It's FOSS

Play Local Music With File-Manager Simplicity

Pulkit Chandak — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 15:06:44 +0530

Have you ever wished for a file manager that shows you nothing but audio files that you can play, and then play them within the manager itself? Yeah, I haven't either. But if you had, I might have discovered the application for you. Here comes SonicTree.

SonicTree: The Simple Music Player

SonicTree is an as-simple-as-it-gets kind of music player in the middle of all the fancy, all extensive ones we've recently seen (like the high-fidelity player Astra). It offers you an easy experience: a file-explorer, a list of playable audio files, playback of said audio files, and a simple playing menu at the bottom.

Most music players automatically categorize your music files based on the metadata of the file. This one desn't and that's its unique feature. If you are someone who has meticulously organized music files into folders of your own criteria, you might like SonicTree.

There's nothing much more or much less to it, but let us explore the features in detail.

Interface

SonicTree has a file-explorer on the left that is shown in a (surprise, surprise) tree structure. You can expand directories into subdirectories, and double clicking on any directory lists all the playable audio files on the big canvas on the right.

Besides the file title, there's also the track number, artist name, album name, duration and year of release.

On the bottom of this canvas, there's the playerback interface. It shows the song and artist name, the album cover, a seek for the song as well as the volume, buttons for playing, pausing, next track and previous track, and technical information of the song such as the filetype, bitrate, frequency, stereo settings and whether it is lossless or lossy.

On the top, there are two menus, one that rescans the folders, and one that can be used to change the repeat status to off, single track, or playlist.

The interface, though, looks very dated and clunky by modern application standards in 2026. The design looks like something from the early 2000s era and not in a chic way, and the song listings quite literally overlap on each other (at least on my system). The looks can be worked upon and straightened out a bit to bring it to the present, in my opinion.

Performance

SonicTree boasts low strain on the hardware of the system, and gapless playback, and on that counts it delivers well. It seems to barely have an impact on the system, taking about 50 MB RAM and 02-0.5% CPU usage (numbers may vary depending on your system). The playback is indeed gapless, seamlessly switching between tracks without a delay.

The playback of files is usually alright. I've tried MP3, WAV, M4A and OPUS audios, and they all work flawlessly. But these are all lossy formats. When I tried a lossless FLAC audio, it didn't play at all. That might be a dealbreaker for a lot of people, as mostly the point of an offline music player is to play lossless audio. But I can't really say that they don't deliver because on their website, they don't really list formats that are playable.

Navigation

As for the navigation, the seeks and the buttons on the GUI are the obvious choice, but there's a simple set of keyboard shortcuts as well that do the job. Space to toggle the playing, Enter to select the song from the list to play, Ctrl+Left or Right Arrows to change the track, Ctrl+Up or Down Arrows to increase/decrease volume, Shift+Right/Left to seek through the song, and finally, Esc to exit.

Get SonicTree

SonicTree can be downloaded from its official page on SourceForge.net, and is available only as an AppImage:

Get SonicTree

Wrapping Up

SonicTree doesn't offer much. It looks a little awkward, a little out of time, but it gets the job done. It is essentially for people who like managing their music files in their own way, in their own folder structure. Can't say if I can count it among the list of best music players for Linux.

The shortcomings can't really be pointed out, as they didn't really claim to cover it all in the first place. But since this is still a very early version, perhaps more improvement will be seen in the later ones.

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Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray": All the New Features So Far

Sourav Rudra — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 12:52:21 +0530

Every two years, Canonical puts out a Long Term Support release that gets five years of security updates, which can be stretched further with Ubuntu Pro. In between those LTS releases, Canonical ships an interim version every six months, and each one is supported for nine months.

Those releases don't carry the same importance as an LTS, but that's the point. They give Canonical room to test newer kernels, toolchains, and design changes with a smaller user base before those changes get baked into the next LTS.

The next one, Ubuntu 26.10, carries the codename "Stonking Stingray", continuing the tradition of ordered alphabetical codenames after Resolute Raccoon (26.04).

Stonking is British slang for something impressively big or excellent, and a stingray is the flat-bodied, boneless fish that spends most of its time half-buried in sand near the seafloor (which is quite understandable seeing the state of this world).

If things go as planned, it will land on October 15, 2026, with a short support window that will close in July 2027.

⏱️Ubuntu 26.10 Release Schedule

Below is the release schedule as laid out by Canonical; do keep in mind that some of these dates might change if there are any regressions or other developmental hurdles.

Milestone	Date
Ubuntu Testing Week (optional)	July 2, 2026
Feature Freeze	August 20, 2026
Ubuntu Testing Week (optional)	August 27, 2026
Beta Release	September 24, 2026
Kernel Freeze	October 1, 2026
Release Candidate	October 8, 2026
Final Release	October 15, 2026

Know that this is kind of a live blog where we will be adding new changes and handling any anticipated features as they appear. So, yeah, let's see what's coming with Ubuntu 26.10. 👇

Something for New Installations

The typical installation and onboarding experience of Ubuntu.

Canonical is redesigning how Ubuntu gets installed, with a sharper focus on cutting down the complexity around partitioning and storage configuration. The new design is set to lean on safe defaults, guided workflows, and will be hiding advanced options behind a button (presumably) instead of throwing everything at you at once.

Alongside the installer, a new onboarding flow is in the works too. Instead of asking you to make every decision during setup, Ubuntu will move personalization and configuration into a dedicated first-boot experience after the system is already up and running.

Organizations deploying Ubuntu at scale will still be able to automate and configure these onboarding steps, just like they can with the current installer (pictured above).

Worth noting that both of these are explicitly aimed at Ubuntu 28.04 LTS. The design work is happening during the 26.10 cycle, but don't expect the finished experience to show up fully baked in this release.

Linux Kernel 7.x

The Snapshot 2 build of Ubuntu 26.10 that I tested came with Linux kernel 7.0.0-14, but treat that as a temporary implementation rather than a final answer. Canonical changed its kernel selection policy back in 2024, opting to ship whatever upstream kernel version is the latest available at release freeze, even if it's still in Release Candidate status.

That policy got extended further in 2025 to also track interim kernel versions during the development cycle itself through monthly snapshots, for better test coverage along the way.

That means the kernel version could easily shift between now and October. We have already covered what Linux kernel 7.0 itself brought to the table, so if you want the full rundown, that's a good place to start.

A Major D-Bus Change

Ubuntu is finally swapping out dbus-daemon, the default D-Bus implementation it's used since its very first release back in 2004, in favor of dbus-broker.

If you didn't know, D-Bus is the messaging system your desktop relies on constantly, letting apps, background services, and the system itself pass messages back and forth. Anything from plugging in a USB drive to updating a notification badge runs through it.

Dbus-daemon has held up fine as the reference implementation for over two decades, but it has limits. Under heavy load, messages can vanish unexpectedly, and it queries message targets sequentially instead of all at once, which adds up to latency as the bus gets busier.

Dbus-broker addresses both by design, built around an asynchronous, event-driven architecture from the ground up, and it's already the default on several other distros.

GNOME 51

Ubuntu 26.10 is shipping with GNOME 51, the upcoming stable release from the GNOME project that's scheduled to be out sometime in mid-September. We start with the Shell changes first, which has picked up many fixes that you will actually notice during daily use.

Screenshot selections now stretch cleanly to monitor edges instead of stopping short, the power-off dialog properly shows its "Install Updates" checkbox again, and the overview search box stops resetting its loading spinner every time you type a character.

It also swaps in custom sound effects instead of pulling from the system sound theme, saves and restores your monitor brightness across sessions, and only lights up the audio input icon in the top bar while your mic is actually recording.

The rest of the desktop environment picks up smaller but still visible changes.

The Settings app drops the "Windowing System" (Wayland ftw, I guess?) field from the About page and condenses system details into a single page. Similarly, Software now warns you before installing an app that's already reached end-of-life, and Calendar got its internals rebuilt around GListModel for better performance and has picked up support for opening Teams meeting links directly.

Mutter, GNOME's window manager, is dropping support for legacy NVIDIA drivers.

AI is Coming

If you remember, Canonical shared their plans to handle AI on Ubuntu back in April, when Jon Seager split things into two approaches. Implicit AI improves things you already use without you noticing, and explicit AI is the kind you'd actually summon on purpose.

The short version of it all was that everything would be local-first and built around open-weight models rather than forcing a cloud subscription onto users.

One of the earliest features under this new initiative is Myna, a local speech-to-text tool built around a simple push-to-talk flow. Hold a hotkey, speak, and the transcribed text lands wherever your cursor was sitting.

Recognition happens entirely on your machine through a sandboxed component called the Canonical Inference Snap, with different model sizes to match whatever hardware you're running.

Ubuntu Certified Check

If you ever wondered whether your device was officially supported by Ubuntu, then you will like this one. The Settings menu is getting a simple way to check whether your machine is Ubuntu Certified.

Once live, it will show up inside the About page, where it will pull a certification status for your exact hardware model, checked against Canonical's own database.

Results range from fully certified to certified for a different Ubuntu version, close to a certified model, not certified, or unable to check.

Package-Agnostic Approach

The App Center is getting rebuilt to handle apps consistently no matter which packaging format they come in, with unified search, ratings, categories, and metadata.

Earlier, when Canonical rebuilt Ubuntu's software center into App Center for 23.10, it launched without the ability to install local DEB files at all. Double-clicking one either threw an error or left you staring at a spinner that never resolved.

That got fixed with an update to Ubuntu 24.04's App Center months later.

Continued Rustification

Canonical is putting more weight behind memory-safe Rust rewrites, recently becoming a Gold Sponsor of the Trifecta Tech Foundation with a €40,000 yearly contribution.

Ubuntu's already swapped coreutils, findutils, diffutils, and sudo for their Rust equivalents, with sudo-rs becoming the default in 25.10. Ntpd-rs is next in line, a Rust rewrite of the tools Ubuntu uses to keep system clocks synced.

The Trifecta funding is going toward catching ntpd-rs up to chrony on features like multi-threaded NTP servers and GPSd support, alongside AppArmor and seccomp hardening.

Although ntpd-rs is arriving in the testing archives for 26.10, it becoming the default is planned for next year, when Ubuntu 27.04 is introduced.

Miscellaneous Additions

And here are a bunch of smaller but important changes that deserve your attention now that you have scrolled so far. ☠️

Continued push toward WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility compliance.
New wallpapers, chosen through the usual community wallpaper contest, though Canonical hasn't announced it yet.
The full desktop experience for RISC-V, targeting RVA23-compliant hardware.
Better driver management controls, with clearer metadata and maturity indicators for available drivers.
Microsoft password and MFA authentication support through authd, with approval requests routed through Microsoft Authenticator.
An experimental amd64v3 (x86-64-v3) package archive for testing performance gains on newer Intel and AMD CPUs.
A proposed change to strip signed GRUB builds down to bare essentials for Secure Boot, dropping support for filesystems like Btrfs and ZFS in the process.

📥 Download Ubuntu 26.10

While the stable ISOs for this interim Ubuntu release are a few months out, you can take the snapshots for test runs on a virtual machine or a spare machine.

We don't recommend installing such images on computers that are used daily or on production-sensitive deployments because these contain components that might break at any time.

Ubuntu 26.10 (snapshots)

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Ubuntu 26.04 Stopped Notifying Users About Updates, But That Was Intentional

Sourav Rudra — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 23:11:58 +0530

If update notifications have stopped showing up on your Ubuntu 26.04 LTS install, that isn't some random glitch. OMG Ubuntu's Joey Sneddon has traced it back to a Launchpad bug report and a Discourse thread that both point to the same root cause.

The issue is that update-notifier only sends a desktop notification when its tray icon is visible, and that icon was switched off in Ubuntu 26.04, with nothing in the Settings menu to switch it back on.

Guillaume Michaud, who filed the bug on July 5, found 10 pending non-security updates sitting on his machine without a single prompt to install them. He tested it manually. With the tray icon forced on, update-notifier fired a notification, and with it switched off, nothing happened at all.

Canonical's Marco Trevisan had flagged a related problem himself back in April, when the update indicator wasn't obeying its own settings and couldn't be switched on even manually.

That got fixed within a day, but the icon stayed off by default. Commenting on the bug again in June, Marco called the setup a design choice and said anyone who wants the icon back can enable it through gsettings.

However, this sounds worse than it actually is. 😅

Ubuntu still runs unattended-upgrades in the background by default, so security patches keep installing themselves whether a notification ever appears. The actual gap was in non-security updates, the kind you'd normally want to review yourself, going completely unflagged.

The fix

Alessandro Astone has already shipped update-notifier 3.207.2 as a security update cleared for Ubuntu 26.04.1. It removes the tray icon dependency entirely. Now, an App Center install, an unattended-upgrades run, or a manual check all trigger the same notification.

And because it went out as a security update, the fix reaches most systems automatically thanks to unattended-upgrades.

If you'd rather have the tray icon back, open a terminal and run:

gsettings set com.ubuntu.update-notifier show-updates-status-icon true

Or just check your update status directly through App Center's "Manage" tab, the Software Updater, or simply run:

apt list --upgradable

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