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Firefox 156, GNOME 51, LibreOffice 26.8: this week in free software

A PDF reader up to 45% faster in Firefox, offline maps in GNOME, 13,007 new characters in Unicode: what came out from 14 to 20 September.

NovoTechDakar

Published 21 September 2026, 08:00 GMT
1 min read

A laptop being used for programming (illustration). — A laptop being used for programming (illustration).Photo: Tirza van Dijk tirzavandijk, CC0 · source

In 30 seconds

Firefox 156 speeds up its PDF reader by up to 45%.
GNOME 51 adds offline maps; LibreOffice 26.8 breaks its download record.
Unicode 18.0 adds 13,007 characters.

The week of 14 to 20 September 2026 was a busy one for free software. Here are the releases worth noting, free and usable without a licence.

Firefox 156: the built-in PDF reader is up to 45% faster.
GNOME 51 “A Coruña”: the desktop environment used by many Linux distributions adds offline maps and gets faster.
Raspberry Pi OS: a new launch bar (dock) and redesigned desktop controls.
LibreOffice 26.8: a new version of the office suite, which breaks its download record.
Thunderbird 156: improvements to secure sign-in to email accounts.
Unicode 18.0: 13,007 new characters.
RustFS 1.0: S3-compatible object storage, now production-ready.

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Sources

Linuxiac Weekly Wrap-Up: Week 38, 2026 (September 14 – 20), Linuxiac.

Spotted an error? Write to infos@novotech.blog. Corrections are flagged at the end of the article.

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