Guake 3.10 has been released with the ability to choose which search engine to use with its “Search on Web” feature, a new pin button to temporarily prevent hiding, and more. Guake is a drop-down terminal for the GNOME desktop which includes split terminal functionality, session save/restore, support for transparency, and many other features. While it doesn't support Wayland, it does run using Xwayland, but you'll need to manually set the hotkey to show/hide Guake. The application is inspired by the famous Quake console—the terminal stays hidden until you press a key (default is F12). Execut ..read more

NormCap is a free and open source screen capture tool for text. Instead of capturing an image of the screen, this application captures the text displayed on the screen using OCR, and copies it to the clipboard. It's available for Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux. Use this to extract text from screenshots or pictures, and copy unselectable text from anywhere on the screen (a webpage that doesn't allow selecting text, an application user interface, etc.). The tool supports numerous languages, works offline, and it supports multiple monitors. Only English is installed by default, so when you wa ..read more

After upgrading from Ubuntu 22.10 to 23.04, pipx broke on my laptop and fixing it was not exactly straight-forward, so I thought I'd write here about this, in case there are others running into this issue. While I ran into this issue on Ubuntu, this isn't Ubuntu-specific, and it can happen on other Linux distributions as well. pipx is a tool that makes it easy to install (using PyPI as the package index) isolated Python applications. pip is a Python package installer for both libraries and apps, while pipx is made specifically for applications, creating an isolated environment for each app a ..read more

GPU Screen Recorder has been updated recently with AMD/Intel GPU support; previously it only worked on systems using an Nvidia graphics card. GPU Screen Recorder is a screen recorder for Linux similar to ShadowPlay for Microsoft Windows, that makes use of the GPU to record the screen, having a minimal impact on the system performance (very low CPU usage). According to its developer, "this is the fastest screen recording tool for Linux". It currently only supports X11 sessions (Wayland and Xwayland are not supported). The software is available as a command line tool, but there's also a g ..read more

Hanabi is a GNOME Shell extension that allows using a live wallpaper (video) on the GNOME desktop. According to the developer, the extension “is not even close to alpha quality”, but it's already usable, albeit you'll need to install it manually since it's not available on the GNOME Shell extensions website. This live wallpaper GNOME extension currently supports playing a local video as your desktop background, with or without audio, and the ability to set the audio volume. From the extension top bar menu, you can pause the video and mute/unmute the audio. To get the video playback to use le ..read more

Birdtray is a system tray icon for Thunderbird, which shows the unread email count, with some extra features.  The application has stopped working a while back—it no longer shows the unread email count with newer Thunderbird versions (both the latest Thunderbird 102.* stable and the latest beta—112 at the time I'm writing this article), and it doesn't work properly on Wayland either. I have updated the Linux Uprising Apps PPA for Ubuntu and derivatives (and Linux distributions based on it, like Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, etc.) with fixes/workarounds for these issues, and I'll also explain wha ..read more

vtm is a text-based desktop environment that runs inside a terminal, available for Linux, Microsoft Windows, macOS, and *BSD. The tool can run TUIs (terminal user interface) applications in floating windows that can be moved, resized and closed (mouse support included) just like windows in a traditional desktop environment.  vtm is a terminal multiplexer too, like tmux and screen, allowing users to detach and reattach sessions from a terminal, allow multiple computers to connect to the same session at once, etc. Just click the Disconnect button, and the vtm TUI is closed, but the proces ..read more

The next Debian/Ubuntu releases will likely no longer allow pip install outside a virtual environment or separate Python installs because of conflicts between pip and the OS package manager. It can still be forced, but that's strongly not recommended. Software shipped with a Linux distribution can be (quite easily, I might add) broken by installing packages using pip. All the user has to do is install a package (or some of its dependencies) that's newer and backwards-incompatible with a version that was installed from the Linux distribution official repositories. And this isn't even about b ..read more

penguins-eggs is a command line tool to turn your current Debian, Ubuntu, Arch Linux or Manjaro system to a redistributable live ISO image. Debian / Ubuntu flavors are also supported (so you can also use this for Xubuntu, Kubuntu, etc.), as well as Linux distributions based on these, like Devuan, Linux Mint and elementary OS. Using this, you can create an installable live ISO with your Debian / Devuan / Ubuntu-based, Arch Linux or Manjaro system, and include all installed applications as well as your home folder (personal files, configurations, etc.). If you're not creating the ISO for yo ..read more

scrcpy, a tool to display control Android devices from the desktop, has been updated to version 2.0, receiving a major new feature: audio forwarding. But that's not all – this release also adds H265 and AV1 video codec support, along with other changes. [[ This is a content summary only. Please visit Linux Uprising for the full article ]] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Originally posted on Linux Uprising Blog ..read more