Ubuntu beta looking good, F-Droid & Firefox Redesign, Flatpak for dev and CLI tools

So let's begin with the Ubuntu 26.10 beta, and it looks like a nice upgrade for Ubuntu users, more stuff than I was expecting.

So of course you get GNOME 51 in there, I'm not going to go through all the features of GNOME 51.

Again, you have the reduced motion toggle, you've got better fingerprint support, you've got many more login methods supported in GDM, you've got some accessibility fixes, a lot of improvements to default apps.

We covered that previously, there's a video on the channel if you want to know more.

On top of that, Ubuntu makes specific changes to its Tiling Assistant extension, where you now get a Windows-like layout picker, meaning when you drag a window around, you will see a little box at the top of the screen that lets you pick a tiling layout.

nice addition.

This is actually one of the cool features of Windows 11 and it's nice to see it implemented here in Ubuntu.

The desktop icons that Ubuntu ships were also ported to GTK4 which means everything will look more in line with the rest of the system.

You also get more keyboard shortcuts in there which is nice.

The Ubuntu App Center now can also handle drivers as they were previously in the software and updates tool.

which Ubuntu removed before replacing all its features, so now the features are trickling back into the software center.

You will only see those drivers if you have potential proprietary drivers to install, so probably just NVIDIA GPUs.

Now, you know when I said we weren't going to talk about AI? Well, I lied because Ubuntu's AI efforts are not in 26.10 beta.

They had their Mina dictation tool, which was supposed to let you talk into any text field, which is not a bad feature, but it apparently did not make the cut for the beta, and so probably won't be in the stable version either.

They also moved to the kernel 7.3, which has a lot of good performance improvements.

You've got the Mesa drivers 26.2, and also you've got Ubuntu's better handling of out-of-memory behavior, which should terminate programs before terminating the entire session when you're running out of RAM.

On top of that, all the core utilities are now their Rust-based versions, the little holdouts that they had are now replaced, they moved to DbusBroker instead of DbusDemon, which shouldn't change much for most users, and they also made the hardware reporting tool HWCTL, or hardware control, into a Snap, for whatever reason.

It does look like an interesting release for Ubuntu users.

It does bring a lot of stuff.

The little tiling extension is pretty cool.

The out-of-memory behavior is pretty cool too.

And GNOME 51 is a great update as well.

So I think for Ubuntu users that don't stick to LTSs, this might be a good one.

Of course, you'll get a dedicated video when it releases.

I think it's on the 15th of this month.