Ubuntu’s old Unity desktop remade in Wayfire and Libadwaita
If Canonical hadn’t burned through cash and goodwill during its smartphone detour in the mid-2010s, Ubuntu would likely still ship with the Unity desktop today – albeit in an evolved form. What would that form actually look like? Well, you don’t have to shut your eyes and imagine, thanks to Ubuntu community member Muqtxdir, who’s experiment in “re-building ubuntu’s unity shell in a wayfire session through gtk4-layer-shell and libadwaita widgetry” (sic) gives us a sideways glimpse. Muqtxdir, who help maintain and develop Ubuntu’s Yaru theme and contributes to the immutable Vanilla OS Linux distribution, recently shared a video of his […]
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A new beta build of Orion for Linux is available, with the v0.3 update ready for ‘broader, real-world use and feedback’, according to Kagi, the company behind it. Orion for Linux is a native GTK4/libadwaita web browser powered by WebKitGTK, aiming for feature parity with established macOS version (platform-specific features notwithstanding). It launched an alpha in early 2026 and an initial beta in March. In the months since the last beta, Kagi say Orion for Linux has “evolved into a much more capable browser” with its core browsing features like tab management, a password manager, history tracking, focus mode and […]
gThumb, the open-source image viewer and organiser, has been rewritten in Vala and ported to GTK4/libadwaita – and compared to the old UI, it’s barely recognisable. An alpha build of gThumb 4.0 is available for testing. Alongside the visual revamp, this brings support for WEBP and PNG animations, lets you export images in the JXL format and includes a censor filter to pixelate or blur out parts of an image. But it’s the visual changes that mark this update out. Sure, any port from GTK3 to GTK4 will add a visage of modernity, but it’s not a “automatically looks amazing” […]