Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray": All the New Features So Far

Every two years, Canonical puts out a Long Term Support release that gets five years of security updates, which can be stretched further with Ubuntu Pro. In between those LTS releases, Canonical ships an interim version every six months, and each one is supported for nine months.

Those releases don't carry the same importance as an LTS, but that's the point. They give Canonical room to test newer kernels, toolchains, and design changes with a smaller user base before those changes get baked into the next LTS.

The next one, Ubuntu 26.10, carries the codename "Stonking Stingray", continuing the tradition of ordered alphabetical codenames after Resolute Raccoon (26.04).

Stonking is British slang for something impressively big or excellent, and a stingray is the flat-bodied, boneless fish that spends most of its time half-buried in sand near the seafloor (which is quite understandable seeing the state of this world).

If things go as planned, it will land on October 15, 2026, with a short support window that will close in July 2027.

⏱️Ubuntu 26.10 Release Schedule

Below is the release schedule as laid out by Canonical; do keep in mind that some of these dates might change if there are any regressions or other developmental hurdles.

Milestone	Date
Ubuntu Testing Week (optional)	July 2, 2026
Feature Freeze	August 20, 2026
Ubuntu Testing Week (optional)	August 27, 2026
Beta Release	September 24, 2026
Kernel Freeze	October 1, 2026
Release Candidate	October 8, 2026
Final Release	October 15, 2026

Know that this is kind of a live blog where we will be adding new changes and handling any anticipated features as they appear. So, yeah, let's see what's coming with Ubuntu 26.10. 👇

Something for New Installations

The typical installation and onboarding experience of Ubuntu.

Canonical is redesigning how Ubuntu gets installed, with a sharper focus on cutting down the complexity around partitioning and storage configuration. The new design is set to lean on safe defaults, guided workflows, and will be hiding advanced options behind a button (presumably) instead of throwing everything at you at once.

Alongside the installer, a new onboarding flow is in the works too. Instead of asking you to make every decision during setup, Ubuntu will move personalization and configuration into a dedicated first-boot experience after the system is already up and running.

Organizations deploying Ubuntu at scale will still be able to automate and configure these onboarding steps, just like they can with the current installer (pictured above).

Worth noting that both of these are explicitly aimed at Ubuntu 28.04 LTS. The design work is happening during the 26.10 cycle, but don't expect the finished experience to show up fully baked in this release.

Linux Kernel 7.x

The Snapshot 2 build of Ubuntu 26.10 that I tested came with Linux kernel 7.0.0-14, but treat that as a temporary implementation rather than a final answer. Canonical changed its kernel selection policy back in 2024, opting to ship whatever upstream kernel version is the latest available at release freeze, even if it's still in Release Candidate status.

That policy got extended further in 2025 to also track interim kernel versions during the development cycle itself through monthly snapshots, for better test coverage along the way.

That means the kernel version could easily shift between now and October. We have already covered what Linux kernel 7.0 itself brought to the table, so if you want the full rundown, that's a good place to start.

A Major D-Bus Change

Ubuntu is finally swapping out dbus-daemon, the default D-Bus implementation it's used since its very first release back in 2004, in favor of dbus-broker.

If you didn't know, D-Bus is the messaging system your desktop relies on constantly, letting apps, background services, and the system itself pass messages back and forth. Anything from plugging in a USB drive to updating a notification badge runs through it.

Dbus-daemon has held up fine as the reference implementation for over two decades, but it has limits. Under heavy load, messages can vanish unexpectedly, and it queries message targets sequentially instead of all at once, which adds up to latency as the bus gets busier.

Dbus-broker addresses both by design, built around an asynchronous, event-driven architecture from the ground up, and it's already the default on several other distros.

GNOME 51

Ubuntu 26.10 is shipping with GNOME 51, the upcoming stable release from the GNOME project that's scheduled to be out sometime in mid-September. We start with the Shell changes first, which has picked up many fixes that you will actually notice during daily use.

Screenshot selections now stretch cleanly to monitor edges instead of stopping short, the power-off dialog properly shows its "Install Updates" checkbox again, and the overview search box stops resetting its loading spinner every time you type a character.

It also swaps in custom sound effects instead of pulling from the system sound theme, saves and restores your monitor brightness across sessions, and only lights up the audio input icon in the top bar while your mic is actually recording.

The rest of the desktop environment picks up smaller but still visible changes.

The Settings app drops the "Windowing System" (Wayland ftw, I guess?) field from the About page and condenses system details into a single page. Similarly, Software now warns you before installing an app that's already reached end-of-life, and Calendar got its internals rebuilt around GListModel for better performance and has picked up support for opening Teams meeting links directly.

Mutter, GNOME's window manager, is dropping support for legacy NVIDIA drivers.

AI is Coming

If you remember, Canonical shared their plans to handle AI on Ubuntu back in April, when Jon Seager split things into two approaches. Implicit AI improves things you already use without you noticing, and explicit AI is the kind you'd actually summon on purpose.

The short version of it all was that everything would be local-first and built around open-weight models rather than forcing a cloud subscription onto users.

One of the earliest features under this new initiative is Myna, a local speech-to-text tool built around a simple push-to-talk flow. Hold a hotkey, speak, and the transcribed text lands wherever your cursor was sitting.

Recognition happens entirely on your machine through a sandboxed component called the Canonical Inference Snap, with different model sizes to match whatever hardware you're running.

Ubuntu Certified Check

If you ever wondered whether your device was officially supported by Ubuntu, then you will like this one. The Settings menu is getting a simple way to check whether your machine is Ubuntu Certified.

Once live, it will show up inside the About page, where it will pull a certification status for your exact hardware model, checked against Canonical's own database.

Results range from fully certified to certified for a different Ubuntu version, close to a certified model, not certified, or unable to check.

Package-Agnostic Approach

The App Center is getting rebuilt to handle apps consistently no matter which packaging format they come in, with unified search, ratings, categories, and metadata.

Earlier, when Canonical rebuilt Ubuntu's software center into App Center for 23.10, it launched without the ability to install local DEB files at all. Double-clicking one either threw an error or left you staring at a spinner that never resolved.

That got fixed with an update to Ubuntu 24.04's App Center months later.

Continued Rustification

Canonical is putting more weight behind memory-safe Rust rewrites, recently becoming a Gold Sponsor of the Trifecta Tech Foundation with a €40,000 yearly contribution.

Ubuntu's already swapped coreutils, findutils, diffutils, and sudo for their Rust equivalents, with sudo-rs becoming the default in 25.10. Ntpd-rs is next in line, a Rust rewrite of the tools Ubuntu uses to keep system clocks synced.

The Trifecta funding is going toward catching ntpd-rs up to chrony on features like multi-threaded NTP servers and GPSd support, alongside AppArmor and seccomp hardening.

Although ntpd-rs is arriving in the testing archives for 26.10, it becoming the default is planned for next year, when Ubuntu 27.04 is introduced.

Miscellaneous Additions

And here are a bunch of smaller but important changes that deserve your attention now that you have scrolled so far. ☠️

• Continued push toward WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility compliance.
• New wallpapers, chosen through the usual community wallpaper contest, though Canonical hasn't announced it yet.
• The full desktop experience for RISC-V, targeting RVA23-compliant hardware.
• Better driver management controls, with clearer metadata and maturity indicators for available drivers.
• Microsoft password and MFA authentication support through authd, with approval requests routed through Microsoft Authenticator.
• An experimental amd64v3 (x86-64-v3) package archive for testing performance gains on newer Intel and AMD CPUs.
• A proposed change to strip signed GRUB builds down to bare essentials for Secure Boot, dropping support for filesystems like Btrfs and ZFS in the process.

📥 Download Ubuntu 26.10

While the stable ISOs for this interim Ubuntu release are a few months out, you can take the snapshots for test runs on a virtual machine or a spare machine.

We don't recommend installing such images on computers that are used daily or on production-sensitive deployments because these contain components that might break at any time.

Ubuntu 26.10 (snapshots)

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Ubuntu 26.04 Stopped Notifying Users About Updates, But That Was Intentional

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:

apt list --upgradable

---

Suggested Read 📖: GNOME's Security Might Be in Peril as Lone Tracker Goes Off

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Codeberg Has Drawn a Hard Line on Use of AI With Community Backing

📋

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.

Codeberg's annual member assembly has tackled two important votes this week, and both are about AI.

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.

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Collabora Online Turns 10, Refusing to Hand Over Your Data to Someone Else's AI

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.

Celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Collabora Online, they have now released Collabora Online 26.04, marking a major milestone for the self-hostable offering.

We already saw this

Collabora Online 26.04 Writer, Calc, and Impress.

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.

Collabora Online

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FOSS Weekly #26.30: Vocalinux, My Computer, Alacritty Terminal, TDF Against Microsoft and More Linux Stuff

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.

Jellyfin is having a leadership crisis. I hope it gets sorted soon because Jellyfin is my favorite media server, and I would like to see the project being happily developed.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

Three years ago Linus called AI "90 percent marketing." Last week he told critics inside the kernel project to fork it or walk away. He is not alone. People have accepted AI as a tool in the development kit.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

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.

Lastly, enjoy workspaces in Linux Mint.

⌛ Don't Miss: Last Week for Linux Books

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.

Get the eBooks

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

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

Join It's FOSS Plus

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

GNOME removed "Other Locations" tab from the sidebar in Nautilus so a developer created a "My Computer" style to show all the mounted drives in a beautiful overview.

If you share a lot of screenshots or images and want to stop routing them through Imgur or similar services, Slink is worth a look.

📽️ Videos for You

In the latest video, I show an e-paper clock that I built recently. The special thing is that it tells time in book quotes. The code is here for you to explore.

Subscribe to It's FOSS YouTube Channel

💡 Quick Handy Tip

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.

Local AI Weekly will start from first week of August. If you are interested in learning about open source AI, please subscribe to our upcoming Local AI Weekly newsletter.

Subscribe to Local AI Weekly

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

How adept are you with Git? Our Git Command Knowledge puzzle will test you.

A riced-up Hyprland setup. 🤌

🗓️ 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.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: A slightly different thread than usual, FOSSers are discussing whether the answer to EV charging issues is swappable batteries.

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Plex's Open Source Alternative Jellyfin is Having a Leadership Crisis

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.

---

Suggested Read 📖: You can set up Jellyfin on a Raspberry Pi to host your media library locally.

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Getting Windows-Like "My Computer" Feel on Linux File Manager

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.

0:00

/0:20

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:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannmasoch/nautilus-my-computer
sudo apt update
sudo apt install nautilus-my-computer

Fedora users can install it through the project's COPR repository:

sudo dnf copr enable yannmasoch/nautilus-my-computer
sudo dnf install nautilus-my-computer

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.

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