That gets worse on image-based systems like GNOME OS, where the base image is read-only and you can't just swap out a package and move on.

GNOME wants to fix that with a new app it's prototyping, tentatively called Test Center.

Something new to tackle testing

It is meant to act as a one-stop solution for installing, running, and removing anything experimental, whether that's an app or a piece of the system itself.

For apps, you skip the usual grind of hunting down CI artifacts or building your own Flatpak bundle by hand. A developer hands you a link, you tap it, and the build shows up tagged as experimental, set to expire on its own.

System components run on sysext images instead of Flatpaks, though the idea plays out the same way. Take something like parental controls, still early in development, you'd grab the sysext tied to that merge request through Test Center, and it lands on your system as an overlay rather than a replacement.

Remove it, and you restore your system to the same state before the experimental change was applied.

Plus, there's a good reason system-level testing has been such a mess up to now.

According to Modal Collective, the closest thing on a regular package-based distro is packaging your changes into an unofficial repo like a COPR or PPA and asking testers to install from there themselves.

Once they do, the experimental packages don't sit next to the stable ones, they replace them outright. Break something, and it's on you to fix it. You won't get proper updates again until you do.

What's next?

All this effort is part of the GNOME OS Developer Tool Suite, a project that's been in funding through Germany's Prototype Fund since June 2026. Tobias Bernard, Jonas Dreßler, and a few others are working on this under the Modal Collective umbrella.

In a related plan, an easier way to distribute command-line developer tools on image-based systems is also part of the same project, though the team says more details on that are coming in a separate post.

If you're developing for GNOME OS and have opinions on what's currently annoying about testing and development workflows, the team wants to hear from you on Matrix, in the #gnome-os room, or in person at the GNOME OS BoF during GUADEC.

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

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

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

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

1. Kan.bn

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Planka

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Vikunja

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Wekan

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

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

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

5. Tududi

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

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

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

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

6. Leantime

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Fizzy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bonus: Schedule

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

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

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

Which tool should you use to replace Trello?

I have deliberately not included these in my list here:

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

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

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

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

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

But no matter how good it is, it is not open source. 🙃

Thankfully, the open source space has no shortage of alternatives. Rocket.Chat, Mattermost, Zulip, and Matrix-based clients like Element have all built up loyal followings among teams who want to own their data.

Now there's a new name to add to that list. It's called Chatto, and it's still early in its development cycle, with a stable 1.0 release yet to arrive.

Chatto goes open

After spending the past few months developing Chatto, Hendrik Mans has decided to offer the project openly under AGPL-3.0+ with a few Apache-2.0 exceptions for certain components.

It's built as a self-hosted option for teams who would otherwise reach for Slack, Teams, or Discord. Hendrik wanted something light on resources, simple enough that an administrator can just run the executable and get started.

It covers the essentials you would expect from a chat app. That includes channels, rooms, file sharing, video embeds, and a roles and permissions system for fine control over which user gets what kind of access.

You also get screen sharing, along with end-to-end encryption on every voice and video call, and the number of people that can join comes down to what kind of capacity your server has.

Going forward

Right now, there's no dedicated desktop or mobile client. Chatto's roadmap lists both as something that could be worked on, but they're still in the discovery phase, meaning that they are still deliberating on whether to offer those.

Beyond the client apps, the roadmap lists a dedicated Slack to Chatto migration tool, along with GDPR-compliant data export, thread locking, and thread deletion as planned feature additions.

Hendrik is currently working on new room types, bot accounts with dedicated API tokens, Chatto hub integration, and server-wide user suspension. Next in line are an emergency lockdown mode for admins, slow mode, in-app message reporting, and server invites.

For anyone who'd rather skip the self-hosting altogether, Chatto Cloud is entering public beta soon too. It'll run on European-owned infrastructure, with neat perks like automatic scaling and nightly backups.

Don't worry about vendor lock-in either, as moving data in or out of it will be made accessible.

Suggested Read 📖: Best Open Source Slack Alternatives

That is when I found Space Haven, a native Linux space-themed colony sim with base building, survival, and combat elements built into it.

It is the work of Bugbyte, a Turku-based indie game studio who initially introduced the game on Kickstarter back in 2019, running a successful crowdfunding campaign, and eventually making it out of Early Access.

Here's how my playthrough of it went.

Worth your time?

I say yes! If you are someone who is a buff for building intricate bases and micromanaging the smallest of details, then this game can be a good play for you.

I completed the tutorial before starting a full playthrough, which walked me through the basics quite well, but it did take some considerable time to finish.

There's a lot to keep track of once you are actually playing. Crew health and mood depend on beds, food, privacy, and toilets, so you cannot just build a ship and forget about the people living on it.

Powering the ship adequately matters just as much, where you place power generators and power nodes to route power distribution throughout your ship, keeping life support equipment like the oxygen generator and water purifier running to keep the crew alive.

Below you can see how I had to add a power node to provide electricity to the oxygen generator, with power-related metrics visible on the right. In this case, I was completing a quest objective to expand the ship's power grid.

Resource extraction comes next. Pod hangars support mining, building, and starfighter types, and once you assign a mining pod hangar, it automatically sends out a pod to a selected resource and starts mining.

For moving beyond the current region, hyperspace jumps are the only way. After ensuring that you have installed a Navigation Console and Hyperium Hyperdrive, you can use the Starmap to chart your way forward.

Then there's the combat. The ship can be protected by placing Point Defense Turrets for shooting down incoming asteroids as well as enemy drones and spacecraft. The crew members themselves can be drafted and equipped with weapons too!

You can send them aboard derelict ships to salvage for resources, and any aliens or clankers they run into get shot on sight once you give the order.

Room for improvements

Two things bugged me while playing. The camera stays locked to one angle; there is no way to rotate the view to see the ship or its contents from a different side. Loading a new map also means clicking through a checkmark button every single time before you can proceed, which will get annoying.

What I have covered here is only the surface of what Space Haven has to offer. There is a lot more to dig into, including deeper ship combat, faction missions, and even prison management, if you go further than I did.

Even with the fun I had, it would be wrong to exclude an issue that can be a dealbreaker for you. Crew members treat every task as a separate event instead of chaining related jobs together, placing a single wall block before wandering off, or returning to base after each mining haul instead of heading straight back out.

That is something the developers can fix in a future patch. For me, it was not much of a dealbreaker, as I am used to making things hard for myself. ☠️

🎮 How to Play?

As this is a native Linux game, you can run it on any computer that meets the minimum hardware requirements, provided the distro you install it on has the necessary components to run recent video games.

It costs $24.99, with prices going lower during sales. You can grab it from GOG for a DRM-free copy that you can share with others, or from Steam if you want access to mods.

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

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

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

Key Specifications

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

ELM11-Feather is priced at $39.

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

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

Full-Stack Programmability

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

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

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

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

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

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

🛒 Pricing and Availability

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

The board is priced at $39. Shipping cost isn't listed yet, and BrisbaneSilicon hasn't given a firm ship date either. The company does say it has already manufactured and tested a small batch of 5 boards ahead of the main production run, which is a bit more reassurance than most campaigns start with, though the only risk it flags is component availability for the GOWIN FPGA and the BL702 chip.

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

Now, that patience is paying off, as the project's June update reveals that Wayland will no longer be considered "experimental" starting with the next Cinnamon release.

Better late than never, eh?

Don't worry, both X11 and Wayland sessions will be fully supported starting with the next Cinnamon release, and the latter won't be the default session. Linux Mint's founder, Clement Lefebvre, said that the Wayland experience now feels solid, "almost on par with X11."

Of course getting here took longer than it did for other distros, but a project like Mint doesn't rush a major change like this without carrying out the appropriate prep work.

You will see the results of that in what's lined up for the new release.

Cinnamon finally has full HiDPI support, sharp icons, better mouse cursors, and fixes for bugs affecting Chromium apps like Slack and VS Code.

Similarly, window progress shows things like Nemo's (the file manager) file/folder copy progress in the panel's app button, and focus stealing prevention keeps other apps from yanking your attention away mid-task.

Multi-monitor setups and KVM switches behave better, and hardware acceleration now runs across the compositor, desktop session, and both Wayland and Xwayland clients, including GBM over EGL for NVIDIA GPUs.

They have been busy

Back in February, Lefebvre revealed the team was rethinking its release schedule altogether, since a new version every six months on top of maintaining LMDE left them testing and releasing more than actually building features.

By April, the decision was final, Linux Mint 23 got pushed all the way to Christmas 2026, the longest gap between major releases the project has taken. Part of that extra time went straight into Wayland.

Earlier, Lefebvre had called a redesigned Cinnamon screensaver the last missing piece of the puzzle for full Wayland support.

The old screensaver only ran on X11 as a standalone GTK app, sitting outside Cinnamon's own window manager. The new one runs on both X11 and Wayland, rendered natively by Cinnamon's own compositor.

The rest of that time bought more convenience for users. Mint started shipping HWE ISOs in May, giving people access to newer kernels like 6.17 on LM 22.3 without needing to wait for the LM 23 release.

All that's left now is the wait. Based on what's already landed, the next Linux Mint release looks like it'll be worth it.

Be it Obsidian or Logseq or Tolaria, there is a pain point associated with almost all of them. They add a layer on top of the plain markdown files. From Wikilinks to custom properties, there is always something that makes the interprotability an issue.

It almost feels like a vendor like in despite Markdown being an open standard.

Recently, I started experimenting with a different idea. Instead of relying on a specialized application, I tried using the KDE Plasma desktop itself as the foundation for this workflow.

Let me share how we can use Dolphin, along with a few KDE tools, to build a simple Markdown-based knowledge management system. I

t is still an experiment, and it certainly has limitations (that I will discuss later), but it has been an interesting workflow to explore.

Create Some Templates

The first step is to create a few Markdown templates that make taking notes faster.

Inside your ~/Templates directory, create two files:

• Markdown.md
• QuickNotes.md

Once these files are in the Templates folder, they become available from Dolphin's right-click context menu, allowing you to create new notes instantly.

Open QuickNotes.md in your preferred Markdown editor and add a simple structure such as:

## Core Concept

---

## Key Characteristics

---

## Examples

---

## Related Reading

---

This is the template I use for quick notes, but you can customize it as per your need.

From now on, you can create a structured Markdown note anywhere in your file manager with just a few clicks.

Create a Folder for Your Notes

Next, create a folder that will hold your entire note collection.

I created mine as ~/Documents/MarkdownSource, but you can choose any location you prefer.

Inside this folder, create sub-folders to organize notes. I also recommend creating two additional folders:

• Inbox, for notes that you haven't organized into a dedicated folder, yet.
• Attachments, for images and other files that your notes may reference.

Keeping attachments inside the root of your notes directory makes them much easier to manage later.Avoiding Vendor Lock-in By Using KDE Plasma As Personal Knowledge Base

Install a Markdown Editor

Since this workflow revolves around plain Markdown files, you'll need a Markdown editor.

I intentionally avoid recommending dedicated PKM applications such as Obsidian or Logseq here, because using one of those would defeat the purpose of this workflow.

I've tried the Ghostwriter Markdown editor from KDE, and it has worked very well for this experiment. Apostrophe is a similar editor, if you prefer a GNOME style application.

On Arch Linux, you can install it using:

sudo pacman -S ghostwriter

For other distros, use your package management commands.

Configure Dolphin to Open Markdown Files

Now make Ghostwriter the default application for Markdown files.

Open System Settings and navigate to Default Applications → File Associations.

Find the Markdown file type and move Ghostwriter to the top of the application list.

This can also be done by right-click on a Markdown file, go top Properties. Here, select the open with option and change the application preference order in a similar interface as above.

From now on, double-clicking any Markdown file in Dolphin will open it directly in Ghostwriter.

Use Dolphin Tags for Organization

Tagging is one of the most useful features in any PKM system. Without it, finding notes later becomes much more difficult.

Fortunately, Dolphin already includes a simple tagging system.

Open Dolphin and enable the information panel by selecting Menu → Show Panels → Information.

A sidebar will appear showing details about the selected file or folder.

Here you'll find a Tags field where you can assign one or more tags to each note.

Once you've tagged your files, Dolphin's search function can quickly locate notes that share the same tag.

Interlinking Notes

We've now covered most of the essential parts of this workflow. The only major feature left is linking notes together.

This is one area where a file manager-based workflow is less convenient than a dedicated PKM application.

Since Dolphin doesn't understand wiki links or automatically manage relationships between notes, you'll need to create standard Markdown links yourself.

One improvement I would recommend is storing all your notes and attachments inside a single dedicated notes directory. Instead of using absolute file paths, create links using relative paths whenever possible.

Relative links are much easier to manage because the entire notes directory can be moved to another location without breaking the internal links, as long as the folder structure remains unchanged.

To make this easier, I created a small Bash function that generates the relative path between two files.

relpath() {
  local from_dir
  from_dir=$(dirname "$(realpath "$1")")
  realpath --relative-to="$from_dir" "$2"
}

I added this function to my .bashrc. I originally wrote this function for a terminal-based PKM workflow, but it fits this KDE-based workflow just as well.

Now, whenever I need to create a link from one note to another, I simply run:

relpath current_file distant_file

The command prints the relative path, which I can directly use in the Markdown link.

A normal Markdown link looks like this:

[Link text](Link address)

It's a manual process, but once the link is created, you can easily navigate between your notes from within your Markdown editor.

And this way, you have a folder containing subfolders of markdown files. The interlinking is the hardest and boring part but once that is done, your knowledge base can be used on any OS, with any Markdown editor.

It Is Not Perfect (Obviously)

And that's not a surprise. You are not using a specialist tool so there are a few limitations worth knowing.

Strict Data Organization Is Needed

With this approach, your desktop environment effectively becomes your knowledge management system.

That also means you are entirely responsible for keeping your notes organized.

If you don't maintain a clear folder structure, your note collection can quickly become difficult to manage.

For example, a note may contain links to attachments stored in completely different folders. Without a consistent organization strategy, finding those files later can become frustrating.

Similarly, if you are linking notes to a PDF file, keep those files organized in a folder and don't mess up with its location. Else, interlinking won't work.

Distro and Desktop Environment Changes

This workflow is tied to KDE Plasma's tagging feature. Moving away from KDE Plasma would likely mean abandoning parts of this workflow altogether.

Link Fragility

You probably have already realized that this is the weakest link in the entire workflow.

The Markdown links point directly to file paths. If you rename or move a file or folder later, every note pointing to that location will break.

Unlike dedicated PKM applications, Dolphin doesn't automatically update links when files are moved. Any reorganization requires manually updating the affected links yourself and that would be a serious pain.

Wrapping Up

I know this approach is far from perfect. Compared to dedicated PKM applications, it places much more responsibility on you to organize your notes, attachments, and folder structure properly.

Personally, I think that's not necessarily a bad thing.

When you organize your notes yourself, you naturally become more familiar with your knowledge base. You're more likely to revisit, reorganize, and improve your notes over time instead of treating them as something you write once and never look at again.

At the same time, this workflow won't suit everyone.

If you depend on advanced features such as automatic backlinks, graph views, embedded queries, or seamless note linking, a dedicated PKM application will provide a much better experience.

On the other hand, if your priority is to keep everything as plain Markdown files while using lightweight tools that are already available on your desktop, this approach is certainly worth trying. In my opinion, this workflow also works well for people following the Zettelkasten method.

I'm still experimenting with this workflow myself, and I'll probably continue refining it as I use it more.

What do you think about this idea? Would you consider using your file manager as a personal knowledge management system, or would you rather stick with a dedicated application? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Eventually, that number will be scaled up to 50,000 public sector workers, covering agencies ranging from ministries down to municipal offices.

What's happening?

Currently, Nextcloud is handling file sharing, and features like chat, video conferencing, and groupware tools are coming next. The existing implementation as well as the expansion is being handled by DVZ M-V, the state's IT services provider.

The state's CIO, Marco Anschütz, says the SharePoint migration for the first 5,000 employees went smoothly, with no disruption or data loss, further adding that:

Together with DVZ M-V, we've built a platform that runs reliably today and is being expanded step by step.

The above quote was translated from Deutsch. 📝

Nextcloud isn't the only aspect of the open source push. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern also uses OpenProject as an alternative to proprietary project management tools and has built its own administrative AI assistant, LEA, that is based on OpenWebUI.

Not a solo effort

The northern state isn't figuring this out alone. In 2025, its Ministry of Finance and Digitalization signed a cooperation agreement (in Deutsch) with the State Chancellery of Schleswig-Holstein, specifically to strengthen digital sovereignty across both states.

That's a state which needs no introduction when it comes to adopting open source solutions to Big Tech problems.

Many of their governmental agencies have already migrated their email system off Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, made LibreOffice mandatory across their administration, and are expecting to save more than €15 million a year in licensing costs as a result.

Nationally, Germany backs the same direction with the Deutschland-Stack, a sovereign infrastructure framework. It limits public administration to two document formats, ODF and PDF/UA, excluding Microsoft's .doc, .ppt, and .xls entirely.

The framework also favors open source tools and European providers over foreign ones, aiming to cut vendor lock-in, and promoting digital sovereignty across public administration.

Wrapping up

None of this means Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is cutting ties with Microsoft entirely. SharePoint is out, sure, but that's the scope of what's actually announced so far.

Nonetheless, going from 5,000 employees to their stated target of 50,000+ is a massive undertaking, and with two states coordinating this move instead of migrating separately, their alliance might end up as an example for other German states to follow.

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

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

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

Orico 8848U4 DAS Specification

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

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

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

Build Quality And Design

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

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

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

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

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

Sides has nothing, just minimal branding.

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

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

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

Linux Compatibility

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

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

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

Performance Testing

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

Understanding The "40Gbps" Claim

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

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

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

Benchmark Results (ext4)

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

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

NTFS vs ext4

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

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

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

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

Real-World Transfers

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

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

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

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

Things To Keep In Mind

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

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

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

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

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

Who Is This For Really?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Going forward, the distro will be based on Debian Testing instead of an Ubuntu LTS release, under what the company calls the Continuous Debian approach. The move is permanent too, as TUXEDO OS will not follow Testing into the next Debian stable release.

Behind the switch is also a fair bit of frustration with how Canonical has been steering Ubuntu lately. Announcing the rebase, they stated that:

By moving to Debian, TUXEDO OS gains substantially more independence while reducing the effort required to maintain up-to-date software. The result is a robust operating system with a clear focus on digital sovereignty—for both TUXEDO customers and users running TUXEDO OS on third-party hardware.

Done with Ubuntu

TUXEDO says that an aging LTS base makes backporting harder as time goes on, since newer dependencies are often missing or stuck on outdated versions. Things get worse when core libraries like Qt (which KDE Plasma runs on) get updated and break software pulled from Ubuntu's repositories.

Snaps are another pain point, as Canonical keeps moving toward packaging and delivering Snap-only software, making it harder for TUXEDO to keep those components out of their distribution.

Similarly, the Ubuntu AI roadmap hasn't offered much clarity on how it will actually work, and slow security updates were the final points of contention.

The new base

With Ubuntu now gone, Debian Testing, the development branch of Debian, becomes the new base. New packages arrive here from Debian Unstable, but only after proving they build identically from the same source, a requirement Debian made mandatory back in May.

The switch is already visible under the hood too, as the internal testing version of TUXEDO OS is pulling from Debian's repositories instead of Ubuntu's (as shown above).

Why should you care?

Don't think that this is only a rebase; TUXEDO Computers is also working on introducing some major upgrades.

Btrfs becomes the default file system on new installs, paired with Snapper for automatic snapshots before every update. That is the same setup openSUSE has used for years, so it is a proven solution.

They haven't detailed their kernel strategy yet. My guess, and it's only a guess until TUXEDO confirms otherwise, is something closer to how Ubuntu or Fedora handle it, shipping recent kernels quickly instead of sitting on an older one for stability's sake.

A visual overhaul is also on the way, though they haven't locked in the new look yet, and current builds still run the old theme over the new Debian base. Gaming and enterprise use cases are both getting attention too, with the specifics being shared later.

If you are already running the Ubuntu-based TUXEDO OS, there is no direct upgrade path here. A clean install will be required, and TUXEDO says a full migration guide is coming before the final release shows up.

Alternatively, if you would rather stay on an Ubuntu base, the company will be offering a transition path to Kubuntu 26.04 instead.

When to expect?

An extensive beta testing phase kicks off in the coming weeks, aimed at non-production setups. Expect things to shift based on feedback and whatever release blockers turn up along the way.

If you want a more complete look at what they are cooking up, the next FrOSCon happening in August is the place to be. The TUXEDO Computers team will be presenting this new development direction in a dedicated talk.

Now, we have a Windows log file that has been silently eating up space on people's storage drives, with a Microsoft customer support agent even suggesting buying a new hard drive when a user complained about it.

What happened?

The file responsible is CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal, a write-ahead log for the database Windows uses to track camera, microphone, and location permission requests. It's supposed to stay a few megabytes and clear itself out after about a month. Instead, it can balloon past 500GB, sitting in a folder Windows won't even let you open to check.

The user who got the hard drive advice was Donald Gibson, who posted about it on Microsoft's Q&A forum in March 2026. His System and Reserved storage had ballooned to 111GB when it should have sat around 40GB, all thanks to a single 66.5GB CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal file eating up precious space on his 221GB drive.

When he contacted Microsoft support, the agent had never heard of the bug and had to loop in a supervisor before responding. The result was a suggestion to buy a new portable hard drive, and no help deleting the bloated file either.

This is not something new that has popped over the past few months, a Reddit thread from a year ago had the same file ballooning to 513GB on someone else's machine, with no folder anywhere to explain where the space went.

A quiet fix

The official fix didn't show up until June 29, quietly tacked onto the release notes under the "Change log" section for a preview update that had already shipped six days earlier.

But not everyone will have this now, as the full rollout is expected with the July 2026 Patch Tuesday update, which is well over a year after the first reports started showing up.

The same update also shipped a redesigned Start menu, a new point-in-time restore feature, and support for bigger local AI models, so it is not like Microsoft was short on engineering hours to spare.

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Freewrite did it for writers. PicoCalc did it for tinkerers. Now Talisman Design, an independent hardware studio out of Phoenix, Arizona, wants a shot at it with PocketMage, a pocketable personal digital assistant that just launched on Crowd Supply.

PocketMage Key Specifications

Let's take a look at the hardware:

• Chip: ESP32-S3 with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
• RAM: 2 MB QSPI PSRAM
• Displays: 3.1-inch e-paper (320x240) + 1.8-inch OLED (256x32)
• OS: PocketMageOS, custom, open source, built on FreeRTOS
• Storage: 16 MB QSPI flash and MicroSD card slot
• Battery: 1200mAh LiPo, rated for about 7 days
• User Input: Built-in tactile QWERTY keyboard, USB keybord support and touch scrollbar on main screen
• Expansion: FPC port with I2C, SPI, UART, GPIO and power
• Dimensions: 100 x 73 x 21.7 mm
• Shipping: expected by the end of March 2027

I find the dual-display setup interesting in this tiny device. There is the main 3.1-inch e-paper panel display and then there is a secondary, 1.8-inch OLED strip for menus and anything that needs a fast refresh. Somewhat like those touchbars in MacBooks except that it's display only.

That's deliberate because although e-paper is sunlight-readable and power-friendly, it's too slow for scrolling menus and hence the secondary OLED display.

Underneath all that is an ESP32-S3, which may feel like an unusual choice for something marketed as a PDA. It's a microcontroller, not the kind of chip you'd find running a full desktop OS, but that's sort of the point.

ESP32 boards have gained a massive hobbyist ecosystem of late, which means PocketMage keeps the whole thing low-power enough to hit that 7-day battery estimate.

A DIY kind of gadget should allow tinkerers some tinkering room. PocketMage doesn't disappoint. It has an FPC expansion port with I2C, SPI, UART, and GPIO for anyone who wants to bolt on their own hardware and thus showing off your engineering skills more than your writing skills.

At the core: PocketMageOS and the Bazaar

PocketMage doesn't run Linux. It runs PocketMageOS, a custom, "wizard-inspired" operating system built on FreeRTOS, with a built-in suite that includes a Markdown text editor, a dictionary, a journaling app, and a terminal.

Third-party apps get distributed through something called the Bazaar, essentially an app store for sideloaded software. I can already see a calculator, a text-based web browser, an e-book reader, a Pomodor timer and, a bit oddly, a Tarot card reader among the available apps.

Back PocketMage on Crowd Supply

PocketMage is live on Crowd Supply now, and at the time of writing this article has raised $66,538 of its $100,000 goal from 204 backers, with 58 days left to go.

The DIY kit is $185 and the pre-assembled version is $235, both with free US shipping and a flat $12 for international orders. Both come in Parchment or Royal Purple. Backers should expect deliveries to start by the end of March 2027.

If you're comfortable with the idea of assembling it yourself and want to save $50, the DIY kit gets you the exact same hardware as the assembled version. You only need screwdrivers to assemble it. No soldering required. If you'd rather skip the build entirely, the $235 tier is the way to go.

The pricing may seem steep at first. But if you look at the alternatives, PicoCalc is cheaper at $89 but doesn't include a battery and only lasts 16 hours on a charge, the Freewrite Traveler costs $549 for a writing-only device with no expansion port, and the GPD MicroPC 2 is $680 and not really pocketable at all.

At $185 to $235, PocketMage isn't the cheapest option in this space, but it's not the priciest either, and it's the only one on that list that's fully open on both hardware and software.

Do You Need This or Do You Want This?

Here's the thing, though. Your phone is already in your pocket, already has a keyboard, and already does everything PocketMage does. That's the harsh truth.

I can't speak for you, but personally, I doubt if I can use PocketMage for any serious work. But the child inside me would want this just for fun.

That tiny cyberdeck feel takes you straight back to the 80s when something like this could have been the talk of the town, the envy of your peers.

And these tiny devices have their own niche market. No wonder that we have several handheld Raspberry Pi devices and Linux computers.

It's not a need, it's a want, aimed primarily at hobbyists, cyberdeck builders, and people nostalgic for a Palm Pilot they never quite got over.

Would you buy a PocketMage? Share your answer in the comments please.