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Yesterday at LGM2026, GIMP’s maintainer Jehan Pagès gave a talk about GIMP as a community project and made several interesting announcements.

This post is going to be quite a bit critical, so before I proceed, here is the obligatory disclaimer: I used to be a GIMP contributor, significantly decreased my participation in late 2021, and officially bowed out in late 2022.

I’m omitting a lot of things I found less interesting to discuss. You can watch the whole thing here and make your own judgments.

Past organization attempts

During the talk, Jehan mentioned that the project first considered creating some form of a non-profit in 1999 but never acted on that idea. Then Jehan himself nearly created a non-profit for GIMP in 2023, but instead went on to sign a fiscal sponsorship agreement with GNOME Foundation in June 2024.

Actually, scratch that. He did not exactly mention those last two bits of info: they were listed on the slide but weren’t discussed at all.

There’s no explanation why Jehan decided against creating the non-profit. Neither is there an explanation what the fiscal sponsorship agreement means.

I do know one thing the agreement involved — transferring all BTC to GNOME Foundation for GNOME Foundation to immediately sell it and put the fiat money on GIMP’s account (they’ve been managing GIMP’s money since dawn of times). But I know it from tracking the transactions and reading one contributor’s comments on Reddit, not from any sort of official announcement, because the only official announcement was very inspecific and hidden in release notes of v3.0RC1.

By my rough calculations from a year ago, there should be around 2 mil USD on that account after selling all BTC. So what have they been doing with that since early last year?

Committee

First off, in 2024, the team created a formal committee. It’s currently comprised of 9 people:

Let’s break it down.

• Akkana Peck created some really useful plugins for GIMP back in the day and wrote several extremely good books for beginner GIMP users.
• Aryeom Han is a digital artist and animator, she’s 1/2 of Zemarmot animation project that relies on GIMP for production.
• Jehan Pagès has been the most active developer in the past decade or so and the current GIMP maintainer since 2021.
• Liam Quin has been a great help in supporting users for over two decades now and, since my departure, managing the social media presence (at least partially).
• Michael Natterer is former project maintainer and former lead developer. His involvement severely decreased in the past years after he had to take over family business.
• Michael Schumacher is the guy who has been managing funds on GIMP’s end for a very long time and sorting out various organizational things like LGM participation.
• Pat David was an active GIMP educator in 2010s, created the current GIMP’s website, and has been maintaining it ever since. He’s been keeping a relatively low profile in the project, you probably know him more as the creator of Pixls.us.
• Simon Budig used to be one of the most active contributors in the past (see this interview from November 2025). He’s been mostly patching things here and there every once in a while for the past 10-15 years and mainly doing user support.
• Ville Pätsi is another former active developer. To the best of my knowledge, he’s still around but mostly in the user support role.

So that should give you some idea who the committee members are. Personally, I think the committee’s composition is alright. But what do they do?

Jehan specifically said:

The GIMP committee is only for the funds. It was very important to me that it’s not about leading the software, it’s about managing the funds to support the software. We don’t decide what features go in, it’s not our role and it should not be.

I’ve seen projects like FreeCAD adopt this kind of role separation and still get a lot of heat from a vocal minority, so I can perfectly understand this sentiment. (Full disclosure: in case of FreeCAD, I’m very much biased.) So yes, this planned detachment from making software decisions makes sense to me personally and, hopefully, to you too.

The committee actually has a dedicated project on GNOME’s Gitlab server where they explain a few things. They even use the issue tracker for decision-making in the open.

The caveat is that while the committee has been around since approx. June 2024, it was never properly introduced. It got two minor mentions on the main website in release notes (v3.0RC2 and v3.2.2), and two mentions on developer portal (1, 2). Imagine a committee managing approx. $2,000,0000 of a FOSS project’s money and being nothing but a footnote on that very project’s website.

So, about the things they do…

Grants

One of the committee’s decisions was to try issuing grants. So far, there have been two test grants issued to Jehan himself and to Øyvind Kolås, the lead GEGL developer of 20+ years.

Jehan did not specify what the grants were issued for, how much any of them was, whether there was any formal proposal or agreement or any grant review and approval process whatsoever.

Incidentally, there is a description of the grant awarding procedure. I found it after asking someone who knew where to look. You now know about it too, likely after reading it here in an arcane blog post at the edge of interwebz.

Jehan also mentioned that they are waiting for something to be unblocked from the administrative side to continue with the second round of grants. The slide specifically says “Currently waiting to be allowed to continue”.

Taken literally, this could mean that the committee doesn’t have full control over the funds and depends on the GNOME Foundation to take action.

Again, there is no public information about the relationship between GIMP and GNOME Foundation. We are on the speculation territory here.

No-AI policy

Jehan mentioned that the team has adopted a strict No-AI policy. This is a principle thing, and as you probably know from this study, FOSS projects are all over the spectrum on the use of AI.

To the best of my knowledge, the formal part of this policy is only mentioned in a Gitlab template updated in March 2025 and on the Internship programs page at the developers portal.

The GSoC thing

During the talk, Jehan mentioned that the project’s participation has been very successful, and 9 out of 10 students from 2022-2025 program installments sticked with the project. He went on to attribute this success to the team looking at people more than at proposals.

This is a mostly sensible approach, except his data is all wrong. Let me explain.

The project indeed had 10 slots from GSoC between 2022 and 2025. However they were filled by 8 different people: both CmykStudent and Idriss Fekir participated twice.

Here is a quick breakdown.

• CmykStudent successfully completed both 2022 and 2023 projects and went on to become GSoC mentor in the organization in 2024 and is still a very active contributor. Most recently, he’s been working on the CMYK color mode and a shape drawing tool.

• Idriss Fekir did two good GSoC projects dedicated to the text tool, his involvement extended somewhat after the 2024 project, but he hasn’t been active since October 2025. He had 8 commits to the project over the last 12 months.

• Shubham did one decent project in 2023, layer autoexpansion support, and stopped at that.

• Cheesequake worked on modernizing the GtkTreeView widget and continued contributing past his GSoC project until about 7 months ago.

• Varun Samaga B L made 15 commits to GEGL as part of his GSoC project in 2024 and dropped out.

• Shivam Shekhar Soy completed his part of working on the new extensions website last year and left the project after the program’s end.

• Gabriele Barbero worked on the text tool and continues contributing. His latest merged commit from March this year fixed the text tool’s overlay positioning when the view is rotated.

• Ondřej Míchal implemented GEGL filter explorer and keeps contributing. His most recent patches touch widgets, flatpak builds, and controllers UI in Preferences.

To sum it up, the statement that 9 out of 10 people sticked with the project is incorrect. There were 8 GSoC students between 2022 and 2025. 5 people continued contributing past their respective GSoC projects, 3 of them are currently active.

That is still a really good result, plus, as far as I can tell, all 10 GSoC projects in the past years have been successful. I have no idea why this exaggeration was needed when they had a perfectly solid case already.

Summing it up

So what have we learned from this LGM talk and this quick research?

• The project has had a committee since at least the first half of 2024. It only makes decisions on spending the available funds.
• GIMP has been in a fiscal sponsorship agreement with GNOME Foundation at least since June 2024, with undisclosed terms.
• The team has been trying to start actually spending money on development, but all we know about it is that two active developers got the grants.
• The second round of grants is blocked on the administrative side, whoever they are, for whatever reason.
• There is no formal explanation what the grant program covers, who is eligible, what the program’s budget is, etc. But there is a short formal description of the process, and you can apply for a grant when the grant program resumes.
• The project has had a strict No-AI policy since at least March 2025.
• You have to pay attention to GIMP’s announcements of bugfix releases and release candidates. This is where they hide important news announcements about changes in the project management.

In conclusion

I hope that while I’m very salty about this talk, you will appreciate that I’m also doing my best to stay objective.

Despite the unfortunate GSoC blunder during the talk and the continuous lack of transparency, the team is finally making the right organizational changes, if at a glacial pace. Let’s hope to see more in the coming months/years.

The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce Ubuntu Studio 26.04 LTS, code-named “Resolute Raccoon.” This marks Ubuntu Studio’s 38th release.

This Long-Term Support (LTS) release is supported for 3 years, through April 2029.
An Ubuntu Studio LTS arrives once every two years. This is more than a routine update: it is a long-horizon milestone for creators, educators, studios, and production systems that prioritize dependability.

This release reflects months of development, packaging, design, testing, and community feedback, all focused on making Ubuntu Studio production-ready from first boot.
Whether you record music, edit video, design graphics, or publish layouts, the goal is simple: stay out of your way and let your creativity lead. That shows up in practical improvements across this release, from desktop layout choice and modernized setup tools to updated defaults and day-to-day polish.

For full technical details, known issues, and upgrade instructions, please see the Ubuntu Studio 26.04 LTS Release Notes.

You can download Ubuntu Studio 26.04 LTS from the download page.

Why This LTS Is Special

• You can trace a clear through-line across recent LTS cycles: 20.04 LTS was the last Xfce-based LTS and set up the desktop transition, 22.04 LTS stabilized the Plasma era, and 24.04 LTS introduced the new Subiquity/Flutter installer generation and PipeWire 1.0 maturity.
• Ubuntu Studio 26.04 LTS builds on that foundation with practical workflow improvements instead of a single marquee feature: three selectable desktop layouts, fully rewritten Installer and Audio Configuration tools (Python with GTK4 and Qt6 frontends), and broader translation coverage.
• It also brings forward ideas that were future-looking in earlier cycles, especially minimal-install flexibility and easier post-install workflow selection, while adding production-focused updates like FFADO support, easier PipeWire tuning, and new default additions such as Loopino and Plasma PipeWire Settings.
• As with prior Ubuntu Studio LTS releases, this cycle carries a three-year support window, through April 2029.

Major Highlights

Three desktop layouts, one familiar home

This release includes three selectable desktop layouts:

• The classic Ubuntu Studio top-panel layout
• A macOS-like layout with global menu and dock
• A Windows-like bottom-panel layout

Creators coming from different platforms get a familiar starting point and a faster path to feeling at home.

The default layout for new installs was selected by community vote. For background on the design direction, see Coming to 26.04 LTS: Three Layouts.

Installer and configuration tools modernized

Ubuntu Studio Installer and Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration were completely rewritten, with modern interfaces and desktop-aware behavior.

This is more than a visual refresh. Both tools were rebuilt from the ground up in Python with dual GTK4 and Qt6 frontends, and automatically select the interface that best matches your desktop environment.

Internationalization also took a major leap forward: both tools now include translations across 21 languages, helping more creators configure their systems comfortably in their preferred language.

Audio production gets more powerful

Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration now includes built-in support for FFADO FireWire devices and simpler PipeWire tuning through menus instead of manual entry.

For musicians and engineers using professional FireWire interfaces, FFADO support improves compatibility with legacy-but-still-essential studio hardware without extra manual setup.

PipeWire sample-rate and buffer controls are now easier to access and adjust quickly, making low-latency tuning far more approachable for both new and experienced users.

Better defaults for creators

VLC is now the default media player, offering broad format compatibility and a familiar, dependable playback experience for day-to-day media review.

vmpk now replaces jack-keyboard, giving MIDI-focused users a more modern and flexible virtual keyboard workflow.

More quality-of-life improvements across the release

Beyond the headline features, this release includes several practical improvements that make daily use smoother:

• Live sessions now inhibit lock screen/screensaver to prevent interruptions during testing or demos
• SDDM and splash visuals were refined for a cleaner login and boot experience
• Desktop menus include translation coverage improvements
• Theme metadata updates improve Plasma 6 compatibility and consistency
• Key workflow tools were substantially updated, including QPrompt, RaySession, and Patchance

New in 26.04 LTS

• Three selectable desktop layouts with community-voted default

• Rewritten Installer and Audio Configuration tools with expanded language support.

• Improved audio workflow controls, including FFADO support and easier PipeWire tuning

• New packages:

  • Loopino — A lightweight creative audio sampler with drag-and-drop sample loading, on-the-fly recording, a full ADSR envelope, filters, and effects. Available as a standalone application, CLAP plugin, and VST2 plugin, making it a flexible addition to any audio production workflow.

  • DistroAV — Formerly known as obs-ndi, DistroAV brings NDI (Network Audio/Video) support to OBS Studio, enabling high-quality, low-latency multi-track audio and video streaming over a local network. A natural fit for live streaming and networked A/V production setups. Not installed by default; install it by running sudo apt install distroav in a terminal.

  • snd-hdspe — An updated ALSA kernel driver for RME HDSPe PCIe sound cards (MADI, AES, RayDAT, AIO, and AIO Pro). This maintained fork of the original driver brings compatibility with newer kernels and expands hardware control through standard ALSA interfaces, giving professional RME users a reliable path forward. Not installed by default; if you have supported RME hardware, install it by running sudo apt install snd-hdspe in a terminal.

  • Plasma PipeWire Settings — A KDE Plasma 6 panel widget for adjusting PipeWire quantum and sample rate on the fly, without touching configuration files. It is included by default and shown in the system tray by default, pairing with Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration so the most common adjustments are always within reach.

  • Plasma Window Title Applet — A Plasma 6 panel applet that displays the active window title. Used in the macOS-like desktop layout to complete the global-menu experience.

• Notable package changes:

  • Skanpage replaces Skanlite for scanning, offering multi-page document scanning and straightforward saving to common formats.

  • rubberband-lv2 replaces rubberband-ladspa, providing high-quality time-stretching and pitch-shifting as an LV2 plugin aligned with the broader move away from LADSPA.

  • Minimal installation workflow with modular post-install creative tool selection

• Quality-of-life polish across live session behavior, translations, and desktop consistency

Minimal Install: Your Studio, Your Way

One topic we often see in community discussions is package “bloat”: some users want everything preinstalled, while others prefer to start lean and add tools only as needed.

Both approaches are fully supported.

If you want a lightweight starting point, choose the minimal install option during installation. This option has been available since 24.10. You will get the Ubuntu Studio desktop experience, theming, and core configuration, then add only the workflows you want using Ubuntu Studio Installer (audio, video, graphics, photography, and publishing).

If you want a complete creative workstation out of the box, the full install remains available.

You can also start from any official Ubuntu flavor and add Ubuntu Studio workflows without reinstalling.

Special Notes

The Ubuntu Studio 26.04 LTS disk image (ISO) exceeds 4 GB and cannot be reliably written to some file systems such as FAT32, and may not be readable when burned to a standard DVD.

We recommend using a compatible file system for downloads and creating a bootable USB stick.

Minimum installation media requirements:

• Dual-Layer DVD or 8 GB USB drive

Release images are available here.

Featured Creative Apps

Ubuntu Studio 26.04 LTS ships with a strong cross-discipline toolkit for creators working in audio, video, graphics, and publishing.

Highlights include:

• Blender 5.0.1
• Kdenlive 25.12.3
• Krita 6.0.1
• GIMP 3.2.2
• Ardour 9.0.0
• OBS Studio 32.1.0

For the complete software version list and source package references, see the release notes.

Whether your work is audio engineering, filmmaking, digital painting, motion graphics, podcasting, or publishing, the full Ubuntu Studio stack is ready to support it.

Upgrade Notes

Upgrades from Ubuntu Studio 25.10 are expected to be enabled shortly after release. Upgrades from Ubuntu Studio 24.04 LTS are expected to be enabled with the release of 26.04.1 LTS in August 2026.

Detailed upgrade instructions are available in the release notes.

Known Issues

Ubuntu Studio shares KDE Plasma and core Ubuntu components with other Ubuntu flavors. Some known issues overlap with Kubuntu and Ubuntu:

• Kubuntu release notes
• Ubuntu release notes

Additionally, on first login for a newly created user, a reboot prompt for applying audio-production group configuration is expected behavior (tracked at Launchpad bug #2063899).

Thank You

Ubuntu Studio is built by a volunteer community of developers, testers, artists, translators, documenters, and users. Thank you to everyone who tested pre-releases, reported bugs, submitted improvements, and helped shape this LTS.

In Memory of Steve Langasek

We want to give special recognition to Steve Langasek, who passed away in January 2025.

Known to many as vorlon, Steve’s impact on Ubuntu, Debian, Ubuntu Studio, and the wider Linux community is difficult to overstate. His work, guidance, and support helped countless contributors and projects over many years.

In Ubuntu community tributes, he has been remembered as “a great mind, mentor and conscience.” If you have not read it yet, Remembering and thanking Steve Langasek is a powerful reflection on his legacy.

For this cycle in particular, Steve was responsible for the codename “Resolute Raccoon,” as noted during the community codename activity at Guess the release 26.04 – R. We are honored to carry that name in this release and dedicate this moment of thanks to his memory.

Contributors

Special thanks this cycle go to many familiar contributors from prior releases, including:

• Eylul Dogruel: artwork and visual design
• Ross Gammon: upstream Debian development and testing
• Sebastien Ramacher: upstream Debian development
• Dennis Braun: upstream Debian development
• Rik Mills: Plasma and Kubuntu collaboration
• Scarlett Moore: Plasma and Kubuntu collaboration
• Aaron Rainbolt: Plasma and Kubuntu collaboration
• Michael Mikowski: Plasma and Kubuntu collaboration
• Len Ovens: testing and workflow insight, support and help
• Mauro Gaspari: tutorials, promotion, and documentation
• Utkarsh Gupta: Ubuntu Release Team support and collaboration
• Florent “Skia” Jacquet: Ubuntu Release Team support and collaboration
• Michael Hudson-Doyle: Ubuntu Release Team support and collaboration
• Erich Eickmeyer: project leadership, packaging, and direction

And to everyone in the Ubuntu Studio community: thank you for your trust, your feedback, your patience, and your passion.

Support Ubuntu Studio

Ubuntu Studio is built by volunteers, but volunteer work still comes with real costs.

As outlined in Ubuntu Studio Needs Donations, the project is now covering additional monthly expenses due to a web hosting provider change. This release cycle also included a large amount of development work, including fixing long-standing bugs and rewriting both Ubuntu Studio Installer and Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration from the ground up.

If Ubuntu Studio helps your creative work, your teaching, your studio, or your community, please consider supporting the project financially. Donations help keep the infrastructure running and make it easier to keep improving the tools, packaging, and user experience that go into each release.

You can support Ubuntu Studio here:

https://ubuntustudio.org/contribute/

Get Involved

Ubuntu Studio is a community project driven by volunteers. If you would like to contribute your time through packaging, documentation, testing, user support, or promotion, we would love your help:

https://ubuntustudio.org/contribute/

Notstandskomitee made a remix for Aalborgs electronic act AU2PILOT, released on the album Fatamorgana - Remixed on the label NOIZ, available as download or CD-R.
https://autofilter.bandcamp.com/album/au2pilot-fatamorgana-remixed

qpwgraph v1.0.1 - A Spring'26 Release rncbc Tue, 21 Apr 2026 - 17:00

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What if an integrated plug-in instrument could rival even full-blown modulars? That’s the question posed by u-he’s Zebra 3, out now at long last for macOS, Windows, and Linux. It’s unlikely any other soft synth takes on just this much synthesis territory, or with this much depth. From spline-based morphing oscillators to physical modeling and […]

The post Zebra 3 is here, a sprawling semi-modular plug-in that runs deep appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

I didn’t have time yet to blog about liquidsfz-0.4.1, which was released two weeks ago, so here is a quick overview of the bigger changes.

The .sfz parser was made more robust, which means that broken .sfz files (there are some files out there which load fine in sforzando but have questionable syntax) can be loaded with a best-effort strategy. These files now produce warnings instead of an error.

Three different problems were fixed that could in some situations cause audible clicks, so updating from a previous version is recommended. A few smaller fixes (and two new opcodes) improve compatibility with more .sfz files. Finally, some improvements were made to the LV2 plugin.

• liquidsfz-0.4.1 source code
• precompiled statically linked linux 64bit binary
• full list of changes (github release)

Skip the laptops and loads of proprietary hardware with an ultra-simple, portable, affordable add-on that turns any turntable into a digital vinyl turntable. That's the pitch from NAP Works for crowdfunded, compact hardware built on open-source tech. It might do more than just impress digital vinyl DJs: this has the potential to win over even the CDJ crowd.

The post Devious Pocket: standalone, simple digital vinyl from any turntable appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

Rolando Trevino recently started working on Open Apollo, Linux drivers for Universal Audio’s Thunderbolt and USB audio interfaces. Initial support is now done and available for testing.

Apollo x4 and Apollo Solo USB are currently marked as verified to work, but Morten Mosgaard tested his Apollo Twin X and Apollo 8P, and both of them work as well. That makes the “Thunderbolt 2 Devices (Not Supported)” status in README at least partially obsolete.

Here is what you should expect to work at the moment:

• Capture and playback, also on PipeWire
• All sample rates supported
• Preamp and monitor control

DSP initialization, loading, and mixing works, but there is not much of control yet. There are also some known issues with Ardour and Audacity that are being taken care of where possible.

Overall, the project is not complete but is already at the stage where user feedback will help the development a lot.

If you own a UAD Apollo device and would love to use on Linux, go try it when you can. If you maintain packages for Linux distros, you also know what to do :)

If you’d love to help with programming, the developer has published all his clean-room reverse-engineering findings.

Kudos to Rolando, love the energy and the persistence!

The experimental electronic project TMS (Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen, Malte Steiner) will perform their piece Occurrences at Lydknust 26 festival in Esbjerg (DK) 19. April.
Occurrences debut was 2024 in Helsinki and for it TMS developed a cybernetic system which registers and processes their sonic inputs coming from metal percussion and tactile resonance via piezo-microphones. The computer responds to their playing and calculates control data, not only for internal sound synthesis but also for an external DIY modular synthesizer and real-time generated visuals.

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another bug fix release in the new stable 1.28 release series of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

This release only contains bug fixes as well as a number of security fixes. It should be safe to update from 1.28.x, and we recommend you do so at your earliest convenience.

Highlighted bugfixes:

• Various security fixes and playback fixes
• audioencoder: allow change of channel configuration with avenc_aac
• audioinvert: fix float format handling
• h264parse, h265parse, baseparse: Preserve upstream buffer duration if possible
• compositor: fix segfault with force-live=true and no sink pads (regression)
• fallbacksrc: send select-streams event to collection source element directly
• hlsdemux2: fix seekable range for live HLS streams
• glupload: Fix linking glupload with restrictive caps filter
• nvcodec: Add capability caching to speed up plugin initialization
• RTP and RTCP packet handling fixes
• RTSP server fixes for clean-up of timed out play requests
• video-converter: fix I420/A420 BGRA/ARGB output on big-endian
• qtdemux: fix invalid WebVTT timestamps, and other fixes
• qmlgl6sink: Qt6GLVideoItem caps update handling fixes
• threadshare udp sink and source fixes
• transcriberbin and speechmatics text-to-speech fixes and improvements
• videorate: Fix wrong caps in case of PTS going backward
• vtdec: more Apple VideoToolbox decoder fixes
• wavparse: Fix parsing of RF64 wave files
• wasapi2sink: Ignore transient device errors from default device
• waylandsink: various fixes and improvements
• WebRTC DTLS robustness/stability improvements
• Cerbero: Various inno Windows installer fixes and improvements; new 'gstreamer_bundle' wheels meta-package
• Various bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

See the GStreamer 1.28.2 release notes for more details.

Binaries for Android, iOS, Mac OS X and Windows will be available shortly and will be published on the Downloads page.

The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the beta release of Ubuntu Studio 26.04 LTS, codenamed “Resolute Raccoon”.

While this beta is reasonably free of any showstopper installer bugs, you will find some bugs within. This image is, however, mostly representative of what you will find when Ubuntu Studio 26.04 LTS is released on April 17, 2026.

As an LTS release, Ubuntu Studio 26.04 will be supported for 3 years until April 2029. We encourage everyone to try this image and report bugs to improve our final release.

Special Notes

The Ubuntu Studio 26.04 LTS disk image (ISO) exceeds 4 GB and cannot be downloaded to some file systems such as FAT32 and may not be readable when burned to a DVD. For this reason, we recommend downloading to a compatible file system. When creating a boot medium, we recommend creating a bootable USB stick with the ISO image or burning to a Dual-Layer DVD.

Images can be obtained from this link: https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/26.04/beta/

Full updated information, including Upgrade Instructions, are available in the Release Notes.

Please note that upgrading from 24.04 LTS before the release of 26.04.1, due August 2026, is unsupported.

Only Install What You Need

A common piece of feedback we hear is that people prefer to start with a lean base and install only the tools they actually use, rather than getting an overwhelming number of pre-installed packages. We hear you.

Ubuntu Studio includes a minimal install option in the installer, and has since 24.10! This gives you the Ubuntu Studio desktop experience: the theme, the audio configuration and the optimized settings without the full suite of creative applications. From there, you can use Ubuntu Studio Installer to add exactly the workflows you want: audio, graphics, video, photography, or publishing; à la carte.

Alternatively, if you’re already running Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, or any other official Ubuntu flavor, you don’t have to reinstall at all. Just install the Ubuntu Studio Installer package and pick the components you need. This has always been an option, but we want to make sure everyone knows about it.

The full install remains available for those who want a complete creative workstation out of the box, and that’s a perfectly valid choice too.

New Features This Release

This is an LTS release, which means stability and polish have been the primary focus. That said, there’s a lot that’s new and improved since 24.04 LTS.

• Three Desktop Layouts: As previously announced, Ubuntu Studio 26.04 LTS now ships with three selectable desktop layouts: the classic Ubuntu Studio top panel, a macOS-like layout with a global menu and bottom dock, and a new Windows 10-like bottom panel layout. This gives users coming from any platform a familiar starting point.
• By Popular Vote: Our community decided in a vote on Ubuntu Discourse to make the bottom panel (traditional) layout the default. The classic top panel remains as an alternate look-and-feel theme.
• Ubuntu Studio Installer and Audio Configuration completely rewritten: Both tools have been rewritten from scratch in Python with dual GTK4 and Qt6 UI backends. The application automatically detects your desktop environment and launches the appropriate interface. Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration now includes FFADO support for FireWire audio devices and PipeWire buffer/sample-rate configuration via dropdown menus instead of text entry. Both tools include translations for 21 languages.
• New Borealis sound theme replaces the Ocean sound theme. This is the sound theme Ubuntu Studio used clear back in the early (7.10 Gutsy Gibbon) days, and now it’s back!
• Live session improvements: The screensaver and lock screen are now inhibited during the entire live session, fixing a long-standing annoyance where the screen would lock and prompt for a non-existent password.
• Loopino is a new lightweight audio sampler plugin (LV2/CLAP/VST2) for loading, trimming, and looping audio files with drag-and-drop support and on-the-fly recording.
• Plasma PipeWire Settings is a new Plasma applet for managing PipeWire configuration directly from the system tray.
• snd-hdspe is a new DKMS kernel driver for RME HDSPe MADI, AES, RayDAT, AIO, and AIO Pro PCIe sound cards, available in the repositories for those who need it.
• DistroAV (formerly OBS-NDI) is now available in the repositories for network audio/video in OBS Studio using NDI technology.
• PipeWire continues to improve with every release and remains the default audio server.

Major Package Upgrades

• OBS Studio version 32.1.0
• FreeShow version 1.5.9 (snap)
• QPrompt version 2.0.1
• RaySession version 0.17.4
• Patchance version 1.3.2
• Geonkick version 3.7.0
• BChoppr version 1.12.8
• harpwise version 6.34.4
• blender version 5.0.1

There are many other improvements, too numerous to list here. We encourage you to look around the freely-downloadable ISO image.

Known Issues

• There is a minor cosmetic issue in the splash screen when transitioning from the install session to the live desktop session when running the .iso image in that it shows the default KDE Plasma splash as opposed to the Ubuntu Studio splash. This does not occur after installation, and is corrected in later builds.
• You will be prompted, upon first login of any new user, to reboot to apply proper audio configurations for audio production. This is intentional and is a workaround for the installer’s inability to configure the first user as part of the “audio” group or for new users to be added to the audio group automatically.
• Official Ubuntu Studio release notes can be found at https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-studio-26-04-lts-release-notes/
• Further known issues, mostly pertaining to the desktop environment, can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ResoluteRaccoon/ReleaseNotes/Kubuntu
• Additionally, the main Ubuntu release notes contain more generic issues: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/resolute-raccoon-release-notes/

How You Can Help

Please test using the test cases on https://iso.qa.ubuntu.com. All you need is a Launchpad account to get started.

Additionally, we need financial contributions. Our project lead, Erich Eickmeyer, is working long hours on this project and trying to generate a part-time income. Go here to see how you can contribute financially (options are also in the sidebar).

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Does Ubuntu Studio contain snaps? A: Yes. Mozilla’s distribution agreement with Canonical changed, and Ubuntu was forced to no longer distribute Firefox in a native .deb package. We have found that, after numerous improvements, Firefox now performs just as well as the native .deb package did.

Thunderbird is also a snap in order for the maintainers to get security patches delivered faster. This is done by the Thunderbird team in cooperation with Canonical.

Additionally, FreeShow is an Electron-based application. Electron-based applications cannot be packaged in the Ubuntu repositories in that they cannot be packaged in a traditional Debian source package. While such apps do have a build system to create a .deb binary package, it circumvents the source package build system in Launchpad, which is required when packaging for Ubuntu. However, Electron apps also have a facility for creating snaps, which can be uploaded and included. Therefore, for FreeShow to be included in Ubuntu Studio, it had to be packaged as a snap.

Also, to keep theming consistent, all included themes are snapped in addition to the included .deb versions so that snaps stay consistent with our themes.

We are working with Canonical to make sure that the quality of snaps goes up with each release, so we please ask that you give snaps a chance instead of writing them off completely.

Q: If I install this Beta release, will I have to reinstall when the final release comes out? A: No. If you keep it updated, your installation will automatically become the final release.

Q: Will you make an ISO with {my favorite desktop environment}? A: To do so would require creating an entirely new flavor of Ubuntu, which would require going through the Official Ubuntu Flavor application process. Since we’re completely volunteer-run, we don’t have the time or resources to do this. Instead, we recommend you download the official flavor for the desktop environment of your choice and use Ubuntu Studio Installer to get Ubuntu Studio — which does not convert that flavor to Ubuntu Studio but adds its benefits.

Q: What if I don’t want all these packages installed on my machine? A: See the “Only Install What You Need” section above. Use the minimal install option and then add only the workflows you want with Ubuntu Studio Installer.

What Is Imagewmark? How do you embed a secret message into an image that survives cropping, scaling, and compression without needing the original source to decode it? Imagewmark is a Free Software tool that does exactly this. It embeds encrypted invisible digital watermarks (128 bits) into images…

What Is jj-fzf? The Jujutsu VCS has flexible expressions for specifying revision sets and allows non-linear editing of (ancestry) commits. jj-fzf is an interactive TUI that turns the jj log output into a fast keyboard driven control panel. Based on fzf, it allows live revset editing, instant diff…

An MRI scan is never a pleasant occasion – even if you aren’t worried about the outcome, lying still in a confined, noisy space for long periods of time is at best an irksome experience. For hearing protection and to ameliorate boredom or claustrophobia, the patient wears headphones. Since magnets and wires can’t be used inside an MRI machine, the headphones have to literally pipe the sound in through tubes, which gives them poor sound quality and reduces the amount of noise they can block. [SomethingAboutScience], however, thinks that photoacoustic speakers could improve on these, and built some to demonstrate.

These speakers use the photoacoustic effect, which is mostly caused by surface heating when exposed to an intense light, then transferring the heat to the surrounding air, which expands. If the surface can transfer heat to the air quickly enough, and if the light source is modulated quickly, the rapid expansions and contractions in the surrounding air create sound waves. As a test, [SomethingAboutScience] shone a modulated 5-Watt laser on a piece of gold leaf, which produced recognizable music.

Gold leaf works because it absorbs blue light well and is thin enough to transfer heat to the air quickly. To cut out the absorbing surface, [SomethingAboutScience] also shone the laser directly into orange nitrogen dioxide gas, which produced a somewhat cleaner sound (in a purely auditory sense; nitrogen dioxide is quite dangerous, and calling it “a little toxic” is an understatement). Soot-coated glass also worked rather well, though a soot-coated glass smoking pipe didn’t provide the desired acoustics. He also 3D-printed an earphone shape with a gold leaf-lined cavity inside it, then used a fibre-optic cable to direct the laser light into it. We would be personally reluctant to couple a 5-Watt laser into a reflective cavity centimeters from our eardrums, but it didn’t appear to damage its surroundings.

We’ve seen the photoacoustic effect used before to perform long-range, almost silent command injection to voice assistants. It’s also possible to use lower-power lasers and beam sound directly into people’s ears.

Thanks to [Marble] for the tip!

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce the first development snapshot in the API/ABI-unstable 1.29 release series.

The API/ABI-unstable 1.29 release series is for testing and development purposes in the lead-up to the stable 1.30 series which is scheduled for release in Q4 2026. Any newly-added API can still change until that point.

This development release is primarily for developers and early adopters, and distros should probably not package it.

Highlighted changes:

• ac4parse: New basic AC-4 parser element, plus AC-4 typefinding
• analytics: New GstAnalyticsMtd derivative to represent grouping of Mtd's and Keypoint
• Parse HDR10+ metadata out of H.265 and AV1 bitstreams
• Matroska demuxer: Can build a dynamic seek index now if needed
• New h264seiinserter and h265seiinserter elements that support both closed captions and unregistered user data SEIs
• Add HLS WebVTT sink element to the hlssink3 plugin
• New plugin for general purpose compress/decompress
• New udpsrc2 element with better performance for high bitrate streams
• New VA-API overlay compositor
• Opus audio support for F32 and S24_32 samples and 96kHz sample rate
• Playbin3 subtitle switching fixes
• Bump ranks of the new Rust RTP (de)payloaders to PRIMARY and default to mtu 1200 for payloaders
• rtspsrc2 authentication support
• GstPlay track selection notification improvements
• QML6 GL Source now supports navigation events
• QuickTime demuxer gained Bayer support
• Splitmuxsink now includes the start and end timecodes in fragment-opened and closed messages
• srtpdec gained a way to invalidate keys for a specific SSRC
• The APE tag demuxer can extract cover art tags now
• translationbin can control the textaccumulate latency now via a new property
• Allow device providers rank override using GST_PLUGIN_FEATURE_RANK
• cerbero gained support for Android on RISC-V64
• Countless bug fixes, build fixes, memory leak fixes, and other stability and reliability improvements

Binaries for Android, iOS, Mac OS X and Windows will be made available shortly at the usual location.

Release tarballs can be downloaded directly here:

• gstreamer-1.29.1.tar.xz
• gst-plugins-base-1.29.1.tar.xz
• gst-plugins-good-1.29.1.tar.xz
• gst-plugins-ugly-1.29.1.tar.xz
• gst-plugins-bad-1.29.1.tar.xz
• gst-libav-1.29.1.tar.xz
• gst-rtsp-server-1.29.1.tar.xz
• gst-python-1.29.1.tar.xz
• gst-editing-services-1.29.1.tar.xz
• gst-devtools-1.29.1.tar.xz,
• gstreamer-docs-1.29.1.tar.xz

As always, please give it a spin and let us know of any issues you run into by filing an issue in GitLab.

Qtractor 1.5.12 - An Early-Spring'26 Release rncbc Fri, 20 Mar 2026 - 18:00

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They say you should never throw out old clothes because they will come back in style one day. Maybe they are right. We noted in a recent BBC post that, apparently, wired headphones are making a comeback. Like many people, we were dismayed when Apple took the headphone jack out of the iPhone and, as [Thomas Germain] notes, even Google eventually ejected the normal headphone jack. (Although, in fairness, most of the Pixel phones we’ve seen come with a pair of USB-C earbuds.)

On the face of it, though, wireless seems to be a good idea. You can get cheap Bluetooth earbuds now, although maybe still not as cheap as wired buds. Sure, they sound terrible, but so do cheap buds. It is a pain to charge them, of course, but not having to untangle wires is a benefit. On the other hand, you never have to charge your wired headphones.

So why are people suddenly going back to wires? According to the BBC and analytics firm Circana, the second half of 2025 saw an explosion in wired headphone sales, and sales continued to rise in 2026.

Quality of Sound

The biggest reason cited was sound quality. While Bluetooth has made huge strides in sound quality, you are still trading something for wireless. We have to admit, we get annoyed when the Bluetooth drops out, but we wonder how many people can really hear much difference in audio quality? If you care about latency, maybe that’s a point in the wired gear’s favor. But if your song starts 250 milliseconds late, you probably don’t care. It is only an issue when you have video or games.

Many people, when using a modern Bluetooth stack, can’t tell the difference in audio quality between wired and wireless, especially with normal source material and in typical listening environments.

According to [SoundGuys], while Bluetooth is technically worse, if you are over 24 or not in a perfectly quiet environment, you probably can’t tell the difference. Another study found that casual listeners could only guess which headphones were wireless 50% of the time. Even two pro audio people got it wrong 30% of the time.

It Got Better

The problem historically with Bluetooth is that it creates a digital stream to the headphones, which is compressed and decompressed using a codec. The original codec was SBC (Subband Codec), and it didn’t sound that great.

However, as technology gets better, so do the codecs. AAC, LDAC, and others sound great. LDAC, for example, transmits audio at roughly 990 kbps and with very little distortion.

So when you are looking at Bluetooth sound, you have to account for several things. If your source or destination doesn’t support modern codecs, it might not sound as good as it could. In addition, you are dealing with the headphone’s internal digital-to-analog converter. If you think your $10 earbuds have a converter that matches the audio output from your phone or motherboard, you will probably be disappointed. But that’s not a fault inherent with Bluetooth. Cheap sound devices sound worse than expensive ones, in general.

Other Reasons

There are other reasons to go wired. Apparently, some social media influencers have decided that the right pair of wires dangling from your ears is a fashion accessory. Maybe some of it is like the resurgence of vinyl records or typewriters: nostalgia. Or, perhaps it is just a fad. As a practical matter, it does help people see that you are just sitting at your desk swaying for no reason.

Apparently, even the brand and design of headphones are important to fashionistas. For example, the three-year-old video below shows how old Koss headphones with some color changes went viral. (Although of course you can also get a Bluetooth variant.)

While this might not make sense to a Hackaday crowd, headphones have long been a fashion accessory, and headphones like Beats were, at least at one point, the must-have accessory for some people.

Of course, if you really want to make a statement, you can check whether any of the 10 $135,000 headphones are in stock. Or, try a $750,000 pair of Beats, which probably don’t sound as good as you would hope for that price.

Back to Reality

There are people who swear they need gold-plated cables or ones with no oxygen or whatever to get the perfect sound. Tests involving sending audio through a banana don’t back that up.

So, sure, you need to invest in good-quality gear. You really need to make sure the whole setup supports something like aptX, LDAC, or even AAC. You also need a good source. Old movies don’t look better on an 8K TV; after all, why should your headphones improve your 1979 mix tape digitized at 32k?

Unless you are worried about latency or you experience dropouts for some reason, there is very little difference for most people. Of course, if you want to use a wired headphone on a modern phone, you probably need an adapter or USB headphones, which basically have the adapter built in. And your audio will only be as good as that adapter, too, so choose wisely. Don’t forget to pick the right cables, too.

If you are experiencing dropouts, you may need better equipment. Or maybe just take your phone out of your pocket with the keys and the RFID-blocking wallet. Bluetooth can, in theory, travel 30 ft, but reality is something else, and interference from other devices can also be a problem, especially if you have a dual WiFi/Bluetooth device in your computer. We’ve heard, too, that unpairing and repairing can sometimes help, although you wouldn’t think it should matter.

One thing we do suggest. As long as wired headphones are a fad, it is probably a great time to list your old wired gear on eBay, Facebook Marketplace, or a similar site. Fads drive prices up, and the old cans may never be worth so much again.

Your Turn

So what do you think? Can you really tell the difference? What’s your daily driver? Let us know in the comments.

The main goal of liquidsfz is to implement a library that supports playing .sfz files and is easy to integrate into other projects. We also provide a JACK client and a LV2 plugin.

A new version, liquidsfz-0.4.0 is now available.

• liquidsfz-0.4.0 source code
• precompiled statically linked linux 64bit binary

The release adds support for parametric equalizers and some other new opcodes. It implements some extended CCs and generators (like sample=*sine), as well as parsing and loading programs from AriaBank .bank.xml files. A custom UI for the LV2 plugin was added to be able to select AriaBank programs in the LV2 plugin.

For a full list of changes, see the github release.