Most consumer routers give you a locked-down firmware, a few years of updates if you are lucky, and a web UI that makes you miss the terminal.

Routers powered by OpenWrt are a breath of fresh air here, as they give users a full Linux system, a proper package manager, support for VPNs, and the freedom to actually configure their network the way they want.

CZ.NIC, the organization behind the Czech Republic's national domain registry, which also does network security research, has the Turris line of OpenWrt-powered routers built to offer security, modularity, and long-term support.

Late last year, they launched the Turris Omnia NG, a router with Wi-Fi 7, swappable M.2 Wi-Fi modules, and a quad-core ARM processor. Now they are back with the Turris Omnia NG Wired, which does away with the built-in Wi-Fi and is designed for rack-mount installations.

📝 Turris Omnia NG Wired: Key Specifications

The Omnia NG Wired runs Turris OS, a Linux distribution based on OpenWrt that ships with a web UI for easy router management and handles system updates automatically.

On the hardware side, a quad-core ARMv8 processor running at 2.2 GHz drives the device, backed by 2 GB of RAM and 8 GB of eMMC storage. CZ.NIC went with passive cooling for this one too, so there are no fans or noise to worry about.

For connectivity, you get two 10 Gbps SFP+ ports, one for WAN, one for LAN, and four 2.5 Gbps RJ45 ports for local devices.

Michal Hrušecký, head of hardware development at CZ.NIC, notes that:

In addition to 10G and 2.5G ports, we also considered expandability. Thanks to M.2 slots, you can add NVMe storage or mobile connectivity as a backup, for example.

This makes Omnia NG Wired a flexible foundation that can be adapted to specific deployments.

Additionally, the front panel has a 240x240 px IPS display for network stats and a D-pad for navigation, and the USB 3.0 ports round things out.

If wireless coverage is eventually needed, a Wi-Fi 6/Wi-Fi 7 upgrade kit is supposed to be made available separately (couldn't find its listing), so the wired-only design is not a permanent constraint. And with CZ.NIC's long-term support promise, updates to the device will continue well past the 10-year mark.

🛒 Get Yours

Prices for the Turris Omnia NG Wired range from €420 to €499, depending on the retailer you go for. The official website lists the authorized sellers who cater to different regions.

Germany has strictly standardized its digital document requirements. The Deutschland-Stack (in Deutsch), the country's new sovereign digital infrastructure framework, names just two document formats that public administrations are allowed to use: ODF and PDF/UA.

Proprietary document formats from Microsoft like .doc, .ppt, and .xls are not included.

What's happening?

The framework is published by Germany's Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation, and it covers every level of public administration in the country, from federal government bodies down to states and municipalities.

Also keep in mind that the rollout of key infrastructure components is targeted for 2028.

ODF, or OpenDocument Format, is an XML-based file format for office documents. It covers text files, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents. The standard is maintained by OASIS and is also an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 26300), which means it is vendor-neutral and not controlled by any single company.

PDF/UA, short for PDF/Universal Accessibility, is the ISO accessibility standard for PDF files (ISO 14289). It lays out specs that make PDF documents readable by assistive technologies like screen readers, making it a sensible choice for a government that has to serve a diverse population.

The reasons behind this are not hard to understand. Vendor lock-in is the obvious one.

When public administrations run on proprietary document formats, they end up dependent on the vendor that controls those formats, with no real way out without significant disruption and cost.

The Deutschland-Stack explicitly calls this out, with reducing lock-in effects listed as one of its core goals. The framework also prioritizes use of open source solutions where possible, and explicitly favors sourcing from European providers over foreign alternatives.

Speaking on the subject, Florian Effenberger, Executive Director of The Document Foundation, stated that:

This is not a recommendation or a preference, it is a mandate. Germany’s decision to anchor ODF at the heart of its national sovereign stack confirms what we have argued for years: open, vendor-neutral document formats are not a niche concern for some technology specialists and FOSS advocates.

They are a fundamental infrastructure for democratic, interoperable and sovereign public administrations.

Closing Words

Moves like this take time to matter, but they do matter. Governments adopting open standards at this scale sends a clear signal about where things are heading, and it makes the case for interoperable, vendor-neutral infrastructure in a way that no amount of social media preaching can.

Germany doing this in a binding, nationwide framework is a meaningful step, and the rest of Europe would benefit if they took note of this.

If you have not been living under a rock, then you most likely know that age verification has been all over tech news lately, and the conversation surrounding it is a mess with a lot of information and misinformation flowing around.

For people who are trying to understand what's going on, the TLDR is that laws in regions like California, Colorado, and Brazil now require operating systems to report age signals to apps and app stores.

systemd, the init system and service manager used by most major Linux distributions, has made a change tied to this whole situation, but it is probably not what you are imagining.

What's going on?

The systemd project merged a pull request adding a new birthDate field to the JSON user records managed by userdb in response to the age verification laws of California, Colorado, and Brazil.

This is the same record that already holds basic user metadata like realName, emailAddress, and location. The field stores a full date in YYYY-MM-DD format and can only be set by administrators, not by users themselves.

Lennart Poettering, the creator of systemd, has clarified that this change is:

An optional field in the userdb JSON object. It's not a policy engine, not an API for apps. We just define the field, so that it's standardized iff people want to store the date there, but it's entirely optional.

In simple words, this is something that adds a new, optional field that can then be used by other open source projects like xdg-desktop-portal to build age verification compliance on top of, without systemd itself doing anything with the data or making it mandatory to provide.

A merge request asking for this change to be repealed was struck down by Lennart, who gave the above-mentioned reasoning behind this, and further noted that people were misunderstanding what systemd is trying to do here.

So yeah, that is what this change looks like, but this won't be stopping the haters and conspiracy theorists from making wild accusations, of course. Let's see how this develops.

Suggested Read 📖: Systemd creator quits Microsoft

If you want to backup your data on Linux, there's no shortage of reliable options that offer some pretty good functionality. We have Déjà Dup that handles the basics well if you just want a simple GNOME app that protects your files without much fuss.

Timeshift takes a different angle; it snapshots your system so you can roll back after a bad update, though it's not really designed for personal data backups.

For users who want more control, Borg and Restic have been the standards for years. Both are encrypted, deduplicated, and trusted by a vast community of Linux users.

BorgBase, on the other hand, is a managed repository hosting service for Borg and Restic backups that has been around for almost a decade. Vykar is their newest project—an open source encrypted backup tool that's worth a look if you're in the market for something new.

Vykar: Overview ⭐

Vykar is an open source, encrypted, deduplicated backup tool written in Rust, developed by the BorgBase team, and released under the GPL-3.0 license. It draws inspiration from the likes of BorgBackup and Borgmatic but uses its own repository format, making it incompatible with existing Borg or Restic repositories.

The whole thing is configured through a single YAML file where you define your repositories, source directories, encryption settings, and retention policy.

Key features include:

• Scheduling via vykar daemon.
• Deduplication is doable via FastCDC.
• Compression support with LZ4 or Zstandard.
• Desktop GUI (vykar-gui) with system tray support.
• WebDAV server for browsing and restoring snapshots.
• Encryption with AES-256-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305 (auto-selected), and Argon2id key derivation.
• Concurrent multi-client backups, where multiple machines can write to the same backup repository at the same time.

The desktop GUI deserves a particular mention. Borg relies on third-party tools like Vorta for a desktop interface, and Restic has Backrest, which is also a community project. Vykar ships its own GUI as a first-party component.

It reads directly from vykar.yaml, runs backups on demand, and can sit in the system tray running scheduled backups in the background.

As for the performance, the project's website has put up a comparison of Vykar against Borg, Restic, Rustic, and Kopia, tested against a 49 GiB dataset of 367,000 files.

On backup duration, Vykar finished in 61 seconds, Rustic took 313, Borg 268, Restic 138, and Kopia 85. Restore times follow a similar pattern where Vykar does it in 69 seconds, versus 82 for Rustic, 225 for Borg, 130 for Restic, and 132 for Kopia.

CPU efficiency shows the clearest gap. Vykar used 234 CPU seconds for backup, compared to Borg's 250, Restic's 696, Rustic's 728, and Kopia's 428.

Memory usage is where the picture gets more interesting. Borg uses just 236 MB during backup versus Vykar's 623 MB. Restic is also lighter at 327 MB. So Vykar is trading some RAM for its speed advantage. This is something to factor in on memory-constrained systems.

Repository sizes across all five tools land between 19.7 and 19.9 GB under equivalent Zstd compression settings, so deduplication efficiency is roughly comparable across the board.

Get Vykar 📥

Before you install, know that Vykar supports four storage backends: the local filesystem, S3-compatible object storage (any provider works), SFTP, and a dedicated REST server.

The installation itself is a one-liner:

curl -fsSL https://vykar.borgbase.com/install.sh | sh

Pre-built binaries for Linux (x86_64 and aarch64, both glibc and musl), macOS (Apple Silicon), and Windows are also available on the GitHub releases page.

From there, you can refer to the quickstart guide for going through the creation of a config file and initializing the backup process.

In the previous newsletter, I discussed how various distros are handling the age verification laws. At the end of the article, I speculated that we would see a few existing or new distros coming up with "no age verification" as their unique feature.

Guess what? We have a new distro called Ageless Linux which is created specifically to refuse compliance with OS-level age verification laws.

But it's more than just a distro; the project also maintains a tracker of where various distros and organizations stand on age verification and a $12 RISC-V hardware project aimed at putting non-compliant devices in the hands of schoolchildren. I am glad that it exists.

Here are other highlights of this edition of FOSS Weekly:

• Things you can do Linux but not on Windows
• Chrome on ARM Linux (aka Raspberry Pi).
• A new web browser for Linux users.
• GNOME 50 and Fedora Ashahi releases
• And other Linux news, tips, and, of course, memes!

📰 Linux and Open Source News

GNOME 50 is here and X11 is not. Wayland is all the way in this new release. Upcoming distros like Ubuntu 26.04 and Fedora 44 will have it. Rolling distros like Arch should also get it soon.

Google has officially announced Chrome for ARM64 Linux, with a release targeted for Q2 2026. That means Raspberry Pi users, Snapdragon laptop owners, and anyone else running ARM hardware will get the Chrome experience on Linux.

Although, not open source, Kagi's Orion browser has made it to Linux as a public beta, and it's genuinely interesting because it's one of the browsers on the platform not built on Chromium or Firefox's engine. It is based on WebKit and works okayish on GNOME.

A significant chunk of the Manjaro team has gone public with the "Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto," signed by 19 members, calling for the project to separate from its parent company and restructure as a nonprofit.

Fedora Asahi Remix 43 arrives with Mac Pro support. In case you did not know, Asahi is the project bring Linux to Apple's Silicon processors.

AI companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta etc have put $12.5M into Open Source Security, managed by Linux Foundation. This is funny in a way. They are putting together a fund to fix the problem their AI tools created in the first place.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

Google wants every Android developer to register using their real identity before their apps will install on certified devices, but not everyone's on board.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

A clean beginner's guide to Markdown covering the core syntax: headings, text formatting, links, images, lists, and block quotes. It comes with a downloadable cheat sheet and a few recommendations for online editors if you want to try it without installing anything.

Windows users have been conditioned to ask, "But can Linux do X?" This piece by Roland flips it around and asks what Linux can do that Windows can't. The answers range from practical (live sessions, moving installs between machines, reviving old hardware) to genuinely impressive (swapping kernels, choosing filesystems, replacing every layer of your stack).

📚 eBook bundle on AI

Inside this 20+ eBook library, you’ll gain expert insights from practical lessons like Learn Python Programming, 4E and the LLM Engineer's Handbook. These massively efficient tools save you time and effort so you can prioritize other important tasks and systems.

Your purchase supports the World Central Kitchen organization.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

If your Raspberry Pi homelab is freezing up under load, the default 200 MB swap is probably the first thing worth looking at.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

If your GNOME top panel has turned into a wall of icons, Veil is worth a look. It's a shell extension that lets you hide panel items behind a toggle arrow.

📽️ Videos for You

You could move away from Google today if you wanted to, and DuckDuckGo is one of the good ones to consider.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

In Nautilus file manager, you can press CTRL+F to start a search in the current directory and CTRL+SHIFT+F to search across the other system folders. To go even further, you can add new search locations via the Search settings.

And, if you use the shortcut CTRL+ALT+O after selecting a file or folder, you can go to it's location in the file manager. Do note that this works in the Search and Recent pages of the file manager.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Do you know the brain behind Debian? This Ian Murdock quiz will test your knowledge.

🤣 Meme of the Week: We must protect it at all costs!

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On March 17, 1988, Apple sued Microsoft for copyright infringement over the look and feel of the Windows GUI. Apple's argument was that Windows borrowed too heavily from the Macintosh interface it had debuted in 1984. The case dragged on for years before a judge ruled that Apple had only limited rights to the design elements in question.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: One of our regular Pro FOSSers is having an issue with CUPS on antiX Linux; can you help?

Fedora Asahi Remix is a collaboration between the Fedora Asahi SIG and the Asahi Linux project that has brought Fedora Linux to Apple Silicon Macs. While I have personally never used it, I have seen its development progress consistently.

Each release has closed more hardware gaps, brought the experience closer to what you would expect on native hardware, and stayed in sync with mainline Fedora. Its latest release keeps that momentum going.

🆕 Fedora Asahi Remix 43: A Packed Release

Based on Fedora 43, this release of Fedora Asahi Remix 43 takes advantage of Linux kernel 6.17 and comes with KDE Plasma 6.6 as the desktop environment.

The latter is the flagship desktop that has introduced quite a few useful upgrades. One of the more practical ones is the OCR support in Spectacle. You can now pull text directly from a screenshot, making it helpful for situations where you need to copy something out of an image or a terminal error you cannot select.

Accessibility also sees many additions. Plasma Keyboard is the brand new on-screen keyboard that replaces the older solution, and a grayscale filter has been added to the Color Blindness Correction options in System Settings.

Beyond that, it also introduces Plasma Setup, a first-run wizard that handles user account creation separately from OS installation. This should come in handy for anyone setting up a new machine.

A GNOME variant is also available, featuring GNOME 49, which comes with new default apps, shell upgrades, and file manager refinements.

Both desktop variants benefit from RPM 6.0, which delivers some security-focused changes like full fingerprint-based OpenPGP key identification, multiple signatures per package, and OpenPGP v6 support with post-quantum cryptography.

Then there is the inclusion of the DNF5 backend that ensures Plasma Discover and GNOME Software now use the same underlying package management plumbing as everything else on the system. This specific change has yet to arrive on mainline Fedora and is on track for a Fedora 44 debut.

Hardware support also sees work, with the Mac Pro now being a supported device, and users of M2 Pro and M2 Max-powered MacBooks now getting functional microphones. There's also 120Hz refresh rate support for the MacBook Pro 14 and 16 models.

📥 Get Fedora Asahi Remix 43

All you need is a single command to get Fedora Asahi Remix installed on your Mac device. But you have to take note that this distro only works on Apple Silicon Macs running at least macOS 13.5 or 14.2.

curl https://fedora-asahi-remix.org/install | sh

Existing users, you will have to follow the upgrade guide for Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop to get this release on your computer. If you are on the GNOME variant, then you will have to use DNF to get this release.

The Linux Foundation has announced $12.5 million in grants to strengthen open source software security. The funding will be managed by Alpha-Omega and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), two of its security-focused initiatives.

The idea behind this move is to tackle the growing problem of AI tools generating security findings (both legit and hallucination ones) at a scale open source maintainers simply cannot keep up with.

We already know that many open source projects don't have the resources or tooling to handle such a flood of reports. Combined with the other development-related issues they have to tackle, a project could be in real trouble if they are overwhelmed with AI slop.

Alpha-Omega and OpenSSF plan to work directly with maintainers to make sure whatever security tooling comes out of this is actually practical and fits into how their projects already work. The goal is to help them stay on top of growing security demands without getting completely buried.

The AI giants who have pitched in include the likes of:

• Anthropic
• AWS
• Google
• Google DeepMind
• GitHub
• Microsoft
• OpenAI

On this, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux Foundation Fellow and Linux kernel maintainer, said:

Grant funding alone is not going to help solve the problem that AI tools are causing today on open source security teams. OpenSSF has the active resources needed to support numerous projects that will help these overworked maintainers with the triage and processing of the increased AI-generated security reports they are currently receiving.

This is not unfounded

Back in 2025, cURL's bug bounty program on HackerOne got hit with a wave of AI-generated reports. These were not real vulnerability findings, just a vomit of unresearched submissions that people were clearly generating with AI and sending off without actually understanding what they were reporting.

cURL's creator, Daniel Stenberg, initially tried to push back. He warned that anyone submitting AI slop would get publicly named, ridiculed, and banned. That did not really help. By January 2026, the project had already gone through 20 submissions in the first few weeks alone.

So, the cURL bug bounty program was shut down entirely. I am betting that the developers are putting all this saved effort and time into tackling more productive tasks.

Of course this funding grant does not fully remedy the problem of AI slop for open source projects, but it is at least a step in the right direction. These deep-pocketed AI giants need to do better, and hopefully this sets a precedent.

Suggested Read 📖: Linux Market Share Statistics

GNOME has had quite a journey so far, consistently evolving according to the community's needs, gaining both loyal users and ardent haters. Each release has brought steadier foundations, a more coherent design language, and a growing set of applications built around the same visual identity.

What it offers is fairly compelling. GNOME is built around a Wayland-first approach, with a consistent design system through Libadwaita, a decent attempt at accessibility, and a core app suite that handles most everyday tasks without much additional configuration.

Its latest release, GNOME 50, continues on that path with some major changes.

GNOME 50: What's New?

There is a decent amount packed into this release. On the shell side, there is more control over screen time limits, the top bar now shows a power mode indicator when you are not on the default profile, and a few annoyances around keyboard layouts and folder handling have been addressed.

The removal of X11 from GDM is the change most people will have an opinion about. It was supposed to happen in GNOME 49 but got pulled back at the last minute due to a bug. GNOME 50 sees it through, and this time it is not coming back.

Accessibility also sees some attention, specifically around Orca. The screen reader gets a redesigned preferences window, global settings that no longer need to be saved on a per-app basis, and a new option for reading chat room messages.

There is more to this release than that of course, and we will get into the details further below.

X11 is Gone

If you followed the GNOME 49 release, you may remember that X11 briefly came back. The plan had been to disable X11 sessions in GDM by default, but a bug caused GDM to stop detecting /usr/share/xsessions, which meant other desktops' X11 sessions would not appear at login.

The change was rolled back temporarily with an explicit assurance that GNOME 50 would finish the job. GDM now runs entirely on Wayland for its own sessions. X11 support has been removed outright, along with the ability to compile GDM without Wayland support.

Features that depended on X11, including XDCMP and the system-wide X server, are also gone. Desktop environments that ship their own X11 sessions can still be launched via a per-user X server, so Plasma, Xfce, and the others are not caught out by this.

Shell Refinements

The Shell picks up a mix of new features and reliability fixes. Parents can now extend screen time limits directly from the interface, and screen time tracking has been corrected to work properly when idle inhibitors are active (i.e. when apps are preventing the system from going idle).

This release also introduces a non-default power mode indicator in the top bar, so it is visible at a glance if the system is running in a performance or power-saving mode. The volume slider snaps to 100% when over-amplification is enabled. This should clear up any confusion about where the recommended volume ceiling actually sits during adjustment.

A couple of smaller but welcome fixes include default folders that were manually deleted no longer reappearing after a reboot, and password text is no longer exposed in IM pre-edit fields, which was a privacy concern.

Better Display Handling

Variable refresh rate and fractional scaling are two settings that have been sitting behind an experimental flag for so long that many users have either forgotten about them or given up on them.

Both are now stable features in Mutter, and if you have a high refresh rate display and skipped enabling these before, this is the release to try them properly.

HiDPI support has been extended to remote desktop and color management sees meaningful additions too with HDR screen sharing, a new SDR-native color mode, and wp-color-management v2 protocol support.

Discrete GPU detection has been improved which should help multi-GPU setups behave more predictably. For NVIDIA, Mutter has some fixes to handle driver quirks to improve performance on those GPUs.

Nautilus Buffs

The Files (aka Nautilus) app sees a significant round of improvements with this release. Path completion in the location bar is now case-insensitive, which is a small change that makes the experience noticeably smoother when you are typing quickly and not thinking about capitalization.

Thumbnails are now loaded through Glycin, GNOME's sandboxed image loading library, completing a change that caused missing image thumbnails for some users (including myself).

Icon caching has been reworked alongside this, and the multi-file properties dialog has been improved. Similarly, image thumbnails in the properties view now display against a checkerboard background, making it easier to see transparency at a glance.

Accessibility Upgrades

Orca gets a substantial overhaul, where the screen reader gets a redesigned preferences window that is more visually consistent with the rest of the GNOME ecosystem (it is still GTK3 tho).

More practically, all settings and commands are now global by default, meaning that you don't need to manually save settings on a per-application basis, though doing so is still possible.

Additionally, automatic language switching has been added for both web and interface content, and Browse mode now works across all document content rather than being limited to web pages.

On the platform side, at-spi2-core gains the pointer-moved, key-pressed, and key-released signals. These give assistive technologies a cleaner way to track pointer and keyboard input, with the pointer-moved signal supported on both X11 and on Wayland when the compositor implements the org.freedesktop.a11y.PointerLocator interface.

Other Changes and Improvements

We conclude this article with a few other notable refinements that include:

• As usual, a set of fresh wallpapers is included.
• Loupe (the image viewer) adds support for XPM and JPEG 2000 formats.
• The new session save and restore feature has been postponed to a future release.
• GTK 4 has dropped its Librsvg dependency as it can now render SVGs natively.
• Calendar now shows event attendees in the event editor dialog and supports arrow key navigation in the Month view.

The release notes contain all the useful information you will need about this release.

How to Get GNOME 50?

If you run a rolling release distribution like Arch Linux, EndeavourOS, and CachyOS, GNOME 50 will arrive as an upgrade as soon as the maintainers are done pushing it to the repos.

The upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44 releases will also feature this GNOME release, so be sure to keep an eye out for those.

If you are an impatient one, then GNOME OS is the most straightforward way to get GNOME 50, though it is not yet a full-fledged Linux distribution.

Suggested Read 📖: What the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release offers

Manjaro has long been one of the more popular Arch-based Linux distributions, known for making Arch Linux more accessible to everyday users. But it has been losing ground for years, both in terms of user trust and active contributors, and the complaints about its direction have only gotten louder.

Now, things have hit a breaking point, with calls for a fork if the current leadership does not budge.

A Manjaro team member going by the handle "Aragorn" has published the "Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto" on the official Manjaro forum. The post lays out a detailed restructuring plan for the project that has been signed by 19 team members, including developers, community managers, moderators, and the company's technical lead.

Is there any weight behind this?

The manifesto opens by stating that the Manjaro Project has been declining over the past decade, losing trust and contributors while repeating the same mistakes without ever addressing them.

One example cited is the repeated failure to keep TLS certificates current, something volunteers had reportedly already built tooling to fix, only to be ignored.

From there, it goes after the core issue directly. Aragorn writes that Philip Müller (the project lead) has been running Manjaro as his own personal venture rather than a community effort, keeping a tight hold on access to both the codebase and the infrastructure.

Aragorn goes on to say that:

The priorities of the Project leadership do not align with those of the developers and community. The current leadership’s goal is to turn Manjaro into a successful business, and thus far, these attempts have mostly failed.

The money situation makes it worse. The manifesto says the company, Manjaro GmbH & Co KG, has not been funneling any of its funds back into the project and has not pursued outside funding either.

What the team wants is a clean separation, where the Manjaro Project is spun off from Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG and restructured as a registered nonprofit association under German law (e.V.).

The new structure would distribute ownership equally among members, use transparent voting for major decisions, and assign "arbiter" roles to experienced contributors for specific domains.

Under the proposal, the nonprofit would get full use of the Manjaro trademark through 2029. The company keeps the right to use it too, as long as the two don't step on each other's toes. After that initial period, the manifesto nudges the company to declare that it is willing to hand over full trademark ownership to the nonprofit for €1.

Key assets like the GitHub organizations, the self-hosted GitLab instance, forum, CDN, and the manjaro.org domain would all move over to the non-profit as well.

The team has also laid out what would happen if they were ignored. The "Our Resolve" section of the manifesto says that there are three stages (from 0-2): waiting for a reply, striking and going public, and finally forking or leaving. Within Stage 1, there are three phases that control how public the document gets.

They skipped Phase 2 and jumped straight to Phase 3 a few days ago, moving the manifesto to the public Announcements section of the forum and archiving the thread on archive.org. If things don't improve, then a forum lockdown is on the table.

Don't think that this is some kind of witch hunt. One of the Manjaro team members, Dennis ten Hoove, has clarified that the goal of this initiative is not to kick people off the project but to change the leadership and help foster Manjaro as a healthy community-driven project.

Expect a bumpy transition

Philip did break his silence on the matter, saying that he is fine with an association being formed but wants no part in setting one up himself. He also made clear that handing over any assets would need to happen on the company's terms and closed with a warning that public statements damaging to either himself or the business could have legal consequences.

The protesting team's response was measured, where Aragorn pushed back, pointing out that the manifesto already lets the company continue using the infrastructure for as long as it needs to move its operations elsewhere.

Roman Gilg, who signed the manifesto despite being the company's CTO, put a direct question to Philip, asking whether he had any specific objection to the list of assets outlined in the document. Philip went quiet again.

After days of silence on that question, Aragorn declared that Philip was stalling and announced the team was skipping Phase 2 and moving straight to Phase 3 (where things stand as of now).

What can you do?

There's an active community discussion thread with over 200 replies, started specifically to accommodate talks surrounding the manifesto. If you have thoughts on what's going wrong with the Manjaro project and what could be done better, you can head over and weigh in.

One of the Manjaro old timers, Stefano Capitani, has recently posted there, sharing his view of the situation:

I have to apologize to all of you. It seems I’ve missed some of the events here. I believe, without fear of contradiction, that I, along with @guinux , @oberon , and of course @philm, am one of the “old timers” still active, if not as much as before, but still active in Manjaro.

I have to be honest, I feel like I’m having flashbacks because we’ve already had these discussions or “storms” in the past. We’ve always come out stronger, and we’ll come out stronger this time too.

PS: You need to be logged in to the Manjaro forum to view user profiles.

Suggested Read 📖: Ageless Linux Emerges to Protest OS-Level Age Verification Laws

A new Linux distro has appeared.

Not surprisinhg. We get new Linux distributions almost every month, sometimes even every week.

This one is based on Debian. Again, not surprising. Debian has long been the mother of countless Linux distros.

But the interesting part isn’t the base. It’s the reason this distro exists.

It was created as a symbol of resistance.

That’s also not new in the Linux world. Many distros have been born out of disagreement or protest. For example, Void Linux emerged during the heated systemd controversy, offering a system that avoided systemd entirely.

The new distro, called Ageless Linux, follows a similar idea. It’s essentially Debian Linux but without age verification.

Age verification… what?

A new trend is quietly spreading across the United States: laws that require age verification at the operating system level.

It started with California, and states like Colorado, New York, and Illinois have proposed similar legislation. Reports also suggest that Brazil may be moving in the same direction.

What makes this development even more interesting is that Meta, the company behind Facebook, reportedly lobbied heavily for these laws.

Until now, governments mainly pressured social media platforms to verify users’ ages to prevent young children and teenagers from accessing certain services.

Meta’s proposal shifts that responsibility. Instead of every app or website verifying a user’s age individually, the operating system would verify it once.

Then, through an API exposed by the OS or its app store, applications could simply ask the system for the user’s age or age category.

In other words, your operating system becomes the age gatekeeper for every app you install.

And that idea has sparked a lot of debate in the tech community especially among Linux and open-source developers.

Why age verification is 'incompatible' with Linux ecosystem?

At first glance, age verification sounds reasonable. Governments argue that it helps protect children from harmful online content. But many developers and privacy advocates see serious problems with pushing this responsibility to the operating system.

The biggest concern is privacy. Linux distributions traditionally collect little to no personal information about users. Unlike Apple and Microsoft, you are not forced to create an online account before using an operating system. Introducing age verification could mean that operating systems must store or process sensitive identity data, something many Linux projects have deliberately avoided for decades.

Some critics suspect the push is less about child safety and more about control, warning that once operating systems begin verifying identity or age, it becomes easier to expand such systems to regulate broader online activity.

Another issue is security risk. If operating systems start storing age or identity information, it creates a new type of data that could potentially be misused, leaked, or exploited. Even if only age categories are shared with apps, it still introduces a form of system-level user profiling.

There is also a philosophical concern. Many of us in the open-source world believe an operating system should remain a neutral tool, not a platform that enforces identity verification or government regulations.

Because of these concerns, some developers and users see OS-level age verification as a step toward turning operating systems into identity gatekeepers, which runs against the long-standing Linux ethos of user freedom and minimal to no data collection.

Ageless Linux

Unsurprisingly, the age-verification proposal has raised serious discussions in the open-source world. From what it seems, most mainstream distros will enable this feature in one way or another. That includes Debian.

I anticipated this situation. I had a feeling that there would be some new distros offering “no age verification” as their main feature.

That’s precisely what Ageless Linux has done.

The project positions itself as a statement against OS-level age verification. Instead of building systems that identify and categorize users by age, Ageless Linux sticks to a much simpler idea: an operating system should run software, not act as a digital identity checker.

Ageless Linux is a registered operating system under the definitions established by the California Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043, Chapter 675, Statutes of 2025). We are in full, knowing, and intentional noncompliance with the age verification requirements of Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.501(a).

In practical terms, Ageless Linux is basically Debian with the age-verification pieces removed or avoided. The goal isn’t to reinvent Linux, but to ensure that users who oppose these laws still have a distribution that does not participate in age-verification frameworks.

More than just another Linux distro actually

I am glad that Ageless Linux did not stop at "Debian without age verification". Browsing the website, it seems they are more of a project that stands against age verification.

They have a dedicated page, and hopefully a database in the future, that lists the stance of various distros and organizations on the age verification issue. There is a page that lists US state laws that require operating system providers to collect age data from users.

So it’s not just a distro; it’s becoming a full-fledged portal documenting and opposing age-verification laws.

In addition to that, they also have an ambitious hardware project that is "designed to satisfy every element of the California Digital Age Assurance Act's regulatory scope while deliberately refusing to comply with its requirements."

This hardware is basically a $12 RISC-V ARM board. They have named it "Ageless Device" and the aim is to give it to children in schools.

And I’m glad they are not restricting themselves to just a distro, but are moving toward becoming a non-profit organization that educates people about the potential dangers of age verification turning into surveillance infrastructure.

Do check them out.

Kagi is best known for its privacy-focused search engine, but the company has been quietly building out a broader ecosystem of tools for people who would rather pay for software than be the product.

One of those tools is Orion, a web browser built on WebKit, the same engine that powers Safari, with a strong focus on privacy and customization.

Unlike most browsers you will come across on Linux, Orion is not a Chromium derivative or a Firefox fork. It is a fresh build that has earned a reputation for being fast, lightweight, and flexible, with support for extensions from Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

For a long time, that experience was exclusive to macOS and iOS users. But that has changed as Kagi has been working on bringing Orion to Linux. After an alpha phase limited to Orion+ subscribers, the team has opened things up with an early beta build for everyone to try out.

Orion for Linux: What to Expect?

The Beta build has basic browsing functionality in place, with additional bits like password management, browsing history, Dark Mode, and Focus Mode included.

The developers have also addressed a handful of stability issues, including crashes when closing pinned tabs, freezes in Website Settings, and a bug that prevented new tabs from being created on fresh installations.

That said, Kagi Sync and WebKit Extensions are still in development and not available in this beta, so do not go in expecting the full macOS feature set just yet.

A Quick Look

The user interface feels modern and fits in well with GNOME, though the toolbar is a bit cluttered at the top. Kagi Search is set as the default search engine, and you will need to log in to your Kagi account to use it or switch to one of the other search engines via the Settings menu.

Basic web browsing works for the most part, but every so often, Orion throws an "Orion can't open this page" error without much explanation. More bizarre is what happens when you open a page heavy with ads—Orion randomly launches the file manager.

Media controls work reasonably well on GNOME, though there were multiple duplicate entries for WebKit in the media panel. The one actually tied to whatever is playing was the last one, labeled "Playback Stream."

Many other features are either broken or inconsistent at this stage. The sidebar toggle on the top left, Focus Mode, the Share option, Page Tweaks, Website Settings, and Privacy Reports all fall into that bucket. Some of them do nothing and act as placeholders; others behave unpredictably.

The History page, while functional, refuses to open any of the listed webpages when an entry is double-clicked or even launched via the right-click context menu. It also failed to properly list quite a few of the webpages I visited during testing.

The in-built Password Manager works well, letting me add new entries with details like the website URL, username, and password. Searching through them is straightforward via the search bar on top, and importing/exporting passwords looks doable (I didn't test it tho).

If you have multiple windows and tabs open, Orion will prompt you with a warning to take note of the open content and that it will restore those the next time you launch the browser. This is a handy feature that worked decently during my use.

Download Orion Browser Beta

Kagi provides a direct download for the Flatpak package of this beta build, which should work on most popular Linux distributions that have Flatpak configured.

If you run into any issues, there is a dedicated category on Orion's Public Issue Tracker for bug reports and troubleshooting. Additionally, the project's GitHub repository hosts some open-sourced components.

As for the stable release, there is no official timeline yet, but with an early beta already out, in a few months time feels like a reasonable estimate.

Amidst all the chaos in the world, some significant moves are being orchestrated that could potentially have detrimental effects on people's privacy and right to choose. Google's Developer Verification program falls under the latter.

Starting September 2026 (in certain regions), any app installed on a certified Android device will need to come from a developer who has gone through Google's new verification process. This applies regardless of where the app comes from: the Play Store, a third-party storefront, or a direct APK download.

To get verified, developers must register through a dedicated Android Developer Console and provide their legal name, address, email address, and phone number. In some cases, they will also need to upload a government-issued ID.

Organizations are additionally required to provide a D-U-N-S Number, a business identifier issued by Dun & Bradstreet that can take up to 30 business days to obtain.

There are two account tiers on offer: a Full Distribution account with a one-time $25 fee and a free Limited Distribution account for students and hobbyists that skips the government ID requirement. Installs via ADB and apps deployed through enterprise managed device systems are exempt from the requirements.

The requirement goes live in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand first in September, followed by a global rollout from 2027 onward. We covered the initial announcement back in August 2025, when the first alarm bells started ringing.

But is there any convincing justification behind this? Let's find out.

Does it make sense?

Kinda, Google's official position is that this is a security measure. The company points to its own research showing that apps from internet sideloading sources are over 50 times more likely to contain malware compared to those distributed through the Play Store.

The core idea is accountability. Right now, a developer caught distributing malware can be removed from the Play Store and come straight back under a different identity. Developer verification is meant to make that harder by tying app distribution to a verified real-world identity.

In theory, repeat offenders would have a harder time cycling through new accounts to keep spreading harmful content, so there's a reasonable argument here.

Anonymous distribution channels have historically been where a lot of malware activity takes place. Raising the barrier for bad actors to operate at scale is not, on its face, an unreasonable goal.

And for the average Android user who installs apps without thinking much about where they come from, more accountability in the ecosystem is not a bad thing.

Why it doesn't

Take F-Droid, the long-running free and open source Android app repository that has been around for more than 15 years now. It does not build apps in the traditional sense but rather takes publicly available source code, reviews it for compliance with open source principles, compiles it, and distributes it signed with its own cryptographic key.

Under the new rules, F-Droid has no workable path forward. Compelling volunteer contributors to register their identities with Google runs against what the platform stands for.

But claiming those app identifiers on developers' behalf is equally impossible, since that would give F-Droid a kind of exclusive ownership over apps it has no right to own.

F-Droid has been clear that if Google goes through this, it effectively ends the project as it currently exists. IzzyOnDroid, another third-party storefront that distributes developer-signed APKs also faces the same fate.

Enter the Keep Android Open initiative.

It is a community campaign built around stopping Developer Verification. It's open letter to Google so far has 56 signatories from 19 countries, including the EFF, FSF, Tor Project, Proton, KDE, LineageOS, CryptPad, Nextcloud, Vivaldi, and the Software Freedom Conservancy.

The letter argues that Google is overreaching into distribution channels outside its own store, that mandatory registration creates barriers for independent developers and researchers, and that centralizing developer data with Google raises serious surveillance and government access concerns.

The initiative is also urging developers to refuse participation in Google's early access program entirely and not to perform identity verification or accept an invitation to the new Android Developer Console, arguing that without developer buy-in, the verification program simply cannot succeed.

What this means for you

If a significant number of open source developers and smaller projects choose not to register with Google, or cannot do so because of privacy concerns, where they live, or the structural incompatibility of how their apps are distributed, their apps will simply stop working on certified Android devices.

The expected outcome for you is a narrower selection of apps and fewer alternatives to what is available on the Play Store.

There is also a broader principle at stake here. Centralizing all app distribution under Google's registration system hands one corporation the ability to cut off any app on any certified Android device globally.

That kind of consolidated authority over a platform used by billions of people is unsettling.

I think bad actors will always find new ways to distribute malicious apps. They did before developer verification, and they will after. Then there's nation-state spyware, which operates on a different level entirely, and the developer registration requirement was never going to touch that (makes you think, huh).

What Google could have leaned into instead is user education with clearer warnings, better guidance, and more effective communication about what a risky install actually looks like.

In the end, not everyone can be spoon-fed through this. At some point, it is on the person operating the smartphone to exercise a little judgment.

We all know Linux gives us a world of freedoms we couldn't possibly have on Windows, but have you ever stopped to think about that freedom in real, qualitative terms? After all, when most people say they can't switch to Linux, it's usually because of something they just can't do without Windows or macOS or Android (which itself is Linux, even if most don't consider it such).

So, let's take a closer look at some of the things you can do on/with a Linux system that you just can't typically do on Windows.

1. Live USB/Live session

It goes without saying that this one deserves the #1 spot on this list. After all, for most of us, our first experience with Linux was at the welcome screen of a live session from a USB, SD card, or, in the past, CD or DVD. If you go even further back, some of us (myself included) first got to know Linux through the likes of Damn Small Linux running a live session inside Windows itself.

The crazy thing? Live CDs have been a part of the Linux experience since the early 90s, when we still regularly used floppy drives! And yes, live floppies were a thing, too. In fact, they still are.

Not only is there no official way to run Windows as a live session out the box, but Microsoft's own live session solution, Windows To Go, was an enterprise-only solution and has been discontinued. Non-standard solutions exist, but these are on shaky ground in that they rely on creating a Windows install on portable media, which is something Microsoft hasn't sanctioned.

2. Login screen customization

No lie, this one blew me away when I first switched to Linux from Windows. I'd always loved the idea of customising my system's visuals, and the fact I couldn't do this easily on Windows was a source of frustration. So to come from a world where I needed to risk malware or pay a fee just to put a wallpaper on the login screen to the full-scale flexibility of Linux has never stopped being amazing.

Not only can you change your wallpaper, but you can change the layout, even swap out the login manager altogether. Don't like the layout and style of GDM? Try SDDM or LightDM for greater flexibility, or even Ly, if you prefer something terminal-based. As a matter of fact, you can completely ditch the login manager altogether and boot straight to a TTY or desktop environment if you desire.

While you can change your wallpaper on recent releases of Windows, customising your login screen beyond this or changing your login manager altogether is simply not possible. After all, Microsoft wants you to log in with your Microsoft account going forward, so a third-party solution would somehow need to account for this.

3. Changing your desktop environment

Maybe I shouldn't even say "desktop environment" here, because let's be honest — Linux has way more than just desktop environments for us to play with. We've got a broad selection of window managers (compositors, with the rise of Wayland), desktop environments, desktop-independent panels, docks, you name it. Whether you want to do minimal bling with Wayfire or Hyprland, or sink your teeth into something beefy with Plasma or GNOME, the choice is yours.

You can customise your layout, app selection, software store, launchers, or whatever you like, and you won't be penalised for it, nor do you have to pay a dime or risk giving your data to a company that could go defunct and leave you hanging.

Can you change your desktop environment or window manager on Windows? Nope. Sure, you can use third-party tools to achieve some degree of customisation, but these methods are not officially supported and may even violate the operating system's terms of use. Many of these customisations break standard features in Explorer or other parts of the system and can easily fail when Microsoft releases routine updates.

4. Use the system without a GUI

Whether it's booting to the recovery session, running with the login manager disabled, or using a headless install through SSH, there are many ways you can use Linux on real hardware without ever using a graphical interface of any sort. While this option may not appeal to the majority of "average" users, it's still a pretty important distinction. You can use Linux as minimally as you need, even if it's as a temporary solution to bring up your graphical system just as you'd prefer.

For instance, this is the standard way to install Arch, by the way, and you can customise just about any distro to function in the same way even after installation. What makes this possible is the fact that what we know as "Linux" is actually a collection of software: the kernel, GNU utilities, init systems, and more. By choosing exactly what combination of software you're using, you can set up a minimal system that requires no graphical components whatsoever and still directly or remotely execute software from the system. It's even possible to set up such a system to display graphics over the network.

In the case of Windows (for consumers), this pathway isn't supported whatsoever. If something goes wrong, recovery is typically a graphical affair. Even Safe Mode is primarily designed around this. Running Windows as a text-based operating system just isn't something the average consumer can do.

5. Install it on just about anything

Linux on a fridge? A toaster? A toothbrush? Yes. And it probably can run Doom, too. The reality is, Linux is so flexible and portable, it can run on just about any device with a processor, even a tiny microcontroller. From the world's most powerful supercomputers to some of the smallest single-board computers and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, Linux has grown to basically power the majority of the digital world. There are even custom distributions for many non-standard devices, from game consoles to smartwatches, and the list just keeps growing.

On the contrary, while Windows has spread to some other devices over the years, it's not anywhere near the level of portability we have with Linux. You can't just grab a Windows ARM ISO and install it on a Raspberry Pi. You can't put Windows on a smart fridge either, unless the manufacturer happens to have an existing agreement and collaboration with Microsoft. Plus, since Windows is objectively not open-source, the community can't port it on their own.

Linux on the other hand, we can take wherever we want, not only because it's open-source but also because it was built with portability in mind. It can easily be stripped down and streamlined to fit just about any hardware. That's a freedom we just don't have with Windows.

6. Move your Linux install between systems

You might not have ever considered this, but really think about it. Let's say your current laptop or workstation goes down, maybe because the CPU burnt out or the motherboard got damaged, but the SSD is still working just fine. With Windows, it's time to get a new licence. You can certainly recover your files, provided your drive wasn't encrypted, but it's unlikely you're sticking that SSD in another system, booting it up, and continuing on like nothing happened. The bad news is, this is getting even harder with the introduction of mandatory Microsoft accounts attached to your system's TPM chip.

With Linux on the other hand, that's actually a pretty common workflow. I know this first-hand, because I've done it with multiple systems in the past. Sure, if you've got proprietary drivers installed, you may need to ensure that you remove them if your hardware differs too strongly, especially in the case of graphics cards.

Yet, Linux won't just automatically give up and quit if your drivers don't match your hardware. Instead, it'll choose a fallback method or fail to a command-line interface until you get that sorted out. It's a fascinating experience once you actually try it (or are forced to do it).

7. Customize or even swap your kernel

Imagine one day you wake up and decide you need to swap your kernel for a more optimised workflow. It could go something like this:

"Hmm, let's see here, should I run the Liquorix kernel today or the real-time kernel? How about the mainline kernel? Choices, choices..."

This is one thing long-time Linux users may take for granted, but it's actually a pretty big deal that we can do this in the first place. Again, this is made possible not only by the open-source nature of the kernel but also by the modular nature of most of the distributions we use. As a result of this modular nature, we can swap kernels any time we need to, especially so long as the distribution we're using provides a method for doing this.

Why might you need a different kernel? Well, it can be for any number of reasons, but typically, it's down to two main needs: better driver support and better performance. Newer kernels typically have broader support for new hardware, but sometimes an older kernel may also be needed for a specific device or quirk. Likewise, performance can vary with different kernel versions and build-time configurations.

Needless to say, this isn't something a normal user can do on Windows beyond applying standard updates. Yet on Linux, it's something so normal as to not even feel remarkable.

8. Choose different filesystems during installation

Windows supports a few filesystems for reading/writing files, including the typical FAT and EXFAT filesystems, NTFS, and more recently, ReFS, which is more used for server environments. However, when it comes time to actually install the system your options are pretty limited. You can install your main system on an NTFS filesystem, and with the exception of the FAT32 EFI partition, that's about it. No other filesystems are supported out the box, and while Windows setup supports loading third-party drivers, this doesn't cleanly open the door to installing Windows on any non-standard filesystems.

On the other hand, Linux supports many filesystems by default, and most distros give you the option to install on a much broader selection of them. Most offer at least the option of using ext4 or Btrfs, with some, such as Fedora, offering additional options, like XFS. In theory, you can even move your Linux install from one filesystem to another, provided you have the knowhow. For instance, btrfs-convert lets you convert an existing ext2, ext3, or ext4 installation to Btrfs.

9. Revive older hardware

Windows is notorious for its tendency to introduce seemingly unnecessary, forced hardware requirements that stop users from being able to keep using their older hardware, even when testing proves that Windows would run on it just fine. With Windows 11, things have never been worse. Perfectly powerful systems from as recently as 2017 or 2018 are somehow not supported all because of Microsoft's tighter hardware requirements, including requiring a TPM 2.0 chip, Secure Boot, and other platform features that can sometimes just barely edge a system out.

It gets worse when you consider the bloat that's been steadily creeping (or pouring) into Windows over the decades. Since users don't have any right to control what's in Windows by default or create their own official "Windows distribution", there's no way around this.

Not so with Linux, as many are discovering, and as you may have seen earlier with Linux running live off a floppy disk. In fact, there are Linux distributions especially built for this very reason, such as Puppy Linux and antiX, which the modern DSL 2024 is based on. Furthermore, Linux can be compiled specifically for older systems, even those with 32bit processors, unlike Windows, which typically drops older hardware with no way back.

10. Swap parts of your stack, as you wish

We've already talked about how you can swap your desktop environment, login manager, and kernel, but to end off this list, I think we should dig a little deeper. Unlike Windows which basically dictates what your operating system stack is from the ground up and provides few options for change, Linux gives you freedom change pretty much everything. For instance, let's say you're running Ubuntu and you really don't like snaps. Solution? Remove snapd.

You're probably thinking "But won't snapd just reinstall itself on the next update?", and the answer is no, but even if that were the case, you could block the update by locking the package. You can also change your init system, audio system, display system (betwen X11 and Wayland, and now the various forks of X11 that have popped up since it was all-but-abandoned).

Put simply, whatever you don't like about Linux, technically, you can change it. You just have to know how to do it and what to do if something goes wrong along the way. In some cases, there are even scripts that can automate the process for you, or distributions that do exactly what it is you're looking for already. For example, there's Devuan for Debian users who don't want systemd.

While unofficial "builds" of Windows exist, such as Tiny 11, most of these taking risk by distributing modified ISOs of Microsoft's intellectual property. It's legally gray at best, but it's pretty much the only option for many users.

Final thoughts: The narrative needs to flip

I could've kept this list going even longer, but I think the point is clear. While there are legitimate grievances like software that hasn't been ported yet, or challenges with hardware that vendors haven't provided drivers for, the reality is that Linux has a lot going for it if you stop to give it a fair shake.

If you've not yet tried Linux, maybe now's a good time to see what all the hype's about (and I don't just mean Hyprland, all though that's pretty sweet too). There's a lot you can do just fine on Linux that you can't actually do on Windows, or if you can, it's definitely not a walk in the park, whereas for us Linux denizens, it's just another part of daily life.

If you ask my advice, I say go for it: see what you've been missing, and you might just get hooked over this side too.

Here is the big news. Google plans to bring its flagship Chrome browser for ARM64 Linux devices. The release is set for the second quarter (April-June) of 2026.

Which means you should be able to use Google Chrome on Raspberry Pi and other single board computers and laptops with Snapdragon processors.

Google highlighted this in the announcement:

Launching Chrome for ARM64 Linux devices allows more users to enjoy the seamless integration of Google’s most helpful services into their browser. This move addresses the growing demand for a browsing experience that combines the benefits of the open-source Chromium project with the Google ecosystem of apps and features.

But there is Chromium available already

Many FOSS purists prefer Chromium over Chrome, as it is the open-source project that serves as the foundation for Google Chrome. In fact, many Linux distributions, even on non-ARM devices, ship Chromium as the default browser.

However, Chromium is not the same as Chrome. DRM playback support is often limited, Google account sync typically requires workarounds to function properly, and several proprietary features are missing. It is undoubtedly a solid browser, but it doesn’t offer the same level of mainstream convenience and integration that users are accustomed to with Google Chrome.

Took a real long time due to Google's apathy towards Linux

Chromium has been available for ARM devices for years but Google did not care for offering Chrome for Linux users. Emphasizing on Linux because Google quickly released Chrome for Apple's ARM devices in 2020 itself and it was followed by Windows ARM devices in 2024.

This is when Chromebook with ARM perocessors have been in existence since 2012. Google's Chromebook run a cutsomized version of Linux in the form of ChromeOS. And these Chromebooks had Chrome browser. Surely, not much was required for bringing Chrome to Linux ARM devices.

Thank you, NVIDIA?

The announcement blog has an interesting mention of NVIDIA.

Last year, NVIDIA introduced the DGX Spark, an AI supercomputing device that packs its Grace Blackwell architecture into a compact, 1-liter form factor. Google is partnering with NVIDIA to make it easier for DGX Spark users to install Chrome.

So, was it NVIDIA who pushed/inspired Google to work on bringing Chrome to Linux ARM devices? Maybe.

Source: Chromium blog

If rumors and Reuters are to be believed, SUSE Linux us up for sale again. Again because it has changed owners several times in the past. IBM bought Red Hat Linux for $34 billion 6 years ago. It would be interesting to see who grabs SUSE. I hope it's not Microsoft.

By the way, not seeing new articles from It's FOSS in your feed reader? That's because there is an ongoing issue with the RSS feed as I am migrating to FeedPress. Please bear it with me.

Here are other highlights of this edition of FOSS Weekly:

• EA slowly moving towards Linux.
• Firefox's redesign has been leaked.
• Linux Mint keyboard shortcut video.
• MidnightBSD saying no to age verification.
• And other Linux news, tips, and, of course, memes!

📰 Linux and Open Source News

EA is hiring an anti-cheat engineer to bring Javelin to ARM64, and tucked into the job listing is a mention of exploring Linux and Proton support in the future. After ditching Linux for Apex Legends in 2024, it's a surprising turn. But I wouldn't hold my breath on this.

Firefox's Proton UI has been around since 2021 and honestly looks it. Leaked internal mockups show Mozilla is working on something called "Nova," a significant visual overhaul. Tabs, the address bar, and the toolbar are merged into a single floating strip; rounded corners are everywhere; flat grays are out in favor of gradients, and the private window gets a full dark-purple makeover.

MidnightBSD has updated its license to bar residents of Brazil and California from using the project, with Colorado, Illinois, and New York on the list if their respective pending age verification bills pass.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

The age verification laws spreading across US states are making distro maintainers uncomfortable, and responses are all over the place. Ubuntu and Fedora are working on minimal local APIs to tick the compliance box without doing anything too invasive. MidnightBSD is outright banning people from using it (as mentioned above).

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

Wordcloud is a Python tool that turns any list of words into a visual word cloud image, right from the terminal. You can feed it a text file, tweak the resolution, swap the font, change the background color, or use a mask image to shape the output around a custom silhouette.

Some practical privacy tips that don't require a computer science degree or a paranoia spiral. Our article covers the basics well, from securing your email and browser to picking better cloud storage and messaging apps.

Ever wanted a desktop that looks like it belongs on r/unixporn? We have an i3 customization guide that covers a lot, from basic keybindings and color schemes to transparent status bars and per-workspace app assignments.

GSConnect is the GNOME-friendly way to link your Android phone and Linux machine, built on top of KDE Connect. Once paired, you can transfer files, share the clipboard, get phone notifications on your desktop, and use your phone as a remote mouse.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

Prefer your local AI neatly containerized? This guide shows how to get Ollama running in Docker.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

FRANK OS is a full desktop operating system, complete with a Start menu, overlapping windows, Alt+Tab switching, and a ZX Spectrum emulator, running on an RP2350 microcontroller.

Foot is a minimal Wayland-native terminal emulator that focuses on speed and simplicity. A hidden gem worth exploring.

Keith Curtis spent a week building what he calls "Cursor for LibreOffice," an AI extension that lives in a sidebar and actually edits your documents.

📽️ Videos for You

Sharing some of the essential keyboard shortcuts for Linux Mint, this time in video format.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

On GNOME, first install Tiling Shell. Then, when you right-click on the titlebar of a window, you get various tiling options. Do keep in mind that not all apps will support this.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Match Linux apps with their functions in this puzzle. And yes, fresh new puzzles are coming soon 😄

🤣 Meme of the Week: Winslop doesn't know what consent means.

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On March 9, 1955, a program called "Director" was demonstrated on MIT's Whirlwind computer—automatically managing system resources while user code ran. It's considered one of the earliest rudimentary operating systems ever created.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: Can you help one of our regular FOSSers decide whether to keep Secure Boot enabled or not?

If Reuters report is to be believed, SUSE Linux is again up for sale in the market with a price tag of $6 billion.

This is about enterprise-oriented SUSE Linux. openSUSE, on the other hand, is community-managed but heavily funded by SUSE. I like to think of SUSE Linux as Red Hat and openSUSE as Fedora.

So any decision taken by SUSE Linux impacts openSUSE, more directly than indirectly. We will have to see what direction it takes if SUSE is sold again.

Notice how I am reusing the word 'again'? That's because this is not the first time SUSE Linux has been sold.

Long history of changing hands

SUSE was founded in 1992 and provided the distribution along with support and services to enterprises. In fact, it was the first company to market Linux to enterprises.

It was first purchased by Novell in 2004 for $210 millions. Novell did put a lot of effort in popularizing Linux, pitching it against Windows and Apple. They even ran ads that some veteran Linux users might remember.

It was a good run until Attachmate purchased Novell in 2011 for a hefty $2.2 billion. SUSE was part of Novell and thus Attachmate took the ownership of the project.

And then in 2014, Micro Focus acquired Attachmate for $2.35 billion and thus once again SUSE saw a new owner.

Come 2018 and a private equity group EQT bought Micro Foucs for $2.535 billions. Needless to say, SUSE was part of the deal.

Except for the first one, the rest of the deals were for the parent company, not necessarily for SUSE. However, the current report suggests that EQT is only selling SUSE this time for approximately $6 billion.

Red Hat went for $34 billions

Red Hat is often considered SUSE’s closest competitor, as both primarily focus on enterprise customers. In 2019, IBM acquired Red Hat for $34 billion, making it one of the largest software acquisitions in history. Since then, Red Hat has become a central pillar of IBM’s hybrid cloud strategy, helping drive growth in areas where IBM had been struggling to maintain momentum.

Who could buy SUSE?

We can only guess, and if it were up to me, here are a few big names that could take advantage of SUSE:

• Amazon: Although Amazon has its own Linux distros for deploying AWS internally
• IBM: It already has Red Hat in its kitty. Getting SUSE means near monopoly in enterprise Linux. But this could also be blocked by regulators.
• Oracle: Oracle has its own Oracle Linux for enterprise. With SUSE, it can expand its business.
• Broadcom: They have already gotten VMWare and thus they already have one foot in the enterprise Linux market. With SUSE, they will only consolidate their position.
• Microsoft: They have Azure but that's primarily for cloud servers. For a company like Microsoft, $6 billion is not a huge amount. They can expand their enterprise offering with SUSE.

These are all guesses. For all we know, an unknown player could enter the scene, or it might not be sold at all.

Your turn now. What do you think of SUSE being in the market again. Which company should buy it?

There is simply no shortage of terminals for Linux. And yet we keep on seeing new terminals coming up almost every year.

The regular terminal works but then there are terminals like Kitty and Ghostty that provide modern features and customization.

In the same regard, foot is also a good terminal worth having a look. It is not a new project. It has been an active player for sevaeral years and yet not many Linux user have heard of it.

Foot terminal

Foot is a fast and lightweight Wayland-native terminal emulator. Older terminal emulators were designed around X11 and later gained Wayland support, while Foot is a terminal emulator designed specifically for Wayland from the beginning. Modern GPU terminals like Kitty or Alacritty instead support both X11 and Wayland as first-class backends.

Let me show you some of the features of Foot terminal that provide significant value to the user.

Sixel image support

With the Sixel image support, terminals can display actual images. Foot supports the sixel protocol and thus you can view real images in it without extra effort.

What's the point? Well, if you are using terminal tools like fastfetch, you can display real images in terminal instead of the usual ASCII renderings. Look at the image below for example:

Also, terminal file managers like Yazi can show image file previews in a preview pane with the image support.

Scrollback search

Imagine you executed a command and it produced a long output. Normally, you cannot search in the command output displayed on the screen.

Foot supports scrollback search. If you have a huge scrollback of thousands of lines, the ability to search through it is a game changer.

Press CTRL+SHIFT+R to search a scrollback history. You will get a search prompt at the bottom-right of your screen. Enter search string and you can see that results are live updating.

Keyboard-driven URL detection

Some terminal output may contain URLs. For example, I use hyperlinks in markdown notes and preview them using Glow. In this case, I can press the shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+O to highlight links.

When you press the shortcut, you can see that small alphabetic characters are attached near the links. Press the associated character, and that link is opened in your default web browser.

You can press the ESC key to quit the URL mode.

Server-daemon mode

In server-daemon mode, one process hosts multiple windows. It offers reduced memory footprint, reduced startup time, etc.

But do remember, if the main process crashes, all windows go down with it.

To get server mode in Foot, start the foot server along with desktop login. That is, you need to auto-start the command:

foot --server

We have a dedicated guide on how to auto-start applications and commands at desktop login.

Once done, instead of opening new terminal instances using foot, use footclient.

Fallback font configuration

The user can configure which fallback font to use. If you use a lot of glyphs in the terminal, you can configure the fallback fonts as per need.

Also, it allows you to set one fallback font with a different style and size than another one.

Installing foot terminal

On Ubuntu and Debian-based distros, please use this command:

sudo apt install foot

On Fedora-based distros, use:

sudo dnf install foot

On Arch-based distros, use the pacman command:

sudo pacman -Syu foot

Basic foot configuration

Foot expects a configuration file at ~/.config/foot/foot.ini. When you install Foot, a default configuration will be added at /etc/xdg/foot/foot.ini.

So, you don't need to start from scratch but you still need to do a few things to get started with foot. First, create a config directory for Foot:

mkdir -p ~/.config/foot

Now, copy this default configuration to your local config location and start editing.

cp /etc/xdg/foot/foot.ini ~/.config/foot/
nano ~/.config/foot/foot.ini

How to know about modules

You cannot write a configuration if you don't know what modules are available for you to customize. Don't worry! Foot provides a concise description of available modules in a separate man page. Open a terminal and use the command:

man foot.ini

Read the page once before starting to configure.

Options that you may require

In this section, we will see some of the useful configuration keys.

Change the Shell

The shell option sets a different shell to the Foot Terminal without altering the default system shell.

The syntax is shell = /usr/bin/zsh. You can use the which command to find the path to the shell to use.

Change Font

Changing font is one of the most important parts of any customization. And Foot provides the font- variables for the purpose:

• font = IBM Plex Mono:size=14: Sets the font to IBM Plex Mono and sets the size to 14.
• font = Ubuntu Mono:wieght=bold:size=14: Sets the bold font to Ubuntu Mono and sets the size to 14.
• font = JetBrains Mono:weight=bold:slant:italic:size=14: set the bold-italic font to JetBrains Mono and size set to 14.

Include another config

Splitting up the configuration will enable you to maintain and modify it easily in a later stage. And this is the best approach for theme customization.

For example, let's see how you can set a Catppuccin Mocha theme to the foot terminal.

Visit the Catppuccin Foot theme GitHub repository. Go to the themes/catppuccin-mocha.ini file and download it using the download button at the top of the page, as shown in the screenshot below.

Now, create a directory with the command:

mkdir -p ~/.config/foot/themes/

Paste the downloaded catppuccin-mocha.ini file inside this directory. Assuming you have downloaded the file to the ~/Downloads directory, use the command:

cp ~/Downloads/catppuccin-mocha.ini ~/.config/foot/themes/

Now, we need a little troubleshooting. With the latest update, Foot color schemes need a [colors-dark] module, and the Catppuccin comes with [colors]. Just open the file:

nano ~/.config/foot/themes/catppuccin-mocha.ini

And edit the [colors] to [colors-dark] and save it.

One more step. Open the foot.ini config file in your favorite editor:

nano ~/.config/foot/foot.ini

Add the below line to the top of the file:

include ~/.config/foot/themes/catppuccin-mocha.ini

Also, comment out all the blocks, including and under [colors], [colors-dark] inside it the foot.init file.

That's it. Reopen Foot Terminal and enjoy the new themes.

I let you try it and discover more of its features.

Linux gaming has been getting some wins lately, and while most of it is thanks to the hard work of countless open source contributors and community members, Microslop, err, Microsoft's unhealthy obsession has also been driving people towards the platform.

There is also another side to this, where developments outside the platform affect it.

Steam, which is among the key drivers of that growth, has a new client update that offers many useful upgrades.

What do you get?

The most relevant fixes for Linux users address a bug where Proton games were incorrectly flagged as "Not valid on current platform" for users with huge libraries. A related instance of the same bug also affected offline mode specifically, so if you have a large library and have been running into these issues, both cases should now be sorted.

Moving on from that, the /store chat command has been updated to use the new Store trailer player (the video player that shows game trailers) instead of the old one.

On the library side, any game demos you have installed that are no longer available will now show a prompt to uninstall them rather than a play button. Plus, any new demos and free-to-play titles will appear at the top of your recent games list.

Steam is also rolling out opt-in anonymized framerate data collection, currently in beta with a focus on SteamOS devices. The data is stored without any connection to your Steam account but is tied to the type of hardware you are playing on. Valve says this will help improve game compatibility information.

Then there are Reviews, which are getting a small but useful addition. You can now include your hardware specs when writing or updating a user review on a game's store page, giving your review a bit more context for other gamers.

Depending on who you ask, this can either be a privacy headache or a genuinely useful signal for judging how a game runs on hardware similar to yours.

Finally, a fix went out for an issue where the game beta/version info was showing the date the beta was assigned to you, rather than the date the actual game build was created.

How to get Steam?

Officially, Valve only provides DEB packages for Linux, so you can get it installed on Debian, Ubuntu, and other derivatives without any issues. On Ubuntu, you just double-click on the package and click on "Install" to get it on your system.

There are some unofficial builds out there that do work, and if I had to suggest one, it would be the RPM Fusion version of Steam (available on GNOME Software). But again, this is not provided by Valve, so verify it before installing.

I am of the belief that age verification laws are multiplying like a virus; these have seemingly popped up out of nowhere and are being lobbied for hard by many politicians and lawmakers.

Brazil's Digital Statute of the Child and Adolescent takes effect on March 17, 2026, and explicitly names operating systems and app stores as entities that must implement age verification.

California's Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043), signed in October 2025 and effective January 1, 2027, requires OS providers to collect age data at account setup and pipe it to every app via a real-time API.

Colorado's Senate Bill 26-051, which passed the state Senate on March 3 with a 28-7 vote, would mandate the same and is currently awaiting a House vote before being set in stone.

They say they are doing it to protect the children; I think that is performative. Now we have a popular open source project outright banning people from using its offering just because they live in a region that has mandated age verification.

Age verification excludes

MidnightBSD, a FreeBSD-based desktop operating system, has quietly updated its README to reflect a new geographic restriction. The project has added a clause that bars residents of any country, state, or territory with OS-level age verification mandates from using MidnightBSD.

It is not a blanket ban but is directly tied to the existence of these laws, meaning the list grows as more regions pass similar legislation.

As it stands right now, it reads:

Residents of any countries, states or territories that require age verification for operating systems, are not authorized to use MidnightBSD. This list currently includes Brazil, effective March 17, 2026, California, effective January 1, 2027, and will include Colorado, Illinois and New York provided they pass their currently proposed legislation.

The project also urges anyone affected by this restriction to write to their local representatives and push for these laws to be repealed or replaced.

MidnightBSD has been around since 2006, when Lucas Holt forked it from FreeBSD 6.1 to build a desktop-oriented BSD for everyday users. It ships with Xfce and its own package manager, mport, targeting i386 and amd64 hardware.

It is a small, community-driven project with no corporate backing. The fines these laws carry, up to $7,500 per minor for intentional violations, are a serious risk for a team this size.

I wonder, though, how this would actually be enforced; maybe the official website and download mirrors for MidnightBSD will be out of reach for people in those regions. Of course, a tech-savvy crowd who uses MidnightBSD will know how to bypass such an embargo.

It makes you wonder how effective such age verification laws are. Oh wait, some of these so-called public servants are also pushing for VPNs to be banned.

Such a nice coincidence. 🙂

Suggested Read 📖: How Linux and BSD Distros Are Responding to the New Age Verification Laws