On May 27, Adam Williamson of the Fedora QA team sent a message to contributor Nathan Giovannini, CC'ing the project's devel and test mailing lists so everyone could see what had been going on.

Adam had been combing through Nathan's Bugzilla history and found what he described as the work of "some kind of agentic AI system," operating unsupervised across both Fedora's bug tracker and several upstream projects.

Soon after, Nathan replied, saying his credentials had been compromised and that he had nothing to do with any of it.

Skynet, is that you?

The agent had been mass-reassigning Bugzilla reports to Nathan's account, despite him not being the maintainer for any of the affected packages. In Fedora's Bugzilla instance, the assignee is supposed to be whoever can actually resolve the bug downstream, typically the package maintainer.

It had also been prematurely closing bugs, where the correct protocol was to mark a bug as POST when a fix was proposed upstream but wasn't pushed downstream. The agent was just closing them outright after submitting or merging an upstream patch.

Then there were the NOTABUG closures. The agent had been shutting bugs in components it had no ownership over, with comments Adam identified as clearly LLM-generated. Some of those comments just restated what the original reporter had already written. Others sounded plausible but were wrong.

The fourth problem was the most serious. The agent submitted an incorrect fix to the Anaconda installer project, and when a maintainer pushed back, it kept firing back LLM-generated responses until the maintainer gave in and merged it.

The Anaconda team reverted the PR, but two related pull requests had already shipped in Anaconda 45.5.

A supply chain problem?

This is not a particularly sophisticated attack.

A contributor account gets compromised, an AI agent runs through it, and bad code ends up in a release before anyone notices. The damage in this case was caught and cleaned up, but the scenario itself is not hard to replicate.

Fedora approved a policy on AI-assisted contributions last year, placing full accountability on the human contributor and requiring transparency when AI tools are involved. Submitting unreviewed, low-quality machine-generated content is explicitly called out as unacceptable.

What played out here was the policy's failure conditions, except it was routed through a stolen account rather than a contributor acting in bad faith, so the policy had no way to apply.

Open source software sits underneath nearly all modern enterprise infrastructure, which is what makes the supply chain angle worth taking very seriously.

IBM and Red Hat announced Project Lightwell in late May as a $5 billion effort to secure open source supply chains using AI tooling and a team of over 20,000 engineers. It targets vulnerability remediation across upstream and enterprise environments, from language ecosystems to AI frameworks.

However, it does not address the specific problem of agentic AI operating through hijacked contributor accounts, but it reflects where the industry is moving towards as AI keeps accelerating both the discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities.

Fedora's 2FA problem isn't going away

The incident kicked off a debate on the devel list that has apparently been sitting unresolved since the XZ backdoor in 2024.

Daniel Berrangé, a Red Hat engineer and long-time Fedora contributor, pointed out that mandatory 2FA had come up after that incident; the only outcome was a soft recommendation that provenpackagers should have it enabled, and nothing has moved since.

Fabio Valentini raised a separate issue saying that a lot of this activity happened on Bugzilla, which uses its own account system and may not support 2FA at all. Daniel acknowledged that but said it was not a reason to avoid mandating it for the Fedora Accounts (FAS), and noted Bugzilla may become less relevant if Fedora eventually moves to the issue tracker on Fedora Forge.

Michael Catanzaro, a GNOME developer, said he uses 2FA everywhere except Fedora, even though his Fedora account is among his most sensitive. The sticking point in his case is that Kerberos ticket renewal isn't working properly with 2FA in GNOME Online Accounts.

In the end, seeing that a compromised account got bad code into their repos, the Fedora folks ought to step up their efforts when it comes to mandating 2FA for contributors whose work affects many users.

If you have been keeping an eye on the display server situation on Linux, you know where things are headed. Wayland is taking over as distros are dropping X11 sessions one by one.

So naturally, someone went ahead and built a brand new X11 server from scratch. Developer Jos Dehaes recently went public with yserver, a new MIT-licensed X11 display server written entirely in Rust.

Now, this will either impress you or make you shout "Clanker!" but this project was built with significant help from Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding agent. The repo has both a CLAUDE.md and an AGENTS.md file in plain sight, making this a proper vibe-coded project.

What is it?

Well, yserver isn't aiming to clone X.Org, rather it is meant to be a practical X11 server for modern Linux that focuses on what real desktop environments and applications actually need today.

Everything that has accumulated over decades and serves no purpose in today's computing environment has been dropped. That includes the DDX driver ABI, multiple X11 screen support, non-TrueColor legacy visuals, indirect GLX, and endian-swapped clients.

Under the hood, yserver drives hardware directly through DRM/KMS and Vulkan, skipping the usual middleware layers that sit between the display server and the GPU. This means a more direct path to the hardware with fewer moving parts sitting in the middle.

According to the project's documentation, yserver uses libseat for seat management, which ensures it can run without root and the core is deliberately single-threaded, resulting in predictable protocol behavior.

What can it do?

Currently, yserver can already boot into MATE, Xfce, and Cinnamon sessions, and it has also been tested with window managers like FVWM3, e16, and Window Maker. FreeBSD support is on the roadmap, but work on it has not started yet.

Hardware coverage is wider than you might expect. In testing, Jos has covered AMD Ryzen and Radeon setups, Intel Kaby Lake iGPU, NVIDIA with the proprietary driver, Snapdragon X1, and Apple M1 and M2 on Asahi Linux.

These were all tested on MATE, Xfce, and Cinnamon configurations, btw.

The obvious question

Major players in the Linux space like Ubuntu dropped the X11 session in 25.10, Fedora has done away with X11 on its flagship Workstation desktop edition, and KDE has already announced Plasma 6.8 will drop X11 support entirely.

So who is yserver for, exactly? Well, there is still a distinct group of users stuck on X11, whether because of legacy desktop environments, specific hardware setups, or workflows that just have not made the jump yet.

And the project itself is very early. There is one primary contributor, and the security model is incomplete, with the design documentation clearly stating that clients can currently read other clients' windows and global input.

Heck, even the name is a placeholder. 😅

So, yserver won't be replacing Wayland or X11 on your computer anytime soon, but it is a nice project to know about, and it also shows us how prevalent vibe coding has become, whether you like it or not.

Via: Phoronix

The LF AI & Data Foundation has announced the formation of the DocLang Specification Working Group, kicking off a collaborative effort to build an open, AI-native document format standard.

The working group operates under the Joint Development Foundation's vendor-neutral governance model, ensuring that no single company controls the roadmap.

The founding members are IBM, NVIDIA, Red Hat, ABBYY, and HumanSignal. Though, the spec documentation also credits Forgis as a founding member, but the announcement didn't mention them.

By the way, DocLang is not the only thing in play here. Combining its open document format specification with Docling, IBM's open source document processing toolkit also under LF AI & Data, the initiative is looking to build a more complete open source document AI stack under one roof.

Together, the two cover the full pipeline from document ingestion and parsing through standardized representation and downstream consumption by language models and agentic AI systems.

As for the specification itself, it is already at v0.6, is available under the Apache 2.0 License, and covers document structure and semantics, geometric layout, pagination, and complex components like tables, charts, formulas, and code blocks.

There's also native support for audio, image, and video content, and governance metadata like privacy flags and model training constraints are embedded directly in the document rather than stored in a separate file.

Who is it for?

The primary target is enterprises running generative AI and agentic workflows on large document sets. Formats like PDF, DOCX, and JPEG were designed for human consumption, not machine interpretation.

When such files are fed into AI pipelines, their reading order gets mangled, tables flatten into plain text, and figures disappear entirely. The result is a scenario where the document quality becomes the bottleneck, not the model itself.

DocLang is meant to fix that by giving pipelines a single, unambiguous representation where the same document always produces the same output regardless of which tool processed it.

It is also relevant to anyone building with LLMs and vision-language models on real-world content. Docling and ABBYY FineReader Engine already support DocLang output natively, so existing pipelines can adopt the standard without overhauling their tooling.

You can go through the specification for DocLang on GitHub.

Suggested Read 📖: Open Standards for What AI Actually Costs

We are used to seeing systemd as the default init on most Linux distributions, but not everyone is a fan.

Some users and developers take issue with its broad scope, preferring init systems that do one thing and do it well rather than one that reaches into session management, logging, device handling, and more.

To escape it, people often find refuge in systemd-free distributions that feature a diverse selection of init systems.

While we are yet to see a widespread trend where mainstream distros ditch systemd, smaller projects have the flexibility to do so, with the decision usually being made only after discussing such a major change with the community.

KaOS, the independent distro built around Qt, has successfully embarked on its move away from systemd, introducing the first release candidate (RC) for what will be the next chapter in its developmental cycle.

Their motivation boils down to upstream changes that left the team in a tight spot. Systemd 254 dropped support for its split /usr setup, later versions killed AUFS compatibility, and KDE Plasma's increasing systemd dependency made things worse.

In the end, switching init systems became the only real option for the project. 🤷

KaOS' Dinit Image Debuts

The KaOS Dinit 2026.06 RC image ships with a new startup stack where Dinit takes over as the init system and service manager, Turnstile handles session and login tracking, and seatd takes care of seat management. Together, these cover what systemd previously handled as a single unit.

Just so you understand what the fuss is about, Dinit (source code) is a lightweight, open source service manager that can also act as a system init. It handles starting services in parallel, respects dependencies between them, and is designed to work with other system components rather than replace them fully.

It already powers Chimera Linux and eweOS as the default init and is one of the init options available on Artix Linux and antiX.

That said, KaOS is not going fully systemd-free with this release. Systemd's udev and tmpfiles stay in place for now, and elogind is still present. The devs plan to keep these components around for the forseeable future.

What else does the ISO offer?

For the display manager, SDDM has been ditched in favor of greetd with tuigreet, which is said to integrate better with the new seatd-based session setup. The Calamares installer has also been updated to run cleanly on a pure Wayland session, with fixes applied to QML modules that had lost text input capability in areas like the user creation screen.

Likewise, Limine is now the default bootloader, with other UEFI options remaining available through the installer, and for partitioning, the automated setup in Calamares now covers most popular filesystems.

There's also a new welcome utility, Croeso, which walks new users through around 15 common post-install settings after installation. And for the sound backend, phonon-mpv is now the default, replacing the previous VLC-based one.

Try the RC

This is a release candidate, not a stable release. Rough edges are expected, so it is best treated as a testing build rather than something for everyday use. The ISO is available for download from the KaOS RC portal via mirrors hosted across regions like France, U.S., and Japan.

Moreover, existing non-Dinit ISOs are still around and will be for sometime. The KaOS developers have not confirmed when or if these will be phased out.

Proton Drive (partner link) is getting a lot of love these days. We recently covered the encryption upgrades and the Linux desktop client that's in the works. Now Proton has added something the terminal dwellers will find useful; an official Command-Line Interface (CLI) for Drive, available on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

The CLI is built on the Proton Drive SDK, the same foundation that powers the official desktop and mobile apps. It runs as a single binary on the various platforms and carries the same end-to-end encryption capabilities as Drive.

Here's a look at what it can do and how you can get it running on Linux.

What does it offer?

The CLI lets you handle the usual file management tasks from your terminal. You can upload, download, and browse files; manage the trash folder; and even oversee content sharing and invitations.

Results come out in plain text by default, and passing --json makes the output machine-readable for scripting.

Do note that it does not have a built-in continuous sync engine like the existing desktop clients do. That said, you should get similar behavior by scheduling it with cron or a systemd timer on Linux, so it is not as limited as it first sounds.

If you are the kind of person who would rather write a shell script than reach for a mouse, this will make Proton Drive (partner link) a natural part of your existing workflow rather than something that needs to be launched from the app launcher.

This is how you get it on Linux

I tested these instructions on a Fedora Workstation 44 system, and everything went smoothly.

First, you have to download the relevant CLI binary for your platform from the downloads index. I went with linux/x64 as I am on an x86 setup.

Now, open a terminal in the directory where you saved it and make the file executable:

chmod +x proton-drive

Verify the build:

./proton-drive version

Sign in through your browser:

./proton-drive auth login

Your session is stored securely via libsecret, so no password is ever passed on to the command line. Following that, you can run ./proton-drive help for getting the full command list or add --help to any command for its available flags.

If you prefer building from source, then the instructions and the source can be found on GitHub.

Suggested Read 📖: Microsoft Just Brought Linux Commands to Windows

Other than its well-known lineup of office suites, ONLYOFFICE has been consistently building up its collaborative platform, DocSpace, since 2023. It sits in the same space as Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, targeting teams that want a self-hostable, format-compatible alternative.

Things got a bit complicated recently when Nextcloud and IONOS forked ONLYOFFICE into Euro-Office, a "Made in Europe" alternative aimed at organizations with data sovereignty requirements. ONLYOFFICE pushed back, accusing the fork of violating the additional conditions attached to its AGPLv3 license.

When ONLYOFFICE Docs 9.4 arrived shortly after, it came with a licensing update that tightened the language around attribution, copyright notices, and trademark rights, which felt very much like a direct response to that dispute.

Now, DocSpace 3.7 is here with its own licensing update along the same lines, and it brings expanded AI provider support, a reworked form filling experience, and several room management improvements on top of that.

🆕 ONLYOFFICE DocSpace 3.7: What's New?

The editors on this release are the same ones from the Docs 9.4 release, getting you niceties like horizontal lines in documents, a Dark Document mode for spreadsheets, 25 new slide themes, 20 new slide transitions, and a dedicated Chart Design tab.

Then there's the form filling rooms, which have received comprehensive upgrades that let you create and edit PDF forms directly inside a room rather than having to upload a finished form from external sources.

A new Start filling mode, accessible from the editor toolbar or the file context menu, puts the form into filling mode for everyone in the room, making it easier to collect responses from multiple people at once.

Related to that change, the form filler role now keeps the form hidden from the room list until filling mode is active, at which point responses get gathered into a spreadsheet automatically.

Additionally, you can refresh that file on demand with the new "Sync responses to XLSX" option, and there is now also support for routing responses to a third-party external database if you have one connected.

DocSpace 3.7 similarly goes big on upgrading its existing AI functionality. You can now generate DOCX files, PDF forms, and PPTX presentations directly from the AI agent chat and open them immediately for editing.

Accompanying them are three new AI providers, DeepSeek, xAI, and Google AI. This brings the total to seven, joining the existing roster of Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, and Together AI options, along with any custom providers you configure.

Beyond that, you can set a default provider and model that gets auto-selected whenever you spin up a new agent, and the provider configured in DocSpace also syncs automatically to the editors.

You can also upload images into the AI chat for adding more context to your queries, and an extended thinking display shows up for more complex queries. Those who would rather keep AI out of their workspace entirely can now toggle it off across DocSpace and the editors without losing chat history.

The toggle resides at:

Settings > Customization > General > AI Services Management

The rest of the update covers a good spread of smaller but useful changes, including the ability to group rooms with tags, bulk-delete multiple rooms at once, and replace default document templates via settings.

Admins also get a couple of new access controls, with options to prohibit external link creation and set limits on how many users can join via an invite link and for how long.

📥 Get it Now

This release is available via a dedicated portal for users who are okay with ONLYOFFICE taking care of the infrastructure. Those who prefer a more hands-on approach can wait a bit and self-host the community edition of DocSpace 3.7 when it is made available.

The source code for all of that can be found on GitHub.

Suggested Read 📖: Tuta Joins The Euro-Office Umbrella

Collabora is a UK-based company that builds open source office suite solutions based on LibreOffice. These are designed to run both on a browser and locally, integrating directly into an organization's infrastructure.

Their flagship offering is Collabora Online (COOL), the paid, enterprise-grade version that ships with support agreements, long-term maintenance, and thoroughly tested updates.

Complementing that is Collabora Office, a desktop app for Linux, Windows, and macOS that mirrors the same interface. However, there's a third edition called Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) that runs the same codebase as COOL but gets new features first and doesn't cost a dime.

It has now received a new release that delivers a range of upgrades, including some AI ones that are quite interesting.

A Packed Release

Calc gets AI integration aimed at data analysis and formula debugging. A floating indicator now appears on cells with errors, opening a quick menu to inspect and fix the issue in place.

Per-user sheet views are another useful addition for teams, where each person working on a shared spreadsheet can now set up their own filters and column or row arrangements without touching anyone else's view.

Similarly, pivot tables now support calculated values, so you can build calculated columns from existing spreadsheet data, and table styles arrive with preset themes covering light, medium, dark, and custom options.

A batch of new functions is also included; they are CHOOSECOLS, CHOOSEROWS, DROP, EXPAND, HSTACK, TAKE, TEXTAFTER, TEXTBEFORE, TEXTSPLIT, TOCOL, TOROW, VSTACK, WRAPCOLS, and WRAPROWS.

AI assistance is now available in Writer as well, helping with text suggestions, rewrites, and general writing tasks without leaving the document. Document comparison receives an overhaul too.

You can now bring up an older version of a file, either from the server or a local copy, and see exactly what changed. Insertions, deletions, moved text, images, and tables are all marked up with color-coded indicators showing who made each change and when.

The comparison can be viewed side by side or through the tracked changes panel.

The editor also handles conflicting changes more gracefully. When one change overlaps with or depends on another, accepting or rejecting it no longer risks wrecking the surrounding content.

Combined with reinstate improvements, going back and forth through a review cycle is a lot less tedious than it used to be.

Before I forget, markdown files can now be imported into Writer and exported back out. This can be helpful for anyone whose work crosses between a traditional document editor and a text-based or developer-oriented workflow.

No surprises here, but Impress gets some AI powers too! It can assist with early research and slide preparation, helping summarize information and turn dense content into something that works better on a slide deck.

A new follow-me presentation mode lets viewers sync to the presenter's current slide automatically. Someone who missed an earlier point can pause, go back to review it, and rejoin the live session without interrupting the presenter.

The present to all feature works like a buff to the above, allowing the presenter to kick off the slideshow for all viewers at once rather than waiting for everyone to manually start it themselves.

Presentations can now mix slides of different sizes within the same file, and ODP files gain section support, allowing longer decks to be organized into grouped sections with overview pages.

Interoperability with Microsoft's OOXML family of file formats continues to improve in this release. Collabora has been running a validation effort across 200,000+ documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, working toward zero conversion errors when files move between Collabora and Microsoft Office.

This release also introduces significant accessibility improvements, with screen readers now able to properly detect color pickers, line style selectors, numbering options, bullet choosers, and special character dialogs.

Form controls across interface elements in Writer, Calc, and Impress now carry correct labels that assistive technology can read aloud, and keyboard-only navigation is now more consistent across toolbars, sidebars, and panels.

All of that has earned Collabora a BITV 2.0 (in Deutsche) certification from the German accessibility regulator.

Try CODE 26.04

Don't let the warning note earlier fool you, though. While this is a fast-moving class of document editors, Collabora thinks it is ideal for home users, small teams, and early adopters.

If you want to try it without setting anything up, Collabora offers a live hosted demo. Sign up with an email address, and you get access to both the Collabora Online and Collabora Office Classic demos.

For self-hosting, CODE is available as a Docker image for x86-64, ppc64, and arm64 hosts, and as native .deb and .rpm packages for Linux. The CODE portal has full setup instructions, including reverse proxy configuration for Apache and Nginx, and SSL setup via Let's Encrypt.

Suggested Read 📖: TDF and Collabora Feud

People who dabble in 3D printing know that Bambu Lab makes some of the most capable consumer 3D printers on the market right now. And no, this is not sugarcoating it; the hardware is genuinely good, catering to tinkerers at varying price points.

The software, though, is like a slow-burning wound for anyone who values owning what they buy. Things have been downhill for some time now, and it started back in January 2025, when the company announced a new authorization and authentication system for its X1 Series printers.

Some Lore Info

They pitched it as a security update, with the change requiring Bambu Lab authorization for basic printer operations, locking out third-party tools in the process even in the offline LAN mode.

The backlash was severe enough that Bambu had to walk back parts of the announcement, add an FAQ, and introduce a "Developer Mode" as a compromise. The damage to trust, however, was already done.

By June 2025, the same authorization system had rolled out to the P and A series as well, cutting off third-party software from working with Bambu printers by default.

More recently, they went after an open source developer who had built a fork of OrcaSlicer that restored direct communication with Bambu printers by studying the publicly available Bambu Studio source code.

He had not touched any proprietary library, yet Bambu Lab threatened him with a cease-and-desist, which led to the project being taken down. The Software Freedom Conservancy later confirmed this was a violation of the AGPLv3 license that governs Bambu Studio and its upstream projects.

This is where open source alternatives like Bambuddy come in. The tinkerer community has made it clear that locking down hardware people paid for tends to produce exactly this kind of response.

Bambuddy: Overview ⭐

Bambuddy is a self-hosted, open source print management system for Bambu Lab printers, built by a developer known as Martin (maziggy). It runs in Docker, sits on your local network, and gives you a full web-based dashboard to manage your printer.

It offers you things like real-time monitoring, print management, file archiving, scheduling, and a lot more, all running locally on hardware you already own, whether that is a pricy Raspberry Pi 5, a NAS, or any other Linux-capable machine.

Bambuddy also has a print queue with drag-and-drop reordering and time-based scheduling, so you can line up overnight jobs or off-peak prints without having to babysit the machine.

For anyone running multiple printers, it supports dispatching to a fleet with automatic load balancing based on which machine is idle and has the right filament loaded.

Remote printing is handled through Proxy Mode, which lets your slicer talk to your printer from anywhere in the world without port forwarding or touching Bambu's infrastructure. Traffic is forwarded securely with full end-to-end TLS, and there is built-in Tailscale awareness if you already run a private mesh network.

Not only that, but it also supports a wide range of Bambu Lab printers, including the X1 Carbon, X1E, P1P, P1S, P2S, A1, A1 Mini, and the newer H2D, H2D Pro, H2C, H2S, and X2D.

For people who want to cut desktop slicers out of the loop entirely, there is an optional sidecar that runs OrcaSlicer or Bambu Studio headlessly in Docker. With this, you get a Slice button directly in the Bambuddy interface, multi-plate support, per-AMS filament matching, and the finished file drops straight into the queue when it is done.

Get Bambuddy

The source code for Bambuddy can be found on GitHub, licensed under AGPLv3. Installation guides, setup walkthroughs, and feature documentation are all on the official wiki.

You can also check out the Bambuddy website for a live demo and a full feature overview before committing to a self-hosted setup on your homelab.

Passwords are one of those things everyone knows they should handle better but rarely do. The bare minimum is not reusing them across sites, and beyond that, you really want a password manager doing the heavy lifting for you.

If you have been looking for options, you have probably come across Proton Pass (partner link) and Bitwarden as two of the more popular cloud-powered choices. For local hosting, something like KeePassXC lets you keep everything on your own machine without any cloud dependency at all.

But I recently came across something a bit different. It is web-based, fully open source, works completely outside any ecosystem, and does a fair bit more than just storing passwords. And you can self-host it as well. So let me tell you about it.

AliasVault: One Vault for Everything

Offered as an open source, end-to-end encrypted password and email alias manager, AliasVault lets you store passwords and create new aliases for use on the web.

The latter works like this. Instead of using your real name and email address everywhere, you generate a unique identity, password, and email alias for each service you sign up to.

If one of those services ever leaks your data or starts spamming you, you know exactly where it came from, and you can just kill that alias.

Operated under XIVISOFT, this is the work of Leendert de Borst, a software developer from the Netherlands who has been building privacy-focused tools since 2013. The project itself is licensed under AGPL-3.0, and the source is available on GitHub.

The cloud version runs on dedicated servers in Germany (Hetzner), within the EU, making it GDPR-compliant. There is also a full self-hosting path via Docker if you would rather keep everything on your own infrastructure.

Initial configuration

Getting started with AliasVault on the cloud version means heading over to app.aliasvault.net and creating a new vault.

The first thing I noticed is that it does not ask for an email address at signup. You just pick a username, anything you want, and that's all the identifying information it collects.

Before you get to the vault itself, you are asked to agree to the terms and conditions. This is pretty standard for any web service, though the terms here are straightforward and not particularly alarming.

The short version is that you cannot use AliasVault for illegal purposes, you are responsible for keeping your account secure, and the project itself is not liable if you lose your master password and your data becomes inaccessible.

Once past that, you set your master password, and AliasVault shows a strength indicator right there during setup. A strong password is not optional here given the zero-knowledge architecture and the sensitive nature of the contents; lose it and the vault contents are gone for good.

If you are coming from another password manager, the empty vault screen immediately displays an import button. AliasVault can pull in credentials from 1Password, Bitwarden, Chrome, Dashlane, Firefox, KeePass, KeePassXC, Proton Pass, and Strongbox.

Adding new logins

Clicking on the "+ New" button will give you multiple options to add a new entry for Login, Alias, Card, and Note. During my use, I mostly stuck to the Login entry, using it to add new credentials to the vault.

The interface presented here is easy to get used to. You enter the username, add the password, enter the website URL, and click on "Save Item" to get an item added to the vault.

You can even generate passwords, and from the left-hand side menu or at the bottom of the item entry, you can add more content to a vault item, such as email addresses, notes, a two-factor authentication secret, file attachments, or a custom field.

Just click on the plus button to get going.

Keeping things organized is straightforward too. Creating a folder takes about three seconds. Click "+ New Folder", type a name, and hit "Create". Moving an existing login into a folder is done through the item's edit screen, where a Select Folder dropdown lists all your folders.

What is missing, though, is anything resembling bulk management. There is no drag and drop to move items into folders, no batch select to reorganize a bunch of credentials at once, and no multi-select for bulk deletion.

If you are migrating a large existing vault and want to sort everything into folders, you are doing it one item at a time.

The search functionality does make navigating a crowded vault easier, at least. The search bar at the top of the interface queries across your entire vault in real time, pulling up matching items as you type, with icons shown.

Creating an alias

This is where AliasVault separates itself from a regular password manager. Switching to the Alias tab in the "+ New" panel lets you create a fictional identity tied to a service, not just a username and password.

You give it a name and a website URL, hit Create, and AliasVault generates the whole package. A unique email address at the @aliasvault.net domain, a username, a strong password, and a fictitious identity complete with a first name, last name, gender, and birth date.

All of it is ready to use at signup for whatever service you are creating the alias for.

Any emails that land on that alias address show up directly on the item's page inside the vault. I tested this with Facebook, and it worked well enough, getting multiple emails, including the OTP needed to confirm the signup.

The only wrinkle was Facebook asking me to verify the account with a live selfie. ☠️

Another thing to keep in mind is that the built-in email server is currently receive-only.

You cannot reply to or forward emails from your alias addresses on the cloud version. It is a deliberate limitation for now, listed on the roadmap as a future paid feature, so if two-way alias email is something you need, that is worth factoring in.

The browser extension

AliasVault also has browser extensions available for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, and Brave. I tested it on Vivaldi using the Chrome extension, and the experience was clean.

Logging in connects directly to aliasvault.net, and you get a "Log in using Mobile App" option here as you do on the web app if you would rather not type your master password. I didn't test this one, but it should work well.

Once inside, the extension mirrors the web app fairly closely.

You get your full vault list with website icons, folder filters, a search bar, and a "+" button to add new items without leaving the browser. The Emails tab also works here, so you can check alias inbox activity without switching to the web app.

It even shows relevant saved credentials automatically when you land on a website you have a login stored for.

The Settings tab also has a few things worth knowing about. You can switch the vault unlock method between your master password and a PIN code, with the PIN falling back to the master password after three failed attempts.

There is also an auto-lock timeout you can configure, ranging from 15 seconds all the way up to 24 hours, or never if that is your preference. Clipboard behavior is configurable too. Copied sensitive data is cleared automatically after 10 seconds by default, with options to change that to 5, 15, or never.

Closing words

AliasVault is one of those tools that makes you wonder why no one put these two things together sooner. A password manager that also handles email aliasing is something that Proton Pass does, but there are some limits involved.

While it is still in beta and missing a few things like bulk credential management and reply support for aliases, nothing about the current state feels rough or half-baked. If privacy matters to you and you have been running a password manager and a separate alias service side by side, this is worth a serious look.

Suggested Read 📖: Bitwarden vs. Proton Pass

During your journey around the world of Linux, you might've come across riced-up builds that look and feel like something out of a sci-fi novel. And if you wondered, why can't I have this on my system?, then you wouldn't be alone.

Many of those builds have something like Niri or Hyprland sitting on top of a Linux distribution that plays nice with such heavy customization. But setting those up is a bit of work, and not everyone might be up for it.

That is where pre-configured distros and scripts like Garuda Linux, Omarchy, ArchRiot, etc. come into the picture. With this article, we will be taking a look at Dank Linux, a desktop shell suite that can transform your system into a slick Hyprland one.

Dank Linux: Hyprland Premium?

Okay, that might be a bit overstated, but using Dank Linux will make you feel that.

Here, you don't need to pay extra for Hyprperks, and instead, you get a tailored Hyprland desktop experience powered by DankMaterialShell (dms), which is a desktop shell built with Quickshell and Go.

It brings panels, a notification center, a lock screen, an app launcher, media controls, and automatic wallpaper-based color theming into one package.

Currently at v1.4.6 "Saffron Bloom", the MIT-licensed project is actively developed, with the installer supporting Arch Linux (incl. derivatives), Fedora (incl. derivatives), Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE, and Gentoo (requires systemd), with both x86_64 and ARM64 hardware covered.

Installation was okay

After setting up a minimal Arch Linux virtual machine, I ran the cURL script to get Dank Linux installed. The installer asked me to configure a few preferences, like the privilege escalation tool (I went with sudo), the compositor, and the terminal emulator.

I initially picked Niri as the compositor, but after installation, the session would hang on startup due to some bug. I tried a few fixes, but none worked, so I reran the installer and switched to Hyprland with Kitty as the terminal.

After entering my password and letting the installation finish, rebooting left me at a TTY login screen. The system didn't automatically boot into Hyprland, so I had to run the following command to get into the Dank Linux session:

hyprland

The desktop experience was lovely

Once in, you will notice that the installation is quite minimal, with only a limited set of applications shipped out of the box.

To get close to my usual Linux workstation setup, I had to separately install Firefox for browsing, LibreOffice for documents, Nemo as a GUI file manager, and VLC for audio and video playback.

Launching them was easy via the application launcher, with the top bar showing the active window title, a clock, a calendar, weather info, system resource usage, battery status, network connectivity, and quick access to notifications and settings.

Window tiling works cleanly, with windows snapping into a neat layout without any fussing around from my side. That said, the settings menu is where things get interesting in terms of customization.

You can pick a Material Design color theme, let the shell pull one automatically from your wallpaper, or set a custom one. Font changes apply across the shell from the 'Typography & Motion' section, and you can enable a dock if a top bar is not your thing.

The top bar itself is configurable, and you can even swap out the app launcher logo. Similarly, the quick access options are reorderable, so you can arrange them to match how you actually work.

Though this last one was a bit wonky during my testing, refusing to slot the buttons where I wanted them to.

Audio and video playback worked without any issues. I pulled up a YouTube video in Firefox, and it played back smoothly, with no tearing or stuttering worth noting given this was running inside a virtual machine.

What made it nicer was the 'Media' panel sitting in the top bar. It picks up whatever is playing and shows the title, the source, and a progress bar, along with buttons to skip, pause, or resume playback.

For documents, I grabbed a sample ODT file and opened it in LibreOffice Writer. Formatting text, rearranging content, and saving the file all worked as expected. Nothing surprising there.

Plus, it was good to see that the Wayland clipboard and app integration was working well during edit sessions.

The workspace switcher is another area where Dank Linux does well. You get 10 workspaces out of the box, and the switcher gives you a view of what is open across each one.

From the settings menu, you can choose what the workspace switcher indicator shows, whether that's workspace names, running app icons, or both, along with tweaking the overall appearance and enabling reverse scrolling direction.

Small stuff, but having all of that in a GUI menu rather than being buried in a config file can make a real difference in day-to-day use.

Get Started

On a supported distribution, you simply need to run the following cURL script to get Dank Linux:

curl -fsSL https://install.danklinux.com | sh

Though I highly suggest you go through the instructions for dankinstall to prepare your base system properly before making the switch.

If you have been following Proton Drive this year, you know the pace of development has picked up. The developers have been busy rolling out a shared SDK across all their clients, and each update has introduced major improvements.

This week's update is the biggest one yet.

Two things have landed at once. Proton pushed a cryptography overhaul that makes file encryption a lot faster and quietly confirmed that a native Linux client is now in development.

A faster Drive experience

According to Proton's testing, uploads are now up to 3x faster across platforms, and downloads are up to 2x faster.

Everyday tasks like Android photo backup and macOS file sync finish quicker, and the Photos section has been cleaned up too, with faster album loading and smoother timeline scrolling even in large libraries.

All of this is a result of Proton pulling together the work from their Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and web teams into one integrated engine. Whereas earlier, every platform was running its own separate implementation, which meant development efforts were scattered across the board.

Now they all run on the same codebase, which means improvements roll out everywhere at the same time rather than platform by platform.

Encryption got a serious upgrade

Proton Drive has used OpenPGP to encrypt file contents since day one. The latest update moves to a newer version of that, and the key change here is that encryption now makes full use of the device's hardware.

The numbers shared by Proton make the difference clearly apparent. On mobile, a 4MB file that used to take 97ms to encrypt now takes 32ms. On desktop-class hardware, the same job goes from 12ms down to 3ms.

In practical terms, this means encrypting an HD video on your phone dropped from about 90 seconds to around 30, and on a desktop the same goes from around 12 seconds to 3.

Existing users are urged to update their clients to take advantage of these improvements.

Linux users, rejoice! 🎉

The most interesting bit of info in the SDK announcement is very easy to miss. Proton has confirmed that they are currently building a native Drive client for Linux, which is being put together from scratch using the SDK.

Earlier this year, the January SDK update had briefly mentioned a Linux client as something on the roadmap. This week's post is a step past that, with them confirming it is now in active development.

For years, many of you have been vocal about the lack of a native Proton Drive app on Linux, and if our comments section is anything to go by, it has been one of the most requested things from the Proton ecosystem.

The SDK is what is making it possible now, and building on it means the Linux client will not be playing catch-up with other platforms when it does arrive. If you haven't already, you can check out Proton Drive via our partner link below while supporting us in the process.

Canonical's Steam snap for ARM64 has been promoted to stable, nearly five months after a call for testing drew feedback from users across a wide range of ARM hardware.

The reason a snap like this exists at all is that Valve's Steam client for Linux is x86-only. To make it run on ARM64, Canonical bundled the x86 Steam binary together with FEX-Emu, a Linux usermode emulator that translates x86 and x86-64 instructions for ARM64 systems at runtime.

This stable release also introduces FEX's library forwarding feature (thunking) as a user-configurable option. Instead of emulating every graphics API call through FEX, thunking forwards OpenGL and Vulkan calls directly to the host system's native ARM64 libraries, which cuts down on emulation overhead.

Canonical has tested this release across three hardware families, all of which are said to have shown good performance across popular games. These include the NVIDIA DGX Spark and associated GB10 devices, Qualcomm Snapdragon laptops (Lenovo ThinkPad X13s, T14s, and Dell XPS 9345), and the Radxa Orion O6 and O6N.

Switch to stable

If you are already running the snap on candidate or edge and want to move to stable, run:

sudo snap refresh steam --channel=stable

They have also laid out a release cycle for the Steam Snap, with new versions first landing in the edge channel for experimental testing, then moving to candidate after around one to two weeks if no major issues surface. From candidate, they graduate to stable after another one to three weeks.

What's next?

Mitchell Augustin, who announced the stable promotion, wants to eventually rebuild the snap around Valve's native ARM64 Steam client and drop the FEX layer Canonical currently maintains on top of it.

Yeah, that native client is already out there, but quietly. ROCKNIX has already shipped it in their distribution, keeping both ARM64 and x86 launch paths available side by side.

Mitchell said he is keeping a close eye on it but is waiting for Proton 11 to exit beta first before making any moves.

For now, you can use the snap on your ARM64 device, and if you run into any issues or want to contribute to development, then the GitHub tracker for this app is the place to go.

Suggested Read 📖: Microsoft Just Brought Linux Commands to Windows

The Linux Foundation has been steadily growing its roster of projects and initiatives, with AI governance becoming an increasingly prominent part of that push.

Their latest push in this direction is a plan to launch the Tokenomics Foundation, a new program focused on open standards, benchmarks, and best practices for the economics of AI token consumption.

It will work in close partnership with the FinOps Foundation, which has been busy with efforts surrounding cloud cost management since 2020.

Why now?

The foundation says that token costs have been moving around. They dropped heavily through 2023 and 2025, then settled down, and new model pricing is climbing again.

Citing a research paper, they pointed out that global token usage is projected to grow 24x between 2026 and 2030, hitting 120 quadrillion tokens per month.

Separately, they also noted industry analyst projections of AI infrastructure investment crossing $1 trillion by 2027, with the inference market going from roughly $106 billion in 2025 to $255 billion by 2030.

None of this spending is easy to measure consistently today. Cached vs. non-cached tokens, input vs. output pricing, on-demand vs. reserved compute. Every provider defines and bills for these differently, with no neutral framework to compare them across vendors.

Having a standardized approach to all of this is precisely the gap the Tokenomics Foundation is looking to fill with its open standards and benchmarks.

What will it do?

The foundation will operate through a Governing Board that sets direction and allocates funding, alongside a Technical Committee responsible for the actual specifications and benchmarks.

The first confirmed deliverable is expanding the FOCUS specification, an open billing format that came out of FinOps, to cover token-based spending models. That would give enterprises a common schema for AI cost data regardless of which provider they are using.

Twelve organizations have thrown their support behind it so far, including Google Cloud, Flexera, KPMG, Accenture, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Booking.com, IBM, and JPMorgan Chase.

The formal launch is at FinOps X in San Diego, from June 8 to 10, where the technical roadmap, initial working groups, partnerships, and upcoming conferences will be announced.

You might remember that the Linux Foundation took a similar approach with the Agentic AI Foundation late last year, pulling MCP, goose, and AGENTS.md under open governance before the agentic AI space had a chance to fragment further.

Suggested Read 📖: Tuta Joins The Euro-Office Umbrella

Tuta, the German encrypted email and calendar provider, has officially joined Euro-Office.

Unless you have been living under a rock or were trapped in some freaky dungeon, this collaborative effort has brought together many notable European companies.

The participating names include Nextcloud, IONOS, Proton, XWiki, Soverin, EuroStack, BTactic, Open-Xchange, and a few others who are jointly developing an open source document handling solution.

It is in the works as a web-based, AGPL-licensed fork of ONLYOFFICE that is expected to support real-time collaborative editing across documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs, with wide format support.

Don't think of it as a standalone office suite, though. It is designed to be plugged into existing platforms like Nextcloud Hub, Proton Drive, XWiki, or OpenProject, and the first stable release is expected in a few days.

Speaking on the matter, Matthias Pfau, co-founder and CEO of Tuta, added that:

We’ve joined Euro-Office because we see great potential for this project to become a truly sovereign alternative with great usability and data protection. It is built by European engineers, people and companies that you can trust, and it is fully open source.

This is exactly what we need here at Tuta to compliment our encrypted offerings of Tuta Mail, Tuta Calendar, and Tuta Drive.

Why not LibreOffice?

Why LibreOffice was not chosen as the base is not something the coalition has addressed directly. The FAQ on the project's GitHub page (linked earlier) does mention openness to collaboration with the LibreOffice community and Collabora, with the document converter being highlighted as one area where that could happen.

And there's still an open question hanging over the project. The Document Foundation (TDF), the nonprofit behind LibreOffice, asked Euro-Office back in April what its native document format would be.

As of today, the question remains unanswered with the official material still framing the project around "great MS compatibility."

TDF's argument is that this just relocates the dependency rather than removing it. If they go with the OOXML approach, the server moves to Europe, but the document format stays bound to decisions Microsoft makes.

ODF, the Open Document Format, is an ISO standard with no single company controlling it, and Germany recently mandated it by law for use in public administration.

Nearing a release

I have been keeping an eye on Euro-Office since it was first announced, and there has not been much in the way of official updates on how things were coming along.

But now, the coalition is growing, a stable release is close, and the push for a genuinely European document stack appears to be gaining real momentum. I am curious to see what ships.

A Vim fork has arrived, and it exists because of AI. Drew DeVault, the developer behind SourceHut, announced Vim Classic back in March 2026 after becoming unhappy with the direction both Vim and NeoVim were heading.

His gripe was that generative AI had started creeping into their development, and he wanted no part of it.

The NeoVim side of that concern is the project's labeling of AI-assisted pull requests as "AI assisted 🤖," which has now stacked up a fair number of requests, many of which have already been merged.

With Vim, the situation is a bit murky. Drew points to a GitHub issue where community members suspected one contributor of using LLMs, but a Vim maintainer had already pushed back on those accusations.

Anyhow, Vim Classic has received its first-ever release, so let's see what it has to offer.

A classic Vim experience

Based on Vim 8.2.0148, Vim Classic predates the Vim9 script entirely. This was done deliberately to keep the maintenance burden manageable, stopping at the last patch before the script was introduced.

As a result, some Vim plugins that rely on Vim9 Script will not work with Vim Classic.

From that base, select patches have been backported from upstream, mostly addressing CVEs discovered after 8.2, alongside some bug fixes and original patches to keep things building on modern toolchains.

DeVault is also upfront that not every applicable security patch has been confirmed as backported, so some CVEs may have slipped through. The project is currently recommended only for early adopters comfortable with that uncertainty.

In addition, the charityware model carries over from Vim, with this project continuing to support the children of Uganda (albeit via a different charity) that Bram Moolenaar, the creator of Vim, endorsed.

The packages

Vim Classic 8.3 is currently available as a source tarball from SourceHut (direct download). You will also find the release tarball and its PGP signature, signed with DeVault's public key, up on the project's refs page.

For the source code, head to the homepage of the SourceHut instance for Vim Classic.

Suggested Read 📖: KDE Linux is Coming Along Nicely

If you have been following AlmaLinux OS, you know it is one of the more popular free enterprise Linux distributions out there.

Born out of the CentOS chaos, it has steadily grown into a community-governed project with a clear focus on stability and compatibility for production use.

Now, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation is taking things to Los Angeles, with an event squarely aimed at the studios and engineers who keep the entertainment industry running on Linux.

AlmaLinux Day: Los Angeles

This is a free, one-day gathering with a crowd that is set to be a mix of VFX engineers, sysadmins, cloud and DevOps folks, and open source contributors working in or adjacent to media and entertainment.

The AlmaLinux people have scheduled it a day before SIGGRAPH 2026, the premier annual conference for the computer graphics and VFX world, so that attendees get the technical conversations and networking in before the bigger crowd moves in on Sunday.

Sessions on Saturday will cover GPU driver integration for production use, the economics of running large-scale cloud rendering, and the AlmaLinux 2026/27 roadmap.

Of course the big reveal for the day is the launch of a dedicated AlmaLinux Media & Entertainment edition, which is a purpose-built variant tailored for the needs of studios and creative teams.

All of that is the result of the Media & Entertainment SIG's hard work, a group that has been at this since December 2025, working to get AlmaLinux certified and production-ready for VFX, animation, and post-production studios.

Event Details and Registration

The event takes place on Saturday, July 18, 2026, from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM (local time) at the E-Central Downtown Los Angeles Hotel.

The venue can be found on OpenStreetMap (listed under the old name 'Luxe Hotel') and Google Maps. It is located at 1020 S Figueroa St., near the LA Convention Center.

You can register for it now.

Worth noting is that the event room has a hard cap, and the first 100 registrants get a special gift. So registering sooner rather than later is the wise move here.

The hotel is also ADA compliant, so people with nerfs (disabilities) should not face major barriers, though the actual experience on the day will depend on the venue's current setup and staff.

If you want to speak at the event, the call for speakers is open until June 5, 2026. They are particularly interested in topics like render farm architecture, migration stories, and security/CVE response in production.

For more details, refer to the official announcement.

You might remember that the KDE folks have been busy working on KDE Linux, their own Linux distribution that is still very much in active development. I tried its Alpha build last year and found the experience surprisingly smooth for something so early.

Fast forward to today, and Nate Graham, a well-known KDE name, has put out a progress report covering a pretty busy May for the project, with security fixes, build system changes, and a notable app swap all making the cut.

A lot of work

The most significant infrastructure work this month came from contributor Hadi Chokr, who reworked how KDE software gets built. The old process churned out Arch packages and handed them off to mkosi for installation.

That is now gone, replaced by KDE's own kde-builder tool compiling everything directly.

As a result, there are three major improvements. The build process now works the same way KDE developers build software on their own machines, the project is now more distro-agnostic, and builds are faster because the new setup uses caching more effectively.

Reacting to the many Linux vulnerabilities of last month (e.g., Dirty Frag and Copy Fail), the devs went through KDE Linux's package list looking for anything insecure or unnecessary.

The end result was a slew of cuts that included dropping the Zen kernel, axing several insecure kernel modules, removing a bunch of unused packages, and finally killing off the project's AUR dependency.

It's not all removals though. Nate also added a service that installs newly added pre-installed Flatpak apps on existing KDE Linux systems automatically, while leaving untouched anything the user has already removed on purpose.

There's a swap too; KWalletManager is being retired in favor of KeepSecret, a new, more modern KDE app for managing passwords and credentials.

Another thing to note is that Ark, the graphical file compression/decompression utility, now has .7z file support in its KDE Linux Flatpak packaging, bringing it in line with what the Flathub version already offers.

And, lastly, testing is being improved.

Right now, KDE Linux only checks that each build boots to the desktop, which is not saying much. Work is underway to change that though, with an OpenQA-based testing system in the works that should catch a lot more before a broken build goes out.

Suggested Read 📖: A New Tool to Integrate Windows Apps in Linux

The Espressif-backed M5Stack has been keeping its Cardputer product line alive since 2023 by continuously updating it.

The original ran on an ESP32-S3, and the follow-up, the Cardputer-Adv, stuck with the same ESP32-S3 but brought in better audio, a larger battery, a 6-axis IMU, and more expansion options.

Both were decent microcontroller-powered devices, but neither ran a real Linux environment.

The CardputerZero is where that changes. It trades the ESP32 for a Raspberry Pi Compute Module Zero (CM0), and with that, the Cardputer platform goes from embedded tinkering territory into something you can do proper computing on.

📝 CardputerZero: Key Specifications

The horsepower is provided by a Broadcom BCM2837 inside the CM0, equipped with a quad-core Cortex-A53 at 1GHz with 512MB of LPDDR2 RAM and a VideoCore-IV GPU for graphics and hardware video codec.

The device itself measures 84 × 54 × 23.1 mm (W×H×D), small enough to fit in your pocket, with the display being a 1.9-inch ST7789v3 LCD with HDMI output up to 1080p at 30fps, which is paired with a 46-key matrix keyboard and a 1,500mAh LiPo battery.

Here are the rest of the specs:

• RAM: 512MB LPDDR2
• Storage: microSD card slot
• Camera: Sony IMX219, 8MP (3280×2464), CSI 4-Lane (standard model only)
• Wireless: 2.4GHz Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.2/BLE
• USB: 2× USB Type-C, 1× USB-A (both USB 2.0)
• Networking: 10/100M Ethernet
• Audio: ES8389 codec, MEMS mic, 1W speaker, 3.5mm TRS out
• Video: H.264/MPEG-4 decode at 1080p 30fps, H.264 encode at 1080p 30fps.
• Sensors: BMI270 + BMM150 IMU (gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer), RX8130CE RTC
• Expansion: Grove HY2.0-4P port (I2C/UART switchable), 2.54-14P bus (SPI, UART, I2C, USB, GPIO, 5V).
• IR: Infrared TX/RX

There are a few other things to know before you get yours, though. The screen is not a touchscreen, and the magnetic attachment found on earlier Cardputer devices is gone.

You also get access to a built-in app store where you can load your projects or grab community firmware without needing to involve a computer. Carrying out lightweight edge AI via tools like OpenClaw is possible for local automation and testing.

Many Choices

M5Stack is offering the CardputerZero in two variants. The CardputerZero gets you a Sony IMX219 8MP camera, the full IMU sensor suite, and a 32GB microSD card. The CardputerZero Lite skips those three and costs less.

The CM0, keyboard, display, battery, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, expansion ports, and infrared transceiver are all the same across both models.

For the standard CardputerZero, the MSRP is $149, but Kickstarter pricing looks like this:

• Super Early Bird (reserved only): $89
• Early Bird (72 hours): $104
• KS Special: $119
• Double Pack: $238

For the Lite, against an MSRP of $99:

• Super Early Bird: $59
• Early Bird (72 hours): $69
• KS Special: $79

Keep in mind that we are now well beyond the window for any early bird offers and have now moved on to "KS Special", which is the limited-time pricing for buyers on Kickstarter that will be live until July 3.

There is also a Transparent Black version that was unlocked as a stretch goal after the campaign crossed the $1 million mark. It is a Kickstarter-exclusive colorway, and backers of either model can pick it at no extra cost through a PledgeBox survey once the campaign ends.

They will send out the survey when the crowdfunding campaign ends. 📝

Get Yours

The Cardputer platform has built up a decent community over the past couple of years, with firmware projects, retro emulators, security tools, and dashboards floating around GitHub.

Bringing Linux into the mix with the CardputerZero should give that community a fair bit more to work with.

As of writing, the campaign has raised over $1.4 million against a $10,016 goal, with over 10,900 backers and 32 days still left. Units are set to ship some time around November 2026.

Before Microsoft became the company that shipped Windows to corporate desks around the world, it had to start somewhere. That somewhere was a scrappy little operating system written by one guy at Seattle Computer Products.

Tim Paterson built what he initially called QDOS, short for Quick and Dirty Operating System, in 1980. Intel's 8086 chip was out, but CP/M, the dominant OS of the time, had no 8086 support. He wrote something to fill that gap, modeling the CP/M API so existing software would run on it.

Microsoft bought the rights to 86-DOS for just under $100,000, shipped it to IBM as PC DOS 1.0 in August 1981, and retained the rights to sell the same OS to other PC manufacturers as MS-DOS.

That single deal set Microsoft on the path to dominating personal computing for the next two decades.

Fast forward to now

On April 28, the 45th anniversary of 86-DOS 1.00, Microsoft published a blog post announcing that the earliest known DOS source code is now publicly available on GitHub, under the MIT license.

And the story behind it is an interesting one. Tim did not hand over a tidy source archive; instead, what he kept were physical assembler printouts and stacks of continuous-feed paper from 1981 that he had held onto over the decades.

Getting those into usable shape took effort, with historians Yufeng Gao and Rich Cini having to locate, scan, and transcribe the DOS-related portions into compilable code.

What's included are the 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, several development snapshots of the PC-DOS 1.00 kernel, utilities like CHKDSK, and the assembler Paterson used to write the OS itself.

Who's this for?

Honestly, seeing Microsoft open up old code is not that surprising anymore. 6502 BASIC went open source in September 2025. MS-DOS 4.0 in 2024. MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 back in 2018. There is a clear pattern at this point.

If you are into retro computing or low-level systems work, this is genuinely worth digging into. The source code is compilable, and you will need a copy of Seattle Computer Products' ASM assembler, which you can pull from any 86-DOS or early MS-DOS release.

The GitHub repository's README has the necessary steps for you to follow.

Suggested Read 📖: Someone Turned a PS5 Into a Linux Gaming PC