October brought ghosts, ghouls — and a glut of great Linux app updates.

Big hitters included Mozilla Firefox 144, Thunderbird 144, ONLYOFFICE 9.1, Ghostty 1.2, GIMP 3.0.6 and the all-new Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0. And major virtualisation updates in the form of VirtualBox 7.2.3, Parallels Desktop 26 and VMWare Workstation 25H2.

But, as regular readers (you rock) will know, each month I round up a slew of smaller Linux app updates which didn’t receive the ‘full post’ treatment on this site, yet are still worth knowing about.

As ever, if you spot an update I’ve missed (or am yet to hear about), give me a shout using the contact form. Your tips help hugely.

Waffle over, on to what arrived in October.

Calibre 8.11.x

Calibre, the venerable open-source ebook manager, converter and reader, added AI integration in September, letting users connect to local large language models (via Ollama) to ‘ask questions’ about the text they’re reading.

In October, the developers refined the feature: users can now set arbitrary HTTP headers for requests, and custom URLs work as intended. Small but important tweaks to one of Calibre’s biggest feature additions in a while.

Elsewhere, this update improves Tolino e-reader support, fixes an issue with the ebooks.com plugin and resolves a regression that broke HTML versions. On Linux, Calibre 8.11 no longer uses /tmp for export libraries to fix issues on distros that mount /tmp in RAM.

Calibre is free and open source software available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Official installers are available from the project website for Windows and macOS, while Linux users can run an official script that downloads and unpacks the official binary.

Resources 1.9.0

Resources 1.9 is the first update to this GTK4/libadwaita system monitoring tool the 1.8 release back in March (which added Raspberry Pi GPU monitoring among other changes). It ships with a range of minor new features and general improvements.

Notable, Resources will stop updating ‘graphical’ elements within the app if its window is not in view. This is designed to save on power. It also now supports type-to-search, so you don’t need to reveal or focus a search field box to start sifting for a specific process.

Other changes of note:

• **Support for the new Intel Xe GPU driver **
• Power usage reading improved for certain GPUs
• PCIe 7.0 and 8.0 interface support
• Wi-Fi interfaces now show link information so…
• **Flatpak build will request network access **to get link info
• New ‘Commandline’ column option in Processes view
• ‘Uptime’ added to the CPU view
• Battery detection and power calculation improved
• Numerical values right-aligned in Apps and Processes views

Resources is free, open source software for Linux. The developer would prefer that youinstall it from Flathub but there are unofficial Arch and Fedora packages/repos around for those who’d rather not.

Haruna 1.6

Haruna is a cute (pun intended) modern media player targeted at KDE desktops (it runs elsewhere too, of course). It’s kind of like a Qt version of Celluloid in that it does everything you’d expect, in a modern, flexible guise.

Last month it scored a minor update that focused on the player’s playlist feature. It’s now possible to resize the in-window playlist; an icon for playback actions is shown in the playlist header; the button to add a new playlist moves to the tab bar.

Haruna’s mouse settings now lets users customise the action for mouse forward and back buttons (for those with mice that have them), refining a feature the previous update added.

Various bugs were fixed, including issues with looping playlists, playlist tabs not saving, and issues renaming playlists immediately after adding them.

Haruna is free, open-source software and you can get the latest release from Flathub. If the very latest version isn’t essential, Haruna is also available to install from the Ubuntu repos.

BleachBit 5.0.2

Free, open source and cross-platform system cleaning tool BleachBit saw its first major release in nearly 2 years back in May. Last month, it got a minor update with new UI options, backend reliability buffs and several new cleaners for Linux users.

BleachBit 5.0.2 is able to clean the pacman cache (on Arch-based distributions) and clean out disabled snap packages on Ubuntu. Both of the new cleaners ought to be used with care: BleachBit is powerful software but not everything it can delete should be!

Elsewhere, this update introduces official support for Debian 13, Linux Mint 22.2, openSUSE Leap 15.6 and 16. The official Debian and RPM package metadata has been updated, and a swathe of translations updated.

• UI font size can be changed using ctrl + - / + / 0 shortcuts
• New full screen mode can be activated by pressing f11
• Fix for issues vacuuming Firefox 140 and later

The next major release, 5.2.0, will offer granular cookie cleaning options. A redesigned BleachBit GUI is in development (earmarked for inclusion in v5.4.0) and will remain GTK-based.

BleachBit 5.0 is available for download from the BleachBit website for Windows (installer and portable) and for Linux (provided as a 64-bit DEB for Ubuntu and Linux Mint, supports Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and above).

DigiKam 8.8.0

If you take a lot of photos (or just hoard them, like I do), DigiKam is a solid to manage, organise and perform edit your snaps. A new version of the Qt-based app landed in frame in October.

DigiKam 8.8.0 is a flashy (sorry) release that sees the app complete its core port to Qt 6.10. This should improve performance on and compatibility with modern OSes.

The release also updates the LibRaw, Exiv2, and G’MIC-Qt (v3.6) plugins. This means broader support for RAW files, latest camera metadata reading and more image filters. Plus, the *Image Editor *now offers a background-blur tool for fake depth-of-field effects.

With this release, tag hierarchies can be imported and exported as text files. This will make it easier for users to move carefully structured tags between systems; in Preview mode, DigiKam 8.8 will visualise focus points in images shot on Fujifilm and Olympus cameras.

Elsewhere, the app respects monitor colour profiles on Windows, macOS, and Linux with Wayland, and uses native desktop notifications for imports and batch edit progress updates.

DigiKam 8.8.0 is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS. For the former, grab the official AppImage from the project web site, seek it out on an alternative storefront or wait for it to hit your repos (if you’re on a rolling-release distro).

Bazaar 0.5.6

Ubuntu users who make heavy use of Flathub who aren’t using Bazaar, should check this solid desktop storefront and Flatpak management tool out – the latest update giving even-more reason to do so!

Bazaar 0.5.6 continues to flesh out its feature set with the sort of things most of us come to expect from a desktop app store.

Screenshots in app listing open in a new in-app viewer with zoom buttons, paging and a button to copy the image the clipboard. Descriptions in app listings use ‘better rendering’ and look more like they do on Flathub itself – and text is selectable, hurrah!

Bazaar’s global progress bar makes it handy to track when apps are installing, updating or being removed. With this release, it tweaks its ‘pending’ state so you can tell when an operation is being readied to run, but isn’t yet running.

Finally, there’s now a ‘Flathub like carousel for featured apps’ at the top of the main view. Slides for apps which are spotlighted use an app’s logo, title, sub-line and defined branding colours, similar to the Flathub website and GNOME Software.

LibreOffice 25.2.7

All good things come to an end (I don’t mean this post, lol), and so the October release of LibreOffice 25.2.7 rounds off the 25.2.x series.

No new features arrive (they rarely do in a maintenance update) but the seventh and final batch of bug fixes and stability buffs improve reliability, performance and—here it comes that word—interoperability across the suite’s core components.

LibreOffice 25.2.7 is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows from the LibreOffice website, but may turn up in Linux distro repositories also — The Document Foundation urge all users of this release to upgrade, if possible, to the newer LibreOffice 25.8 series.

Until next month!

That wraps up this month’s recap of smaller but noteworthy releases. While these updates might not have gotten their own headlines, they’re still the sort of steady improvements that make daily Linux desktop use all the better.

Got a tip about an app update I should cover? The contact form is always open!