It looks like the Racoon has bedded in and settled down, as Canonical releases the first point release of this year’s Ubuntu LTS version, offering an upgrade to users on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat). Ubuntu 26.04.1 is the first point release of April’s long-term support version, which will be supported until 2031. Assuming that it follows the pattern of previous Ubuntu LTS releases, 26.04.1 will be followed by four further point releases – usually, the final release comes a little while after the following LTS release. That means Ubuntu 26.04.5 should arrive some time after Ubuntu 28.04 - meaning in or around September 2028. It’s accompanied by most of the remixes releasing matching point releases: Kubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu Studio, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, and Ubuntu Cinnamon. Notably, two flavors are missing from this list. There are 10 official flavors but only eight point releases lists. There was no official 26.04 release of Ubuntu MATE. Maintainer Martin Wimpress has stepped down – he has a new project called Nøughty Linux he’s working on instead. There’s not much to see on the website yet, but if you’re curious, his talk at the 2025 Ubuntu Summit will give you a taste. Ubuntu Unity isn’t in that list, either. That remix missed the 25.10 release cycle because lead developer Rudra Saraswat – whom we first talked to in 2022, when he was 12 – is at university. The good news is that some developers did step up to help and there is an Ubuntu Unity 26.04 release. It replaces a bunch of subcomponents of the previous version, though, and that means it’s officially not an LTS release. Ubuntu Unity users should be aiming for the 26.10 release instead. This first point release has a few consequences we can expect. One is that for LTS users, it’s upgrade time, if you are planning on trying to stay current. Canonical does not start offering new version upgrades to LTS users until the first point release. Now that Raring-point-one is here, people running Ubuntu 24.04 “Noble Numbat” will start to see offers to upgrade to the new version. This applies to those running their Ubuntu servers as pets, rather than herding them like cattle. One of the things that really crumples the cardigans of hardcore Debianisti is that Canonical inserts messages into the output of the apt command. So the upgrade offers won’t be limited to graphical desktop users. Another consequence, albeit less concerned with any of the official flavors, is that System 76’s Pop!_OS 26.04 is expected soon. The company said on LinkedIn that they were aiming for an end-June release date. That didn’t happen. The team is certainly hard at work. Its in-house COSMIC desktop hit version 1.0 in December last year, and earlier this week, it released COSMIC version 1.7.0. That means that the next Pop!_OS will now use Ubuntu 26.04.1. The Reg FOSS desk is becoming quite fond of COSMIC and Pop!_OS, after a fairly shaky start. It feels quite a bit faster than Ubuntu itself, and on our newer testbed laptop – a 2018 Dell XPS13 – it’s not only very fast to start, but its ability to change the screen DPI on the fly is very handy. On older kit, it can make effective use of NVIDIA GPUs that the official binary driver can no longer use on modern kernels, although we have seen it freeze up quite a few times on those 10-15 year old machines. COSMIC is new and it’s developing faster than any other desktop in the Linux world. The team has ambitious plans for “Epoch 2” and beyond. At the rate they’re moving, perhaps Pop!_OS 26.04 will come with COSMIC 2. ®

Microsoft has dropped Windows 11 26H2 into the Windows Insider Release Preview Channel and released August's preview update. Windows 11 26H2 shares the same servicing branch as Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, and many of the tweaks and updates that users are looking forward to have already appeared in the monthly Windows updates. The latest, the August Preview Update, includes such modifications as the long-awaited movable taskbar, more Start Menu customization, and the ability to drop web and Microsoft Store suggestions from local results in Windows Search. The update will turn up via an enablement package – a relatively small piece of code that switches on functionality already downloaded, but currently dormant. "Think of it as a switch rather than a full operating system replacement," Microsoft wrote. It's considerably more compact than a multi-gigabyte full download and reinstall of an operating system. Resetting the support clock The shared codebase and shared updates – Windows 11 26H2 will share the same release note KB identifiers as 25H2 and 24H2 – might have some users wondering about the point. One answer is support. For example, support for the Home and Pro editions of Windows 11 24H2 ends on October 13, 2026. Windows 11 26H2 resets this clock, with 24 months of support for Home and Pro versions, and 36 months for Enterprise and Education editions. Enterprises will still need to validate the new release. The servicing branch is the same, and if something works with Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2, it should work with Windows 11 26H2. However, Microsoft still recommends "testing with devices running recent versions of Windows 11 to confirm compatibility with your apps, policies, and infrastructure." Some organizations will have already done this, while others will have waited until the Release Preview milestone was reached. Microsoft took careful aim at its foot when it skipped the Release Preview stage and released the infamous document-destroying Windows 10 October 2018 update. It has been considerably more cautious in the years since. The move to Release Preview was accompanied by the August Preview Update, which included a raft of improvements, but was also greeted with dismay by some users complaining of problems with cursors and black desktop backgrounds following the installation. As far as Microsoft is concerned, it is not currently aware of any issues with the update. ®

The controversial Omarchy distro is attracting both criticism and fans – and financial support, too. Omarchy is an opinionated respin of Arch Linux and a pet project of Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson, better known as DHH. Although the first release was as recent as June last year, this week sees the release of Omarchy 4.0.1 – a security fix for the mid-August Omarchy 4 “Quattro”. Although it started out just over a year ago, Omarchy now has a sibling project Omakub, which is based on Ubuntu, and an organization behind it called Omacom. A week ago, DHH announced the launch of the Omacom Foundation with $8 million. Its founding patrons include figures behind Shopify, Stripe, Dell, Block, Cloudflare, Sesame, and 37signals - closely followed by people behind Dropbox and OpenClaw, taking the total to $10 million. The project, like the man behind it, is controversial. But that means attention, and an “opinionated distro” gets opinionated reviews. Some of the criticism is strong stuff: for instance, Merchants of Insecurity, whose top line is: “First, a PSA: Do NOT use Omarchy if you care about security of your machine even a little bit.” Author “One Happy Fellow” is not the first: last year, a member of Framework's community forums posted Omarchy is not a secure distribution and should be taken off the Linux installation options. Others like it or give it a guarded thumbs up while saying it’s not for them. There really is no such thing as bad publicity. As P. T. Barnum put it: "Say anything you like about me, but spell my name right." DHH is no stranger to controversy. We suspect he doesn’t mind at all. The Register reported in late 2025 that Framework, known for its repairable laptops, was sponsoring Omarchy and Hyprland, and in turn, multiple people criticized Framework for sponsoring such controversial projects. That piece linked to some of the criticism of DHH, but he has been attracting criticism since at least 2014. We tried it, and it does work. It has a unique UI based on the Hyprland tiling compositor and a panel and menus provided in the new release by Quickshell. This is heavily keyboard-driven, but ignores almost all existing keyboard shortcuts and UI conventions from other OSes. There are no title bars, let alone close buttons or anything like that. No middle-click or right-click app menus. The jaded take of the Reg FOSS desk, who is a big fan and advocate of keyboard-driven UIs, is that such things usually reflect ignorance of existing user interface standards. We found it a bit clunky. We had to install an additional tool, hypermon, in order to be able to make our testbed machine’s second display useful. You can’t use established pacman commands to update it – you must use the custom omarchy update script, and when trying that in a VM, we hit a known bug. On hardware, it worked fine. It’s Arch, extensively preconfigured. Lots of apps are preinstalled, and the selection is surprising and not typical of a FOSS product. The selection includes Discord and WhatsApp for communications, Docker, Obsidian for note-taking, Neovim as an editor, and OBS Studio for streaming. There are optional extras for using speech, automatic dictation via Voxtype, and other unusual features. There’s a terminal-based music player, cliamp. (We like the name of that one, and may keep it around.) There are, of course, options to add AI tools – one of the startup messages invites you to configure your preferred plastic pal who’s fun to be with LLM bot. It’s pretty big. A default install (not that there is any other kind) took 14 GB of disk space after the first update. It did install in a VM with a 16 GB virtual disk, but there wasn’t enough disk space to update the OS. It uses about 1.5 GB of memory at idle. It’s not lightweight, but then, Omarchy definitely comes with batteries included, as well as (to quote a friend’s old email signature) “bells and whistles, plus a couple of gongs. Don’t forget the horns, the custard pies and the water-powered whirling knives.” If you don’t know your way around existing environments or distros, want something fashionable and snazzy looking, and are willing and happy to jump in and learn, then this is an interesting new option. You may not agree with the politics and views behind it, but you must be able to either tolerate them – or ignore them. It works, it’s quite fast, it looks striking, and it does the job. If you just want something clean, fast, pretty, and with tiling by default, personally, we’d suggest Pop!_OS instead. ®

AROS is an all-FOSS re-implementation of AmigaOS, and after years of effort, it now supports Arm kit – both 32-bit and 64-bit Raspberry Pi hardware, especially the Pi 3. The AROS project's nightly builds page has some interesting new offerings. Notably, there's raspi-aarch64-system for 64-bit capable Raspberry Pi hardware, including the Pi 3 and Pi Zero, and raspi-armhf-system for older ARMv6 based devices. We first mentioned AROS 13 years ago, and last took a proper look in May 2025. Building a version of AROS that runs natively on Arm processors has been a long term goal, as the AROS Arm support page details. It has made good progress, though, and now the nightly images include a version which runs well on the Raspberry Pi 3. (Unfortunately, the Reg FOSS desk’s Pi 3 is currently running PiHole full-time, and Pi 4 support is slightly lagging, with no sound or networking.) There's no specific mention of what has changed on the project's Github repo, but we suspect that some judicious use of LLM has enabled this sudden burst of progress. Since May 2026, there have been 13 commits by Claude Code. Even so, it works. This is an existing, human-written OS which can now boot and run on a Raspberry Pi 3. The install images are small – only slightly over 100 MB in size – but if you want to give them a try, you should also copy the contents of the additional raspi-aarch64-contrib or raspi-armhf-contrib files, which contain an additional gigabyte of compressed files with apps, demos, accessories, and supplementary tools. Whether or not it has been made with LLM bot assistance, we think this is an impressive step forwards. AROS has been able to run on Arm CPUs for years, but until this, it ran hosted on top of another Arm OS – usually Linux. Now it can boot and run on bare metal. We feel this is a good step for several reasons. Although the native platform for AROS was for many years x86-32, on that platform, AROS is a small fish in a big pond: there's a vast array of off-the-shelf hardware for x86 PCs, and it’s impossible for a tiny experimental OS to support more than a fraction of it. We have tried and failed to get AROS running on bare metal more than once. For many years, the best way to try it was to run it under VMware thanks to a specialized distro called Icaros Desktop. The Raspberry Pi represents a much narrower platform: there are only a handful of models of Pi, and as a result, a very small number of GPUs and network interfaces that AROS needs to support. That makes it much easier to offer complete coverage. The Pi is also a fairly severely constrained platform: except for the most recent - and most expensive - models, most of the older and cheaper Pi kit only has either 512 MB or 1 GB of RAM. That isn’t enough to do full justice to Linux, Windows, or any BSD with a graphical desktop – but it’s plenty for AROS. This initial build boots to the Workbench desktop in about five seconds. And, of course, those lower-end Pis are still cheap, which is always welcome. For now, the Pi version of AROS is a prototype: it’s incomplete, may not be very stable, and lots of things don’t work yet. An important missing part is that it doesn’t have any 680x0 emulation yet, so it can’t run any classic Amiga apps. Even so, we suspect that quite a few old Amiga fans might enjoy playing with a brand-new £30 ($40) Amiga. If you just want to play your old games, there are much easier ways to do that on a PC. Last year, we also looked at Commodore OS 3 – and in there, we gave PiMiga a mention as well. Both products are free Linux distros bundled with emulators and tons of Amiga apps, games, and demos. Easier still, if you’re a Windows user, just buy a copy of Amiga Forever. Either way, knock yourself out. AROS is re-invigorating other bits of the Amiga world, as well. Later in 2025, we also reported on a new Amiga web browser, which runs on the A600 GS and A1200 NG computers. These are Arm-based machines which run Amiga software via emulation on an OS called AmiBench – which uses parts of AROS. TheA1200 is now officially an Amiga Alongside the A600 GS and A1200 NG Arm-based machines, last year we also mentioned THEA1200 from Retro Games Ltd. This is another Arm-based machine, based around a tweaked emulator, like RGL’s existing Sinclair reproduction The Spectrum. However, THEA1200 just recently moved one step closer to Amiga legitimacy. On its Facebook page, RGL announced that THEA1200 is officially an Amiga product: “The Amiga name has a new chapter. With the recent announcement from Mike Battilana and the Amiga Corporate [sic], we’re delighted to see the Amiga brand move forward with a clear and unified future. We’re proud to be part of that future with THEA1200, bringing the Amiga experience to a new generation while celebrating everything that made the original so special.” As we said last year, THEA1200 is an Arm computer running Linux, which runs a bundled emulator derived from Amiberry. The same is true of the AmigaKit machines we mentioned earlier, the A600 GS and A1200 NG: they too run an emulator based on Amiberry on top of Linux, and inside that, they run AmigaKit’s AmiBench OS. When RGL says it has come to an agreement with Mike Battilana and Amiga Corp, that means Cloanto. Cloanto is the company that sells AmigaForever, and it owns the Amiga trademarks, the Kickstart ROM, and the rights to the original 680x0 AmigaOS. Inside AmigaForever, along with various retro models for games compatibility, there's even a higher-spec VM running Cloanto’s updated version of classic AmigaOS, which it calls 3.X – it also has a page about the improvements 3.X contains. A deal with Cloanto means RGL can bundle the genuine original AmigaOS with TheA1200. This could give TheA1200 an edge over the AmigaKit models in terms of its compatibility with older games and original Amiga apps. (As one sign of the complexity of Amiga ownership, German developer Hyperion also has an AmigaOS license, for the purposes of developing a PowerPC version. The Register covered this back in 2004, and Hyperion used it to develop AmigaOS 4 – used in, among other things, the Amiga X1000 which The Reg covered in 2010. Controversially, Hyperion is using this license to flog updates to classic AmigaOS: in 2022, we reported on AmigaOS 3.2.2 and in 2025 on AmigaOS 3.2.3.) Christian Simpson – known on YouTube as Peri Fractic – recently revived Commodore International, and following its FPGA-powered Commodore 64 Ultimate computer, the company also launched a Sailfish-powered smart flip-phone, as The Register covered back in June. The Commodore brand is back, and it's in the news. However, the revived Commodore doesn't own the Amiga name, or IP, or code. Feel free to call us excessively cynical, but we suspect that this could be a motivation behind licensing some Amiga rights to another vendor in 2026. This exposure will increase the value of Cloanto's IP. Hypothetically, if Cloanto were to sell its rights to the revived Commodore, that could mean it could ask for more money. ®