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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I recently had a very interesting conversation with a reader who suggested that I should not ignore AI. Because this is the next new normal and we have to adapt.

I agree but in the context of local AI. Local AI is the popular term used for the open source models that live on your system, stay offline and don't send data anywhere.

Sure, it's not for everyone and not every one would be interested in AI, irrespective of whether it is open source or not.

And that's why I am creating a separate newsletter called "Local AI Weekly" for people who are interested in learning and using the local (open source) AI.

If you are interested, you can subscribe to this upcoming newsletter.

FOSS Weekly will have the usual Linux and open source material that you love. No changes on that end. If you don't like AI, nothing changes for you.

📰 Linux and open source news that matter

David Plummer, the ex-Microsoft engineer who built the original Windows Task Manager, has had enough of what Notepad has become, his response is TinyRetroPad, a fully functional Notepad clone built in x86 assembly that comes in around 2.5KB.

Proton's Lumo 2.0 fills the gaps that made the original feel half-baked.

Memory is in; web search now actually searches, returning cited results instead of falling back on training data; and image generation is finally possible.

If you're not a developer or bug hunter, Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 2 isn't really worth your time yet; the user-facing stuff (GNOME 51, voice typing) is still months out. But Canonical has done some backend work that should simplify image delivery.

The Wine 11.12 release is mostly housekeeping, with fixes for two gamepad bugs worth knowing about. Need for Speed: Most Wanted had a stuck Up input firing on its own, and Super Hexagon went deaf to keyboard and mouse once a controller was plugged in.

The Linux Foundation has launched Akrites, a body for open source vulnerability handling, with roughly 20 founding members, including Anthropic, AWS, Google, Microsoft, GitHub, Red Hat, and NVIDIA.

Additionally, they have also announced their intent to launch the Agent Name Service, an open DNS-based standard for verifying AI agent identities. Here, every agent gets a versioned name and certificate tied to standard domain verification, with every registration and change logged in a tamper-evident, publicly auditable record.

Nate Graham of KDE has announced a fairly basic Developer Mode for KDE Linux that is supposed to let developers jump into a session tailored for Plasma or distro-related work.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

We had an interesting chat with iodé's Brian Russell on what running a de-Googled Android distro project actually looks like in practice.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

If someone you know just switched to Linux and is intimidated by the terminal, we have a course to point them to. These are ten short chapters, all hands-on, that will walk them through core file operations.

KDE's System Monitor is a lot more flexible than its default layout suggests. Join us as we guide you through building your own page from scratch, picking chart styles, and organizing everything neatly with rows, columns, and sections.

Here are ten fonts worth knowing about if your terminal is still running whatever shipped with your distro.

1 backup is no back up. 2 backups are 1 backup and untested backups are not backups. Those are the golden rules for backups and I have a list of different kinds of backup tools you can explore on Linux.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

Purism's Linux-powered Librem 16 laptop starts at $2,899 for the base configuration and tops out at an absurd $11,944 if you max out every build-your-own option.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

KDE Step is a physics simulation tool that turns abstract concepts like harmonic motion, orbital mechanics, and electrostatic equilibrium into something you can actually watch play out.

📽️ Videos for You

Keeping the batteries on modern laptops in optimum condition over time requires a little more attention than usual.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

In KDE Plasma, go to Settings -> Default Applications -> File Associations.

Here, search for a file type of your choice; as an example, I chose an .svg image below.

Now, arrange the applications in order of your choosing. Like Gwenview, Inkscape, and GIMP, then apply the changes.

Now, in Dolphin file manager, you can double-left-click (first app in the list) to open the image in Gwenview, middle-click (second app in the list) to open in Inkscape, and Shift+middle-click (third app in the list) to open in GIMP.

You can do this for other file formats as well.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Some choices in this puzzle don't belong with the rest. Can you get them all?

The terminal can bite you if you go to it ill-prepared. 🙃

🗓️ Tech Trivia: IBM just announced the world's first sub-1nm chip. The transistors are only 0.7nm wide, called 7 angstroms, and the new "nanostack" design packs about 100 billion of them into a chip the size of a fingernail. IBM says that this is 70% more efficient than their previous 2nm chips.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: Pro FOSSer Mikael is wondering what everyone thinks of AUR. Seeing the recent fiasco surrounding it, this is a well-timed thread.

Lastly a question for those who read the entire newsletter properly. Would you be interested in a text-only version of FOSS Weekly?

Brave browser released Origin, a striped down, non-crypto version of the Brave browser. It's basically Brave browser without the bloat but still with ad-block and anti-tracking.

Here's the good thing which you will lke a s Linux user. This Brave Origin costs $6o for Windows and macOS users, but it is free for Linux users. Not everyday we Linux users get such privilege.

Epic Games open-sourced Lore at State of Unreal 2026, a Git alternative built specifically for projects that mix code with huge binary files, the kind of thing Git LFS handles awkwardly.

NVK, the open source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA cards, can now run DLSS in games. The catch is it's experimental and needs a special flag to turn on, so don't expect it to just work out of the box yet. Full stable support lands with Mesa 26.2 in August.

Remember Canonical's "implicit/explicit AI" framework from a few months ago? Myna is the implicit half taking shape as a local speech-to-text dictation tool that's expected to land in Ubuntu 26.10.

ArmSoM's Sige series has always shipped on Rockchip silicon, until now. The Sige6 swaps in an Allwinner A733 instead, an octa-core chip with a 3 TOPS NPU, LPDDR5 RAM up to 16GB, and an M.2 slot for NVMe storage.

Fruit Ninja's developers are making a dungeon crawler, and the demo already runs on Linux through Proton without a hitch.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

If you're running ARM64 servers on Ubuntu, you can finally patch kernel vulnerabilities without scheduling a reboot, something AMD64 has had for years.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

Most people use Firefox for browsing and nothing else, which is a shame given how much is actually packed in. There are many features that you might've missed, like split-screen tabs, a PDF editor with merge support, the built-in eyedropper tool, and full-page screenshots.

If you've ever wondered how LVM actually works under the hood rather than just clicking through an installer's defaults, we can walk you through it command by command.

Niri rearranges nothing when you open a new window; it just adds another column to an endless horizontal strip, and you scroll over to it. After a few weeks of daily use, Bhuwan admits the real appeal only showed up once they stopped trying to use it like a normal tiling WM.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

I briefly tested Terramaster F4-425 Pro NAS. The device is good but there are some rough edges to handle on the software side.

Raspberry Pi-powered handhelds are cropping up regularly now. Our list covers six such options that you could look into.

PINE64's latest offering is PineVoice, a $49.99 smart speaker that skips Alexa and Google Assistant entirely in favor of being a dedicated Home Assistant voice satellite.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

Audiophiles, this one's for you. Astra is a music player that lets you play locally stored music files with many controls to fine-tune playback.

📽️ Videos for You

There's a simple command that can save you some considerable space on your Linux server.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

In KDE Plasma System Settings, go to Window Management -> Virtual Desktops. Here, enable the "Switch desktops independently for each screen" option to easily switch between the different virtual desktops on multiple monitors.

This was introduced with the recent Plasma 6.7 release and should be very convenient for people who like to multi-task.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Can you match terminal shortcuts with their actions?

Selective outrage, I guess, right Brave Linux users ;)

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On June 18, 1997, the DESCHALL Project cracked the 56-bit Data Encryption Standard. Managed by a modest i486 server, online volunteers pooled their idle computer power to brute-force the key in 96 days, proving DES was obsolete.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: A developer has posted on our forum showing off their new GNOME shell extension called Snap Text for OCR.

Last week I shared something personal and something I was way too hesitatnt to share. It was the fact that the ad-driven model that kept It's FOSS running for 14 years is breaking down, and that YOUR support is the most direct way to keep this going.

The response was overwhelming and I cannot thank you enough to all the well wishers and supports. From what I see, so far 112 readers opted for the lifetime Plus membership. Several readers, even existing paid members, bought coffees (a metaphor for donation).

Several readers wrote in to share how It's FOSS helped them make the switch to Linux, sometimes years ago, and that it finally felt like the right moment to "give back". Thank you 🙏

There were a few concerns raised as well so let me answer them here for everyone.

"Will It's FOSS continue to publish? Will it survive?"

Fair concern. Here is the thing: the 112 people who joined last week made a real difference. They showed their confidence in It's FOSS, in the work we do and that's a huge confidence booster for me. It shows that there are good people out there who are willing to actively support us and no big tech can take this community support from us. The more Plus member we have, the stronger we become. So, yes, We are not just going to survive, we are going to thrive. Just keep supporting us 💪

"I already get the newsletter and content for free. What do I actually gain by paying for the Plus membership?"

Honestly, not a lot of extra features. There are a few eBooks to download, though. But this is intentional. I never wanted to lock Linux content behind a paywall. The tutorials, the news, this newsletter, they stay free. What the Plus membership does is make sure they stay free, for you and for everyone else too. You are not buying a product for yourself, you are doing it for everyone. For students who canot pay, for someone who has just lost a job, for people who do not even earn $119 in an entire month.

The $30 discount on lifetime membership will continue till 25th June. If you have been on the fence, this is the week to get off it. Our goal is to reach 200 lifetime member by the next week. Do help us please.

Not ready for a lifetime commitment? A one-time donation helps too.

Thank you for 14 years. Let's make it 14 more.

📰 News That Matter

Linux 7.1 does a lot for a feature release. The new NTFS driver is the main talking point here, but Intel FRED switching to on-by-default and a long-overdue Steam Deck OLED audio fix are worth knowing about too.

Another new release this week is KDE Plasma 6.7. There are a few improvements here and there and the two vintage themes make a comeback.

With Ubuntu, Fedora, and soon KDE all dropping X11, yserver is a strange but interesting counter-move, arriving as a new X11 server, written in Rust, assisted by Claude. It intentionally drops decades of cruft to focus on what modern desktops actually need.

Session, the private messaging service that doesn't require a phone number, has managed to avoid getting shut down thanks to the community stepping up and donating the funds required to keep things running.

A new open standard called DocLang wants to be the format AI pipelines actually need instead of fighting with PDFs and DOCX files that were designed for human eyes. This vendor-neutral working group has already released v0.6 of the specifications with more work already underway.

In contrast, a compromised Fedora contributor account let an AI agent run loose across Bugzilla unsupervised, mass-reassigning bugs to the wrong person, closing reports it had no business closing with hallucinated LLM-generated comments.

Commodore and Jolla have joined to create anti-doomscrolling flip smartphone. It uses Linux-based Sailfish OS.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

Arch User Repository, the community contributed repo, suffered supply chain attack.

Arch had to shut off new AUR registrations after three separate malware waves tore through the community repo in the span of a week. More than 1,500 AUR packages were hit. AUR helper Yay released a new version with some measures to spot malicious packages.

A few lesson from this incident:

• It is always better to install packages from official repoistories your distro provides.
• If you are erelying on AUR, looking at the PKGBUILD is more important than ever.
• There is little end users like you and I can do in case of supply chain attacks. It is up to distributions to secure the users.
• Supply chain attacks are going to be a bigger problem for the open source ecosystem. No wonder IBM-Red Hat is coming up with a $5 billion project Lightwall for this purpose.

Proton has launched Easy Switch for Business, a six-step migration tool that moves a company's emails, calendars, and contacts from Google Workspace to Proton Mail (partner link) seamlessly.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

CachyOS swapped out Octopi for a homegrown Rust package manager called Shelly, and it looks like a useful upgrade. One window handles repos, AUR, AppImage, and Flathub together; search spans all four at once; and it just looks like something built in 2026.

If that doesn't interest you, then we have a list of GTK themes that cater to a wide variety of tastes, ranging from the warm retro tones of Gruvbox to the macOS-inspired looks of WhiteSur and McMojave, and even a pitch-black option in Flat Remix for OLED screens.

If you use GNOME, explore this list of GNOME Extensions. Perhaps you will find some good ones for your usecase.

And here is the Dank Linux review I mentioned in the last newsletter but forgot to add the link.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

Raven Resonance has come up with something they call an ambient computer, which can easily be passed off as a smart glass. It is Linux-powered, not open source, and is called Raven Prism.

There's also a Linux cyberdeck that was in the news recently that you might've missed.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

Unhappy with KDE ditching X11 on Plasma? There's a fork that looks to preserve the experience while being init system agnostic.

📽️ Videos for You

If you ever feel the need to experience how bad Winslop is, you can create a bootable USB drive on Linux to get things going.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

If you are using the Clipboard Indicator extension on GNOME, then you can go into its settings, and under the "Behaviour" tab, enable "Paste on select." This allows you to automatically paste the selected clipboard item directly into your active text field when you click on it in the clipboard menu.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Can you name all the popular file managers in this crossword?

I am not complaining, are you? 🧐

🗓️ Tech Trivia: Last time we talked about Alan Turing and his unfortunate passing, but what often gets overlooked is Tommy Flowers' contribution to building Colossus.

Using 1,800 thermionic valves, his breakthrough dramatically shortened World War II while also proving that vacuum tubes could be reliable, forever changing modern computing history.

He did get some recognition in 2023, when a blue plaque went up at Dollis Hill in London, the former Post Office research site where he built Colossus using mostly spare telephone parts.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: A FOSSer is looking for pointers about an operating system called OpenIndiana. Have you ever used it?

It's FOSS turns 14 tomorrow. Incidentally, my son turns 1 tomorrow as well. Two milestones the same day call for celebration, right?

But there is something important that I wanted to share with you and it relates to the future of It's FOSS.

The thing is that Google Search is gone. Not broken but gone. What replaces it is an AI that reads the web, summarizes it, and hands you the answer directly. No links. No clicks. No visits to the sites that actually wrote the content.

This is not a minor update. This is a structural shift in how the internet works.

For the past two decades, a quiet but fair deal powered the open web: you search, you click, we earn a little from ads, and we use that to keep writing. That deal is over. Google now takes our content, serves the answer, and the publisher gets nothing. Not even a visit.

Since the launch of ChatGPT, It's FOSS has already lost 80% of its Google search traffic. And it's alarming now.

I built It's FOSS because I love Linux and open-source software. Not to get rich. I built it because I wanted a place where people could learn Linux for free, stay informed, and feel part of a community that actually cares about what open-source software means. For years, that worked. Ad revenue kept the lights on. We kept creating informational content that helped Linux users all around the world.

That model is now broken, and no tweak to our content strategy will fix it. This is not an algorithm we can optimize around.

The big publishers will survive this. They have corporate backing, licensing deals, and investors to absorb the losses. We don't. What we have is you.

If It's FOSS has ever helped you, fixed a problem, taught you something new, saved you a frustrating hour, this is the moment to return the favor. You want us to continue for 14 more years, right?

Becoming a Plus member keeps this alive:

• The newsletter you're reading right now
• The tutorials, guides, and news on It's FOSS
• A small, independent voice in a world where content is increasingly written by non-humans for non-humans

To mark 14 years of It's FOSS (and my son's first birthday), I'm offering $30 off the lifetime membership this week. This one-time payment also solidifies the trust you have in It's FOSS and keeps us going in the age of AI slop.

Not in a position to subscribe? A one-time donation helps too. Every contribution, whatever the size, is a vote for keeping It's FOSS alive, keeping the open web alive.

I've spent years writing about open source because I believe software freedom matters, using a free operating system matters. I still do. But this freedom also needs people willing to sustain the communities that talk about it.

I'm asking you to be one of those people.

📰 News That Matter

Proton has given us some back-to-back updates. There's an encryption overhaul that makes uploads up to 3x faster and downloads up to 2x faster, thanks to a cryptography rewrite. News on how a native GUI client for Linux is in the works, and an official CLI offering for Drive that works on Linux, Windows, and macOS.

A lot has landed in the DocSpace 3.7 release. You get AI-generated files, DeepSeek, xAI and Google AI support, a complete rework of form filling rooms that now handle PDF creation, room tagging, bulk deletion, and new admin controls.

Similarly, Collabora have introduced CODE 26.04, possibly their biggest release yet. It includes AI assistance across all three editors, a reworked document comparison tool in Writer, per-user sheet views in Calc, 14 new spreadsheet functions, and a follow-me presentation mode in Impress. Yeah... AI everywhere.

You know what else is everywhere? systemd. Well... almost. KaOS has decided to distance itself from systemd and opted for dinit instead.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

ProtonMail is a solid Gmail alternative for privacy-conscious users, but the absence of canned responses is still a daily pain point for me.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

Man pages are famously dense, but they're also the most accurate and complete documentation Linux has.

Need to send a large file without uploading it to someone else's server first? CheezyPizza does it browser to browser over WebRTC, with no account, no size cap, and no middleman.

Not open source software but Melia is a new Linux desktop email client that takes privacy seriously in ways most clients don't bother with. Tracking pixels are neutralized, incoming emails are verified against SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and senders whose display names don't match their addresses get flagged automatically.

If you find Linux Mint running slowly, try disabling animations and window effects. It may improve the performance a yiny bit and tiny bits help when you are struggling with performance.

On the contrary, if you have decent hardware, you can add eye candy to Linux Mint by adding more desktop effects.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

Bambu Lab has been on a path to vendor lock-in, and even after outcry from the community over some of its recent moves, they don't seem to be learning anything.

Luckily, the open source community knows how to respond to such predatory behavior.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

AliasVault can be a refuge from your escape from Bitwarden, seeing how they have been pulling off some major moves quietly.

📽️ Videos for You

If you use top to monitor processes in Linux, you ought to know some of its lesser-known commands.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

If you are on a GNOME setup, then you can enable certain user interface settings on the Resources app to display important usage and hardware-related details in the sidebar at all times.

Go into the "Preferences" menu via the hamburger button (looks like three lines), then under the "General" tab, look for these options and enable them:

• Show Usage Details in Sidebar
• Show Device Descriptions in Sidebar

Suggested Read 📖: Mission Center vs. Resources

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

There have been many instances of the open source community striking back at projects that locked down. We have a puzzle that will test your knowledge of such occurrences.

Can you help this Arch user? 🤣

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On June 7, 1954, Alan Turing, the mathematician who conceived the theoretical blueprint for modern computers and helped crack Enigma cipher at Bletchley Park, reportedly took his own life at age 41.

His work helped shorten World War II and laid the foundation for every computer running today.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: A newcomer is asking which web browsers his fellow FOSSers are using. Care to contribute?

Microsoft has released its own version of Coreutils to bring Linux commands to Windows command prompt. If you can't beat them, join them? This is a big move from the company that once called Linux a "cancer".

Someone forked Vim to keep it free from any AI assisted code contribution. A bit too extreme? You tell me.

KDE Linux is shaping up well, as May's progress update shows the project dropping its AUR dependency, switching to kde-builder for a faster and more distro-agnostic build system, and replacing KWalletManager with the newer KeepSecret app.

Valve brought the Steam Deck OLED back after months of absence and quietly raised prices by nearly 50% to cover rising component costs. People bought them anyway. North America sold out overnight, and if you've been waiting for prices to normalize, don't.

M5Stack's CardputerZero is a credit card-sized Linux computer built around a Raspberry Pi Compute Module Zero, with a 46-key keyboard, 1.9-inch display with HDMI out up to 1080p, 8MP Sony camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, and a 1,500mAh battery.

AlmaLinux Day is coming to Los Angeles on July 18, scheduled the day before SIGGRAPH 2026 to catch the VFX and studio crowd before the larger conference kicks off.

More European companies are joining hands to push Euro-Office, the ONLYOFFICE clone.

Here are other highlights of this edition of FOSS Weekly:

• A new tool that feels like a reverse WSL.
• Software that feels open source, but isn't.
• Getting the fastest Arch Linux download mirrors.
• And other Linux news, tips, and, of course, memes!

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

GitHub Copilot's metered billing went live this week. What was a predictable monthly subscription is now usage-based, with each request priced dynamically by model and context.

The thing is that you cannot avoid AI specially if you are working as a sysadmin or DevOps. The best way is to use AI as a tool to assist you in your workflow. There is this new book that guides you to build intelligent automation using LLMs, RAG, and AI agents for monitoring, troubleshooting, and system administration. You don't want to be left behind, after all.

Get the book

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

Your Arch mirror list from install day is probably not your fastest option anymore. reflector lets you pull the most recently synced HTTPS mirrors by country in one command. rate-mirrors benchmarks them and picks the fastest without you needing to specify anything.

Want to try Alpine Linux without touching your main system? The installation process is text-based and a bit different from what most distros do, so running it in VirtualBox first makes sense.

Steam is proprietary. So are Obsidian, Warp, Docker Desktop, and the Snap Store backend. Thirteen tools that regularly fool Linux users into assuming otherwise, with open source alternatives listed.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

ZimaBoard was the device I began my homelab journey with a couple of years ago. I tried their latest device, ZimaCube 2 and shared the experience in this review. If money is not a problem and you are looking for the comfort of owning a homelab, Zima devices are worth it.

Jan AI came close to replacing Ollama for Bhuwan with its one-click model downloads, built-in cloud provider support, and local API server. But performance-wise, it disappointed.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

WSL runs Linux inside Windows. Winpodx does the opposite. It spins up a Windows container using Podman and streams individual Windows apps to your Linux desktop via FreeRDP.

📽️ Videos for You

We are now almost halfway through 2026, and these things still hold up.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

In GNOME, if you have multiple keyboard layouts enabled, click on the keyboard layout button in the quick settings panel and click the "Show Keyboard Layout" button to get a quick overview of that layout.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Can you spot all the hidden logos in this image puzzle?

A glass of Wine to keep the Winslop away. 🍷😉

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On June 5, 1833, Ada Byron met Charles Babbage at a party in London and walked away captivated by his mechanical Difference Engine.

That chance encounter sparked a friendship that led Ada to write what is now recognized as the world's first computer program, over a decade before the word "computer" referred to anything other than a person doing sums.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: Manuel, a regular FOSSer is looking for suggestions for a terminal app that shows git branch history. If that doesn't interest you, then there's another thread discussing whether technical education is failing in Australia.

The big news is that Linux distros are getting a standard Projects folder alongside Documents, Music, and Downloads. Most people already create one manually, but now it's official, and apps can start using it as a default location too. So it's more than just 'mkdir Projects", it has actual use.

Although, I am curious what kind of icon this new Projects directoy will get 😄

Here are other highlights of this edition of FOSS Weekly:

• Firefox quietly using Brave's ad blocker.
• A series of new Ubuntu releases.
• Warp terminal going open source.
• Hackers hijacking a package and publishing it to PyPI.
• And other Linux news, tips, and, of course, memes!

📰 Linux and Open Source News

Firefox 149 has quietly shipped Brave's open source adblock-rust engine with no mention in the release notes. It's disabled by default with no UI, but can be enabled via about:config.

MinIO's GitHub repo has been archived again after going into maintenance mode last year. If you're running it in production, then it is time for a change.

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS "Resolute Raccoon" is out. You get GNOME 50, Linux kernel 7.0, Wayland-only, five new default apps, deb packages back in App Center, and post-quantum crypto out of the box.

It's flavors have also gotten releases, and we have already checked out what Kubuntu 26.04 and Lubuntu 26.04 offer.

A flaw in Elementary Data's GitHub Actions workflow let an attacker push a backdoored version to PyPI in under ten minutes. If you have elementary-data 0.23.3 installed, you got work to do.

LVFS, the service behind Linux firmware updates, has one full-time developer and no security team. Vendors consuming millions of downloads without contributing now face download quotas and feature restrictions until they sponsor the project.

Fedora 44 is out after a two-week delay. It is powered by Linux 6.19, includes GNOME 50 and Plasma 6.6, has NTSYNC for better Windows game performance, and a completely refreshed Games Lab spin.

In related news, Microsoft might be looking to rebase Azure Linux on Fedora.

In an interesting development, AI-focused Warp terminal is now open source. Good to see them finally making the right decision.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

AI is coming to Ubuntu, and Canonical's approach is local-first with open-weight models delivered via snaps.

There is a petition asking for a native Linux version of a 3D architectural modeling program Rhino 3D. If you can, please sign it. This may result in bringing a mainstream app to Linux, which may help grow Linux adoption.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

GSConnect is the GNOME extension that brings KDE Connect to your desktop, letting you share files, sync notifications, use your phone as a trackpad, and mount Android folders over Wi-Fi.

Forgot your Ubuntu root password? You can boot into recovery mode, use the dpkg repair option to get a root shell, and reset it with passwd. Work only on systems with a root password set.

If you are using KDE, check out lesser known features in Konsole terminal.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

LeafKVM is an open source KVM-over-IP device in a CNC aluminum case, built on Rust and Buildroot.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

WSL9x is a project that does the opposite of what you'd expect. Instead of running Linux apps on Windows, it runs a modern Linux kernel 6.19 inside Windows 95, 98, or ME

An It's FOSS reader shared a project he made that shows a map of where your computer is connects. If you are into networking or just plain curious, you could give it a try.

📽️ Videos for You

Resharing the terminal customization video for the new readers. It's a detailed, step by step tutorial on how to make your terminal look as beautiful as the ones you see in our screenshots.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

You can use the Vitals GNOME Shell extension to add more system monitor readings to the GNOME top panel. Click on Vitals in the top panel, and select the values you want in the panel.

Deselect the ones you don't need to hide them from the panel. Do note that the hidden ones are still visible when you are in the drop-down view. Hidden or not, these values are all still accessible in the dropdown view of the extension.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Test your Linux command line knowledge in this fun quiz.

This is just Microsoft thing 👇

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On May 2, 1983, Microsoft introduced its two-button Microsoft Mouse alongside the new Microsoft Word processor. Despite manufacturing around 100,000 units for IBM and IBM-compatible PCs, the company sold only 5,000 before eventually finding success with a much-improved version.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: Pro FOSSer Dan is in a limbo where an update broke file thumbnails on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

And I am working on a complete overhaul of the It's FOSS Plus portal. Stay tuned for that.