After being in beta for almost a year, Lightworks, a professional video editing and mastering software, has reached version 11.5 stable, this being the first Lightworks release for Linux. The new version is of course also available for Windows.

According to Wikipedia, "Lightworks was an early developer of computer-based non-linear editing systems, and has been in development since 1989". The application was used in some renowned Oscar and Emmy Award award-winning films, including The King's Speech, Martin Scorsese's Hugo and The Departed, Mission Impossible, Pulp Fiction, Braveheart and Batman.

For those not familiar with Genymotion, this is a fast, cross-platform Android emulator that comes with pre-configured Android (x86 with OpenGL hardware acceleration) images which support multi-touch gestures, Ethernet, emulation widgets for GPS, battery, camera and more.

The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 4.2 today, which "features a large number of performance and interoperability improvements targeted to users of all kinds, but particularly appealing for power and enterprise users".

Below you can see a Firefox notification in action using GNotifier, under Unity and GNOME Shell:

The new Unity window decorations will support full GTK3 theming, they will introduce improved resizing speed and, something many of you have requested, anti-aliased corners.

Further more, the default behavior in Ubuntu was set to type ahead find, instead of the recursive search that was used in the previous Ubuntu versions (and which is default in upstream Nautilus).

Pidgin uses the Ubuntu Messaging Menu but many people prefer its old tray icon, which you could whitelist to use the systray. 

That's no longer possible out of the box with Ubuntu 13.04 and 13.10 because the Unity systray whitelist was removed (there is a PPA that restores the systray whitelist though) but luckily, Philip Langdale has created a plugin for Pidgin that provides an Ubuntu AppIndicator.

This package no longer works and it shouldn't be used. Install the adobe-flashplugin package from the Ubuntu Partner repository (to enable it, open Software & Updates, on the Other Software tab) instead.


A Pepper Flash Player installer for Chromium browser has been added to the official Ubuntu 14.04 repositories.

Great news for Ubuntu GNOME / GNOME Shell fans: GNOME Shell 3.10 has landed in the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr repositories. Currently, the package is available in the Proposed repositories.

Some Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian and Arch Linux (and probably other Linux distributions) users are experiencing problems with Dropbox. It seems that some recent Python update breaks Dropbox (it doesn't affect new installations though), resulting in the following error:

Improper screen brightness can cause your eyes to tire faster and a bright screen at night can make it difficult to fall asleep. WildGuppy tries to overcome this by adjusting your laptop's brightness automatically based on the ambient light, using the laptop camera as a light sensor.

Update: Prime Indicator was abandoned, but it was later forked, and it now includes quite a few new features. The Ubuntu PPA installation instructions in this article now install the fork (called Prime Indicator Plus). For more about Prime Indicator Plus, see this article:

Quick tip: If you use Chrome or Chromium browsers and hardware acceleration is disabled for your graphics card, you can try to force it to get better video playback performance (for instance on YouTube) as well as support for features such as the 3D Earth view in the new Google Maps.

The application supports almost all Android applications and you'll get notifications when you get a call, a SMS or WhatsApp message, Facebook notifications and so on. From the LinConnect settings you can select which applications can send notifications to your desktop so you don't get flooded with useless notifications.

Laptop Mode Tools is a package that allows you to extend the battery life of your laptop by enabling the Laptop Mode Linux kernel feature along with other power-related tweaks.

This was a command line only tool until version 1.64, which introduces a GUI that lets you toggle individual power saving modules. The new GUI configuration tool isn't exactly pretty as you can see in the screenshot below, but it's definitely an useful addition because it no longer requires users to work with various configuration files.