It’s a Sunday, which means it’s time for me to round-up a rabble of recent Linux releases that did get a mention during the week.
With a lot of people busy getting ready for Christmas (and other festivals that happen this time of year) there aren’t too many major releases to mention from the past week, but there is a modest set of minor updates issued you may want to know about.
This might be the final Linux Release Roundup before Xmas. If, like some sort of weekly Santa, you only pop by to read these posts I’ll use this moment to say thank you, and wish you a merry denomatively-appropriate holiday.
Cozy 0.4.6
Cozy is a GTK+ based audiobook player for Linux desktops. It’s still early days for the app but it’s already impressing me thanks to a fairly active release cadence.
The player continue to pick up new features and improved functionality, as the latest release shows.
Cozy 0.4.6 adds a brilliant new feature: playback speed.
Next time you’re listening to an audiobook in which the reader is ….a…..lit…..tle….on…..the….slo…www…side you can increase playback speed to hear more of what they’re taking an age to say a bit sooner.
Likewise, if you’re listening to an audiobook where the reader talks a little too fast (a bit like I do in our 3 minute YouTube videos) you can decrease playback speed so that sentences arrive at a leisurely pace.
Cozy is available to install as a Flatpak app from Flathub.
sudo apt install flatpak
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak install --from https://flathub.org/repo/appstream/com.github.geigi.cozy.flatpakref
A fan of traditional installation methods? You can download an Ubuntu installer from the Cozy Github page, which we’ve helpfully linked to below.
MuPDF 1.12.0
Reading PDFs on the Ubuntu desktop isn’t the most glamorous of tasks. With PDF readers a little too utilitarian to big up or overhype,
The lightweight PDF viewer MuPDF has published a new release. The app, which can also be used to open ebooks and other files, adds a few new characters to its features list.
MuPDF 1.12 changes include:
- Better color management, including spot color rendering
- New structured text API
- Faster text searching
- Semantic XHTML output format
- Improved support for LARGEFILE and TIFF
- Add PCLm, and PSD output
- New “mutool trace” tool
You can install MuPDF 1.12 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and later by using PandaJim’s PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/apps
sudo apt update && sudo apt install mupdf mupdf-tools
uLauncher 3.3.0 Dev
The Python-based quick launcher ULauncher, which is similar to apps like Synapse, Albert, and Kupfer, has a new development release candidate available for testing.
We spotlighted the app at the start of the year so it seems like a a nice bookend to mention it again towards the end.
ULauncher prides itself on being fast and the latest release candidate is the quickest version yet (in my opinion at least). The latest release candidate adds Wayland support, makes the shortcut icon optional, and fixes a few outstanding issues.
You can download uLauncher 3.3.0 (RC) for Ubuntu from Github:
You can grab the current stable release from the ULauncher website.
Atom 1.23
A modest update to popular Electron-based code editor Atom is available to download.
Atom 1.23 allows packages to register URI handlers, features improved compatibility with external Git tools, and adds some much needed performance fixes and improvements.
Visual Studio Code 1.19
Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code also has a new releases out.
Visual Studio Code 1.19 improves the appearance of tabbed headers; improves Git handling; and lets you easily view terminal output in the VS Code editor.
Visual Studio Code is available to download for Ubuntu from the official website. This will add the VScode repo to your software sources to provide you with future updates.
You can install install Visual Studio Code from Flathub:
flatpak install --from https://flathub.org/repo/appstream/com.visualstudio.code.flatpakref