If update notifications have stopped showing up on your Ubuntu 26.04 LTS install, that isn't some random glitch. OMG Ubuntu's Joey Sneddon has traced it back to a Launchpad bug report and a Discourse thread that both point to the same root cause.
The issue is that update-notifier only sends a desktop notification when its tray icon is visible, and that icon was switched off in Ubuntu 26.04, with nothing in the Settings menu to switch it back on.
Guillaume Michaud, who filed the bug on July 5, found 10 pending non-security updates sitting on his machine without a single prompt to install them. He tested it manually. With the tray icon forced on, update-notifier fired a notification, and with it switched off, nothing happened at all.
Canonical's Marco Trevisan had flagged a related problem himself back in April, when the update indicator wasn't obeying its own settings and couldn't be switched on even manually.
That got fixed within a day, but the icon stayed off by default. Commenting on the bug again in June, Marco called the setup a design choice and said anyone who wants the icon back can enable it through gsettings.
However, this sounds worse than it actually is. 😅
Ubuntu still runs unattended-upgrades in the background by default, so security patches keep installing themselves whether a notification ever appears. The actual gap was in non-security updates, the kind you'd normally want to review yourself, going completely unflagged.
The fix
Alessandro Astone has already shipped update-notifier 3.207.2 as a security update cleared for Ubuntu 26.04.1. It removes the tray icon dependency entirely. Now, an App Center install, an unattended-upgrades run, or a manual check all trigger the same notification.
And because it went out as a security update, the fix reaches most systems automatically thanks to unattended-upgrades.
If you'd rather have the tray icon back, open a terminal and run:
gsettings set com.ubuntu.update-notifier show-updates-status-icon true
Or just check your update status directly through App Center's "Manage" tab, the Software Updater, or simply run:
TLDR: - Codeberg e.V. members voted on two AI-related proposals at their annual assembly, and both passed. - The first formalizes that Codeberg will never use project or user code and data to train AI models. - The second amends the Terms of Use to ban projects that mostly consist of AI-generated code. - Codeberg cites server strain from AI crawlers, rising hardware costs, and eroding contributor trust as its motivations.
One formalizes a promise already implied by the non-profit's privacy policy that it won't use code or user data to train AI models. The other rewrites the Terms of Use to ban most AI-generated projects from the platform outright.
Both proposals passed after a 14-day voting period that closed on July 22.
The two votes
The first vote turned an existing privacy stance into formal policy. Codeberg's privacy policy already states it doesn't want to need user data, and the members have now extended that same principle to AI.
The forge and its associated services will not use code or data from projects and users to train AI tools, according to the passed motion.
The second vote was more contested. It passed 358 to 144, with 14 abstentions, on a turnout of around half of Codeberg's active members. The result is the addition of a new clause to the Terms of Use (check point 2.7) barring projects built mostly from AI-generated code, specifically naming tools like Claude and OpenAI Codex.
Why do this?
Codeberg's reasoning goes well beyond a single grievance. AI crawlers hit the platform indiscriminately, reading every issue filter variant and every point in git history. This results in excessive workload for volunteer system administrators who could instead be working on new improvements.
Hardware costs are climbing too. Codeberg says a drive that cost around €700 a few years ago now runs closer to €3,700 and is often out of stock. Because the association, Codeberg e.V., owns its hardware rather than renting cloud capacity, it has to absorb those price hikes directly.
Codeberg also argues that vibe-coded, single-use software is flooding the platform with projects that consume storage and CI/CD resources far beyond what their contributor count would justify.
At the same time, maintainers face a growing pile of low-effort AI-generated contributions to review.
What it means for you?
Codeberg is confident that these changes won't trigger a mass deletion of existing repositories. The moderation team isn't generating a purge list either, as enforcement will happen case by case as issues come up.
Projects with an active community, real history predating AI tools, or the odd, unknowingly accepted AI contribution are unlikely to be affected. Small side projects and experiments get some leeway too, as long as they don't draw much attention.
The line is drawn at projects built by autonomous AI agents, code maintained mostly through heavy AI use, or projects burning far more resources than their contributor count justifies.
It's hard not to read this against what Linus Torvalds has been saying lately. He went from calling AI "90 percent marketing" to telling critics to fork the kernel or walk away if they don't like it in Linux.
What Codeberg did here is the opposite; it looked at the same technology and decided the costs, to its servers, the trust between contributors, and to the model of running a small non-profit forge, outweigh whatever AI might offer in return.
My humble opinion
I think they did the right thing. Codeberg is just getting more popular, and they can't risk cost overruns at this stage, with active development and no shortage of new repositories building on it.
A project like Linux is a different story. It's one of the most heavily reviewed codebases on the planet, where a bad AI-generated patch tends to get caught fast, with some harsh words following soon after.
Collabora Productivity has spent the past decade proving that an open source office suite can compete directly with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace without asking organizations to give up control of their infrastructure or their documents.
All of that is backed by a team of open source engineers whose work has made Collabora a trusted name when enterprises go shopping for a collaborative document platform.
Most of what ships in Collabora Online 26.04 will look familiar if you followed the CODE 26.04 release back in June. So this will be me rehashing the information we already covered earlier.
AI assistance touches every major app in the suite this time, landing in Writer, Calc, and Impress. Writer's version helps draft and rewrite passages, Calc's works through formula errors and spreadsheet data, and Impress's condenses notes or longer documents into slide-ready material.
None of it runs unless an organization switches it on first. From there, teams choose their own path, connecting a commercial API they already trust or deploying a self-hosted model on infrastructure they control, with Collabora not peddling any specific vendor.
Calc's changes lean toward collaboration. Per-user sheet views let two people filter and rearrange the same shared spreadsheet without stepping on each other's setup. Pivot tables now support calculated values, and a batch of newer functions is here for anyone doing serious data work.
Impress picks up Follow-Me Slideshows, where an audience automatically tracks whatever slide the presenter is on, with the option to pause and scroll back through something they missed before rejoining the live view.
Writer's document comparison tool has got the biggest rework this cycle. Bring up an earlier version of a file, whether it's on the server or sitting locally, and the editor highlights everything that changed against the current draft, credited to whoever made the edit and when.
You also have the choice of reviewing changes side by side or through the usual tracked changes panel, and there's BITV 2.0 accreditation too.
Speaking about this release, Michael Meeks, the CEO of Collabora Productivity, said that:
Collabora Online 26.04’s highly customisable and tightly controlled AI assistance enables users to safely accelerate their document related tasks.
Likewise, the new editing and review features, improved accessibility and greater document interoperability will smooth the everyday experience for all users, making it more intuitive and flexible.
Why go for Collabora Online?
Collabora offers four flavors of its suite. CODE is free and self-hosted, built for early adopters chasing new features first. Collabora Office and Collabora Office Classic bring that experience to the desktop, while Collabora Online is the paid enterprise solution.
Everything here has already made it through CODE, where the community stress-tested it first. Collabora then rolls it into Online with a paid SLA, signed security updates, long-term maintenance, and direct access to its support team whenever something breaks.
Ready for another round of latest happenings in Linux world? Here, we go.
Vocalinux 0.14 beta adds custom recording shortcuts, fixes Wayland text injection on GNOME, and handles CPU usage better on hybrid laptops. It didn't run cleanly during testing, but it's pre-release software, so that's a given.
GNOME's entire security tracking operation has been one person since 2020. That person is leaving in December. There's space for a replacement, but they will have to modernize the current system. Nothing to panic about. GNOME Foundation should take care of it.
Speaking of GNOME, the GNOME OS' development is going on nicely, with the developers sharing that a safe mode is coming, allowing users to troubleshoot issues that prevent boot or optimal usage of the OS.
MPEG-4 Visual is now completely patent-free after the last remaining patent, held by Siemens AG in Brazil, expired a few days ago.
If you do a lot of video processing on a Zen 4 or newer AMD chip, FFmpeg's latest AVX-512 optimization is worth knowing about. RGB24 to RGBA conversion is now 1.372x faster.
The TDF has published a sharp piece on why DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX are Microsoft's most effective lock-in tool. These bind organizations not through contracts or bans, but via pesky formatting friction that makes anything outside Office look slightly wrong.
Elon says X's entire codebase is going open source once xAI finishes a security review. He's said things like this before, but his track record has been mixed so far.
Sreenath, a Kitty user of several years, tried Alacritty for two months and came away with a temptation to switch. Features like Vi mode, scrollback search, bracket matching, and sensible defaults are what won him over.
Here are eight GNOME extensions that can make you more productive. A dropdown terminal, clipboard history with regex search, a proper tiling manager, Pomodoro timer, sticky notes that actually stick, and phone notifications on your desktop.
MangoWM does what Niri does but gives you many layout modes alongside a comprehensive tags system, per-tag layout switching, and a lean installation for you to tailor according to your preferences.
Tired of manually mounting your external drive every time? Adding a UUID entry to /etc/fstab handles it at boot, while udev rules combined with autofs take care of hot-plugged USB drives. I wrote this tutorial years ago and it is still valid.
Less than a week to go for the Humble Bundle O'Reilly collection. It is packed with Linux and Unix books, covering everything from shell scripting to system administration and kernel internals. This should be of interest to most Linux users, professional or not.
And part of the money gets donated to Code for America.
What if you could have aan intern sitting on your desk and help you with your work? That's what Intern 2 from Autonomous does. Be prepared to see a lot of such "AI gadgets" in the coming months.
Got an old PC gathering dust? It could be converted into a NAS. We have covered some pretty neat OS options that can complement your restoration efforts.
Why should you opt for It's FOSS Plus membership:
✅ Ad-free reading experience ✅ Badges in the comment section and forum ✅ Supporting creation of educational Linux materials ✅ Free Linux eBook
This one is overlooked often, but Looking Glass is GNOME's integrated inspector tool and JavaScript console that is quite useful for debugging. First, you have to launch the Run a Command dialog with Alt+F2, then launch the tool by typing lg.
You can use it to troubleshoot issues with GNOME shell extensions or other interface snafus, and you can exit it by pressing Esc.
🗓️ Tech Trivia: On July 25, 1990, Microsoft became the first PC software company ever to top $1 billion in annual sales, reporting $1.18 billion for its fiscal year. Just 15 years after Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded it in 1975.
Jellyfin, the local media server solution that makes people forget that Plex even exists, is going through a major shakeup in its development team's organizational structure.
In a forum post published a few days ago, founder Joshua Boniface confirmed that he is departing as Project Leader, while Anthony Lavado is stepping down as a core team member.
Their exit comes just days after the other founder, Andrew Rabert, announced his own voluntary departure.
Joshua and Anthony describe their exit as being amicable, saying that there is little to no risk of a hostile fork. They're leaving day-to-day operations to the rest of the team, many of whom have already been managing different parts of Jellyfin for years.
The departures
Just a placeholder image of an older build of Jellyfin.
Joshua and Andrew leaving are both cases of maintainer burnout. Boniface says he could no longer give the role the mental or time-based effort it demanded and that he was facing real risks to his own mental health as a result.
Rabert's account, shared in a GitHub issue about renaming his now-independent desktop client project, points to something similar. He said he started rewriting Jellyfin's desktop client back in December 2025 but ran into resistance from certain members of the Jellyfin organization over how he was approaching the work.
That friction eventually cost him his motivation, and he made the call to leave the Jellyfin organization.
Anthony's departure is a bit different. He said he hasn't touched much code in recent times, focusing instead on backend tasks like App Store management, and that changes in his personal life mean he can no longer give Jellyfin the time he used to.
He's still sticking around through the transition, though, and says he's committed to making it a smooth one even if it takes up to a year.
Things were looking up!
It wasn't long ago that Jellyfin looked to be in a good spot. Back in May, the project published a State of the Fin update, and the stats pointed to a project running at a healthy pace.
The accompanying activity graph, covering May 2025 through April 2026, showed PRs merged and issues closed staying in the hundreds nearly every month, with PRs merged ranging from roughly 180 to 430 and issues closed from roughly 240 to 500. The contributor count held steady throughout.
That same post introduced Jellyfin's LLM and AI policy, put together in response to a wave of AI-authored pull requests that had piled onto the team's workload.
It also included a section titled "Burnout / Remember the Person", where the team said that growing support demands and the extra review work brought on by AI-generated code had worn down staff across development and admin roles.
If you draw a parallel from the departures above, it is clear that many people were/are running at the absolute limit or have broken past their capacity to deliver good work.
And this is not something new; we are used to hearing about maintainer burnout taking capable devs off projects they once used to have a passion for. While things are certainly improving thanks to increased awareness, there's still a long way to go.
People who used Windows 7 and earflier version would remember "My Computer". It's called "This PC" now a days but does the same job.
You click on the icon, and it opens the file explorer and shows you the meta folders (Documents, Pictures, Downloads, etc.) and all the drives on the system and any other mounted devices.
Windows 8 My Computer
This is useful for many people to see all the locations in the system at a glance.
On the Linux side, GNOME used to have Other Locations page in Nautilus file manager. It served as a central place where you could access network shares, cloud storage such as Google Drive, removable drives, and even your root partition.
Other Locations view in older GNOME versions
Starting with GNOME 47, that page was removed. In its place, Nautilus introduced a dedicated Network folder, while local drives and partitions were moved directly into the sidebar.
This makes sense for systems with only a few drives, but some users still prefer to have a dedicated page that shows everything in one place.
Meet My Computer for Nautilus
My Computer for Nautilus is an extension for GNOME Files (Nautilus) that brings back a dedicated computer view.
Instead of scattering drives and network locations across different places, it puts all your drives, partitions, removable media, and network mounts into a single, organized page. It also comes with a handful of useful features that make Nautilus much more customizable than it is by default.
While bringing back a dedicated Computer view is its primary purpose, My Computer goes beyond that. It adds a few quality-of-life improvements that make Nautilus even more flexible.
Let's have a look at its features.
A dedicated Computer view
The most noticeable change is the new Computer entry that appears at the top of the Nautilus sidebar.
Clicking it opens a dedicated page where all your drives, partitions, removable media, and network locations are neatly organized.
My Computer Panel
You can even make Nautilus open in this view every time it starts.
Simply right-click the Computer entry in the sidebar and select My Computer Settings.
Access My Computer Settings
Under the General tab, enable Start on the Computer View.
Start in My Computer
Customize what appears in the Computer View
The Computer page is fully customizable.
If you don't want certain sections, such as Preferred Folders, Network, or Removable Media, you can simply hide them. This lets you tailor the page to match your workflow.
For example, you can turn it into a dedicated drives overview by hiding everything except storage devices.
Panel Item Visibility
I have removed the Preferred Folders and made the Computer page show only Drives and Network Drives in the image below:
Hidden Preferred Folders
Enjoy Miller columns
One of the most interesting additions is support for Miller Columns.
If you've used macOS Finder before, you'll immediately recognize this layout. Instead of opening each folder in a new window or replacing the current view, folders expand into the next column, making navigation much faster.
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Miller Column View
The extension also includes a preview pane. Selecting an image or video displays a thumbnail along with basic information about the file without opening it.
Customize the sidebar
Another feature I like is the ability to customize Nautilus' sidebar.
Normally, entries such as Recents and Starred cannot be removed. My Computer adds simple toggle switches that let you hide or show these built-in entries.
Sidebar Visiblity
To customize the sidebar, open My Computer Settings and switch to the Sidebar tab.
For example, I hid Recents, Starred, and Network to create a much cleaner sidebar.
Gallery showing the sidebar before and after disabling built-in items.
Customize storage bar colors
If you like personalizing your desktop, My Computer also lets you customize the storage usage bars shown beside your drives.
Open My Computer Settings, switch to the Computer tab, scroll down to Bar Color, and change Color Mode to Custom Gradient.
Bar Color Settings
You can then choose two colors to create your own gradient. Here's how mine turned out.
Colored View
Install My Computer
My Computer is under active development. Since it is a Nautilus extension rather than a GNOME Shell extension, you'll need to install it as a system package or use the project's installer script.
On Ubuntu 26.04 and newer versions, install it from the official PPA:
If you're using another distribution, including Arch Linux, the project also provides a universal installation script:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yannmasoch/nautilus-my-computer/main/install.sh | sh
Wrapping Up
My Computer brings back several features that many long-time GNOME users have missed over the years. While it doesn't recreate the old Other Locations page exactly, it offers a practical alternative by gathering everything into a dedicated Computer view.
The addition of Miller Columns is another nice to have feature. It's a navigation style I've wanted to see in Nautilus for quite some time. Elementary OS' file manager has offered a similar feature for years, but I never found a reliable way to use it on GNOME until now.
If you're happy with Nautilus' current sidebar-centric approach, you may not feel the need for this extension. But if you miss having a dedicated Computer page or want more control over the file manager's interface, My Computer is definitely worth trying.
Would you install it, or do you prefer Nautilus the way it is? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
When OpenClaw hype was at its peak in the beginning of 2026, a lot of people bought Mac Mini just to keep an agent running around the clock.
I never understood why people would spend $500 on a device to run OpenClaw like agents that are merely inferences to a commercial LLM like Claude and ChatGPT.
But these 'claws' are here to stay, and people are utilizing them to run their agent on dedicated hardware. And that's why we have dedicated hardware built around these agents.
Autonomous is a company known for standing desks and ergonomic chairs, although they did start as Robotbase, making personal robots.
Seems like they are back to their roots, sort of. They have a few "AI hardware" projects in their offering and that includes a thinking desk and a paper pet companion.
But the device I am going to feature today is a desk companion that runs AI agents and you can use it as an office assistant or an intern (no offense to interns).
The device is called Intern 2 because it's a follow-up to Intern, which was released six months ago. Let's learn more about it.
Intern 2 Specifications
Board: Orange Pi 4 Pro, 8-core Allwinner A733 (2x Cortex-A76 + 6x Cortex-A55, up to 2.0GHz)
Memory: 6GB LPDDR5
Storage: 64GB onboard + up to 256GB expansion
Connectivity: Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4
New in Intern 2: voice interaction (dual mic, pickup up to 3m; 5W speaker) and browser control, on top of the existing Telegram/Slack/Discord channels
Warranty: 1-year warranty, 30-day free returns
Intern 2 starts at $249 for the OpenClaw or Hermes editions, and $299 for the Developer edition.
So basically, the device ships with an agent framework already running. You pick OpenClaw or Hermes at checkout, plug the box into Wi-Fi, add it to a Telegram, Slack, or Discord group (WhatsApp gets added later through a separate QR pairing step), and it starts triaging your inbox, watching GitHub issues, and running whatever multi-step task you hand it, all without you touching a terminal.
I am guessing you will have to do some configuration to connect it to your mail and suff but that should not be too difficult if your main LLM is already connected to various services you use.
The board underneath is an Orange Pi 4 Pro: an 8-core Allwinner A733 chip, two beefier Cortex-A76 cores paired with six efficiency Cortex-A55 cores, and a 3 TOPS NPU. It's the kind of board you can buy separately, so Intern 2 isn't offering or hiding anything exotic. It is just packaging familiar SBC hardware into something that doesn't look like a dev board.
What does it look like? It looks like a pyramid with a glowing top. I kind of like the look.
The voice interaction is the main selling point here. Why type when you can just speak to it? Is that not what Tony Stark did as Iron Man?
Intern 2 adds dual far-field mics rated to pick up speech from up to 3 meters away, plus a 5W speaker, so you can just talk to the thing sitting on your desk the way you'd talk to a coworker (or an intern). Browser control is also there, letting the agent act on websites on your behalf instead of only working through chat integrations and APIs.
There are three editions to choose from:
OpenClaw ($249): the default, framework preloaded, no setup beyond Wi-Fi and a chat app.
Hermes ($249): identical hardware, running the Hermes agent out of the box instead.
Developer ($299): ships with the shell open. You SSH in, and Claude Code comes preloaded, with room to swap in Codex or OpenCode if you'd rather run your own agent stack.
Open-source Autonomous OS
Intern 2 runs on Autonomous OS, an open-source operating system created by Autonomous for physical AI agents.
It handles sensing, memory, skills, and updates, while the actual "brain" is swappable between OpenClaw, Hermes, PicoClaw, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, or any other agent framework you want to wire in.
Intern is the second reference device built on it, after a desk lamp called Autonomous Lamp. Since Autonomous is working on more AI-powered hardware, it makes sense to have a custom operating system.
Open sourcing is also the wise decision. These devices are more for tech enthusiasts, and some of them may tweak the OS to our liking and needs. So good job, Autonomous.
As mentioned previously, it starts at $249 for the OpenClaw or Hermes editions and $299 for the Developer edition, with free shipping. Every unit ships hand-assembled and tested, backed by a 1-year warranty and 30-day free returns (I like that). Developer documentation is available here.
Should you buy Intern 2 is a question only you can answer. If you have interacted with Nanoclaw, Hermes Agent, etc. and like the idea of interacting with them via voice, this device should interest you.
Sure, this can be built from scratch, especially when the operating system is also open source. But not everyone has the time and skills to do that. People spend money on 'out of the box' experiences after all. I would not mind splurging on it, as I am sucker for such gadgets.
So, would you spend some money and get yourself an "AI Intern"?
