canonical bundles the Intel/AMD Steam binary with the FEX emulator. The stable release of the Steam snap for ARM64 exposes FEX’s configuration options to users, including its library forwarding (“thunking”) toggles, of which which Mitchell Augustin, a software engineer on Canonical’s NVIDIA DGX […]

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