Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Vivid Vervet Beta 1 was released today. Let's take a look at what's new since alpha 2.

Update September 25, 2017: Oracle JDK 9 is now considered stable. There are currently only 64bit builds available in the PPA (no other builds are available for download).

Because I've received quite a few requests for this, you can now install the latest Oracle Java 9 (early access release) in all supported Ubuntu / Linux Mint versions, by using the WebUpd8 Oracle Java PPA.

YouTube Viewer is an application written in Perl that can be used to search, play and download YouTube videos.

The app ships with two interfaces: GTK2 and comamnd line and it offers a wide range of features, like an advanced search, browsing YouTube categories, view your subscriptions, favorites or recommended videos, view complete video information (including comments, upvotes/downvotes, video category and so on and allows posting comments from the app) and more.

Update: With just 3 days before the Ubuntu 15.04 release, Unity was updated with only one change: the default out of the box menu was set back to global menu.

After getting an option to always show the menus as well as global menu (Appmenu) support for Java Swing applications, yet another menu-related change has landed in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet: locally integrated menu (LIM) is now the default menu.

Whisker Menu 1.5.0 was released yesterday, bringing new options for setting the background opacity and displaying your profile picture, customizable recently used limit and more, as well as quite a few bug fixes.

You may also want to see: Alternative Global Menu For MATE And Xfce: Vala Panel AppMenu [PPA]

Update: for Xubuntu 16.04, see the following article: How To Get A Global Menu In Xubuntu 16.04 Or Lubuntu 16.04 (Using TopMenu)

Remember TopMenu? It's a standalone global menu which until recently only shipped with a MATE panel applet. Well, the TopMenu developer has added a new plugin, which allows using TopMenu under Xfce (Xfce Panel).

[Quick update] The Vivaldi Dev team announced a new Vivaldi snapshot today and with it, they've decided to provide 32bit Linux binaries (deb and rpm) for download.

mps-youtube is a a command line tool to search, play and download YouTube videos, which supports both local and YouTube playlists.

By default, mps-youtube is basically a YouTube audio player, but it can also serve as a YouTube video player (and downloader), by enabling external video playback (officially, it supports mpv and mplayer for video playback) from its options.

ownCloud, a free software alternative to proprietary web services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and others that you can install on your own server, has reached version 8.0.0.

After years of development, the first Ubuntu phone is finally here (Europe only) and while the hardware is average at best, the OS is a breath of fresh air, bringing innovations like scopes and "magic edges", designed not just to be different, but in many ways, better than the current trends.

Six months after the first beta, elementary OS Freya beta 2 was released yesterday. Based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (which is supported until April 2019), Freya beta 2 comes with various UI improvements, UEFI/SecureBoot support along with other interesting changes as well as almost 600 bug fixes.

Canonical announced today that the first Ubuntu phone, made in partnership with BQ, called Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition, will go on sale in Europe starting next week on BQ.com, through a series of "flash sales", and it will cost 169.90 Euros (~ $193 / £127).

Syncthing GTK is a GTK3 & Python GUI for Syncthing, which includes a tray icon / Ubuntu AppIndicator. The app adds extra features on top of Syncthing, like filesystem watching and instant synchronization using inotify, system notifications for file updates and Syncthing errors, an auto-updater for the Syncthing daemon binary, speed throttling options and more.

For those not familiar with TLP, this is an advanced power management tool that applies various settings and tweaks to help your laptop save battery power. The app tries to do everything automatically, depending on your Linux distribution and hardware (it runs in the background and doesn't come with a GUI) however, you can manually change its settings by editing the TLP configuration file: /etc/default/tlp

After almost four years and a half of development, Inkscape 0.91 (an open-source vector graphics editor) was finally released a few days ago. The new version includes over 700 bug fixes, a new Cairo-based renderer, OpenMP multithreading for all filters, major improvements for the Text tool, a new Measurement tool and more.