A big update to Tuba, the GTK4/libadwaita Fediverse client, has landed – along with an experimental version for Android.
Tuba 0.11.0 is the first major update to the social app in a year and brings full support for Mastodon quotes. Quoting posts, whether others can quote your posts and revoking consent from those who have are all supported in the composer.
While the app had offered it own approach to “quote tweet” sharing of other people’s posts, adding support for Mastodon’s “consent-based” version means you will quote whilst respecting the needs/wishes of other users on the decentralised social media service.
Mastodon Collections are curated lists of accounts (built around a topic or theme) and shared with a link – not unlike BlueSky’s Starter Packs.
In this release, if your instance supports them, you can browse a Collection, follow individual accounts (there’s no ‘follow all’ option be design) and create and edit your own, all inside of Tuba.
Tuba 0.11.0 adds UnifiedPush support. A UnifiedPush service keeps the connection alive instead, waking Tuba when something new arrives, rather than the entire app needing to run in the background.
Elsewhere, Hashtag Lists let you create custom timelines from multiple hashtags, the post Composer lets you add custom thumbnails to video or audio attachments, and you can now create posts with both attachments and polls (on supported instances).
Other smaller, notable changes in Tuba 0.11.0:
- Profile notes show full content and are easier to edit
- Uses-
AdwShortcutsDialog- for keyboard shortcut cheat sheet - Compact spacing at narrower window sizes
- Saved media toast shows “Open Folder” button
- Custom emoji picker rewritten
- Haiku OS support
- Warns when boosting a post with attachments but no alt text
- Featured and Media (and media replies) profile tabs can be disabled
In all, a welcome update for what remains the most featured and user-friendly Mastodon app for Linux desktop. This is certainly a big release, so to revel in all of its nitty-gritty-glory, do check over the full release notes.
Tuba’s nightly Android builds
Tuba is now available for Android, but the builds are in a formative state. The app’s own release notes mention there are “much better options” for using Mastodon on Android.
But, in working on an Android port, “annoyances and UX papercuts” that affected Linux mobile were found and solved. Even if you or the rest of the world stick with those “much better options” on Google’s mobile OS, the effort still brings benefits.
However, you won’t find Tuba in the Play Store or F-Droid – not yet. Instead, you can download nightly builds from the GTK4Android website.
Where to get Tuba 0.11.0
Install Tuba from Flathub. A Snap Store build is available
Install Tuba from Flathub on Ubuntu (the Snap Store build isn’t updated yet).
The official Tuba website has download links for all available Linuxpackages and formats, as well as a Windows installer if you fancy using this on the other half of your dual-boot, aka ‘the dark side’.
If you’re happy without the changes mentioned in this post, you can install an older version of Tuba on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and up from the repos using sudo apt install tuba. Riding Ubuntu 26.10 daily builds? v0.11.0 will be in the stonking archives shortly.