If you are a content creator in 2026, then I am sure you end up juggling through a stack of apps and browser-based tools for the same handful of jobs. One resizes an image, another handles format conversion, a third takes care of watermarks, and a website somewhere tells you the exact pixel dimensions Instagram, X, or YouTube expects.

None of those steps take long on their own, but doing them one after another for every single post does add up.

Image Toolbox is built to make all that easier. It's an Android app that offers resizing, format conversion, watermarking, and platform-accurate exports under one roof.

What can it do for you?

Working under the name "T8RIN," Malik Mukhametzyanov has come up with Image Toolbox, offering it for free without any advertisements inside the app.

For you, as a content creator, the tools that matter the most are batch processing, format conversion, the 61 built-in export presets sized for platforms like Instagram, X, and YouTube, background removal, and watermarking.

The latter, background removal, comes in both automatic and manual modes, with a choice of models including MlKit, U2Net, RMBG, and BiRefNet.

It's built in Kotlin, uses Image Toolbox Libs for shared components, and Coil for image loading. The whole project is released under the Apache License 2.0.

I used it for a while

When you first launch it, Image Toolbox asks you for the usual set of notification and file access-related permissions, along with a dialog that lets you opt out of update checks.

Before I started editing images, I first tweaked the app to my liking.

In the sidebar menu, I noticed that the app had pulled the purple straight off my phone's Dynamic color setting which was nice, and I then turned on "Amoled mode" for getting a deep black-themed interface.

That was followed by a prompt switching of the app to "Dark" mode instead of "System."

Of course there's a lot more buried in there, like separate categories for Layout, Confetti, Vibration, Screen, Text, and Behavior. I left most of it untouched, as the default configuration was good enough for me.

I kept the focus of my testing limited to a few tool entries (among 100+ tools), as many of the smaller tools kept appearing in the same editor.

First up was Single Edit, which I used to play around with an image's quality, dropping the quality slider to 7 percent, and watching it turn into an oil painting with no realism whatsoever.

During that, the file size for the 3.8 MB photo went down to ~128 kb. I used the three buttons right below the preview to fully rotate and mirror the image horizontally too.

Exif editing also lives in the same area, with parameters like capture date, compression, camera make, and camera model all being editable without me needing to leave the app. I changed the camera make and model values, and the changes were reflected successfully when I saved the image.

Though I did go a bit overboard with tone curves, where I pushed the RGB curve too far, and a simple picture of a cloudy day turned into a fever dream. 😅

It has AI powers

AI Tools was next. I added an image of a clock tower and went with the default/already downloaded U2NetP model that specializes in background removals. I set the output format to be WEBP and clicked on the save button.

It took some time to process the image, but the end result was an image with its background removed. 👇

As you can see above, Image Toolbox gave me a clean output in the requested file format, without any particularly bad artifacting or overcuts. Zoom in, though, and the edges do lack sharpness. I think that's acceptable for a deep learning model that size.

You also have the freedom to opt for heavier, more powerful models if required.

Finally, I checked out "Presets" under the Resize and Convert tool, which basically showed me the same interface as Single Edit. The horizontally scrollable list had a variety of aspect ratios to fit the various social media platforms.

I picked an image from the gallery and then proceeded to look for the right aspect ratio preset.

I ended up using the 4:5 aspect ratio preset for getting an Instagram-ready image. Though I admit it came out a bit squeezed, the image itself didn't really lose its quality or colors.

Track usage

Image Toolbox ships with a "Usage Statistics" page, accessible via the chart-looking button at the top. Its job is to quietly track things like app opens, which tools you reach for most, and how much data you've saved along the way.

Don't worry, nothing gets sent to some data mining server; everything stays on the device.

My statistics showed me a total of 3 app opens, 19 tool opens, around 14 MB in data savings, and WEBP as my most-used format.

And if you prefer multitasking, then you can queue up a batch of images and just check the notification panel for updates instead of keeping the app window open.

Install it on Android

The sheer number of tools and settings in here might overwhelm you, though that does come down to personal preference.

For me, there's plenty in this app I'll probably never touch. It makes me want a stripped-down version, something lighter on storage and memory; that would help it run better on older devices too.

There are two main app store listings for Image Toolbox. On F-Droid, it is under Malik's own name, and on the Play Store, it is under the "ProgiX" publisher name.

Both are the same app, but the F-Droid version is a "FOSS" build that ditches Google-related trackers and dependencies, while the Play Store version is a "Market" build that keeps them, including analytics and crash reporting.

There's no separate paid plan available here either; the lead dev only asks for donations via the sidebar menu.

You can also download APK files for all the variants of Image Toolbox from the Releases page in the project's GitHub repo.

Multikernel Technologies has put out mklinux v7.0-mk2, the first public release of the multikernel Linux tree it's been building since last year.

The basic premise of the project is that one physical server can run several independent Linux kernels side by side, each with its own dedicated CPUs and memory. So, the same box could run a database on one kernel and a GPU training job on another without either kernel touching the other's resources.

Don't worry, it isn't some obscure copy but rather a direct fork of the Linux kernel with a bunch of patches added that give it such a high level of parallel play.

How it works

One kernel runs as the host, controlling the machine's CPUs, memory, and PCI devices. When it spins up a new kernel instance, that instance gets its own dedicated slice of hardware and boots straight onto it using Linux's kexec mechanism, running natively rather than under a hypervisor.

The host tracks all of this through device tree overlays under /sys/fs/multikernel/, and it can shift hardware between running instances while everything stays up.

That's a different setup from both VMs and containers. A VM still puts a hypervisor and a host kernel between the app and the hardware. A container skips the hypervisor, but every tenant on the machine shares one kernel.

Multikernel avoids both problems. Each instance is a full, independent kernel running on its own dedicated cores. Modern NICs and SSDs can hand out separate hardware queues too, so an instance gets exclusive access to a slice of the device, not just a slice of the CPU.

This app-kernel and device-kernel split is the pattern the company documents for the architecture generally, dedicating one instance purely to drivers and I/O so the app-facing kernels never see a device interrupt at all.

This release only supports x86_64 hardware, though Multikernel Technologies says the architecture-specific code is already modular enough for other ports to follow later.

Who's this for?

Multikernel Technologies already sells three products based on this kernel tree, and what they're pitched as says plenty about who this is actually for. Private Cloud is sold as a way to consolidate workloads on bare metal without a hypervisor.

Sandbox is marketed for running AI agents in their own kernel with direct GPU access, and LiveUpdate promises to patch a running kernel without taking the system down.

Every one of those pitches targets infrastructure and SRE teams running their own hardware, not desktop users.

The company's own site names even more targeted use-cases beyond those three, ranging from high core count ARM servers to RISC-V systems built for one kernel per cluster on heterogeneous SoCs.

OEMs looking to bake Multikernel into an embedded device are also welcome.

If you remember, Cong Wang, Multikernel's founder and CEO, first pitched this architecture in an RFC posted to the Linux kernel mailing list back in September 2025. It's great to see how far this project has come.

There's more to it than what I have covered so far. You can read the release announcement to dive into the comprehensive benchmark numbers shared by Cong.

And here's the source code for your perusal. 👇

TDF and Collabora have been at odds since April, when TDF's Membership Committee kicked out every Collabora staffer and partner in one move, with more than 30 people dropped.

That didn't stop Collabora from shipping a range of new releases, with Collabora Office 26.04 being the most recent one, where AI was introduced as an opt-in feature, letting users pick a model and bring their own credentials.

Now, LibreOffice, and by extension, The Document Foundation, has put its rejection of AI at the very forefront with the LibreOffice 26.8 release, going as far as calling it out in the release announcement title itself.

🆕 LibreOffice 26.8: What's New?

There's no AI in LibreOffice 26.8. Nothing about the suite talks to a remote server, and none of it needs an internet connection to work.

This isn't an oversight; it's a promise. TDF says that if your work can't leave the building for legal or privacy reasons, the only way to prove that later (during an audit, for example) is if the software never gave it anywhere to go.

Anyhow, coming back to the editors. 👇

Writer now detects paragraph direction automatically when you open or paste a document, end-of-line spacing follows the paragraph's direction instead of the reading direction, and object resize controls play well with RTL and vertical CJK documents.

It also gets a way to see the baseline grid during editing, and the grid itself now aligns correctly inside text frames. A new Draft View for stripping out the headers, footers, and page margins for distraction-free writing is available too.

Calc picks up the same RTL detection we saw earlier. Typing right-to-left text into an empty cell sets its direction automatically instead of requiring a manual toggle.

With additional improvements like Calculated Fields for pivot tables and a "Shuffle" command for scrambling cell order within a selected range.

Similarly, Math gets new named functions and operators built for two west African writing systems, N'Ko and Adlam, which cover the Manding languages and Fulani, plus left-pointing vector arrows for formulas written right to left.

Chart has basic support for reading and writing back the newer chart formats (chartex) that show up in Microsoft's OOXML files, covering the box-and-whisker, funnel, Pareto, sunburst, treemap, and waterfall types.

Impress and Draw can mix page sizes within one file instead of forcing every slide or page to match, and Impress also picks up presentation sections, letting you group slides under a name instead of scrolling through one long list.

And generally speaking, Calc, Writer, Impress, and Draw now each carry their own background tint in the Notebookbar (the ribbon-style interface on top), so you can tell which app you're in without reading the title bar.

There's also a new Paragraph Composer that balances word spacing across a whole paragraph instead of judging each line by itself, fixing the uneven look that comes from justifying one line at a time.

⚙️ How to Install/Upgrade?

You will usually find LibreOffice already installed on popular Linux distributions, and it is only a matter of time before this release shows up as part of a routine system upgrade.

If you can't wait, then downloading the DEB or RPM package is the quickest way to get this release installed. Alternatively, you could also opt for the Flatpak, but know that it receives updates a bit late.

Refer to the release notes if you want to see the new changes in action.

Linux 7.3's merge window is still open, but what's already confirmed looks like the foundation for one of the more performance-heavy releases in a while. Btrfs direct I/O is pushing close to 95% of theoretical throughput, EXT4 is hitting 2.19 million IOPS on fast NVMe, and a KSM memory bug that caused 700ms freezes is fixed down to under 2ms.

Canonical is co-funding a three-year PhD at the University of Bristol to build a system that can translate large C codebases into Rust automatically. The test cases are AppArmor and snap-confine, both already running in production on Ubuntu, picked specifically because they're complex.

While not FOSS, TeamSpeak has been consistent in supporting Linux as a platform. It is now getting the ability to make direct calls between users without requiring a server.

Proton Mail's new Categories feature is live and works similar to how Gmail tabs do, sorting incoming mail into Primary, Social, Promotions, Newsletters, and two optional categories. The difference is that Proton sorts by metadata only since it can't read your email contents.

A one-line kernel bug in the Intel Xe driver was causing GDM to restart endlessly on Battlemage G21 cards. Tracking it down took Linus Torvalds 18 kernel boots and 24 debug patches.

There seems to be an official Flatpak package in early development for the Chromium browser.

This edition of FOSS Weekly is supported by Linux systems vendor, Star Labs.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

You might have already heard about Omarchy's recent cash infusion; here's a quick run-down:

Ten tech founders have each written a million-dollar check for the Omacom Foundation, a nonprofit that DHH is in the middle of setting up to fund Omarchy and the open-source ecosystem around it.m

The first beneficiary is Vaxry from Hyprland, who will receive funding under an exclusive 3-year sponsorship.

The entire episode has (once again) divided the Linux community, as some people dislike DHH for his (right-leaning) political views, while the supporters don't agree with the usual (left-leaning) political views of most Linux-related organizations. Guess politics spoils a lot of things.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

You might have come across the term "Linux is just a kernel". Here's what it means.

Another basic but essential concept you should know about the root user, as a desktop Linux user.

Serious about perfect document formatting? Why not try your hand at AsciiDoc? It's a plain text format that converts cleanly to HTML or PDF, and this guide covers everything from installation and basic syntax to customizing your output with CSS and XSLT.

GNOME's default look is clean, but it doesn't have to stay that way. Our list covers 17 extensions for changing how the desktop actually looks, from blur effects and animated window close transitions to wallpaper slideshows and a proper desktop clock widget.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

Would you be interested in a newly announced $42 USB dongle that can turn your phone into a keyboard, mouse, and SSH terminal?

If that's not your thing, why not check out MNT Research's mini PC case designed to take the same mainboard as the MNT Reform laptop?

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

weathr is a Rust CLI tool that shows your current weather as animated ASCII art, complete with a house, clouds, birds during the day, stars and fireflies at night, and weather-appropriate animations for rain, snow, fog, and thunderstorms.

📽️ Videos for You

Learn to tweak the KDE file manager in this video on our YouTube channel.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

In GNOME, File Roller lets you open up compressed archives to check out what is inside before actually unzipping anything. If you only need a single item, you can just grab and extract that specific file or folder instead of unpacking the whole thing.

Here's the unofficial Flathub listing if you want to get it installed quickly.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Confident that your container knowledge is enough to beat this crossword?

I laughed harder than I should have on "Microslop".

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On August 29, 1990, the UK's Computer Misuse Act took effect, one of the world's first laws targeting computer fraud. It followed the 1984 Prestel hack, where two men accessed Prince Philip's mailbox but couldn't be prosecuted under existing forgery law.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: Pro FOSSer Neville is asking fellow FOSSers whether they do anything to customize their desktop environment. Go on, share your riced-up setups in that thread!

Chromium's source tree has gained experimental support for packaging the browser as a Flatpak, and the change has already been merged yesterday.

It's a small addition, basically a commit sitting behind a disabled build flag, but it's the kind of change worth keeping an eye on if you've been wanting an official way to run Chromium or even Chrome through Flatpak on Linux.

Currently, the other instances of Flatpak packaging for Chromium are the unofficial community builds, one that's live on Flathub, and the other that's a de-Googled fork.

What's in the patch?

The new code lives in its own folder inside Chromium's Linux installer scripts, and it stays switched off by default behind a build flag: enable_flatpak.

Turning it on lets the build system put together a Flatpak version of the browser instead of the usual DEB or RPM package, leaving out desktop-specific components and system files that a Flatpak file does not need.

The goal, according to the patch author, Tom Anderson, is to test tighter sandboxing and improve how Chromium talks to the desktop through Flatpak's permission system.

Though he also points out that this is not a commitment from Chromium to ship an official Flatpak package.

An official Flatpak would be great

As mentioned earlier, if you want to install Chromium as a Flatpak, then the community-maintained build on Flathub and ungoogled-chromium are the most easily accessible ways to do so.

Both of those are quite popular among Linux users, and even if you don't consider the de-Googled offering's popularity, the community-maintained one is already averaging over 27,000 downloads a month.

An official package would mean people get the same Chromium experience on Linux, just served as a Flatpak, with Chromium's own developers handling sandbox permissions, updates, and desktop integration directly instead of leaving that work to open source contributors.

It doesn't stop at Chromium either; the patch already maps app IDs for both Chromium (org.chromium.Chromium) and Google Chrome (com.google.Chrome), so a Chrome Flatpak could realistically follow the same path if this ever ships.

It would also give Linux users one more straightforward way to install Chromium or Chrome, alongside the existing Snap (unofficial), DEB, and RPM options.

Where this leaves things

That said, Flatpak has its downsides. Flatpak apps tend to take up more disk space than traditional packages since they often ship their own libraries instead of sharing what's already on the system.

Flatpak's sandbox also restricts an application's access to files, devices, network resources, and other parts of the host system by default. Applications can request additional permissions when they need access to resources outside the sandbox, which adds another layer of configuration for users and developers.

None of that makes Flatpak a bad choice, but it does mean an official Chromium package would not automatically be everyone's preferred way to install the browser.

For now, this patch has a build flag turned off by default, nothing more. It does not confirm an official Flatpak is coming. But it's worth watching if this experiment ultimately holds up.

Via: Phoronix

Got a headless Raspberry Pi and want to connect to it? You don't need to use your computer for that. You can do that with your smartphone itself.

TechxArtisan's latest gadget turns your smartphone into a keyboard, mouse, gamepad and even a SSH terminal.

These folks gave us KVM-over-USB gadgets like Openterface Mini-KVM and Openterface KVM-GO in the past.

Now they are working on Openterface KeyMod, a tiny USB-bridge that can do a number of things by interacting with a computer from your phone.

Key Specifications

• Microcontroller: WCH CH32V208 RISC-V MCU
• USB functions: HID keyboard and mouse, plus a USB network bridge (SSH, VNC, file transfer), both active at the same time
• Wireless: BLE 5.3 on both models; KeyMod Plus adds a wired USB option for more bandwidth
• Phone app: KeyCmd, for Android (APK available) and iOS (coming soon)
• Two variants: Mini uses USB-C, Plus uses USB-A

Both variants have the same price tag of $24. The project is being crowdfunded on CrowdSupply.

The interesting thing here is not that the keyboard and mouse part. It's that KeyMod does two USB jobs at the same time. Let me explain.

You plug it into the target machine, and it shows up as a USB composite device: a standard HID keyboard and mouse, and a USB network bridge using the CDC-ECM standard, basically working as a private USB Ethernet link. The target gets a fixed IP at 192.168.11.2, your phone lands on 192.168.11.1. No DHCP, no Wi-Fi hunting, no driver to install on most systems.

Because HID input works without an OS loaded, KeyMod reaches BIOS screens, boot menus, and recovery environments too. It is similar to what Openterface Mini-KVM covers, just without the video feed.

On the phone side, the KeyCmd app decides what KeyMod does next. Their description mentions that KM Basic gives you a wireless keyboard, touchpad, and numpad. KM Pro adds a Shortcut Hub and Compose & Send, which lets you draft a long command, API key, or license key on your phone, review it, then fire it off as real keystrokes.

There's also Macros for scripted key sequences, a Presentation mode for Keynote and Google Slides, a Gamepad mode for emulators, and Shortcut Hub profiles for Blender, VS Code, etc.

Do note that KeyCmd is available only in APK format. It is not in Google Play Store. The iOS version has a 'coming soon' tag. I hope this thing is handled before the device gets shipped because Google plans to restrict sideloading of apps and Apple is notorious for raising fence to protect their walled garden.

Now, the network bridge is what makes Terminal (SSH) over BLE or USB possible, without needing a network setup. It works with macOS and Linux targets today. Windows support needs RNDIS instead of CDC-ECM, and that's still in development. Ah! That's so satisfactory as a Linux user ;)

Mini vs Plus

Mini and Plus run the same software, just connected differently.

KeyMod Mini is USB-C, BLE-only, and tiny enough for a keychain or phone lanyard at 25 x 15 x 5 mm and about 2.4 g.

KeyMod Plus is USB-A, adds a wired USB link to the phone for up to 10 Mbps (versus BLE's 2 Mbps), and is built more for staying plugged into servers, legacy PCs, or rack gear.

At $42, it lands close to InputStick ($34) and DexoPad ($39), but neither of those does SSH over BLE the way KeyMod does.

AI Agent Mode

Not only software, it seems like every hardware got to have AI these days.

So, there's also an experimental AI Agent Mode. You add your own LLM API key (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama whatever you use), describe a goal in plain language like "check logs" or "restart service," and the model plans a sequence of terminal commands, presenting each one for your approval before it runs.

On newer iPhones (14 Pro and up), KeyCmd can also run a small local model instead, TechxArtisan says it has tested a 0.6B Qwen model under 1GB of RAM. It's clearly early, and TechxArtisan itself frames it as likely to stay experimental for a while.

Watch out for...

A couple of things you should know.

BLE encryption isn't turned on yet. The security design is finalized (Bluetooth LE Secure Connections, AES-128, ECDH P-256), but current beta and engineering kits ship without it enabled, with the actual switch-on coming through a firmware update before shipping.

If wireless exposure is a concern for your use case, KeyMod Plus's wired USB link bypasses BLE entirely during operation. CE and UKCA certification are also still in progress, though the company says both are committed before shipping.

On the open source side, KeyCmd for Android and iOS is in development for now and is slated to go fully open source on GitHub once the campaign wraps.

Hardware schematics and PCB files will be published as the project evolves, and OSHWA certification is planned, following Mini-KVM (CN000015) and KVM-GO (CN000022).

One more thing to set expectations on: this campaign's units will most likely ship in the current 3D-printed enclosure rather than an injection-molded one, since tooling would add at least two months to the timeline. Which, I think, means that the product may not look as smooth. If you have ever used 3D printed product, you will understand that.

Getting Openterface KeyMod

Openterface KeyMod is live on Crowd Supply. As of this writing it has raised $9,618 of its $15,000 goal (64%) from 149 backers, with funding closing on Oct 1, 2026.

Both the Mini and Plus are priced at $42, plus $8 shipping in the US or $18 worldwide. Orders placed now are estimated to ship Feb 14, 2027.

We posted on X a few days back, calling Linux 7.3 one of the most performance-focused releases in years. And now, going through what has actually landed in the merge window since then, that claim does seem to hold up.

The merge window for this release opened right after Linux 7.2 arrived, staying open until the end of this month barring any last-minute happenings that move the closure.

So, here's what is confirmed to go into the 7.3 release so far.

Storage gets a serious speed boost

Btrfs picks up several changes at once. Direct I/O now runs through an IOmap bounce buffer instead of falling back to buffered I/O, taking a workflow that topped out around half of the theoretical maximum throughput up to close to 95 percent of it.

Two separate fixes in the logging and fsync paths add roughly 5x gains each, one from removing an unnecessary delay when multiple logging tasks run at once, the other from skipping unneeded hole detection during full fsync on files with lots of extents but no holes.

The default free-space cache also moves from v1 to v2, the safer and faster option that had not yet become the default.

EXT4 gets its own round of work too. Parallel direct I/O writes are now allowed where the filesystem used to be too restrictive, and the multi-block allocator skips unnecessary work through fallocate().

Underneath both filesystems sits a reworked IOmap layer built around a single iterator callback the compiler can inline instead of dispatching indirectly.

You don't need to do anything for any of this. It just works once you're on 7.3, and the IOmap change pays off the most on fast NVMe, pushing EXT4 from 1.92 million IOPS to 2.19 million in testing.

Important scheduler work

Peter Zijlstra's flatten-the-pick patches rework cgroup scheduling around a single runqueue instead of the old, hitch-prone design. Peter tested it on an aging Sandy Bridge box paired with an AMD Radeon RX 580, and both frame rate and frame-time consistency improved.

If you're gaming on hardware that's seen better days, this is the one improvement that should make it feel less choppy.

Intel hybrid CPUs get fixed too. Cluster-aware scheduling has not handled the P-core and E-core mix well, and Ricardo Neri's work closes that gap on Alder Lake, Lunar Lake, and Panther Lake.

Practically, that means less stutter when your laptop is juggling something heavy like a source build, a game, or a video export, while background tasks compete for the small cores.

Memory management fixes

ZTE engineers found a bug in KSM's reverse-mapping, the step where the kernel checks which memory areas point to a merged page before touching it. Under heavy load, one internal lock could stay stuck for hundreds of milliseconds, freezing other things trying to use it.

The fix drops the worst-case from around 700ms to under 2ms. Simply speaking, it means fewer random freezes on servers and containers under memory pressure.

Xiaomi engineer Wenchao Hao fixed a similar slowdown in zsmalloc, which zRAM and Zswap use to store compressed memory.

A Raspberry Pi 4B saw gains up to 1.83x in testing, a 20-core Intel system up to 1.4x. In plain terms, you get snappier performance on budget boards like the Pi and a smaller but real gain on beefier hardware.

Lower latency for real-time workloads

Every time one CPU core uses the kernel's SMP code to ask the others to run something right away, like flushing memory caches, the kernel used to freeze everything else on that CPU until all the other cores responded.

ByteDance engineers traced the slowdown to that wait and reworked it so other tasks can keep running instead of sitting frozen. On busy systems, that frozen wait could stretch out and stall high-priority tasks.

In fleet testing with DPDK, a framework built for fast networking, the worst-case delay for the slowest requests dropped from ~17ms to ~1.5ms. Most desktop users will not notice this one, but for networking and real-time software, it is an important fix.

Some smaller changes

• RISC-V adds support for eleven newer ISA extensions.
• EFI runtime calls now time out instead of stalling indefinitely.
• RAID 5/6 gets a better benchmark-based algorithm selection at boot.
• New AES library APIs clean up how the kernel handles common encryption modes.

Wrapping up. As you might have read recently, Linus Torvalds spent 18 kernel boots and 24 debug patches chasing a one-line Intel Xe driver bug. AI helped him along the way, and the fix is already merged, of course.

The merge window for Linux 7.3 will stay open for a few more days before the release candidates start rolling out, so there's still room for more to land, and the stable release is expected sometime in October.

David Heinemeier Hansson, aka DHH, has put a number on how serious he is about desktop Linux. That number is eight million dollars, and it's going into a brand new nonprofit called the Omacom Foundation.

DHH is incorporating the foundation now, set to cover the Omarchy trademark, its infrastructure and hosting, promotion for the project, and funding for the open source developers whose work it depends on.

He calls it a "moral obligation," not just to get Omarchy into more people's hands but to change how they use a computer in the first place.

Michael Dell of Dell Technologies, Patrick Collison of Stripe, Tobi Lütke of Shopify, Jack Dorsey of Block, Matthew Prince of Cloudflare, Jason Fried of 37signals, Brendan Iribe of Sesame, and DHH himself each put in a million dollars to make it happen.

People already like using Omarchy, DHH says, and he wants this money to last as long as possible instead of getting spent all at once while also making the most out of it.

Hyprland first to gain

Hyprland is the first project outside Omarchy to see any of this money. Omacom is extending an exclusive sponsorship to support Vaxry, the developer behind the Wayland compositor Omarchy runs on.

Under this, he is locked into an agreement for three years, with the possibility of extending for two more years.

This way Vaxry gets to work on Hyprland full time without needing to think about the money. As part of this arrangement, the €5/month Hyprperks subscription service will be discontinued, and everything offered under it will be provided for free.

DHH also joked about finding Vaxry a pookie, noting that:

Many thanks to 37signals (hello self! 😂), Butterfly, and Framework for helping Hyprland get to this point. Thrilled that the Omacom Foundation can take over from October 10, and give one of the best developers in this new Linux moment the chance to go all-in.

(* This deal does not include any direct assistance in getting Vaxry a girlfriend, but I’ll personally be available as a reference for any inquiries on the matter.)

Do you remember this?

This isn't the first time we are talking about money and Hyprland. Back in 2025, Framework became a Gold tier sponsor of the project. But that didn't sit too well with many people, as soon after, a thread titled "Framework supporting far-right racists?" came up on the official forum.

The original poster called out Vaxry's old freedesktop.org ban and pushed Framework to explain why it was funding the project. Framework's own account made things worse that same day. It posted a tweet comparing Omarchy to the old Windows XP product key meme, and people read that as an endorsement of DHH.

While Framework did send hardware to people at Omarchy, the project itself never got any direct funding. Later, Framework had to start publishing a running list of its sponsorships after people kept asking exactly who the company was funding and why.

Where Omarchy's headed

Quattro, Omarchy's newest release, shipped recently, building AI agents into the desktop by default instead of treating them as an extra. While none of the eight patrons have said publicly that Omarchy's AI bet factored into their decision to back the foundation.

My read is that it's hard to ignore, especially with Michael Dell's company betting heavily on AI infrastructure elsewhere. A distro built around AI agents is exactly the kind of bet a company selling AI hardware would want to back.

And it all ties into what DHH said about truly democratizing Linux.

Whether that $8 million and a nonprofit structure are what bring about the "year of the Linux desktop" is a question for another time.

Suggested Read 📖: Speaking of funding, Canonical has pitched in for a 3-year PhD project that looks to automate C to Rust translation for important Ubuntu components.

Built around servers people can host, TeamSpeak has been around since 2001, serving as a reliable communication tool that has gained a reputation for running light and reliably over inconsistent networks.

It has gone through many iterations that have seen it grow from a simple client-server voice tool into something that has a modern interface, built-in screen sharing, and the option to buy hosted servers.

TeamSpeak 6, currently in beta, is the most significant overhaul the platform has ever pushed, having entered testing in January 2025 and progressed through several builds to today's 6.0.0-beta4.1.

If you assume that the platform only focuses on mainstream OSes, then you would be wrong. The client and server software have supported Linux alongside Windows and macOS since the early versions.

Now the developers have announced that direct calls are coming.

Direct calls will be possible

TeamSpeak is adding the ability to make 1-1 direct calls, letting two people call each other without setting up or joining a server first. It's not live yet since the devs are still testing it, but they say it's coming soon.

That's not the only thing direct calls are coming with. Screensharing is built right in, letting you share your screen, a game, or your camera straight from the call at up to 4K or full source quality.

Presets facilitate a quick setup, or you can select the resolution, bitrate, FPS, and audio if you'd rather configure it yourself. There's also a privacy setting so you can choose whether the stream is public, limited to contacts, or private, plus a toggle for capturing system audio alongside it.

Picture-in-picture comes with it too. Using the Shift key, you can drag up to four screenshares or cameras into a corner of another feed while sharing, arranging them according to your preference.

When asked about the possibility of making group calls, SYOX, the Community Manager at TeamSpeak, said that:

This feature focuses on 1-1 direct calls between two users in a private chat. It remains to be seen whether and to what extent we will introduce Group Calls. We are definitely keeping an eye on group calls as a feature addition, but the scope has not yet been discussed, as it was not the focus of this release/implementation.

Can I finally move away from Discord?

This change has me wanting to try TeamSpeak again. Direct calls without needing a server is precisely the thing that made my last test of it so brief, since spinning up a server just to talk to a person never felt worth the effort.

If the feature works as well as it looks in these previews, I might end up ditching Discord sooner than later. And if they can figure out group calls in the coming months, then I won't even need to host a server to talk to my friends, so that's a win too!

The GNOME Extensions ecosystem is packed with tools that let you customize almost every part of the desktop. Whether it's changing the appearance of the top panel, replacing the app launcher, adding visual effects, or making the interface behave exactly the way you want.

We have covered extensions in the past:

• We created a generic list of best GNOME extensions to show extensions of all kinds
• And then we also have a list of GNOME extensions for productivity

Since there are so many of them, I create this new list that focuses on extensions for desktop clooks customization.

1. Just Perfection

If there is one customization extension that deserves to be installed first on a fresh GNOME setup, it's Just Perfection.

As the name suggests, the extension lets you tweak countless parts of the GNOME Shell. From small visual adjustments to larger interface changes, it gives you an impressive amount of control without requiring you to edit configuration files.

In fact, the number of available tweaks is so extensive that it deserves an article of its own, which we already have and you can read it here.

The screenshot below contains effects of another GNOME Extension called User Accent Color which we will see in a later section.

Some of the highlights include:

• Change the position of the panel, clock, and notification indicators.
• Adjust the size and corner radius of the Activities Overview.
• Show or hide individual panel items.

And that's just a glimpse. I recommend checking the project's official README to explore its exhaustive list of features.

2. User Themes

Installing a GTK theme changes the appearance of your applications, but it doesn't affect the GNOME Shell itself.

That's because the Shell uses its own theme, separate from GTK. If you want to customize the top panel, Activities Overview, Quick Settings, and other Shell components, you'll need the User Themes extension.

Once installed, you can apply any compatible gnome-shell theme stored in your ~/.themes directory using the GNOME Tweaks application.

It's a small extension, but an essential one if you're interested in desktop theming.

3. Wallpaper Slideshow

If you like refreshing your desktop without manually changing wallpapers every few days, Wallpaper Slideshow is an excellent extension to have.

It automatically cycles through images from a folder of your choice at configurable intervals, turning your wallpaper collection into a dynamic slideshow. The extension also supports downloading Bing's Wallpaper of the Day if you prefer fresh backgrounds without maintaining your own collection.

Better yet, it automatically detects changes to your wallpaper folder, so newly added images become part of the rotation without any extra setup.

You can control the slideshow from the Quick Settings menu or the desktop context menu, and the extension even remembers its queue across reboots, allowing the slideshow to resume where it left off.

It's a simple way to keep your GNOME desktop feeling fresh with minimal effort.

4. User Accent Colors

One of the nicest visual touches in modern desktop environments is having the system's accent color automatically match your wallpaper. If you've wanted the same experience on GNOME, User Accent Colors is worth a look.

The extension extracts the dominant accent color from your current wallpaper and applies it across the desktop, including GNOME Shell, Adwaita applications, and adw-gtk3 themed GTK3 applications.

It can also generate matching tinted themes and even recolor supported icon packs, giving the entire desktop a much more cohesive appearance.

The result is a desktop that automatically adapts whenever you change your wallpaper, without manually tweaking themes or accent colors. If you're building a visually consistent GNOME setup, this extension is an excellent finishing touch.

5. Dash to Dock

By default, GNOME only displays the Dash while you're in the Activities Overview.

Many users, however, prefer having a dock that's always visible and keeps their favorite applications within easy reach.

Dash to Dock transforms the built-in GNOME Dash into a fully customizable dock that can be positioned on any edge of your screen. You can tweak its size, behavior, transparency, auto-hide options, and much more.

In fact, Ubuntu's default dock is based on a customized version of Dash to Dock.

The only thing I personally miss is a ripple-style hover animation. Fortunately, the next extension offers a different take on desktop navigation.

6. Dash to Panel

While Dash to Dock focuses on creating a dock, Dash to Panel takes things a step further.

It merges the GNOME top bar and Dash into a single panel, giving the desktop a layout that feels much closer to Windows.

If you're switching from Windows 10 or Windows 11, this extension makes GNOME feel instantly familiar.

Beyond changing the layout, Dash to Panel offers a surprising amount of customization. You can:

• Change the panel's color, opacity, and appearance.
• Show or hide individual panel items.
• Keep the original GNOME top panel while using only the dock functionality.
• Customize various behaviors to suit your workflow.

It's one of the most feature-rich panel extensions available for GNOME.

7. Dhruva Dock

Dhruva Dock is the newer addition to the GNOME extensions ecosystem, and it has quickly gained attention thanks to its polished appearance and smooth animations.

The dock supports true magnification effects, includes an integrated clock, and offers several preset themes alongside color customization options.

Unlike many dock extensions, Dhruva Dock isn't limited to the screen edges. You can position it almost anywhere on your desktop, giving you much more flexibility when designing your workspace.

Its fluid animations are easily one of its strongest selling points.

8. Blur My Shell

Few visual tweaks change the look of GNOME as much as adding blur effects, and Blur My Shell has become the go-to extension for that purpose.

What started as a simple blur utility has gradually evolved into a comprehensive customization tool. Besides adding blur to the Activities Overview and various Shell components, recent versions even allow blur effects to be applied to application windows.

The extension also lets you configure different blur pipelines, giving you fine-grained control over which parts of the desktop should be blurred and by how much.

While it doesn't offer the level of control found in Wayland compositors like Hyprland, and older hardware may struggle with the added effects, it's still one of the best visual customization extensions available for GNOME.

9. Dynamic Music Pill

If you frequently listen to music while working, Dynamic Music Pill is an extension worth checking out.

Instead of displaying a simple scrolling track title in the panel, it presents your currently playing music inside an elegant pill-shaped widget with playback controls.

You can place it either on the top panel or alongside the Dash, depending on your preferred layout.

Beyond its attractive design, the extension also includes several useful features:

• Adaptive colors based on the album artwork.
• Multiple visualizer modes.
• Playback controls with configurable click actions.
• Synchronized lyrics.
• Transparency and appearance settings.

It's a great combination of functionality and visual polish.

10. Top Bar Organizer

If you've ever wished you could rearrange the items on GNOME's top panel, Top Bar Organizer makes that incredibly easy.

Unlike many customization extensions, it doesn't overwhelm you with dozens of configuration options. The interface is refreshingly simple.

You simply drag and drop panel items between the three available sections:

• Left Top Bar Box
• Center Top Bar Box
• Right Top Bar Box

That's all there is to it.

Whether you want the clock on the left, system indicators in the center, or a completely custom layout, this extension makes it possible in just a few clicks.

11. Arc Menu

GNOME's built-in search is one of its strongest features. It lets you quickly launch applications, find files, perform calculations, and much more, all from a single interface.

That said, many users still prefer having a traditional application launcher that's always available.

Arc Menu is much more than a simple Start Menu replacement. It offers an impressive collection of menu layouts inspired by different desktop environments and operating systems.

Want a Windows 11-style Start Menu? That's available. Prefer a macOS-inspired launcher? You can switch to that with just a few clicks.

Beyond the layouts, Arc Menu provides extensive customization options. You can change icons, tweak the appearance, reposition the menu, customize categories, and fine-tune almost every aspect of the launcher.

If you enjoy experimenting with different desktop layouts, Arc Menu is one of the most versatile extensions you can install.

12. Burn My Windows

Even the developers describe Burn My Windows as a "useless" extension.

I couldn't disagree more.

If you enjoy desktop animations, this extension is pure fun. Instead of the standard open, close, and minimize animations, it lets you replace them with dozens of eye-catching effects.

Some of my favorites include Apparition, Broken Glass, Incinerate, and Matrix, though there are plenty more to experiment with.

It won't make you more productive, but it definitely adds some personality to your desktop.

13. Customize Clock on Lock Screen

The GNOME lock screen doesn't offer much room for customization out of the box.

This extension changes that by letting you customize the appearance of the lock screen clock.

One particularly interesting feature is the ability to display the output of shell commands. That opens up several possibilities, such as showing inspirational quotes, system information, weather updates, or any other text generated by a script.

For example, I used the command below to print the system details as shown in the screenshot above:

printf "🧠 CPU: %s | 💾 RAM: %s | 💿 Disk: %s" "$(top -bn1 | grep 'Cpu(s)' | awk '{print $2 + $4 "%"}')" "$(free -h | awk '/Mem:/ {print $3 "/" $2}')" "$(df -h / | awk 'NR==2 {print $3 "/" $2 " (" $5 ")"}')"

If you enjoy personalizing every part of your desktop, this extension gives the lock screen a lot more flexibility.

14. Compiz Windows Effect

If you used Linux during the Compiz era, chances are you still remember the famous wobbly windows.

This extension brings that classic effect to modern GNOME.

Whenever you move or resize a window, it behaves like a flexible sheet rather than a rigid rectangle, recreating one of the most iconic desktop effects from the early days of Linux desktop customization.

It certainly makes interacting with windows a lot more enjoyable.

15. Compiz Magic Lamp Effect

Continuing the nostalgia, Compiz Magic Lamp Effect recreates another classic animation from the Compiz days.

Instead of windows simply disappearing when minimized, they smoothly stretch and collapse into the dock using the familiar Magic Lamp animation.

The effect looks particularly good when paired with dock extensions like Dash to Dock, making window animations feel much more polished than the default GNOME behavior.

If you're already using one of those docks, this extension is a perfect companion.

16. Background Logo

Sometimes the smallest tweaks can make your desktop feel a little more personal.

Background Logo lets you place a logo or image directly on top of your desktop wallpaper without modifying the wallpaper itself. Whether you want to display your favorite Linux distribution's logo, your organization's branding, or a custom SVG, the extension makes it easy.

It may not be an essential customization, but it's a nice option for users who enjoy putting their own stamp on every part of their desktop.

17. Modern Clock

If you like the clean desktop widgets found in KDE Plasma, Modern Clock brings a similar experience to GNOME.

Instead of placing the time in the top panel, this extension adds a modern-looking desktop clock widget inspired by KDE's Modern Clock. It sits directly on your desktop and blends nicely with minimalist wallpapers, making it a subtle yet attractive addition to your workspace.

Unlike the standard GNOME clock, this one is meant to be part of your desktop rather than the shell interface. If you're building a customized desktop with widgets and visual enhancements, Modern Clock fits right in.

Wrapping Up

One of GNOME's greatest strengths is the flexibility offered by its extension ecosystem. While the desktop intentionally keeps its default experience clean and minimal, these extensions allow you to shape it into almost anything you want.

Whether you're looking for a Windows-like taskbar, a macOS-inspired launcher, beautiful blur effects, playful window animations, or simply more control over the interface, there's an extension here that can help.

Of course, you don't have to install all of them. In fact, I'd recommend starting with a few that solve problems in your daily workflow and then gradually adding more as needed.

Did I miss one of your favorite customization extensions? Let me know in the comments. I'd love to check it out.

Linus Torvalds just used AI to help fix a Linux kernel bug.

Let me tell you that this is a rare event. Not because Torvalds is using AI. Last Christmas holidays, Torvalds used AI for the first time for a personal, hobby project. He was averted to AI at first but made his peace with it, even for AI-assisted code contributions in the kernel project.

The event we are talking about is rare because Torvalds doesn't code on Linux kernel anymore. He is in the maintainer mode. He just reviews code and merges pull requests from various contributors to the kernel code.

So this is a rare occasion in recent time when he made a kernel patch himself. And he did that with the assistance of AI.

Fixing a one-liner bug with AI

Don't scoff at "one-line" code change. Speak to any software developer and they will telly you that often the bugs are easy, few line code changes. It's the process of finding the root cause that takes time, effort, and skills.

The bug Torvalds dealt with was in the Intel Xe graphics driver for Battlemage G21 cards. It caused GDM, the display manager, to restart endlessly.

Tracking it down with AI required 24 debug patches (did he just use "printfs?) and 18 kernel boots. Ultimately, the culprit turned out to be a single line where round_up() should have been round_down().

And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work.

The AI "did the grunt work" for Torvalds by adding debug instrumentation, running analysis, and even writing the final commit message. I can feel the commit message part, it's a boring but necessary task.

But this debugging session was not all smooth sailing. Torvalds didn't just add "don't make mistakes" to his prompts. On the contrary, the AI told Linus multiple times that the problem was "impossible and unsolvable." Torvalds refused.

I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am.

AI is a tool, use it effectively

This is what many people in the software industry understand. AI is just a tool and it is essentially useful when there is a capable human driving the process.

Look at the example here with Torvalds. A vibe coder with no knowledge of what's going on with the code, would have left it to AI to make decisions, and AI would have called the bug unfixable and walked away.

But Linus Torvalds has experience. He could understand what the AI was doing right or wrong. He persisted and fixed the bug.

The patch will be in Linux 7.3 and has been marked to be backported to stable kernel branches.

The creator of Linux needed 18 boots to find a one-line fix. The AI helped him get there. Although, I think he would have gotten there all by himself as well, even if it would have taken a bit longer.

There is no information available on what model or tool he used. In his personal project, where he used AI for the first time, he had used Gemini from Google. I guess he is not into local AI for now. I hope he finds enough interest and gives us a new gift after Linux kernel and Git. Wishful thinking, I know.

Source: Phoronix.

Proton Mail (partner link), the service people turn to for escaping Big Tech, has rolled out "Categories" as a new inbox view that automatically sorts incoming email into six groups: Primary, Social, Promotions, Newsletters, Transactions, and Updates.

When you receive a new mail, it gets sorted automatically into one of six categories based on metadata, without Proton reading the contents of the message. This is what Gmail already introduced years ago and it does work for most parts.

How does it work?

By default, Primary houses personal and work-related messages along with any important updates; Social covers social media updates and activity notifications; Promotions covers discounts and sales offers; and Newsletters carries news content you signed up for.

The other two categories can be enabled via the Settings if you require them.

Of course, we are not claiming that this is something revolutionary. Gmail and Outlook have offered inbox tabs for years, but they achieved that by scanning the contents of emails that are hosted on their servers.

Proton's approach here is different, sorting mail by metadata instead of reading what's inside each message, since its zero-access encryption keeps that content unreadable even to itself.

Anant Vijay Singh, the Product Lead for Proton Mail, goes even further to note that:

Proton’s business model aligns our incentives with yours because we’re 100% funded by our community, not by advertisers. Enabling Categories doesn’t change any of this.

Your inbox remains protected by zero-access encryption, and emails you send with other Proton users (or using password protection) are end-to-end encrypted.

It's already live

If you haven't logged into your Proton Mail (partner link) account recently, then keep an eye out for a dialog titled "Your inbox, automatically organized." It will show you two options; go with "Yes, organize it" if you want to upgrade to the new category-focused inbox experience.

If you'd rather stay on the legacy, unified inbox system, then choose "Keep inbox as before."

Once enabled, you will see the categories all lined up at the top of your emails, with a useful blue dot appearing on the ones with unread messages.

Moving an email to a different category takes a right-click followed by "Move to category..." or a drag and drop. Going forward, Proton Mail sorts similar emails into that category automatically.

If the default category selection or the feature itself doesn't suit your preferences, then you can manage it from the Settings menu (gear button), where you could either disable it by clicking on the button near "Email categories."

Or, you could go into the "Email categories" settings page to enable or disable individual categories and toggle notifications for each one. I was content with the default selections, so I didn't bother changing anything.

You can see how Proton Mail categorized my mail. 👇

Keep in mind that you cannot disable the "Primary" category as that one always stays on, catching anything that needs your attention along with emails from any category you've turned off.

And that's not all. Proton is also bringing full-content search to Proton Mail on mobile in the coming weeks. It'll let users search the actual contents of their emails, not just subjects and senders.

Proton says that the search will run entirely on the user's device rather than touch its own servers.

Canonical has committed funding to a three-year PhD project focused on building a system that can automatically translate large C codebases into Rust.

And they are not alone; UK Research and Innovation is matching their funding for the project, which is set to run through the University of Bristol's Programming Languages Research Group.

The PhD is aiming to build an all-encompassing platform that can take a C repository running into hundreds of thousands of lines and translate it into Rust that's "safe, behaviourally correct and maintainable Rust."

The work will be carried out by a student, Alex Wood, who will be supported by Professor Meng Wang leading the work, with Dr. Cristina David and Canonical's Jon Seager serving as co-supervisors.

How would this work?

Getting from C to Rust automatically means solving a few separate problems, and the system tackles them in sequence. First, it has to break a massive codebase into pieces small enough to work with without losing track of how those pieces depend on each other elsewhere in the code.

Only then does the actual translation happen, handled by language models that have already been trained on real C-to-Rust conversions, with the goal of writing code that looks like something a Rust developer chose to write rather than C dressed up in Rust syntax.

That's the easier half. The harder task is proving the translated code actually behaves like the original, which is where fuzzing and formal equivalence checks come in.

When something doesn't line up, a separate repair step tries to track down exactly where the translation went wrong and patch it using symbolic program-repair techniques instead of starting the whole chunk over.

Jon points out that the language model handles only one part of the job. Whatever it generates still has to clear validation before anyone can trust that it kept the original behavior intact.

The targeted test case

Both AppArmor and snap-confine already run in production on real Ubuntu systems, handling access control and sandboxing that most users never see but rely on constantly.

That's why they were picked, not because they are simple, but because Canonical wants industrial-grade test cases that offer a much better look at how the approach holds up under real production conditions.

Testing a live component carries with it everything that's built up around it through years of real use, which makes it a far harder thing to translate without breaking something, and that's the point.

Jon also flagged an important caveat, noting that nothing generated by this project is going into either tool anytime soon. The point, he said, is that Canonical has "a vested interest in the software and are keen to see the results," not that a rewrite is coming.

Why should you care?

If the approach survives this test, Canonical will have a real answer to whether automated translation can be trusted with code that protects the system, not just the code that was easy to test on.

As a result, Ubuntu users, from regular desktop installs to enterprise deployments, could eventually see security-critical components with fewer bugs without Canonical having to gamble on a time-consuming manual rewrite of sensitive code.

LightDM 1.33.0 is out after a four-year gap, now under community maintainership rather than Canonical's. Two new maintainers, one behind Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix and the other a long-time Fedora and openSUSE contributor, have stepped up.

Nitrux has given a name to what it's been building since dropping Plasma for Hyprland last year. The Workspace Environment brings four in-house QML components together, a workspace bar, a dock, a settings app, and a lock screen.

A busy point release for Linux has just landed. AMD Radeon picks up HDMI 2.1 support, Apple M3 MacBooks can boot Linux for the first time, and Btrfs large folio support is on by default.

Canonical's VP of Engineering has said that Ubuntu's growth rate inside WSL is outpacing its growth rate on native desktops, which got picked up everywhere (including here 🤐) as "Ubuntu is growing faster on Windows than Linux." He's since clarified that the comparison was about growth rate only.

The Xen Project recently launched a Safety Committee to build the shared documentation, test evidence, and certification artifacts that companies deploying Xen in automotive, avionics, and industrial automation keep having to produce independently.

Privacy company Murena now offers Fairphone Gen 6 with its /e/OS, a private alternative to Android.

PINE64 is halting the production of its Linux-based tablets. Reason? The soaring RAM prices have made it impossible to keep the pricing reasonable for such hobbyist devices. And the RAM prices are increasing due to AI boom. Big Tech has already put their hands on the supply with bulk orders for their data centers and now the consumers are struggling as prices for disks and RAMs have gone up multiple folds.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

Don't remember if I shared it in the newsletter or not. A few days ago, it was found that some AI companies are buying rare books to train their LLMs. And in the process, they were also cutting (read destroying) the books because it is easier to scan the books page by page that way.

404 Media (paywalled content) has tracked one such shipment to the Amazon AI training facility. So at least we have one culprit identified.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

Most people look no further than Tmux and Screen. But what if I told you there were terminal multiplexers that shared sessions over SSH, restored your workspace exactly as you left it, or brought tiling WM concepts straight into your terminal?

A detailed guide on apt that covers updating the package database, installing and removing packages, searching, showing package info, listing upgradable software, and cleaning up leftover dependencies.

Want your GNOME desktop to look like those Catppuccin or Nord riced screenshots without spending an afternoon in config files? Rewaita is a Flatpak app that applies color palettes to GTK and Libadwaita apps through CSS overrides.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

Proton has come up with a tool that tells you how many secrets you have spilled over to an AI chatbot.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

stillOS is a new distro that's built on an AlmaLinux base with atomicity as its main selling point.

📽️ Videos for You

I show you a wonderful dock for GNOME users. See it in action in this week's video.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

On GNOME inside the Nautilus file manager (aka Files), press CTRL+F to start a search in the current directory and CTRL+SHIFT+F to search everywhere. You can also select the result and use CTRL+ALT+O to open that location in file manager.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

If you went through the apt guide earlier, why not test your knowledge with a quick quiz?

The beginning is always simple. 😆

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On August 22, 1955, representatives from seventeen companies that had bought IBM's new 704 mainframe met at RAND Corp in Santa Monica and formed SHARE, the first computer user group, so members could trade code and documentation instead of duplicating each other's work.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: A long-time FOSSer has returned, kicking off a thread on how Windows enabled bitlocker without asking him, resulting in considerable wear on the attached storage disks.

The open hardware manufacturer recently posted an update on its Mastodon account, and it's not great news if you were hoping to grab new Linux-powered PINE64 hardware.

The disruptions in DRAM and eMMC supply are to blame, as PINE64 says its Linux hardware production pipeline is empty for now, with nothing new planned while component costs stay high.

Whether that changes depends on component pricing after mid-2027, and they aren't promising anything before then. They expect stocks for the PineNote and PineTab2 to run out in three months.

Once that happens, there's no more new launches or restocks to cover the outgoing stock.

Not everything is affected though. PINE64's microcontroller lineup, the PineTime, PineVoice, and Pinecil, will keep shipping as usual since they don't rely on the same memory chips.

Concluding their announcement, they gave everyone a status update on the upcoming PineTime Pro:

As for the PineTime Pro, currently the demo firmware has basic drivers for the display, touch, motion, GPS, buttons, heat rate sensor (chip id only), battery charger, motor, microphone and the speaker. Though some issues do need to be ironed out first before a pilot batch begins production.

That's it for this post, all in all it's a bit bleak for the Linux devices, but in the meantime PineStore still have a great lineup of MCU powered devices which will continue to expand with more exciting devices.

The unnamed culprit

PINE64 never actually says the word "AI" in their post, choosing to keep the announcement focused on the DRAM/eMMC shortage. But you have to look further to see where that shortage is actually originating from.

Memory prices have been climbing for months, and DDR5 has taken the hardest hit of all. Companies running AI data centers have been locking up global memory supply well into next year, leaving everyone else fighting over what's left.

Executives across the memory industry aren't optimistic either. SK Hynix's CEO recently said that the worst is still ahead, with supply expected to lag behind demand for years to come.

Not the only ones

PINE64 isn't the only Linux-focused hardware provider caught in this price surge.

The Orange Pi Neo, a Linux-first handheld built with Manjaro, has been sitting on ice since earlier this year for the same reason. The project has been in development for two years and still has no launch date, all because DDR5 and SSD prices refuse to come back down.

I am sure these aren't the only projects affected; smaller ones still in the crowdfunding or conceptualization phase must be facing the same problem.

What worries me is that the AI bubble will eventually burst, but small Linux-focused projects are the ones getting choked out right now. If these component prices stay this absurd, we are going to lose the few independent hardware choices we actually have left.

Suggested Read 📖: Omarchy Bets Its Future on AI Agents While the Linux World Stays Cautious