The first release of Diodon clipboard manager got released almost 16 years ago. The Linux desktop has changed quite a bit since and it is a positive surprise that Diodon is still being used by users today after so many years whereas the concept of Diodon hasn’t really much changed.

The motivation to start Diodon in the first place was, that the clipboard manager I used at the time was not maintained anymore and I also wanted to have a project of my own to tinker with different development technologies.

I was amazed how well Diodon was received and many popular Linux blogging sites posted about the new clipboard manager in town from very early on. Some links of those blog post are referenced in the Wikipedia Diodon page which also got created by some enthusiast.

My goal from the beginning was to build a community around Diodon but I only partially succeeded. Diodon certainly got well promoted on many different corners of the internet. I am also very thankful for the many translators who translated Diodon into their language. There were also a few commits of some contributors now and again but no-one stayed around for long. A honorable mentioned is RedHatter which developed some very useful diodon-plugins which I think are still used by some up to today.

Unfortunately in 2026 Diodon is showing its age. There is only partial Wayland support, it is based on the old GTK3 framework and relies on Zeitgeist which is not really developed anymore. Even though users have been using Diodon in many different desktop environments with the help of the application indicator, Diodon’s main focus was to integrate well into the Unity desktop back in the day, which, of course, mostly died long time ago and is now only a niche. To bring Diodon into 2026 a lot of work behind the scene would be needed.

I haven’t really had much time to show love to Diodon tough and I actually myself moved away to a different clipboard manager which only works on GNOME. As of late I also received some very low quality AI pull requests which took my attention but also made me think on how to continue with the Diodon project.

I have now decided to move Diodon into what I call “low maintenance mode”. Following points I will still try to address as long as it is feasible:

• packaging issues, so Diodon will remain in the Debian and Ubuntu repositories
• Updating of translations
• Addressing of security issues

Other issues I will not have the capacity to address. In case someone wants to pick up the torch and bring Diodon forward feel free to contact me and we can discuss it.

This said I have released a new Diodon version 1.14.0 which includes following changes:

• Updated translations
• Allow cross building
• Improved meson build tool compatibility
• Improved performance when handling large clipboard items

To get the new version you can either download the new release per tarball or install it through the ppa with the following commands:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:diodon-team/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install diodon
# and for all Unity users there is also a scope
sudo apt-get install unity-scope-diodon

Thanks for all faithful users of Diodon over the many years. I hope that this “low maintenance mode” helps the users who still happily use Diodon on a daily basis to continue to do so. For the ones which have issues this should clarify that those issues won’t be looked into and it is most likely better to find an alternative.