Linux Mint is getting automatic old kernel cleanup in the next release, a feature Fedora has handled through DNF's installonly_limit for years. And I did not even know that Mint doesn't do it.

The Document Foundation has put up a write-up (part 1 for now) of how the Austrian Military migrated 16,000 PCs from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. The part worth noting is that ~8,000 users installed it on their own before it was mandated. Now that's a pleasant surprise.

CachyOS released their August update, and the two things that stand out are Shelly v3 and the Server Edition groundwork. Running a cutting edge distro on a server? Old school sysadmins will shiver at that thought.

Apparently, VLC takes around 30 seconds to play an MP3 on Windows. But don't blame VLC when it is Microsoft's fault.

Proxmox VE now officially runs on ARM64, with the same codebase, release cycle, and support window as the x86-64 build. NVIDIA Grace and Vera systems are fully validated, and other UEFI-based ARMv9-A hardware gets best-effort support.

An open source project called Xodus is working through the hardest parts of bringing Xbox Game Pass to Linux. They have already figured out Xbox authentication and game downloads.

KGamma is getting a Wayland replacement that works with Night Color, supports independent per-monitor values, and applies settings on the first frame.

Illinois signed the Children's Online Social Media Safety Act, which requires device makers and OS providers to collect a child's age bracket at setup and expose it via an API for apps to query.

Omarchy Linux is going all in one with AI with its version 4.0 releasing this week.

There are a few more AI-related stories that we covered this week. But I am not going to include all of them here. They get covered in the Local AI Weekly newsletter, and you can also read them if you follow the feed. I'll try to keep the AI buzz to the necessary minimum in FOSS Weekly.

🤝 This edition of FOSS Weekly is supported by TuxCare.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

I had a good chat with Bianca Lewis, OpenSearch's executive director, talking about how OpenSearch has spent the past few years trying to shed the "Elasticsearch fork" label.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

A beginner's guide to installing software from source on Linux. It covers clone, configure, make, where to install things so cleanup isn't painful, and how to fix the missing compiler errors you'll almost definitely hit the first time.

A decade of hopping through Mint, Ubuntu, Kali, Arch, AntiX, and EndeavourOS, and the conclusion is that it was never really about the distro.

Six backup tools for different kinds of Linux users. The highlights include Déjà Dup for GNOME desktop with zero setup, Kopia if you want an open source GUI, Restic and BorgBackup for terminal-native control.

If you regularly deal with PDF, try a tool like PDF Arranger that allows you to split, merge, rearrange PDF docs.

In the same regards, in the situation where you have to convert multiple images into a PDF, use LibreOffice or gscan2pdf. I do this when I have to upload IDs and documents to a government portal.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

This corner may still have some local AI stuff for now. A practical setup guide for running Hermes agent on a Raspberry Pi as an always-on backend while controlling it from a laptop using Hermes Desktop's remote gateway feature.

🎓 Linux Foundation certification offer

Linux is turning 35 this month. The Linux Foundation, the official organization behind the Linux kernel project, has a catalog of industry-oriented training and certifications.

And they are offering 35% off on all of it, including the instructor-led classes that contain very technical topics like performance tuning. Popular certifications like LFCS and CKDA

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

Censor is a PDF document redaction tool. When you want to hide part of information from a PDF, you can use this tool.

📽️ Videos for You

Enjoy customizing GNOME desktops with extensions. Take a look at some of the good ones in action in this video.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

Ubuntu's Tiling Assistant has an experimental layout editor, which allows you to create tiles and assign windows to those tiles. First open the Extensions app and go into the settings for "Tiling Assistant."

Here, click on the "i" button and go into "Advanced..." and enable "Advanced/Experimental Settings." Now, inside the new "Layouts" page, you will find multiple layout entries without keybinds assigned.

Click on the "Disabled" box and enter a keybind, and use the downward arrow nearby to fine-tune the layout.

Once these are set, whenever you press any one of those shortcuts, any open windows can be opened in that layout for you. You can read how it works in the official documentation.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Our Scrambled Linux Editors crossword will test your grasp of Linux editors.

Those pesky clankers sure do know how to trick us. 🤖

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On August 5, 1858, Cyrus West Field succeeded on his fifth try at laying a telegraph cable across the Atlantic. Queen Victoria and President Buchanan traded congratulatory messages soon after. Though the celebration was short-lived, as the cable died within a month.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: Pro FOSSer Xander is asking other FOSSers what they like about Linux; do you have anything to add?

It all started with a tweet by video game designer Jonathan Blow. Blow is the developer behind games like Braid and The Witness.

He mentioned that he had stopped using VLC on Windows because it took about 33 seconds to start playing a simple MP3, and he had switched to Microsoft Media Player instead.

And he also shamed open source software, framing it as a sign that large part of open-source software is in bad shape.

A large sector of open source software is in a truly embarrassing place now...

This quickly turned into a heated discussion, with people joining from both sides.

VLC's official Twitter account clarified that this delay was not a core VLC regression but a side effect of a Windows 11 / Microsoft Defender update that quarantined VLC’s plugin cache. Their suggested solution is reinstalling VLC or regenerating that cache.

Jonathan argued that it is the developer's responsibility to fix. He cited his own experience of fixing an issue caused by AMD in his game Braid.

Linux user jumps in with solid evidence

A Linux user who goes by the X account @VoxelPrismatic jumped in with concrete evidence that it is not a core VLC issue but a Windows issue.

In this tweet, the user shared a recording of what seems like a Linux distro running KDE. Recording clearly showed VLC started playing an MP3 file in 1-2 seconds.

But some people were still not satisfied because VLC being slow to open MP3 files on Windows is a real issue but they kept on blaming it on VLC.

The solution to the problem

VLC suggests the following fixes

• Regenerate the plugin cache (e.g. launch with vlc --reset-plugins-cache, or clear VLC’s cache under the user profile and relaunch)
• Reinstall VLC from the official build

However, a better suggestion came from a few users who noted that excluding vlc.exe in Microsoft Defender solves this problem. And I like this one better because it seems to address the problem where it originates, Microsoft Defender. And if the cache builds up, VLC may be slowed down again (I think).

The same was vouched by several people. So this sure looks like the workaround worth trying.

Asking the right question

Among all this, someone asked the real question; how come VLC not working for a single person becomes "a large sector of open source software" being an embarrassing place?

Blame Defender, not VLC

I understand the frustration. Waiting half a minute to play an MP3 should not be acceptable on a modern system, even if it is on Windows.

It is also okay to blame it on VLC when you don't know the real backstory and are unaware of the root cause.

But giving it a “open source is broken” narrative is highly far fetched.

I haven't tested it myself. Not going to jump into Windows just for this, but from what I see, the onus of fixing it lies on the Microsoft side. And from what I know about Microsoft, they won't do a thing.

What's your take on this episode? Share it in the comments.

Welcome to the first issue of Local AI Weekly. A lot of It's FOSS readers have been curious about local AI but didn't want it mixed into FOSS Weekly. So here we are. A separate space for people who want to explore AI but the open source ones.

I'll be sharing experiments from my own hardware, open model news, tools worth your attention, and will keep an eye on the AI related news worth knowing. Let's get into it.

🧪 Experiment: Hermes on a Raspberry Pi

Hermes is the buzz of the AI town so I decided to give it a try. But I chose a rather unusual setup. I have the Hermes backend running on a Raspberry Pi and connecting to it via Hermes Desktop on my main machine. So the agent actually runs Pi, and I interact from my computer.

Hermes Desktop also has a voice conversation feature, most AI tools have it these days. Voice AI is shaping up to be the next big thing. Ubuntu 26.10 is already preparing native voice AI support and local tools like Vocalinux are already in development.

Seems like we're not far from AI-based desktop companions you can actually talk to. Think email briefings, task reporting, agent control. Those things are already here, even if in early stages.

🔍 Discover AI tools

Here is a new open source markdown-based knowledge base built for you and your AI agents. It is local-first, git-backed, and ships with a native MCP server, so commercial or local AI agents can read and write your notes directly.

Worth a look if you're building a personal wiki or a shared second brain your coding agents can use across sessions. Still in early stages of development, so expect bugs here and there. I am currently using Tolaria for my personal KB, and this one is my on my weekend activity list.

Another interesting open source AI tool I came across recently is Cleat. It basically runs Claude Code inside a Docker sandbox with one command, so an autonomous agent session can't touch your host system. It shares your Claude auth, edits project files, installs packages, and runs any command inside the container, but stays blocked from your SSH keys, other projects, and the rest of your machine unless you opt in.

The project is fairly new, and I don't see activities on its GitHub repo in the last three weeks. Hope it is not on the road to become an abandonware.

📡 Open Model News

The open model space has had a busy few weeks.

Kimi K3 landed on July 16 from Moonshot AI. It's a 2.8-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with a 1M token context window, released under a "Modified MIT license". It's the largest open-weight model ever released, and early benchmarks are putting it within reach of frontier closed models. Running it locally requires serious hardware, but smaller distillations should be here soon.

Around the same time, Inkling was released by Thinking Machines Lab, the startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. It's a 975-billion-parameter multimodal model released under Apache 2.0. The Apache 2.0 choice is significant because it means free commercial use without the usage restrictions that come with some other open licenses, like the modified MIT.

Both are too large to run on most home hardware right now. But these releases matter because quantized versions and smaller distillations typically follow within weeks. Worth keeping an eye on Ollama's model library, even though Ollama is likely offering them on their cloud plan.

🗂 AI Jargon: Quantization

You might have come across the word quantization. It is the process of reducing the 'numerical precision' of a model's weights to make it smaller (and faster). A full-precision model stores each value as a 32-bit or 16-bit float. A quantized model stores them at 8-bit, 4-bit, or even lowre. The model gets smaller so it uses less RAM, and runs faster but that comes at the cost of quality.

Take a look at the tags of any model at Ollama... llama3.1 for example. You'll see names like instruct-q2_K, text-q3_K_S, fp16 etc. Those are quantized. The file size is smaller, an indication that it will need less RAM.

⚡ Quick Tip

When downloading models via Ollama, you can specify the quantization level directly. Instead of ollama pull llama3, try ollama pull llama3:8b-instruct-q4_K_M to get a specific quantized variant. Check the available tags on ollama.com/library for whichever model you're pulling. Just add /tags/ at the end of it.

And we continue...

I'll be honest. The local AI scene is more fragmented than the Linux distro landscape. And not all of us have the same needs. If you're a DevOps person, you might have no interest in AI image restoration tools. If you're a developer, graphics workflows probably don't apply to you.

So I'm going to share my own experiments and exploration. Some of it will be useful to you, some won't. That's fine. You'll likely learn new things and that's the goal.

See you in two week.

My agent harnessing journey started with Nanoclaw. Which is super simple to setup and use. It works for a few simpler tasks through Telegram.

But I wanted something to work on my main computer. Out of all claw like agents, I find Hermes the most suited.

So I installed Hermes on a Raspberry Pi running on Pironman 5 Pro Max. And I installed Hermes desktop on my Asus Zenbook laptop, my primary system.

The advantage is that the Raspberry Pi remains the always-on Hermes machine. I can close Hermes Desktop or shut down the laptop without needing Hermes itself to run on the laptop (for scheduled tasks). Also, Hermes agents won't have unrestricted access to my system. A safer approach, in my opinion. At least, that's the idea I am going with.

The basic architecture is:

Laptop
└── Hermes Desktop
        │
        │ Remote Gateway
        ▼
Raspberry Pi
└── hermes serve
    ├── Agents
    ├── Jobs
    ├── Memory
    └── Tools

Let me show you how you can use the Hermes agent via the remote gateway feature.

Step 1: Start the Hermes Gateway on the Raspberry Pi

Open a terminal on the Raspberry Pi or SSH into it.

You need to add the following in the ~/.hermes/.env file of hermes:

HERMES_DASHBOARD_BASIC_AUTH_USERNAME=admin
HERMES_DASHBOARD_BASIC_AUTH_PASSWORD=YOUR_STRONG_PASSWORD
HERMES_DASHBOARD_BASIC_AUTH_SECRET=YOUR_RANDOM_SECRET

The 'random secret' can be generated with.

openssl rand -base64 32

These credentials will be used from the Hermes desktop. Now start Hermes's backend with:

hermes serve --host 0.0.0.0 --port 9119

You may see a message like this:

Headless backend (hermes serve): web UI disabled — use `hermes dashboard` for the browser UI.

This is normal. hermes serve does not provide a browser interface. It starts the backend that Hermes Desktop connects to.

Keep this process running while testing the connection.

Step 2: Verify that Hermes is listening

Open another terminal tab to access the Raspberry Pi, and run:

ss -ltnp | grep 9119

You should see something containing:

0.0.0.0:9119

This means Hermes is listening for connections on port 9119.

Step 3: Install Hermes Desktop on the pc

Hermes provides an official script for installing the Hermes Desktop:

curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash

During installation, Hermes may ask to choose a terminal backend:

Select terminal backend:

Local
Docker
Modal
SSH
Daytona
...
Keep current (local)

For this setup, you can leave this as:

Keep current (local)

The Terminal Backend setting is separate from the Remote Gateway setting. The gateway is what connects Hermes Desktop to Hermes running on your Raspberry Pi.

I also left out the model selection. Whatever the remote Hermes server uses will be used here, too.

Step 4: Use remote gateway on Hermes

Start Hermes Desktop from the terminal:

hermes desktop

That's the way it runs for the moment. Ironical to run a desktop GUI app from the terminal.

Anyways, inside Hermes Desktop, click on the settings and go to gateway and find the remote gateway option:

In the Remote URL field, enter the address of the device running the Hermes backend with the port 9119:

http://<IP of Pi>:9119

Then save/apply the setting and reconnect.

Hermes Desktop should now connect to the Hermes backend running on your Raspberry Pi.

Hermes Desktop becomes the interface for interacting with the Hermes instance on the Raspberry Pi.

Step 5: Make the gateway permanent

If things are working fine so far, it is time to make things permanent. Because keeping this running on the remote Hermes server is not a wise move.

hermes serve --host 0.0.0.0 --port 9119

Because if I close that terminal or reboot the Raspberry Pi, the gateway will stop.

For an always-on Raspberry Pi setup, running hermes serve as a systemd service works better.

No need to SSH into the Pi and manually launch Hermes every time. It will be automatically start thanks to the systemd service.

Get the Hermes executable path with:

which hermes

And then create the systemd service:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/hermes-server.service

Here's the file I used. You should replace the EnnvironmentFile and ExecStart values as per your setup.

[Unit]
Description=Hermes Agent Backend
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=pi
EnvironmentFile=/home/pi/.hermes/.env
ExecStart=/home/pi/.local/bin/hermes serve --host 0.0.0.0 --port 9119
Restart=always
RestartSec=5

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Once you have saved the service file, run it in this fashion:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now hermes-server

Check the status of the newly created systemd service:

systemctl status hermes-server

Conclusion

I am yet to fully utilize Hermes on desktop with the remote gateway method. Portability could be an issue if I move out of my home network, but even in that case, there are ways to SSH into Raspberry Pi from outside network.

I'll be sharing more of my local AI exploration and experiences. Do subscribe to Local AI Weekly newsletter for that.

I sat down with Bianca Lewis of OpenSearch at Open Source Summit India, right after the project's second OpenSearch Con in the country. Bianca Lewis is the executive director of the OpenSearch Software Foundation.

OpenSearch started life in 2021 as a fork of Elasticsearch, born out of Elastic's move away from an open source license. Five years on, I wanted to know how much of that origin story still holds, and how the project sees itself now that it's an AI data infrastructure layer with its own roadmap and its own community.

We covered a lot of ground: whether OpenSearch is still tethered to Elasticsearch in any way, why ELK Stack remains the more recognizable brand among young developers, how agentic AI fits into the platform, and an uncomfortable but necessary question about what happens when vendor-backed open source projects go proprietary.

Five years in, is OpenSearch still a fork of Elasticsearch, or has it become a product of its own? Does it still pull in any downstream changes from Elastic?

Bianca: That is a great question, and the answer, very simply, is yes, it's an independent project. It's a completely independent project now that began as a fork, as you correctly said, and in the early days the two were very, very similar. Today the focuses and the strengths have become very different, and today they are completely independent projects. I think the only commonality is that users can still use both platforms for similar kinds of use cases.

Explaining OpenSearch to the average Linux user

OpenSearch is enterprise-focused, but how would you explain it to a home labber or self-hoster who's never heard of it?

Bianca: Well, firstly, of course OpenSearch is an AI infrastructure layer for enterprises, but because it's on an open source platform, free and easy to use and adopt, people making new startups, entrepreneurs, developers, and everyone else find it very easy to get started. Download it, it's free to use, all the features are open and available, and they can join very easily a community of thousands and thousands of people to get up and running.

So it's not just enterprise-focused anymore, it's for anyone and everyone. Whoever's requirements fit it, OpenSearch is for them. I don't think it was ever built to just be for the enterprise. The startups of today are the enterprises of tomorrow.

"The startups of today are the enterprises of tomorrow."

The ELK Stack brand problem

ELK Stack is still the more recognizable brand in observability and search. How does OpenSearch compete with that brand recognition among young developers?

Bianca: There is no doubt that Elastic, Elasticsearch, and Logstash and Kibana, which make up ELK, have been around a long time, and that's obviously where the fork came from originally. I hope that after five years of OpenSearch developing as an independent and powerful project — 1.7 billion downloads later, 400 individual companies contributing, more than 3,000 contributors, and 15,000 OpenSearch stack users — the differentiation in young developers' minds is becoming clearer just from the sheer weight of numbers.

I think there are two distinguishing factors. The first is philosophy — how developers want to build their technology stacks conceptually and into the future. Elastic, who owns ELK, even though the license is now back to open source after they closed it, is still owned by Elastic and is open core. That means if a young developer wants to build on Elasticsearch and use the ELK stack, they can use the core version for free, but for any more advanced features or support they're going to have to pay and be tied into Elastic. Developers who want to build on a platform that's fully open, where you get the whole thing for free and can choose whether you want support or hosting when you're ready, have that choice with OpenSearch. It's a different philosophy.

The second layer is that the two platforms have grown along different technological paths. Every platform in this space will say "we're a millisecond faster at this," or "we support this use case better," and that's all true — no platform can honestly say it's the best at everything. But OpenSearch is really good at a lot of different use cases that unify the data layer, and because it's the only alternative that isn't just open core, it's making young developers distinguish OpenSearch, hopefully much faster than ELK or any other platform.

Observability, complexity, and cost

Observability stacks are getting heavier, more expensive, and more complicated. What is OpenSearch doing about ease of setup and cost?

Bianca: Those are two very valid questions, so let me answer them one by one.

On complexity: the advantage of proprietary vendors has always been that on day one it's easy — you buy it, it's off the shelf, it works, and you get support. With an open platform, you build it on day one, and you get the benefit on day two, three, and four because it's customized to your needs and you're not dependent on a vendor. But getting started on day one is a very valid point. Because of that, we've recently launched something called Launchpad, which lets you eailylaunch an observability stack, a search application, or any other OpenSearch application, because OpenSearch isn't just observability, there's also search, AI applications, and security monitoring. All this takes a few minutes, and we encourage developers to ask the community if they get lost, even though the documentation is all there. I believe the ease of setting up OpenSearch has been addressed incredibly well and quickly.

On cost, it's a more complicated question. I can tell you OpenSearch is free, but in real life nothing is ever truly free because you still have to run it on infrastructure and manage it.

What OpenSearch does do is make everything cost-effective. Take observability: in the old days, we had to have it because if something in our infrastructure broke, we had to solve it — we couldn't afford downtime — but nobody wanted to pay for it because it was seen as a cost center.

Today the whole language has changed, because OpenSearch gives you a unified view of the context of your data, which is much more cost-effective than doing log analytics, traces, and metrics separately with tools like Grafana and Prometheus, where everyone looked at the data differently and root-cause analysis took five weeks to put the pieces together.

Today it's all in a single pipeline into OpenSearch — you see it all together, through different lenses in the same view, and you can automate resolutions. You can use models and AI to interrogate that data, automate resolutions, and use your observability stack for more than troubleshooting — for company-wide SLOs, understanding acceptable error rates, and understanding cost.

We're in the token economy now, so we can add cost information into traces and logs and understand accurately how much each service is really costing us. Observability isn't just "pay for troubleshooting" anymore — it's become easier to use and a driver of business imperatives.

AI-agent readiness

How AI-agent-ready is OpenSearch, for someone building a project that leans heavily on agentic AI?

Bianca: In the 3.5 release — we've just released 3.7, so we're two minor versions past that — agentic AI became generally available in OpenSearch, and since then it's become a central theme of how people run their search and observability stacks. I think we're ahead of almost any other platform in the world on fully integrated agentic AI.

As you spin up AI agents, OpenSearch is model-agnostic, so you can use any AI model you want. If it's for a search use case, you can monitor those AI agents with the same platform — monitor the trace of the agent, see which services it's calling, what the costs are, and make sure it's doing the right thing. At scale, when you're running 100,000 queries a minute, we can almost let AI monitor AI for security, safety, and compliance.

AI brings scale and the ability to do things quickly. We don't have to work sequentially anymore. But data without context is just data, it's noise. You need a platform that can recall it and spin up AI agents, you need the data underneath it, and you need the agents to talk to each other to perform tasks but without context, all of that is garbage at scale. OpenSearch has built in some features to address this: short-term agentic memory, so an agent remembers the context of what it was asked over the last week or two, and in 3.7, long-term agentic memory as well, which gives us the context we need to take accurate actions on the data. It's already generally available.

AI data layer vs. traditional search

Is OpenSearch now an AI data layer sitting on top of a traditional search stack, or have the two fully merged?

Bianca: I think ultimately OpenSearch will be looked at in a couple of layers. OpenSearch is the application level, and the application level sits on top of an infrastructure that supports the architecture of the application.

What OpenSearch gives you is that it doesn't tie you into any one vendor's choices. You can have that AI infrastructure layer but choose your own infrastructure. You can self-host, or go to one of the hosted services, like our OpenSearch service on NetApp, Oracle, and AWS and choose whatever fits your model. In terms of features and how things run with agentic AI, we don't really say this works better or worse than that. We say everything works and works really well, and with OpenSearch you retain control over how you want to build it, without being tied into any one approach.

On business-source licensing and the Linux Foundation model

This is a bit of an uncomfortable question, more about the Linux Foundation model in general than OpenSearch specifically. MariaDB, Redis, and Elasticsearch all moved from open source to business-source or server-side licenses at some point, largely to protect their business from hyperscalers who weren't contributing enough but were taking their enterprise customers. Then the Linux Foundation and companies like Amazon fork the original project, as happened with Terraform and OpenTofu, and grow it as the "true" open source version while the original gets left behind. Is there an injustice in that, toward the original projects?

Bianca: I think it's a really great question. I don't ever judge a vendor for deciding to close-source or open-source a project. But without intruding into the particulars of how Elastic or AWS felt at the time, which I can't speak to, I can share a personal viewpoint.

If a vendor is the owner of an open source project, to me that open-core label is simply a go-to-market strategy to get users in and then sell services, support, and enterprise capability. It's not what we'd call vendor-neutral. Building a wide community on a vendor-owned open source project is always tricky, and that's why Mongo, Elastic, Redis, and a few others reached a point where the situation became a threat — the go-to-market had been really successful, they'd built a community, but the biggest customers weren't converting.

I find it interesting that Elastic changed back to an open source license after closing it — because they were losing the community, but they'd closed it because they were losing enterprise customers. They were fine with small players using the free product but wanted the big-money customers. The challenge is that often you want your cake and to eat it too. Once you build your brand on community involvement and then tell the community you're closing it, even if you reopen it later, a lot of the community will just say "thanks, but no thanks."

That's the beauty of the Linux Foundation model. It's a nonprofit that nobody owns, and profit isn't the motive. Yes, there will be cases where hyperscalers fork a project. I think it's important to understand that once they fork it and give it to a nonprofit like the Linux Foundation, they give up ownership. They don't own OpenSearch anymore. They could fork it again and keep something in-house, anyone can always do that, but OpenSearch itself can never be closed now, because the Linux Foundation owns it.

OpenSearch itself can never be closed now, because the people that own it is the Linux Foundation.

It also helps to look at where each company actually makes its money. Take Elastic. They make money selling Elasticsearch licenses, whether self-hosted or on the cloud, so it makes sense for them to gate advanced features behind a license, because they have to survive as a business and answer to shareholders.

Hyperscalers like AWS, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Oracle make their money from selling compute and infrastructure, not directly from the application. Carrying the burden of growing and innovating an application takes away from their core focus of selling infrastructure, so it makes business sense for them to let the community develop the application while they focus on providing a great service to run it, and put their money where they actually make money.

That's the subtle reason hyperscalers are so eager to support Linux Foundation projects. It lets them focus on where they make money, and it guarantees these projects stay open, available, and well-maintained rather than becoming orphaned.

Ultimately it takes time for a project's original founder to say "now we can let the community manage it." What that actually means is that over the years, instead of maintaining the application with a full-time in-house engineering team, the founder becomes one of the companies contributing to a shared engineering effort. You get all the benefit, but the innovation and cost become shared, and the community retains the choices, which is always good for business.

Certifications

Does OpenSearch have plans for a certification track, like Kubernetes has with the CKA?

Bianca: Yes, we've actually recently announced that. The way we're doing it is quite unique and exciting for the open source world. We've already released the first form of learning content, and in a couple of months we're going to release an OpenSearch competency course that carries a badge of competency you can put on LinkedIn.

On top of that, we're going to do the OpenSearch competency certification proper, and based on that certification, we're doing accreditations for different vendors and companies. The follow-up to that is specialist certifications. Since OpenSearch is used across quite a few use cases, we'll have competencies in observability, search, AI applications, and security monitoring. And to renew your certification, instead of retaking the same test every couple of years, as long as you're advancing to more advanced certifications you keep your original qualifications. We want people to grow and advance within OpenSearch.

The biggest misconception about OpenSearch

What's the one thing that most people get wrong about OpenSearch?

Bianca: There are so many things people get wrong about OpenSearch, but I think the biggest one is not recognizing that, as an AI data infrastructure layer, OpenSearch is the only cloud-native, AI-native platform in the world that's truly open source and vendor-neutral. I don't know if people really understand that.

OpenSearch is the only cloud-native, AI-native platform in the world that's truly open source and vendor-neutral.

Maybe if it were named something like "OpenSearch AI" or "OpenAI Search," it would be more recognizable.

Bianca: Yeah because people often equate it to "how does it compare to Elasticsearch?" But conceptually, you can't really compare the two. They'll say "it's like the AWS service," but that's just a vendor who's a member and provides a service on top of it. The platform runs completely independently, within a community that's truly open source. It's not just an AWS project anymore; it's a truly independent, community-owned observability stack.

OpenSearch's 3.7 release, with long-term agentic memory, is already out, and the project's competency certification track is expected to roll out over the coming months. You can find the project's documentation, downloads, and community channels at opensearch.org.

The entire debate in the Linux and open source world these days is if AI generated code should be used or not.

As Linus told AI critics to fork the project or walk away, GKH took a more surgical approach. AI patches are fine elsewhere in the kernel, but drivers/staging is off limits.

The GNOME extensions review queue is still flooded with AI slop months after the no-AI rule went in. The latest attempt to slow it down is a guide written directly for the bots doing the generating, covering the bad patterns that keep showing up.

Keychron's doing for mice what QMK did for keyboards. ZGM is a GPL-3.0 open source firmware built on Zephyr RTOS, coming first to the G6 HE in Q1 2027. If it takes off, Linux users are the ones who gain most since practically no gaming mice ship with official Linux configuration support.

Another Ubuntu deb is becoming a Snap. hwctl, the CLI tool behind Ubuntu Pro and hardware certification checks, is going Snap-only for better sandboxing and tighter GNOME Control Center integration.

Nine months since the last release and nearly a decade in the 3.4 series, Rhythmbox 3.5.0 has finally arrived. Podcasts have seen the most work, where played episodes are now marked, notifications are better, and there's a new gPodder.net plugin for syncing feeds.

Following up on the LVFS sponsorship story from earlier. NVIDIA has now joined as a premier sponsor, bringing the total to four OEM sponsors and hitting the funding target the project set for itself.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

GNOME Boxes hasn't looked modern in a long time. The rewrite, in beta now on GNOME Nightly, fixes that, moving to GTK4 and Libadwaita while opting for a Flatpak-only approach.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

If you use Kitty and haven't touched its Kittens yet, then you are missing out! These are small built-in programs that extend the terminal without needing external tools, covering everything from an interactive theme switcher and font picker to a drop-down terminal, a fuzzy file chooser

If your Linux Mint desktop feels a bit plain, Cinnamon's extension manager provides a set of visual effects worth trying. Effects like burn my windows, wobbly windows, magic lamp, and a desktop cube for workspace switching are available.

A free nine-chapter bash scripting course for beginners, covering variables, arguments, user input, arithmetic, arrays, strings, conditionals, loops, and functions.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

Want to take back control of what you read without an algorithm deciding for you? We have covered ten self-hosted RSS readers, with notes on which ones are actually built for self-hosting and which ones technically work but their own developers don't recommend it.

The list is for self-hosting. For normal desktop usage, we have a separate list of RSS feed readers for Linux. It's a bit old, but most of the apps are still in active development.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

While it is yet to arrive on Linux, the terminal-browser is worth a look. It is a real browser that runs inside a terminal.

📽️ Videos for You

You can master AppImage installation by following a few simple steps.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

Transform Dash to Panel into a dynamic, Plank-style dock with ripple hover animations by tweaking a few key extension settings.

First, navigate to the "Position" tab in the Dash to Panel settings. Disable every item on the panel except for the "Taskbar", and change the panel size or length mode to "Dynamic" so it shrinks to fit your active app icons.

Next, open the "Fine-Tune" tab and enable "Keep original gnome-shell top panel." This restores the standard GNOME top bar for your clock, system status icons, and menus while leaving your new dock at the bottom or side.

Finally, switch to the "Style" tab and enable "Animate hovering app icons." Click the settings gear next to this option to choose and adjust your preferred hover effect.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Do you know what kind of Linux user you are?

Well, it's obvious which one is the winner here. 😉

🗓️ Tech Trivia: IBM launched the System/23 Datamaster on July 28, 1981, just two weeks before the IBM PC. The same engineers built both, and what they learned on the Datamaster helped shape the desktop computer as we know it.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: Pro FOSSer Neville has shared his experiment running Lumina desktop on antiX-26.

I have argued this in the past as well. RSS feeds are the simplest way to get out of the algorithm's web.

Every platform wants to decide what they think you should read. RSS feed is the resistance. You have a list of your own favorite websites that you trust (like It's FOSS), you add these sources in the feed reader and you get to see all the newly published articles from the sources you want.

There are several feed readers for Linux desktop. Even email clients allow you to read from RSS feeds.

But they are confined with a single machine. Since self-hosting is increasingly (and rightly) being popular these days, you can try self-hosting feed readers in your homelab. This should allow you to access your feeds on all the compatible devices on the home network.

And if you want to go the self hosting way, I have a bunch of suggestions for you to explore.

For this list, I looked at how easy each tool is to actually self-host with Docker, whether it can be used with mobile apps (through the Fever or Google Reader API), whether it can generate a feed for a site that doesn't provide an RSS feed on its own, and whether there's a real hosted option if you'd rather not run the server yourself and yet pay for an open source software service.

1. Yarr

Yarr (short for "yet another rss reader") is a single Go binary with an embedded SQLite database. No separate database server, no multi-container setup, just one file you run.

You can run it as a desktop app with a system tray icon on Linux (and Windows and macOS), or point the same binary at a server and use it headlessly over the browser. It picked up Fever API support a while back, so it now works with Fever-compatible mobile clients like Reeder and Unread, something it didn't have for most of its life.

It's built for single person use. There's no multi-user support and OPML handling is basic compared to FreshRSS or Miniflux, so double check your import works before you commit to it.

Yarr is open source under the MIT license and self-hosted only. There's no official paid hosting.

2. Fusion

Fusion is a newer, lightweight reader built with Go and TypeScript. It's pretty much like Yarr.

It ships as a single binary with SQLite, has a proper PWA you can add to your phone's home screen, and supports the Fever API for third-party clients like Reeder, Unread, and FeedMe.

The official Docker image is here, and there's a docker-compose example in the README if you want to get it running fast. It deliberately skips AI features, which the project states outright as a design choice rather than an oversight.

There's no official first-party hosted version yet, though the community has put together one-click templates for Fly.io and Railway if you don't want to manage a server yourself. It is also available on PikaPods.

3. CommaFeed

CommaFeed is a Java and React reader built to feel like the old Google Reader. I am not sure if that's a positive thing or not.

It supports the Fever API and push notifications for new articles, plus a browser extension for quick access. The official Docker image is on Docker Hub, and native binaries are also published if you'd rather skip containers. OPML import and export both work as expected.

If you don't want to host it yourself, there's a free public instance at commafeed.com funded by donations, or you can use PikaPods for one-click hosting starting around $1 a month with a $5 welcome credit. PikaPods shares 20% of that revenue back to the CommaFeed project.

4. Stringer

Stringer bills itself as a self-hosted, "anti-social" RSS reader, meaning no sharing features, no social layer, just a clean list of articles.

It implements a Fever API clone, so it does work with Fever-compatible mobile apps, even though its client ecosystem is smaller and less talked about than Miniflux's or FreshRSS's.

Docker is the common way to deploy it, going back to the original mdswanson/stringer image and continuing under the current stringer-rss organization on GitHub. Feed import has historically been a little clunky, closer to adding one URL at a time than a smooth bulk OPML migration, so test that step before you commit your existing subscriptions.

Stringer is open source under the MIT license and self-hosted only, with no official paid hosting.

5. Miniflux

Miniflux is the reader for people who just want to read their feeds and nothing else. It's deliberately opinionated about staying small, and plain looking. You can understand why there is a 'mini' in its name.

It's a single Go binary that only works with PostgreSQL, no MySQL or SQLite option here. It supports both the Fever and Google Reader APIs, so it plugs into most mobile RSS clients without a dedicated app of its own.

Docker images are published to Docker Hub, GHCR, and Quay with ARM and RISC-V support, alongside Debian and RPM packages if you'd rather skip containers entirely. OPML import and export both work, including URL-based imports.

For saving articles, Miniflux integrates with more than 25 third-party services including Wallabag, Pinboard, Instapaper, and Linkding, and it can auto-send bookmarked entries to whichever one you use.

If you don't want to run it yourself, the official hosted version costs $15 a year with a 15-day free trial, and it runs the exact same open-source code as the self-hosted version.

6. FreshRSS

FreshRSS is the other half of the decision everyone ends up making. Where Miniflux stays deliberately small, FreshRSS goes the other way: multi-user, extension-friendly, and closer to a full Feedly replacement.

It supports SQLite, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, so you can start tiny and grow into a bigger database later without switching tools.

It's multi-user, with an anonymous read-only mode if you want to share a public instance. Thanks to WebSub, it can receive instant push updates from compatible sources instead of waiting on a polling interval.

It also has built-in web scraping, so it can generate feeds for sites that don't publish RSS at all, no separate bridge tool required for basic cases.

Official Docker image is available for easy deployment. Extensions and themes fill in most of the gaps in the default interface.

7. Tiny Tiny RSS

Tiny Tiny RSS has been around since 2005. In 2025, the original developer quit the project and a long-time contributor forked the project to GitHub the same month and has kept development going since.

Its plugin system exposes Fever, FreshRSS, and Google Reader compatible APIs for other mobile clients. Docker is the recommended install path, though it seems a bit heavier, more multi-container setup than Miniflux or FreshRSS.

OPML import and export both work, and its plugin ecosystem covers full-content scraping similar to a built-in readability tool.

8. NewsBlur

NewsBlur is both a hosted SaaS product and a fully self-hostable open-source reader.

It has native apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Mac, and it syncs with third-party clients like Reeder and NetNewsWire too. OPML import pulls in feeds and folders from Google Reader, Feedly, or Inoreader exports.

Its standout feature is "Web Feeds," which can follow a website for updates even if it has no RSS feed at all, by watching the page for changes instead of relying on a bridge tool (mentioned later).

It also supports saved stories with an "intelligence" training system that learns what you want to see more or less of. There are a few more AI features here to explore.

Self-hosting is the heaviest lift on this list. The stack includes PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, and Elasticsearch, run through make nb with Docker Compose. All this realistically needs a few gigs of RAM to run comfortably.

The hosted version has a free tier limited to 64 sites, with Premium at $36 a year (a 30-day free trial) unlocking unlimited feeds, full-text search, and notifications.

9. Feedbin

Feedbin has one of the more polished reading experiences on this list but you should know that the maintainer doesn't recommend self-hosting it, even though you can.

Feedbin's own documentation says its goal is to be a great web-based service, and that this is "at odds with being a great self-hosted RSS reader."

It doesn't recommend running it in production unless you have real time to configure it, and instead points people toward community Docker projects like feedbin-docker if they want to try anyway.

That's a starkly different stance from Miniflux or FreshRSS, which are built with self-hosting as the primary use case.

If you do use it, the syncing story is strong. It works with Reeder, NetNewsWire, Unread, and ReadKit through its API, and it turns newsletters into feeds by giving you a unique subscription email address. It also does full-content extraction for partial feeds and supports podcast playback with resume.

The hosted version costs $7 a month or $70 a year, with a 30-day free trial.

10. Glance

Glance is the odd one out to close on. It's not an RSS reader, it's a self-hosted dashboard that happens to fetch RSS feed from websites alongside Reddit, YouTube, weather, and server stats. Remember Google homepage from twenty years ago?

If you've ever wanted your feeds sitting on the same page as your homelab status and the weather instead of in their own dedicated app, this is that.

Configuration is a single YAML file rather than anything OPML-based, so backing it up is just copying that file. There is an official docker image and it also ships as a single binary under 20MB for Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD.

It's picked up a lot of attention fast, with more than 36,000 GitHub stars and still climbing. It's not going to replace a dedicated reader if you follow hundreds of feeds seriously, but as a "everything I check every morning" page, it's difficult to be ignored.

Bonus: RSS-feed generator apps

What I discussed so far are the self-hostable RSS feed readers. There are a couple of additional tools that help you generate or find RSS feeds.

For example, RSS-Bridge is a companion tool that generates RSS and Atom feeds for sites that don't publish one, and it's meant to sit in front of whichever reader from this list you actually pick.

Similarly, RSSHub is the bigger sibling to RSS-Bridge, another feed generator rather than a reader, built on Node and TypeScript with a much larger route library.

Easily Start Your Homelab with ZimaBoard 2

If you want to start your own homelab but not sure if you can manage all the technical things, try ZimaBoard. Zima devices come with ZimaOS, a very friendly operating system that easily allow deploying containerized self-hostable apps. This is how I started my homelab journey.

Explore ZimaBoard 2

So, which self-hosted RSS reader should you actually use?

I have not included some older, once-popular tools like Winds, Leed, FeedHQ etc in this list because they're no longer actively maintained.

As for what to actually run: if you want the smallest possible footprint, go with Miniflux. If you want more features and don't mind a bit more setup, FreshRSS is the safer multi-user pick. If your want all things at a glance, go with Glance. NewsBlur is a good option if you don't mind paying.

But at the end, the decision is totally yours. You can go through individual projects, see their features, try deploying them on your own and make a decision accordingly.

What are you using to read your feeds these days? Let me know in the comments, and if you've found something newer than what's on this list, I'd love to hear about it.

Let's see what's happening in the Linux and open source world this week.

Ubuntu 26.04 quietly stopped notifying users about available updates, and it turns out that was intentional. The tray icon was switched off by design, and without it, the notifier never fired. Security patches kept installing themselves in the background, but non-security updates just sat there waiting.

Collabora Online turns 10 with the 26.04 release, pulling in the same AI, Calc, Writer, and Impress improvements from CODE 26.04. The AI component is off by default and points to whatever model your organization already runs, not theirs.

Codeberg members voted to ban projects mostly built from AI-generated code and to formally commit the platform to never using user code or data for AI training. They were unhappy with how AI crawlers hit their servers, and maintainers found themselves drowning in low-effort AI contributions to review.

And they are not alone in it. GCC compiler is also taking a stand against AI-slop coding but they have taken a little more moderate approach to it.

OpenUK is calling on the UK government to build its own foundation along the lines of the Linux Foundation after watching British-born open source work repeatedly end up under US governance.

FireDragon, Garuda Linux's default browser, got a full rewrite with the v13 release, dropping the Floorp base for a new codebase. Its Welcome dialog now handles common privacy toggles like ResistFingerprinting and prefetching without needing about:config, TLS 0-RTT is on by default, and the pre-installed extension list is trimmed to just uBlock Origin and Flagfox.

I know we are quite early, but Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" is shaping up to be a busy interim release. Worth bookmarking if you want to stay updated on what's coming.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

An Atlanta man is facing a federal indictment for evidence destruction after CBP agents at the airport demanded his phone passcode, entered it, and watched the device wipe itself. GrapheneOS is in the news for this reason.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

Seeing that we are on the topic, our Markdown beginner's guide covers all the basics you'd need: headings, links, images, lists, bold and italics, block quotes, and line breaks, with a downloadable cheat sheet to keep handy.

Dark mode fans, this one's for you. 15 GTK themes covering most tastes, from Dracula and Catppuccin to Gruvbox, Graphite, and Fluent Dark for anyone coming from Windows 11.

If you use Ubuntu, you should know about these keyboard shortcuts. Makes the desktop usage a bit more efficient, or at least that's what I feel when there are keyboard shortcuts in my muscle memory and I don't have to reach for the mouse.

Getting constant buzz noise from your desk speakers in Linux? You don't have to live with it. Try this fix here.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

My hands-on review of SunFounder's flagship Pi 5 case, the Pironman 5 Pro Max, complete with two small local AI projects built to test it.

Hopefully, next week I'll share how I have set up my homelab on ZimaBoard 2 with AdGuard, Nginx Proxy Manager and Tailscale to have all the services on a .internal domain and accessible from outside the home network.

By the way, I tried out a Markdown editor built specifically for developers who work on documentation in Git repos. Ferrite has a built-in terminal, folder view, Git status, split pane, and diagram support. It seemed too good to be true until I saw that it is "100% AI coded". Now I am not sure if I should be using it.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

I knew this day would come. And it is finally here. Someone has 'vibe coded' a Linux distro. Not recommending to use it, of course.

But something you should know about because I have a feeling that, like AI-developed software, we may soon start seeing lots of AI-coded distros. The problem is that it is easy to launch projects, but maintaining them is a different story altogether.

Not everyone wants their music player rearranging their carefully organized folders into an artist-album grid. SonicTree just shows you your files as they are on disk.

📽️ Videos for You

Last time we talked about GNOME shell extensions that can help you be more productive. But did you know that you can use Extension Manager to manage those?

💡 Quick Handy Tip

If you are an Xfce user with a multi-monitor setup, then you can span the Xfce panel across monitors.

First, right-click on the panel you want to span, and then go to Panel → Panel Preferences.

Here, in the Display tab, set Output as Automatic and enable the “Span monitors” checkbox.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Can you spin the wheel and uncover the command?

Peace over chaos, always. 💪

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On July 23, 1985, Commodore unveiled the Amiga 1000 at New York’s Lincoln Center, stunning audiences with 4,096-color graphics, 4-channel stereo sound, and true preemptive multitasking.

Designed around a custom coprocessor chipset and a Motorola 68000 CPU, it debuted at a price of $1,285.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: The deluge of Flock cameras plaguing streets in the U.S. has FOSSers talking about a Big Brother situation.

From the Git repo's README to blogs, Markdown is everywhere in the tech world in general.

I have been using Markdown for years. That's what I use for writing the articles here. While I often write directly in the CMS, I also manage personal notes, drafts and work on documentation in dedicated Markdown editors on my computer.

Over the time, I have used a number of Markdown editors on my Linux system. But I keep on exploring new ones, a force of habit, as it keeps me aware of the new tools in the field.

Recently, I came across a new Markdown editor called Ferrite. I tried and found that it mentions all the features I wanted:

• Folder view
• Dual pane
• Focused view
• Editor tool bar
• Git status
• Built-in terminal

There are many more features, like code folding, syntax highlights, mini-map overviews, diagrams, and more.

Basically, Ferrite is like an IDE but for Markdown (or should I say text) files.

Meet Ferrite, Markdown editor for developers

Written in Rust, Ferrite a text editor primarily for Markdown but with good support for JSON, YAML, and TOML files. Basically, various text files developers and devops deal with.

For markdown file, you can view it in raw mode (with synax), rendered view (only shows rendered markdown), and split view (shows raw text and rendered view side by side).

For other files, it just displays them with a mini-map overview and highlighted syntax.

There is zen mode for focused work.

Ferrite also allows you to create flowcharts, wire diagrams, mind maps etc.

In fact, Ferrite has a huge list of features. You can export files as PDF and HTML, run shell and Python codes from the editor itself, has a command palette, supports Wikilinks, can view PDF and CSV files and much more.

Basically, it's a Markdown editor specially created for developers.

Why I liked it

Lately, I found myself in situations where I had to edit technical documentation hosted on GitHub. The flow is standard. I fork the repo, clone it on my system, checkout to a new branch, make my changes, push it to my forked repo and then create a pull request to the upstream branch.

This is the usual code contribution flow, applies to collaborative documentation, too.

Now, since this is a dev-like workflow, a text editor that behaves like IDE is perfectly suited for this.

Ferrite's built-in terminal gives me instant access to the command line for quick commit and push. It also shows the locally modified files if you are in a git repo.

For this kind of workflow, though I could use VS Code with extensions, it's an overkill. And I prefer to separate code and text files.

I used Ghostwriter, but it's a simple Markdown editor and I found myself switching between tools. This is when I came across Ferrite and it looked like it could be the perfect fit as it ticked (almost) all the checkboxes for me.

It's not perfect

Like most things in life, Ferrite is not perfect as well. I came across a few quirks after regularly using it for the past few days.

There is a dedicated button to sync the raw and rendered views when you are in the split view mode. This way you should be able to scroll on one side and see the impact on the side pane.

This feature works, but not perfectly. There is a lag that cannot be unnoticed.

Then, it doesn't display images in the rendered view. This is a huge disappointment for me.

Take a look at the screenshot below:

I understand that relative path is crucial for image display in Markdown. But those paths were correct and the image was displayed properly in the Ghostwriter editor:

Also, Ferrite has way too many features. It's like an IDE and if you have ever used an IDE you would know that IDE gradually become too complex with all kinds of settings and tweaks and busy interface.

Sometimes, simplicity also becomes a feature.

Should I use it or not?

Frankly, I did not notice the "100% AI developed" when I started using Ferrite last week. I liked what I saw, used it and fit very well for my current needs. I made notes, something I often do when I try a new tool, so that I can write articles and reviews on those tools later.

And when I started writing this article and went through the details, I learned that the project mentions explicitly that it is fully developed with AI.

That puts me in a dilemma. On one hand, it seems like a good piece of software. 1.7K GitHub stars are proof of its popularity. On the other hand, "100% AI" label is kind of offputting.

What would you do?

Pro Max is the fourth case in SunFounder's famed Pironman 5 case series. These tower cases turn your regular, naked, Raspberry Pi boards into a miniature tower PC.

So here, you get RGB fans and tower cooler for colling, RGB lights for asthetics, small OLED display for stats, full HDMI ports, GPIO pins exposed, NVMe HAT for adding SSDs and AI accelerator.

That's what more or less these cases offer. Only the Pironman Mini has fewer options.

I have used all of these cases so far, thanks to SunFounder sending them for the review. The first Pironman 5 case is used for my daughter's desktop setup. And then I use Pironman Max for running Nanoclaw AI agent 24x7 along with other homelab and smart home automation experiments.

The new Pironman 5 Pro Max has a 4.3" touchscreen, a camera, speakers, and a microphone in addition to what the Max version already offered. The new device is marketed around local AI. And that's what I would also like to focus on in this review, with whatever limited resources I have in my homelab setup.

The hardware

The case costs $145.99. You can get it from SunFounder's website or from Amazon. I think the duty and shipping costs are included in the pricing, but confirm with them to be sure.

Raspberry Pi 5, NVMe SSDs, and the Hailo accelerator are not included. You're buying the case, the cooling, and the screens, and bringing your own Pi and storage.

Assembling the case

Like every Pironman case before it, this is a DIY kit. You assemble it yourself. As a reviewer, I get these cases to review before they are available to the public. And thus I get only paper manuals for assembly.

Not a big deal. I take pride in accepting and completing the challenge. And since I already had the experience of building the previous Pironman models in the past, this one was relatively quicker. No major issue in assembling the case.

However, if this is your first Pironman case, budget more patience for the paper manual than I needed to.

SunFounder usually releases assembly video for their cases. Surprisingly, there is no assembly video for this case so far. I hope they release one soon because it could be challenging.

It's a reversible case!

This is what I noticed while assembling the case, although reversible is not the correct word here. See, there is a super long FPC cable that connects to the camera mount. I found it awkward to have a long cable exposed like this.

It made sense when I saw that there was scope for the camera to be mounted on both top/bottom surfaces. Meaning, you vertically rotate the device by 180 degrees and you have the power button and IPS touchscreen at the top.

This gives you flexibility as the exposed GPIO pins also change their position.

If you use the case with the screen at the top, you need to rotate the display from the operating system; otherwise, it will display everything in reverse. Also, it makes sense to set a screen timeout to save on power.

The OLED and power button behavior, rethought

The small OLED display has changed behavior across every generation, and it's worth mentioning out because it affects how you'll actually use the case day to day.

The original Pironman case kept stats on the small OLED all the time. Pironman Max introduced a tap-to-wake gesture instead, where you had to tap the top of the case to see anything, and honestly, that was an annoyance.

The Pro Max changes this again. The small OLED isn't on by default anymore. You press the power button on the front to wake it, and pressing it again cycles through the different stats. To shut the system down, you hold the power button, the same way you'd shut down a real tower PC.

SunFounder has also pushed this new behavior back to the older Pironman cases through a software update, so if you own an earlier one, you'll see the same button logic after updating those Pironman specific Python scripts.

RGB fans, finally in sync

One thing that bothered me about the very first Pironman case was that the RGB lighting on the rear fans was slightly out of sync between the two fans. It's a small thing, but once I noticed it, I could not unnotice it.

The Pro Max doesn't have this problem. Both fans run in sync now, and the case looks the way it was clearly meant to look.

Configuring the visuals

Everything I've described, the OLED behavior, the RGB lighting color and pattern, screen timeouts, is configurable through SunFounder's dashboard.

The bigger 4.3" touchscreen can be set to auto-dim and turn off after a period of inactivity, which is a sensible way to save a bit of power on an always-on device.

My one complaint is that there's no option to keep the small OLED always on for stats. If the old always-on behavior bothered some people enough to get a tap-to-wake option, and the tap-to-wake bothered others enough to get the current button-press behavior, the dashboard should really let you choose the original always-on mode too, for people like me who want the stats always visible at a glance.

Testing it as a local AI desktop

Pironman 5 Pro Max provides the following additional features from the previous Max version:

• 2 tiny speakers
• USB-based microphone
• IPS touchscreen
• Camera plus mount

This is where the Pro Max earns its "Pro" name, so I put together two small projects that utilize these four additional projects.

First, I built a voice assistant using faster-whisper, piper-tts, sounddevice, openwakeword, and psutil. It listens for the wake word "Hey Jarvis" and handles simple requests like reading out CPU temperature and usage, both through the speaker and on the touchscreen.

Second, I built a face greeter using opencv-contrib-python and piper-tts. I trained it on my own face and my daughter Ushika's face, so whenever the camera spots either of us, it announces "Hello Abhishek" or "Hello Ushika" through the speaker.

Note that Qt no longer ships fonts. Deploy some (from https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/ for example) or switch to fontconfig.
Watching for faces. Press 'q' on the window, or Ctrl+C here, to stop.
Recognized ushika (confidence 68.9) -> greeting

Neither project is complicated on its own, you could run both on a bare Raspberry Pi 5 with a webcam and a USB speaker.

What the Pro Max adds is that everything, the mic, the camera mount, the speakers, and the screen to show status, is already built into one desktop-style unit. That's the whole pitch of this case, and in my testing, it delivered on it.

The OV5647 camera module that came with the case is decent. The official Raspberry Pi AI Camera might have performed even better.

Similarly, if I had Hailo 8 AI accelerator in this setup, these AI projects could easily be expanded to more serious work.

Cooling well done

Even while running these AI workloads, the case stayed cool. CPU temperature usually lingered around 45°C and goes to 56°C under load in my testing. I haven't tried it with an NVMe SSD or the Hailo AI accelerator installed, since I don't own either, so I can't speak to thermals once you add those into the mix.

But since it has one tower cooler and two PWM fans, it should provide the best possible cooling.

A case that keeps growing with the Pi 5

The Pironman line has been evolving with actual user demand, and you can see it clearly if you've followed all three previous versions.

The original Pironman 5 was a tower cooler with room for one NVMe SSD. Pironman 5 Max added a second NVMe slot, so you could mix an SSD with a Hailo AI accelerator instead of just stacking storage.

The Pro Max takes everything from the Max and adds a 4.3" screen and a camera mount on top. That combination, camera or AI camera plus AI accelerator plus SSD, gives you pretty much every upgrade path you could want on a Pi 5 right now.

It's versatile enough to be a basic NAS, a local AI box, a Home Assistant hub, or whatever other Pi project you have in mind, all in a proper desktop-style tower instead of a naked board on your desk.

Is the Pironman 5 Pro Max worth getting?

At $145.99 barebone, this sits well above the original Pironman 5 ($79.99) and the Pironman 5 Max ($94.99). So, you should weigh your needs and wants.

If you just want solid tower cooling and a place to put one NVMe SSD, the original Pironman 5 still does that job for less. Although its gray aluminum look may not be as cool as the dark ones like Max and Max Pro.

If you want dual NVMe with RAID or a Hailo accelerator alongside storage, the Max covers that without the screen and camera premium.

The Pro Max is for a more specific person: someone who wants to build voice assistants, camera-based projects, a Home Assistant hub, or general local AI experiments on a Raspberry Pi 5, and wants the mic, camera, and screen already integrated into a case instead of duct-taped together.

If that's the project you have in mind, this could be a good option. The versatility on offer here, NAS, AI box, Home Assistant hub, general Pi project machine, is hard to match.

Ready for another round of latest happenings in Linux world? Here, we go.

Vocalinux 0.14 beta adds custom recording shortcuts, fixes Wayland text injection on GNOME, and handles CPU usage better on hybrid laptops. It didn't run cleanly during testing, but it's pre-release software, so that's a given.

GNOME's entire security tracking operation has been one person since 2020. That person is leaving in December. There's space for a replacement, but they will have to modernize the current system. Nothing to panic about. GNOME Foundation should take care of it.

Speaking of GNOME, the GNOME OS' development is going on nicely, with the developers sharing that a safe mode is coming, allowing users to troubleshoot issues that prevent boot or optimal usage of the OS.

MPEG-4 Visual is now completely patent-free after the last remaining patent, held by Siemens AG in Brazil, expired a few days ago.

If you do a lot of video processing on a Zen 4 or newer AMD chip, FFmpeg's latest AVX-512 optimization is worth knowing about. RGB24 to RGBA conversion is now 1.372x faster.

The TDF has published a sharp piece on why DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX are Microsoft's most effective lock-in tool. These bind organizations not through contracts or bans, but via pesky formatting friction that makes anything outside Office look slightly wrong.

Elon says X's entire codebase is going open source once xAI finishes a security review. He's said things like this before, but his track record has been mixed so far.

Jellyfin is having a leadership crisis. I hope it gets sorted soon because Jellyfin is my favorite media server, and I would like to see the project being happily developed.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

Three years ago Linus called AI "90 percent marketing." Last week he told critics inside the kernel project to fork it or walk away. He is not alone. People have accepted AI as a tool in the development kit.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

Sreenath, a Kitty user of several years, tried Alacritty for two months and came away with a temptation to switch. Features like Vi mode, scrollback search, bracket matching, and sensible defaults are what won him over.

Here are eight GNOME extensions that can make you more productive. A dropdown terminal, clipboard history with regex search, a proper tiling manager, Pomodoro timer, sticky notes that actually stick, and phone notifications on your desktop.

MangoWM does what Niri does but gives you many layout modes alongside a comprehensive tags system, per-tag layout switching, and a lean installation for you to tailor according to your preferences.

Tired of manually mounting your external drive every time? Adding a UUID entry to /etc/fstab handles it at boot, while udev rules combined with autofs take care of hot-plugged USB drives. I wrote this tutorial years ago and it is still valid.

Lastly, enjoy workspaces in Linux Mint.

⌛ Don't Miss: Last Week for Linux Books

Less than a week to go for the Humble Bundle O'Reilly collection. It is packed with Linux and Unix books, covering everything from shell scripting to system administration and kernel internals. This should be of interest to most Linux users, professional or not.

And part of the money gets donated to Code for America.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

What if you could have aan intern sitting on your desk and help you with your work? That's what Intern 2 from Autonomous does. Be prepared to see a lot of such "AI gadgets" in the coming months.

Got an old PC gathering dust? It could be converted into a NAS. We have covered some pretty neat OS options that can complement your restoration efforts.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

GNOME removed "Other Locations" tab from the sidebar in Nautilus so a developer created a "My Computer" style to show all the mounted drives in a beautiful overview.

If you share a lot of screenshots or images and want to stop routing them through Imgur or similar services, Slink is worth a look.

📽️ Videos for You

In the latest video, I show an e-paper clock that I built recently. The special thing is that it tells time in book quotes. The code is here for you to explore.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

This one is overlooked often, but Looking Glass is GNOME's integrated inspector tool and JavaScript console that is quite useful for debugging. First, you have to launch the Run a Command dialog with Alt+F2, then launch the tool by typing lg.

You can use it to troubleshoot issues with GNOME shell extensions or other interface snafus, and you can exit it by pressing Esc.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

How adept are you with Git? Our Git Command Knowledge puzzle will test you.

A riced-up Hyprland setup. 🤌

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On July 25, 1990, Microsoft became the first PC software company ever to top $1 billion in annual sales, reporting $1.18 billion for its fiscal year. Just 15 years after Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded it in 1975.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: A slightly different thread than usual, FOSSers are discussing whether the answer to EV charging issues is swappable batteries.

When OpenClaw hype was at its peak in the beginning of 2026, a lot of people bought Mac Mini just to keep an agent running around the clock.

I never understood why people would spend $500 on a device to run OpenClaw like agents that are merely inferences to a commercial LLM like Claude and ChatGPT.

But these 'claws' are here to stay, and people are utilizing them to run their agent on dedicated hardware. And that's why we have dedicated hardware built around these agents.

Autonomous is a company known for standing desks and ergonomic chairs, although they did start as Robotbase, making personal robots.

Seems like they are back to their roots, sort of. They have a few "AI hardware" projects in their offering and that includes a thinking desk and a paper pet companion.

But the device I am going to feature today is a desk companion that runs AI agents and you can use it as an office assistant or an intern (no offense to interns).

The device is called Intern 2 because it's a follow-up to Intern, which was released six months ago. Let's learn more about it.

Intern 2 Specifications

• Board: Orange Pi 4 Pro, 8-core Allwinner A733 (2x Cortex-A76 + 6x Cortex-A55, up to 2.0GHz)
• Memory: 6GB LPDDR5
• Storage: 64GB onboard + up to 256GB expansion
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4
• New in Intern 2: voice interaction (dual mic, pickup up to 3m; 5W speaker) and browser control, on top of the existing Telegram/Slack/Discord channels
• Warranty: 1-year warranty, 30-day free returns

Intern 2 starts at $249 for the OpenClaw or Hermes editions, and $299 for the Developer edition.

So basically, the device ships with an agent framework already running. You pick OpenClaw or Hermes at checkout, plug the box into Wi-Fi, add it to a Telegram, Slack, or Discord group (WhatsApp gets added later through a separate QR pairing step), and it starts triaging your inbox, watching GitHub issues, and running whatever multi-step task you hand it, all without you touching a terminal.

I am guessing you will have to do some configuration to connect it to your mail and suff but that should not be too difficult if your main LLM is already connected to various services you use.

The board underneath is an Orange Pi 4 Pro: an 8-core Allwinner A733 chip, two beefier Cortex-A76 cores paired with six efficiency Cortex-A55 cores, and a 3 TOPS NPU. It's the kind of board you can buy separately, so Intern 2 isn't offering or hiding anything exotic. It is just packaging familiar SBC hardware into something that doesn't look like a dev board.

What does it look like? It looks like a pyramid with a glowing top. I kind of like the look.

The voice interaction is the main selling point here. Why type when you can just speak to it? Is that not what Tony Stark did as Iron Man?

Intern 2 adds dual far-field mics rated to pick up speech from up to 3 meters away, plus a 5W speaker, so you can just talk to the thing sitting on your desk the way you'd talk to a coworker (or an intern). Browser control is also there, letting the agent act on websites on your behalf instead of only working through chat integrations and APIs.

There are three editions to choose from:

• OpenClaw ($249): the default, framework preloaded, no setup beyond Wi-Fi and a chat app.
• Hermes ($249): identical hardware, running the Hermes agent out of the box instead.
• Developer ($299): ships with the shell open. You SSH in, and Claude Code comes preloaded, with room to swap in Codex or OpenCode if you'd rather run your own agent stack.

Open-source Autonomous OS

Intern 2 runs on Autonomous OS, an open-source operating system created by Autonomous for physical AI agents.

It handles sensing, memory, skills, and updates, while the actual "brain" is swappable between OpenClaw, Hermes, PicoClaw, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, or any other agent framework you want to wire in.

Intern is the second reference device built on it, after a desk lamp called Autonomous Lamp. Since Autonomous is working on more AI-powered hardware, it makes sense to have a custom operating system.

Open sourcing is also the wise decision. These devices are more for tech enthusiasts, and some of them may tweak the OS to our liking and needs. So good job, Autonomous.

Pricing and Availability

Intern 2 is available right away.

As mentioned previously, it starts at $249 for the OpenClaw or Hermes editions and $299 for the Developer edition, with free shipping. Every unit ships hand-assembled and tested, backed by a 1-year warranty and 30-day free returns (I like that). Developer documentation is available here.

Should you buy Intern 2 is a question only you can answer. If you have interacted with Nanoclaw, Hermes Agent, etc. and like the idea of interacting with them via voice, this device should interest you.

Sure, this can be built from scratch, especially when the operating system is also open source. But not everyone has the time and skills to do that. People spend money on 'out of the box' experiences after all. I would not mind splurging on it, as I am sucker for such gadgets.

So, would you spend some money and get yourself an "AI Intern"?

Humble Bundle and O'Reilly have put together a pay-what-you-want Linux collection called Linux: All the Things (partner link), and it's built to take you from basic command-line comfort to container orchestration across fifteen eBooks.

O'Reilly doesn't really need an introduction. They are one of the most trusted technical book publishers. This bundle leans on some of their strongest Linux titles, including Learning Git, Linux Pocket Guide, and Practical Linux System Administration, alongside a handful of more specialized picks for security testing and Kubernetes.

All fifteen eBooks come as DRM-free PDF and ePUB files. Which means they're yours to keep forever once you buy them. Whatever amount you pay goes toward the publisher, Humble, and Code for America, a nonprofit working on making government services simpler and more accessible. If you use our link, a tiny fraction will come to us as well (read our affiliate policy). Just wanted to be clear about that.

Here's everything in the bundle

Bundle is divided into two tiers with different pricing and sets of books.

Tier 1: Pay $5.90 or More for 5 Books

The entry tier costs $5.90 and gets you five books, leaning more toward Linux internals than beginner material.

Linux Observability with BPF covers using BPF for performance analysis and network monitoring, the kind of thing you refer to when you're troubleshooting a production system rather than just running one. Linux System Programming and Understanding the Linux Kernel go a level deeper still, covering system calls, process management, and how the kernel itself is put together.

The other two books in this tier are Git references. Git for Teams focuses on building efficient, user-centered Git workflows across a team, and Git Pocket Guide is a quick-reference companion for common git commands.

Tier 2: Pay $29.50 or More for All 15 Books

Paying $29.50 or more unlocks the full fifteen-book set. Do note that the tiers above that, $34.50 up to $49.50, don't add any more books. That extra money just routes to O'Reilly, Humble, and Code for America.

This tier adds two more Git titles to round out what Tier 1 started. Learning Git is a from-scratch introduction for anyone still fuzzy on branches and commits, and Version Control with Git goes deeper into collaborative workflows and tooling.

A cluster of books here cover core Linux skills. Linux Pocket Guide, now in its fourth edition for its 20th anniversary, is a command reference built for the terminal. Learning Modern Linux and Efficient Linux at the Command Line build on that with cloud-native context and practical shell efficiency, while Linux Cookbook and Practical Linux System Administration round things out with recipes and day-to-day sysadmin practice.

Learning Kali Linux covers security testing, penetration testing, and ethical hacking basics, useful if you want to poke at your own systems before someone else does.

The last two books look are more advanced and geared towards DevOps. Kubernetes: Up and Running is a solid on-ramp into container orchestration, and Network Programmability and Automation covers automating network devices instead of clicking through them one by one.

🛒 Get the Bundle

All fifteen books are DRM-free PDF and ePUB, so they're yours to keep and move to whatever device you actually read on.

If even a couple of these titles are already on your reading list, $29.50 for all is still a good deal. And part of your payment supports Code for America, which is similar to doing charity yourself.

Linux Mint has taken the slow road to Wayland while everyone else rushed ahead, and it looks like that paid off. Cinnamon's Wayland session is dropping the experimental label with Mint 23 this Christmas, shipping alongside X11 as a fully supported option.

And Wayland is not really as slow as some people think. That's what a recent benchmark study found out.

Most microcontroller boards support Lua as an afterthought. The ELM11-Feather from BrisbaneSilicon builds around it. A GOWIN FPGA runs the whole show with no separate CPU, giving you Lua at the application layer, C for drivers, and VHDL/SystemVerilog for the hardware itself.

Joey Castillo's Open Book started as a DIY soldering project back in 2020. Six years later it's back as Open Book Touch, a proper ready-to-use e-reader with a 4.26-inch touchscreen, ESP32-S3, microSD, user-replaceable battery, and no DRM.

One developer, a few months of work, and Chatto is now open source under AGPL-3.0. It's a self-hosted team chat built to be light and simple enough to run by just launching an executable.

GNOME is working on an app called Test Center that would make trying experimental features less of a gamble.

📚 Linux Learning Offers

There are a few offers I came across that will help you improve your Linux skills, personally or professionally.

First is Linux Foundation offering upto 40% off on its training courses and certification exams. For people looking to make a career in the field of Linux and IT, a certification on Linux, Kubernetes and other related technologies can be of help.

Even if you don't want to go for certifications, you should always thrive for learning more. Humble Bundle O'Reilly collection is packed with Linux and Unix books, covering everything from shell scripting to system administration and kernel internals. This should be of interest to most Linux users, professional or not.

And part of the money gets donated to Code for America.

Third and last, my friend has created an "AI Engineer Bootcamp" course because AI is now a useful tool, even Linus Torvalds thinks so. If this is something that interest you, you can get it an additional discount with custom link.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

Like a zombie back from the grave, the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit, one of the longest-running legal sagas in open source history, isn't dead yet.

Cursor has an unpatched zero-day on Windows where dropping a file named git.exe at the root of any repository causes it to execute automatically when the project opens. This was known to them for months and has not been patched yet.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

I have been using Trello since 2013, watching it slowly turn into something else after new ownership stepped in. I set out to find what Trello used to be, across seven open source tools.

Seven Gentoo-based distros for people who want what Portage offers without starting completely from scratch. We have covered desktop use, penetration testing, security hardening, and audio production.

The compose key has been in Linux desktops for years, and most people have never touched it. Once you assign a key in GNOME settings, short two-character sequences let you type accented letters, copyright symbols, degree signs, and more.

On a related note, learn about remapping the CoPilot key on your keyboard to something useful. Yes, some keyboards these days come with a dedicated Microsoft Copilot key.

Since there is so much discussion around keys, let me share my favorite keyboard shortcuts that make me more efficient in the terminal.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

The ORICO 8848U4 is a 4-bay USB4 NVMe enclosure that connects over Thunderbolt and shows up as native NVMe devices on Linux without requiring any driver installation.

The indie Linux handheld space is getting interesting, with many tinkerers and small companies trying their hand at crowdfunding to fund their creations.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

Space Haven will have you manage a crew of humans on a spaceship trying to survive the cold, dark vastness of space.

📽️ Videos for You

I still stand by this, apt update && apt upgrade needs to go away.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

On GNOME, you can resize a window using the Super key on your keyboard. First, run this command:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences resize-with-right-button true

Now, when pressing the Super key, drag a window while pressing the right-click to resize it.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

How sharp is your Linux automation knowledge?

What does the cat says?

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On July 15, 1928, the ENIGMA cipher machine entered service with the German Army, encrypting messages via rotor wheels and swappable patch cables. Polish cryptographers first cracked it in 1932, sharing their methods with Britain in 1939, which let Bletchley Park read German traffic throughout WWII.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: Pro FOSSer Ernest has kicked off a rather interesting thread, asking other FOSSers what they understand of AI.

I started using Trello around 2013-14 to work on a team project. Trello was new and rising at the time for its simplicity of providing a collaborative Kanban board.

After its acquisition and recent AI surge, Trello has changed a lot. But I still miss its simplicity in Kanban style tools I have tried so far.

As I lean more towards, open source and self-hosting, I have collected a bunch of projects that can be considered in the same league as Trello.

My search for open source Trello alternatives was based on mainly finding simple kanban boards with team collaboration and public boards option. Integration to external services, mobile apps and the ability to import Trello projects are also worth considering. Since we are in the AI era, automation and AI agent access shouldn't be ignored either.

So, let's begin to see what open source tool can replace Trello for you.

1. Kan.bn

Kan is a sleek, modern looking Kanban task board. Built with Typescript, Kan provides a modern user interface and experience. It comes with all of the classic Trello features so you get boards and workspaces, labels and filtering. You also have the ability to comment and check activity logs on the tasks.

There is no automation or AI feature at the time of writing this article. Which is not entirely a bad thing because sometimes simplicity itself is a feature.

One thing that does bother me is the lack of smartphone apps. I like to keep a track on tasks while on the move.

That doesn't mean Kan doesn't provide ways for efficient work. They are already working on implementing templates so that you can easily create same type of tasks. Integrations with external tools is also a work in progress.

The biggest feature for people moving away from Trello is that you can import your Trello boards directly in Kan. That makes it a true open source alternative to Trello.

Kan can be self-hosted or you can pay for their hosted service. Hosted service is free for single user.

2. Planka

If you want to use something that looks and feels like Trello, look no further than Planka. Look at the screenshots, and you'll feel like you are looking at Trello itself.

You get all the usual Trello and kanban board features. You have lists with tasks and those tasks can have deadline and time tracking. Kanban, grid and list views are available. You should also be able to import your Trello tasks here.

REST API with 50+ webhook events helps you integrate task management with external tools in your workflow.

Public boards were supposed to arrive with version 2 but I don't think that has happened yet.

Organizations can have single sign on along with Google, Azure AD and more.

There are no official mobile apps for now. If you must use one, there is a community app in progress. I would suggest waiting for the official mobile apps, instead.

Licensing and pricing are issues here. There are two versions: community and pro. Both versions are available in hosted and self-hosted formats. The pro version has additional features like user roles, recurring cards, UI customization for organization branding etc. You can self-host the community edition for free. Everything else has a price tag, including self-hosting the pro version.

Licensing is 'fair use' and it is not clear that they use a clear, open source solution. I would keep them in 'source open' category.

3. Vikunja

Vikunja is primarily and an open source, self-hostable Kanban board that you can use on your own and with your team. You can add labels, create relation between tasks, add deadlines and priorities.

Tasks and boards can be shared with public, too. This makes it easy to collaborate with external people and they don't even have to create an account.

Apart from Kanban, you also get list, tabular and Gantt chart views. Recurring tasks, sub tasks, due date notification, you get them all.

I like the idea of the "quick add magic". It's a helpful featuere specially if you work with AI to create task description. In the description, use keywords like mention a date and it adds that as a due date. This saves you the trouble of manually assigning labels, due dates, priorities etc.

Vikunja doesn't have smartphone apps but it does let you import your Trello projects.

Written in Go, Vikunja claims to be speedy. How to verify the claim? Well, there is a demo board you can test, no log in required.

It is AGPL licensed and you can self host it on your own or opt for managed hosting from Vikunja itself.

4. Wekan

Wekan is one of the OG open source Trello alternatives. You can self host it on your servers. It feels more enterprise and organization oriented than individuals and lean team. The interface is a bit dated for my liking but still good enough for managing tasks without eye candy.

The promise is simple. You get boards, lists and tasks. It is collaborative and since its enterprise oriented, there is option to purchase commercial support.

There are mobile apps listed on their website but I didn't find anything on the Trello import. No AI integration as far as I can see.

5. Tududi

Funny sounding name aside, Tududi is somewhat of a Clickup alternative. You have boards, areas (work, life, personal) and the ability to create notes. Which is a great way to share common docs with the team.

There are plenty of features to like here. Recurring tasks, subtasks, priorities, labeling, deadlines. All the usual stuff is already here with a few smart features. Progress can be tracked with completion stats and productivity patterns.

No smartphone apps but responsive design makes it easy to follow tasks on web browser on your mobile devices. Don't see automation or AI features here, either. Not sure about public board, too.

It can be self-hosted via Docker or you can use the hosted service from the developer.

6. Leantime

While not exactly a Trello clone, Leantime is a project management tool created specifically with ADHD and neurodivergence in mind. So you get more color codings, emoji-based priority features.

There is a "personal view" that shows all your tasks in one place irrespective of which board they belong to. This is something I have seen in ClickUp.

You can also take notes that won't be saved in the main tasks and would only be used in personal view.

You can track productivity with built in reports and see how the project is coming together.

Another thing that I feel is helpful is the ability to create a blueprint for a project. So instead of creating the main project board immediately, this can be used for the (pre) planning phase.

Leantime also has builtin whiteboard for creating mind maps and wireframes to visually represent your thoughts.

7. Fizzy

From the makers of Basecamp, Fizzy is a relatively new tool and claims to make "Kanban as it was supposed to be". Which means it is keeping things simple by giving you boards with only the most essential features.

We have been using Fizzy for the past several months for managing our tasks here at It's FOSS.

Auto close is the feature that you won't easily find in other project management tools. Once you add a task, it gets added to Maybe list by default. And if the task sees no activity (edits, comments, moving to other lists), it gets moved to a "Not now" list that is hidden from the main view.

Another thing here is that no matter how many lists (columns) you add, you can only view two of them at a time. Helps with focus, apparently.

Fizzy has smartphone apps that makes it easier to manage tasks without sitting in front of a computer.

My biggest gripe with Fizzy is that it doesn't have a deadline feature. Everything is either Maybe, Intermediate lists or Done. And then removing tasks from Done list is done one by one manually, no multi-select here. So if your board has hundreds of finished tasks and you didn't delete them immediately, you have to delete them one by one. Or you just let them stay in the Done section which kind of looks odd when the number increases.

Public boards are available in Fizzy so you can use it for sharing project roadmaps. Webhooks let you integrate to external tools.

Fizzy also has CLI version and thus allowing you to use an AI agent for accessing and managing the board, if that's your thing.

There is no direct way for importing Trello projects in Fizzy. So that's something worth noting. Also, Fizzy is source available, not open source.

You can self-host it or use the hosted service which is free anyways.

Bonus: Schedule

Now this one is completely different than the rest of the Trello alternatives mentioned here. Schedule is a simple, kanban style todo list of your Linux desktop. It doesn't have collaboration features, cannot be self hosted or accessed via web browsers.

It's a desktop application. You install it, you create your boards, add tasks and work on them. Sometimes you need that. Either you don't work with a team or external collaborators or you just want a separate place for your personal projects.

And if that's the case for you, a regular desktop kanban app like Schedule does the job.

Which tool should you use to replace Trello?

I have deliberately not included these in my list here:

• Nextcloud Deck: Kanban feature is good but it's just one part of a different type of software suite.
• Plane, Mattermost and OpenProject: Full-fledged project management suite. Overkill for just Kanban feature.
• Kanboard, Restyboard, Taskboard: No longer actively developed.
• Nocobase, Baserow: More of no code CRM oriented tools than just Kanban boards.

And to answer the question...it all depends on your requirements.

If you want a simple Kanban tool that looks modern, go with Kan. You can use it for free or self host it or opt for the paid hosted version. Fizzy is also a good choice if you don't need deadline features. Vikunja is also rising in popularity and worth a dekko.

I would suggest checking each tool and its features and see if they will be your ideal open source Trello alternatives.

Your turn now. Which Kanban tool do you use? Did you find something worth trying in this list? Share it in the comments,

Back in 2020, I wrote about Open Book: a DIY, open source e-reader project from developer Joey Castillo that you could solder together yourself... at least in theory. It had a 4.2 inch e-paper screen, seven physical buttons for navigation, and the kind of "anyone with a soldering iron can build one" ambition that attracts a certain kind of small userbase.

Six years later, Castillo is back with Open Book Touch. It is built on the same idea just that it's more of a ready-to-use, out of the box kind of product this time. If need be, you can still take it apart and modify it as needed. The new project just went live on Crowd Supply.

With "own your data" becoming a way to resist against Big Tech's walled garden, an open source alternative to Kindle's ecosystem is exactly the kind of thing that appeals to many of us open source lovers. No account needed, no DRM, nothing "phoning home". If you have a good ebook coolection, a device like this is worth adding to wishlist, at least for me.

📝 Key Specifications

• Display: 4.26" e-paper touchscreen, 480 × 800 px, warm + cool frontlight
• Processor: ESP32-S3 dual-core, Wi-Fi + Bluetooth LE
• Memory: 16 MB flash, 8 MB PSRAM
• Formats: EPUB and plain text, no DRM
• Storage: microSD card slot
• Interface: USB-C with integrated LiPo charging
• Dimension: 78 × 120 × 10 mm, about 85 g
• Open source: MIT-licensed firmware, open hardware (to be released at shipping)

The base model is $149, with a limited "Author's Edition" going for $249 during the campaign only.

The most obvious change from the original Open Book is right there on the front. Where the old board had a directional pad, a select button, and dedicated page-turn buttons, Open Book Touch is a single symmetrical slab, just 1 cm thin, with a capacitive touchscreen doing all the work instead. That's why it is called Open Book Touch, perhaps.

The exclusion of physical buttons makes sense because it is a tiny device. The touchscreen sits on a 4.26 inch e-paper panel at 480 × 800 pixels, working out to roughly 220 ppi, sharper than you'd expect at that size. It's a 1-bit display at its core meaning fast, crisp black and white for page turns. Slower 2-bit grayscale mode is reserved for the lock screen, so a book cover or your own photo renders in more shades of gray.

Frontlight uses five warm and five cool LEDs together, so you get a warm tone for reading in bed or something cooler for daylight, rather than being stuck with the single-temperature light.

At its core lies an ESP32-S3, paired with 16 MB of flash and 8 MB of PSRAM, the kind of arrangement you'd want for parsing EPUB files on a microcontroller instead of a full Linux SBC. The firmware itself is C++ on ESP-IDF and FreeRTOS, with SQLite quietly tracking your library's metadata.

Typesetting gets some attention too: justified text with proper hyphenation (English, Spanish, French, and Italian dictionaries are included), inline dithered images, and text set in bitmap versions of open source Lucida Bright and Lucida Sans fonts, complete with true bold and italic weights.

Language support is pretty impressive for a new device. GNU Unifont ships on the device as a fallback covering around 70,000 glyphs, the interface itself is localized into seven languages including Arabic and Hebrew. They have also implemented the Unicode bidirectional algorithm so right-to-left scripts shape correctly instead of just rendering backwards.

There's no DRM support here, by design. Books load from a microSD card or over local Wi-Fi. You may also manage metadat of library with SQLite.

There is no companion app here. This 'feature' could be an inconvenience, too, if you like reading on more than one devices like your computer or smartphone. Perhaps later, something can be thought about it,

The 800 mAh (minimum) LiPo battery is user-replaceable, and the 3D-printed snap-fit case is designed to be taken apart, with printable CAD files included if you want to make your own in a different color.

Whatever happened to the original?

The original Open Book won Hackaday's "Take Flight with Feather" contest in January 2020, a competition sponsored by Adafruit and DigiKey for Feather-compatible boards.

That win was supposed to mean a manufactured run of at least 100 units landing on DigiKey's shelves. From what I recall, that specific retail run doesn't seem to have fully materialized.

Castillo sold bare PCBs himself through Tindie starting mid-2020, and by that October, more than 100 Open Book and E-Book FeatherWing boards had shipped to makers willing to solder them together at home.

So it did shipped, sort of, just not like DigiKey retail run originally promised. But real boards did reach real people as a DIY kit rather than a finished product. The project kept evolving after that, through an RP2040-based "Open Book Abridged" and, eventually, a full reimagining that led to Open Book Touch.

The original Open Book had all its schematics and firmware public on GitHub from day one, before a single board existed. Open Book Touch is a bit different for now. Castillo has open sourced Focus, the C++ application framework that powers the device's interface, and the firmware is MIT-licensed.

But the board files, enclosure CAD, and the Open Book Touch-specific firmware itself are staying private until the campaign ships, going public to backers first and everyone else after. This is what's promised by the developer.

Get Open Book Touch

Open Book Touch is live on Crowd Supply now. At the time of writing, the campaign has raised $25,658 of its $45,000 goal from 131 backers, with about five weeks left to go.

Pledges start at $149 for the standard Open Book Touch (free US shipping, $12 elsewhere), with a $249 "Author's Edition" in a special enclosure available only during the campaign.

Crowd Supply is targeting early 2027 to get the first units to backers, fulfilled through its usual partner, Mouser. Manufacturing runs through NextPCB's Launchpad program, with the e-paper panel itself coming from Good Display.

If you just want the reading experience Castillo designed, the $149 tier gets you the full thing. Go for the $249 Author's Edition only if the nicer enclosure matters to you, since the electronics inside are identical.

Suggested Read: If Open Book Touch is out of your price range or you'd rather build one yourself, we've rounded up several DIY open source e-reader projects you can put together at home.

Most microcontroller boards on the market today rely on Python, usually in the form of MicroPython or CircuitPython. If you've ever wanted something leaner without giving up that no-compile, REPL-driven workflow, Lua is the option worth considering.

But then most microcontroller boards are not built for Lua even if you can run Lua on them.

That's the gap BrisbaneSilicon, a small Brisbane-based semiconductor outfit, is trying to fill with ELM11-Feather. It is a Feather-compatible board that runs Lua natively.

Actually, it's Feather-form-factor follow-up to the company's original ELM11, and the crowdfunding campaign for it is now live on Crowd Supply.

Key Specifications

• Native languages: Lua (application), C (driver), SystemVerilog/VHDL (hardware), all on one board
• Chip: GOWIN FPGA (no separate CPU core, the FPGA runs everything)
• I/O: 23 pins, each configurable as GPIO, PWM, UART, SPI, or I²C
• RAM: 1 MB
• Dimensions: 22.86 x 64.65 x 4.85 mm (0.9 x 2.54 x 0.191 in)
• Weight: 5.2 g
• Form factor: Feather-compatible, works with existing FeatherWings

ELM11-Feather is priced at $29.

More than the specs, the architecture choice is the highlight here. There's no traditional microcontroller on this board. Instead, a GOWIN FPGA does the work, running a dual-core setup with an independent Lua REPL on each core. That's the "clever bit". Because Lua is running on an FPGA rather than a fixed MCU, BrisbaneSilicon can expose the entire stack, hardware included, to the user for modification.

Each of the 23 I/O pins can be configured as GPIO, PWM, UART, SPI, or I²C, which is a lot of flexibility per pin compared to boards that hardwire a fixed number of each. The board also carries 1 MB of RAM, a hardware watchdog, 5 user-programmable LEDs, and a built-in 500 mA LiPoly charger with a status LED, all inside Feather's compact footprint (22.86 x 64.65 x 4.85 mm) at 5.2 g. Being Feather-compatible means it slots into the existing ecosystem of FeatherWing add-on boards without any adaptation.

Full-Stack Programmability

BrisbaneSilicon calls this "Full-Stack Programmability," and that is main selling point of the board. The idea is that the same product can be extended at three separate layers at once: the Application Layer runs Lua, the Driver Layer runs C, and the Hardware Layer runs VHDL/SystemVerilog through a swappable "Hardware Overlay."

In practice, this means a user could design a custom hardware module (say, a quadrature encoder), write the C driver for it, and then expose it to their Lua scripts as a plain function like quadrature_encoder_speed(). Nothing about that workflow requires touching a separate toolchain for each layer either, since BrisbaneSilicon's own IDE, called Arvore, is built to unify all three.

Arvore handles project creation, uploading, and extending the Lua API from one interface, and a beta is already available to download. For anyone who doesn't want to install a custom hardware overlay by hand, the IDE has a config screen for that too. Purists who'd rather do everything from the command line aren't locked out either, that path still works.

BrisbaneSilicon says the hardware schematics and firmware API will both be released under the MIT license once the campaign wraps and production begins.

Compared to a few other boards in the same rough space:

• pico2-ice (RP2350 + ICE40UP5K): more GPIO and RAM, but no native scripting language and a higher price
• Adafruit Feather STM32F405: cheaper, but no FPGA and no hardware-layer extensibility
• Adafruit HUZZAH32 (ESP32): better battery life, but far fewer I/O options and no scripting-to-hardware pipeline

🛒 Pricing and Availability

The ELM11-Feather crowdfunding campaign launches this week on Crowd Supply.

The board is priced at $29. Shipping cost isn't listed yet, and BrisbaneSilicon hasn't given a firm ship date either. The company does say it has already manufactured and tested a small batch of 5 boards ahead of the main production run, which is a bit more reassurance than most campaigns start with, though the only risk it flags is component availability for the GOWIN FPGA and the BL702 chip.

Suggested Read: If you're curious about other Feather-family and Arduino-alternative boards, check out our roundup of Arduino alternative microcontroller boards.

Recently, Microsoft reluctantly agrred that a bug was eating up uo to 500 GB of disk space in Windows 11. They knew about the bug for months, no fix came.

Germany may not have kicked right in the Paraguay match, but it sure has kicked out Microsoft Sharepoint. The state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern will be using Nextcloud for over 5,000 employees. We need wins like these, don't we?

There was a time when every other new distro was based on Ubuntu but that list is shrinking. Linux system vendor Tuxedo is moving to Debian for its TuxedoOS distro.

Firefox users have had containers (old article) for years. Brave 1.92 finally adds them natively, keeping cookies and site data separate per container even when visiting the same site.

You get four default categories, temporary containers are one right-click away, and the feature is also heading to Brave Origin, which as you might remember is free for Linux users.

Most office suites shipping AI right now have made it difficult to avoid. Collabora Office 26.04 goes the other way, keeping AI off by default. Turning it on means plugging in your own API credentials or self-hosted model.

In other news, Canonical is pouring in €40,000/year into the Trifecta Tech Foundation, and their next target is to rustify Ubuntu's time synchronization components.

📚 Linux eBooks from O'Reilly

Humble Bundle has a new O'Reilly collection packed with Linux and Unix books, covering everything from shell scripting to system administration and kernel internals. Pay what you want for a few titles, or pay a bit more to unlock the entire bundle. If you have been meaning to deepen your Linux knowledge, this is worth grabbing before the deal expires.

Part of the money gets donated to Code for America.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

Hannah Montana Linux is back, and yes, it's 2026. Noah Cagle, a developer, has rebuilt the legendary meme distro on Debian 13 with KDE Plasma.

Microsoft was caught lacking after a Windows 11 storage bug ate up to 500GB of disk space, with a fix quietly being slipped into a preview update.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

Three years with Obsidian and Logseq, and the conclusion isn't that one is better. They just solve different problems. Obsidian is a Markdown writing environment where files and folders are the organizing principle. Logseq is an outliner where every bullet is a referenceable block.

But then my colleague Sreenath is obsessed with note management and he also experimented using only Markdown and KDE's Dolphin.

KDE is actually quite versatile and we have covered plenty of KDE tweaks and tips over time. Sharing some of them here:

• Tagging feature in KDE's Dolphin file manager
• Dolphin file manager tweaks
• Customizing and twekaing Konsole terminal
• Theming KDE Plasma (properly)
• Explore KDE themes (a bit old)
• KDE customization tips

Enjoy KDE 😄

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

Sipeed's NanoKVM-Go is a single USB-C KVM that carries video, audio, keyboard, mouse, disk emulation, and power pass-through over one cable with WiFi 6 for wireless connectivity.

PocketMage is a pocketable e-paper PDA with a physical QWERTY keyboard, a 3.1-inch e-ink main display, and a secondary 1.8-inch OLED strip for menus that need faster refresh.

Most USB-C hubs are fixed in what they offer. DockFrame has four slots that take in Framework expansion cards, alongside tool cards so the port lineup can be whatever you need it to be.

Valve quietly open-sourced the Inkterface this week, a DIY e-ink faceplate for the Steam Machine.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

Lockpicker is a GNOME-native frontend for hashcat that lets you crack password hashes without you needing to memorize hashcat's syntax.

📽️ Videos for You

Your Linux terminal needs the oomph factor. These seven tools will get you there.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

On a vanilla GNOME setup, you can assign keyboard shortcuts to an PWA.

First, you need to copy the command used to launch the web app. This is the value of Exec keyword in the desktop file.

Now, open the Settings app, go to Keyboard -> View and Customize Shortcuts -> Custom Shortcuts -> Add Shortcut. Here, you have to add a name for the PWA, and in the Command field, enter the command you copied from the Exec field (without the Exec=) and paste it.

Now input a keybind using your keyboard, and create the shortcut by clicking on "Add." This also works for AppImage files, btw.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

The Riddler can be a pesky character, can you help Batman solve a riddle and save Linux?

I spot an impostor here, I wonder who that is. 🤐

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On July 4, 1956, MIT researchers plugged a keyboard into the Whirlwind computer, letting programmers type commands directly instead of wrestling with punch cards, dials, and switches.

Whirlwind was already five years old at the time, but this simple addition changed how humans and computers would talk forever.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: Pro FOSSer Neville has asked a very interesting question. Do computers need to be managed and can AI take over the job?

Valve refusal to support Linux distributions other than Ubuntu has raised eyebrows over the years, but a recent Reddit thread makes some convincing arguments.

Ever tried a DAS (Direct-Attached Storage) device?

Unlike NAS, where you have a bunch of hard drives available over network, DAS is directly connected to your computer.

I never used such a product because I never had the need. But then Orico sent me there new DAS 88 Series 4-Bay USB4 NVMe SSD Enclosure and I got the opportunity to use a DAS for the first time ever.

Sharing my experience and some benchmarking test that I did for the first time in several years.

Orico 8848U4 DAS Specification

Here's the quick hardware specifications for Orico 8848U DAS:

Do note that there is also a SATA version of DAS in the same 88 Series lineup. It is older, bigger and has a RAID mode. The version I tested is M.2 NVMe SSD only and without built-in RAID functionality. That's intentional to give you the raw NVMe speed in a compact form factor.

Do note that this is a diskless enclosure. You bring your own M.2 NVMe drives. You cannot expect to get enclosures with SSD disks for under $200 in this age of AI slop.

Build Quality And Design

The first thing I noticed is how good this thing looks. The CNC-machined aluminum body has a silver finish that would blend right into a Mac-heavy studio desk. I am a Linux person, not an Apple person, but I will admit the build quality is quite impressive. Feels solid. My Terramaster NAS also has silver-gray aluminium chasis but this one is more "Mac looking."

All the ports and controls are on the back. There is a USB4 Type-C port, 12V DC power input, a dedicated power button, and a cooling fan.

The power button being on the back is a minor annoyance if the enclosure is tucked away. Worth planning your desk layout around it. The power button glows when pressed but difficult to look at it in the back.

The front has disk bay access with a slider button. It's a little bit stiff but not worth complaining about. The disk bay can host M.2 NVMe SSDs of various sizes. I only tested it with 2280 but guess that doesn't really matter.

The front also has 4 indicators at the bottom. They glow blue when the DAS is attached to a running computer.

Sides has nothing, just minimal branding.

The fan is there for active cooling, and ORICO claims it operates under 30dB. In my testing, the device felt completely silent. The fan does start running as soon as power is turned on but there is no audible noise unless you put your ear near the fan vent.

There is no fan speed control that I could find, which is a small omission. It would be nice to have a quiet mode toggle, but in practice it's a non-issue.

Keep in mind that the enclosure has no passthrough port. There is a single USB4 connection and that's about it. If you need to daisy-chain other Thunderbolt peripherals, this will consume your only port. On a laptop with limited Thunderbolt ports, this is something worth thinking about before buying.

Linux Compatibility

I noticed that the drive appeared as a native NVMe device. This means that each drive in the enclosure shows up as a separate NVMe namespace (nvme1p1, nvme1p2 etc) under a single controller.

$ cat /sys/class/nvme/nvme1/transport
pcie                             #output

And this detail matters because it means that the Thunderbolt PCIe tunneling is working correctly. The OS treats these drives as if they are plugged directly into the motherboard's PCIe bus, not as USB devices. My Sandisk external SSD comes up under /dev/sda that means it's treated as USB.

Performance Testing

I tested with a Crucial CT500P3PSSD8 (P3 Plus 500GB NVMe) installed in one bay. I only had one drive available for testing. Rest of them were being used in ZimaCube and Terramaster NAS. I have to buy new NVMe SSDs but the prices are not coming down. I ran benchmarks using fio and hdparm, and also timed some real-world file transfers.

Understanding The "40Gbps" Claim

It is easy to get excited with numbers but let's analyze the numbers. ORICO itself clarifies this in the product page: each drive achieves up to 10Gbps when all four bays are operating simultaneously. The 40Gbps is the total aggregate across all four drives. A single bay doesn't get 40Gbps.

In practice, even that 10Gbps per drive is rare achievement. Thunderbolt 4 tunnels PCIe 3.0 x4, which gives around 3500 MB/s of usable bandwidth total. Divided across four bays, each drive gets roughly 800-900 MB/s of real-world headroom. Mind the difference between bits and bytes.

My single-drive benchmarks came almost there, which indicates that the enclosure is performing exactly as it should. If I had 3 more spare SSDs, I would have tested the full 40Gbps claim.

Benchmark Results (ext4)

I tested with two filesystem configurations. The reliable numbers come from the ext4 run, where direct I/O (O_DIRECT) was fully confirmed working with no cache assistance.

Sequential read at 729 MB/s and sequential write at 669 MB/s are pretty good numbers. Pretty close to the numbers I discussed earlier. That's the advantage of using NVMe over a PCIe tunnel.

NTFS vs ext4

Since the Crucial drive I installed was previously formatted as NTFS, I benchmarked it in that state before reformatting to ext4.

NTFS sequential read was partially served from OS cache due to FUSE limitations and thus it is not a reliable number. Don't think that NTFS is somehow better than ext4 ;)

The NTFS write performance is inconsistent. Sequential writes drop to 231 MB/s and random 4K writes fall to around 2.3 MB/s.

Mind that this is not the DAS's fault. Linux accesses NTFS through the ntfs-3g FUSE driver, which adds overhead, especially on small random writes. The raw device speed (hdparm on the block device directly, bypassing any filesystem) was virtually identical in both runs at around 764 MB/s, which confirms the ORICO hardware is not the bottleneck.

Real-World Transfers

I am not a fan of bechmarking tests. They do not capture how the device actually feels to use. So I ran two practical tests.

Copying a 5GB 4K video file to the DAS took just over 4.5 seconds.

A folder with nearly 2,800 photos and videos totaling 10.2GB transferred in under 12 seconds.

Note that Linux buffers writes in RAM before flushing to disk in the background, so these numbers reflect the immediate user experience rather than sustained disk throughput.

Things To Keep In Mind

The no-passthrough situation is probably the biggest practical limitation but only if you need to daisy chain multiple devices and only have few thunderbolt ports available on your system.

No RAID support is by design here, but something to keep in mind if you were hoping for redundancy.

Fan control would be a nice addition, perhaps? The device was silent in my use, but there is no software or hardware toggle to set a fan curve or force it off. Definitely not a dealbreaker, just something I noticed.

Another thing to note is that there is not enough space for a heatsink since the device has a compact size.

Also note that for $219 you are buying a diskless enclosure. Four decent NVMe drives to fill it will cost a lot more. That's an obvious thing but I still would like to state that.

Who Is This For Really?

The primary userbase for something like this is video editors and creative professionals who are constantly moving large files.

If you are working with 4K or 8K footage across multiple projects, you'll have TBs of data and your internal SSD would fill up fast. A 4-bay NVMe DAS sitting on your desk gives you that additional storage without the latency of a NAS. You plug it in and it just works like local storage, because over Thunderbolt 4, it effectively is.

It is also a good fit for you if you already have a handful of spare NVMe drives sitting around from previous hardware upgrades. Instead of those drives collecting dust in a drawer, you slot them in here and have a fast, compact multi-terabyte storage pool at your desk.

That said, this is not for everyone. If you just need an extra 1 or 2TB of portable storage, a simple USB-C external SSD will do the job at a fraction of the cost and with far less desk space and will also be portable. A dedicated 4-bay DAS only makes sense when you need the multi-bay capacity.

Some NAS devices offer a feature called direct attach, where you plug the NAS directly into your computer over Thunderbolt and use it as local storage rather than over the network. ZimaCube highlights this as a use case.

The difference here is that a NAS with decent specs will cost you significantly more than this DAS. If all you need is fast desk-side storage without the NAS software stack and network overhead, the ORICO DAS is a simpler and cheaper solution.

Conclusion

As a Linux user, the experience was better than I expected. No driver issues, no special configuration needed.

The drive showed up as native NVMe devices and behaved like internal storage. Format to ext4 and you get fast sustained speeds in both directions.

Do evaluate your needs and if it fits, you can get it from its official website or order it on Amazon: