// OMG! UBUNTU! — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Linux App Release Roundup (July 2026)
Check in for a roundup of the hottest Linux app release that landed in July 2026 (and not just hot because of the temperatures last month).
Major updates last month included the Firefox 153 release, with container tabs confusing those who’ve had them for ages. It also finally rounded window bottom corners on GTK-based Linux desktops, Ubuntu included.
But the slick system monitor Mission Center also dropped a big update. I recommend checking that out, especially if you’ve longed for a way to swot over power stats. Anthropic delivered a Linux beta of its Claude Desktop app, easily installed on Ubuntu via a .deb.
But, as ever, there was plenty more scintillating the software scene than just the obvious ones. Read on for a run through other notable updates I made a note to er, make a note about here, in my monthly Linux App Release Roundup series.
Rio, the cross-platform GPU-accelerated terminal (that isn’t one of the other cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminals), saw a flurry of activity last month.
Across the many updates, it gained a drop-down ‘quake’ mode option. This allows you to assign a keyboard hotkey to have a terminal slide in from the top of the display under your cursor. Neatly, the shortcut can work globally, even when Rio is unfocused.
Rio developer Raphael Amorim also split out the terminal engine from its renderer, publishing it as rio-vt, a standalone Rust crate, and librio, the same core wrapped in a C interface. Other devs can build their own terminal frontends on Rio’s tech, without using Rio itself.
Performance improved too, and substantially, per Amorim. Full-screen TUI redraws are up to 1.6x faster and scroll-heavy plaintext (e.g., an avalanche of apt print) now parses up to 2.7x faster.
Other changes in Rio 0.5.x include the return of Sixel and iTerm2 inline images, fixes for the Kitty graphics protocol and, on Linux, Rio now follows system light/dark preference in both Wayland and X11 sessions by reading the standard XDG Desktop Portal.
Rio is free, open-source software written in Rust. Download the latest version from its website, or grab a .deb from its GitHub releases page.