Linus Torvalds created two of the most widely used tools in modern computing: the Linux kernel and Git.

Git, of course, is a version control system primarily used by programmers.

But Theena makes a strong case that Git and plain text are the best tools a writer can use. Not just for backup but for building a writing practice that is truly their own..

At its core, the argument is about breaking free from platform dependency, long-term preservation, and treating your body of work as something worth designing around rather than just storing somewhere convenient.

Here are other highlights of this edition of FOSS Weekly:

• sudo tips and tweaks.
• Apt's new version has useful features.
• Opera GX arriving as a gaming browser for Linux.
• A Linux driver proposal to catch malicious USB devices.
• And other Linux news, tips, and, of course, memes!

📰 Linux and Open Source News

Not open source software but Opera GX, the gaming-focused Chromium browser that's been on Windows and macOS for years, has finally landed on Linux. Sourav took the early access build for a spin and tested the features it's known for, like GX Control for capping RAM and CPU usage while gaming and GX Cleaner for cleaning up junk data.

The Linux kernel is finally dropping i486 support, queued for Linux 7.1. The first patch removes the relevant Kconfig build options, with a fuller cleanup covering 80 files and over 14,000 lines of legacy code still to follow.

Proton has launched two new things: Proton Workspace, a bundled suite of all their services aimed at businesses looking for a privacy-first alternative to Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, and Proton Meet, an end-to-end encrypted video conferencing tool using the open source MLS protocol.

A proposal has been submitted to the Linux kernel mailing list for a new HID driver called hid-omg-detect that passively monitors USB keyboard-like devices for suspicious behavior.

Another proposal, but for Fedora was recently struck down. It looked to move per-user environment variable management from shell RC files into systemd.

Remember the glass UI from the Windows 7 era? KDE is considering bringing back the older classic Oxygen and Air themes. These themes will be optional, of course.

Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI, has donated $1.5 million to Apache Software Foundation. The donation aims to secure the open source stack AI tools depend on.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

Firefox has been losing ground for a decade, and Mozilla is trying something new. A built-in VPN and a growing set of AI features. Roland's piece looks at whether either of those things is likely to actually work.

Puter, the open source browser-based desktop OS, has added ONLYOFFICE to its app marketplace, giving it a full office suite covering documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDF editing.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

Not many people know that sudo command's behavior can be tweaked as well. Here are a few sudo tweaks.

Tennis is a Zig-written terminal tool that renders CSV files as clean, color-coded tables with solid borders and auto-detected themes.

APT package manager's latest version 3.2 has a rollback feature. Sourav briefly tested it.

📚 Linux eBook bundle (don't miss)

No Starch Press needs no introduction. They have published some of the best books on Linux. And they are running an ebook bundle deal on Humble Bundle.

I highly recommend checking it out and getting the bundle.

Plus, part of your purchase supports Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

The Linux kernel dropped i486 support and added GD-ROM driver support for the Sega Dreamcast in the same breath.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

Hideout is a minimal GTK4/Adwaita desktop app for file encryption and decryption, powered by GnuPG.

📽️ Videos for You

Here are some Linux terminal tricks to save you time.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

You can copy a file in Nautilus by pressing Ctrl+C, then press Ctrl+M to paste it as a symbolic link instead of an actual copy. This is a handy way to create a symlink without ever needing to open a terminal!

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

In this members-only crossword, you will have to name systemd's ctl commands.

An appropriate meme on the OS-level age verification topic.

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On April 8, 1991, a small team at Sun Microsystems quietly relocated to work in secret on a project codenamed "Oak", a programming language that would eventually be renamed Java and go on to become one of the most widely used languages in the world, powering everything from Android apps to enterprise software.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: A FOSSer is wondering if anyone has ever jailbroken a Kindle for KOReader use.

If you did not know already, Puter is an operating system that runs inside a web browser. It is open source and you can self-host it if you like.

It has everything you would expect in a desktop. A file system, app store, text editor, IDE, video player, etc. The video below shows it in action. See, how somooth it is.

Why not give it a try yourself here.

Puter has proper office tools now

As you can see in the video above, Puter has a text editor which is capable of taking notes. But it is not enough for rich text format and proper documents.

Now, they are offering ONLYOFFICE in their app center. The open source ONLYOFFICE is a collaborative productivity suite like MS Office 365.

With this integration, you also get spreadhseet, pdf editor and presentation tools. This make the online browser based desktop operating system more capable and complete than ever.

Like Nextcloud but with filesystem

If you ever used Nextcloud, you know that the cloud storage also has office integration with ONLYOFFICE and Collabora (sort of LibreOffice online). The difference I see here is that Puter gives you the entire filesystem, not just cloud storage and productivity tools. This is excellent for people who prefer the comfort of a desktop like environment in the cloud.

Experiencing the office experience in online OS

I have used ONLYOFFICE in Nextcloud in the past. I have noticed that it does take a bit of time to load the application in both Puter and Nextcloud. Sure, we cannot expect a full office app to open in a jiffy like a text editor. These applications take longer to start, even on local desktop system. It takes pretty much the same in Puter.

Creating the document was smooth. The in-built grammar checker worked well too. For some reason, the Save button on the top interface did not work. The print and open and other buttons were working fine and so did the keyboard shortcut. Not a dealbreaker but something worth mentioning. I am sure the Puter team will fix it in the next iteration.

Since I didn't have any complicated word document with macros and images, I uploaded a csv file with 1000 rows and opened it in ONLYOFFICE. I was expecting it to take some time to load and struggle but it did not. Obviously, that's a good thing.

I recorded it in a video so that you can see if yourself if it takes too long or lags while moving down the sheet.

I also created a simple presentation slide. Unsurprisingly again, it went smoothly. ONLYOFFICE actually works quite well in a web browser. That is their USP, afterall.

The entire ONLYOFFICE integration gives Puter the complete desktop OS features. After all, ONLYOFFICE also has PDF editor and diagram app (Visio alternative). All your office needs are sorted, that too in a web browser.

Many more apps at your disposal

Puter Marketplace (app store) has many more applications that you can explore and use as per your requirement. From games to coding to AI, there are plenty of options.

We had covered Puter last summer. In less than a year, Puter has grown and created an ecosystem that is admirable. I was skeptical of the actual, real-world usage of an online operating system that lives in a web browser but it seems there is demand for such a thing. Good to see an open source project filling up this demand.

If you are coming across Puter OS for the first time, you should know that the files you uploaded or created will be available as long as the browser session is not deleted. But if you want to save them for longer period, you can create an account with Puter. If you see a good use of Puter in your workflow or it could help your team (if you have one), you can also self-host it or pay to Puter for their managed hosting.

The open source office space has turned unusually dramatic this week, with multiple conflicts unfolding at the same time.

First, there is a new entrant called Euro-Office. While it is being presented as a European alternative, it is essentially a fork of ONLYOFFICE. That has not gone down well. ONLYOFFICE has accused Nextcloud of violating its license, turning what could have been a routine fork into a full-blown controversy.

And then there is the situation around LibreOffice. The Document Foundation, the organization behind LibreOffice, has removed all Collabora developers and partners from its membership. This is a significant move, considering Collabora builds the online version of LibreOffice and has long been one of its biggest contributors.

Both stories point to a larger pattern. Even in open source, where collaboration is the default expectation, disagreements over governance, licensing, and control can quickly escalate. It is shaping up to be an interesting and important moment for the future of open source office suites.

Here are other highlights of this edition of FOSS Weekly:

• GNOME dropping Google Drive support.
• A major Wayland bug finally being addressed.
• Systemd's sysext feature for immutable distros
• Ubuntu 26.10 potentially having a controversial change.
• And other Linux news, tips, and, of course, memes!
• This edition of FOSS Weekly is supported by GroupOffice.

📰 Linux and Open Source News

GNOME 50 ships without Google Drive integration, and it turns out it's been effectively dead for a while. The library powering it, libgdata, went without a maintainer for four years, got archived after no one answered a 2022 call for help, and was the last thing keeping a CVE-ridden deprecated library in the stack.

Ubuntu 26.04 is bringing deb packages back into the App Center properly. You can test out the beta release for it right now if you can't wait for the stable release.

Nextcloud and IONOS have forked ONLYOFFICE into a project called Euro-Office, citing concerns about its Russian development team, opaque contribution process, and the trust issues that come with the current geopolitical situation.

A Canonical engineer has proposed stripping down GRUB significantly for Ubuntu 26.10's Secure Boot signed builds. The cuts would remove filesystem support for Btrfs, XFS, ZFS, and HFS+, along with LVM, most RAID modes, LUKS encryption, and image format support.

Archinstall 4.0 swaps out its curses-based interface for Textual, making the whole installation flow noticeably cleaner and more responsive.

Ubuntu MATE founder Martin Wimpress has announced he's looking for someone to take over the project. Says he no longer has the time or passion for the project and is looking to hand it over to contributors who do.

Wayland has finally gotten session management. The xdg-session-management protocol was merged into wayland-protocols after sitting as an open pull request for six years.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS has raised its minimum RAM requirement for the desktop install to 6 GB, up from 4 GB in 24.04. Windows 11 minimum RAM requirement suggest only 4GB. But the truth is not in the number on the paper.

The Document Foundation has published an open letter to European citizens arguing that the current shift toward digital sovereignty is only meaningful if Europe actually understands what sovereignty requires.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

If you've ever hit a "Read-only file system" error while trying to install a troubleshooting tool on Fedora Silverblue or another immutable distro, systemd-sysext is worth knowing about.

We now have a detailed comparison of LibreOffice and ONLYOFFICE covering the full suite: word processors, spreadsheets, presentations, PDF editing, format support, and online availability.

If Markdown feels a bit limited for serious documentation work but LaTeX feels like overkill, AsciiDoc sits nicely in between. Our guide covers what it is, and why you might prefer it over other text formats.

You can use conky to get system details as well as make your desktop look beautiful.

📚 Linux eBook bundle (don't miss)

No Starch Press needs no introduction. They have published some of the best books on Linux. And they are running an ebook bundle deal on Humble Bundle.

I highly recommend checking it out and getting the bundle.

Plus, part of your purchase supports Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

PINE64 has revealed the PineTime Pro, the long-awaited follow-up to its open source smartwatch.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

Nocturne is a new Adwaita-styled music player for GNOME that works as a Navidrome/Subsonic client. The interesting part is that it doesn't just connect to an existing Navidrome instance; it can also install and manage its own.

📽️ Videos for You

Archinstall 4.0 is here. Want to see what's changed in video format? Checkout the latest video on YouTube.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

GNOME comes with a dark panel by default. To switch it to a light panel, you can use the command:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme 'prefer-light'

This will make the panel bright, too bright. If you don't like it, you can revert to the dark panel with:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme 'prefer-dark'

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Think you know your chmod from your chown? This quick quiz tests your knowledge of Linux file permissions.

Meme of the Week: Is this what they call divine intervention? 😶‍🌫️

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On March 31, 1939, Harvard and IBM signed an agreement to build the Mark I, one of the first machines that could automatically run complex calculations without human intervention.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: A long-time FOSSer has posted their experience switching from Hyprland to COSMIC.

There is a new open source office suite. It’s called Euro-Office.

As the name suggests, it is a European effort and is primarily meant for European organizations and governments.

Before you get too excited, let me clarify that it is not your typical office suite like LibreOffice that you install on desktop systems. It is designed more for providing collaborative document portals for organizations.

In other words, it’s an online office suite that can be deployed within an organization and accessed via the web. It can also be integrated into other products, like Nextcloud to provide document editing capabilities.

The project has been initiated by Nextcloud and IONOS. Nextcloud is a well-known open source collaboration platform, and IONOS is primarily a server infrastructure provider.

What's the issue with ONLYOFFICE?

Well, Euro-Office is a fork of ONLYOFFICE, and they are not happy about it.

You see, open source ONLYOFFICE’s main business revolves around offering its collaborative product to enterprises and organizations. They do provide offline desktop applications for individuals, but their primary focus remains on the enterprise segment.

And to be fair, they have built a solid product. It works very well with Microsoft Office file formats, which is often the biggest pain point for many users.

Another similar open source project is Collabora Online, which offers an online collaborative version of LibreOffice. However, ONLYOFFICE’s better compatibility with popular formats like DOCX, PPTX, and XLSX makes it a compelling choice.

The issue arises from the fact that ONLYOFFICE originated in Russia and is largely developed by Russian developers. Due to the geopolitical situation, the company has moved operations to Latvia. A European fork could potentially push them to the sidelines.

This isn’t speculation. The intent is clearly stated on the Euro-Office GitHub repository:

ONLYOFFICE is a Russian company (despite many attempts to hide this), and nearly all developers reside in Russia. Open Source is a global effort, but current political situation makes collaboration hard and trust difficult to earn. Especially when development is not transparent and open. A lot of users and customers require software that is not potentially influenced or controlled by the Russian government.

They have also accused ONLYOFFICE of discouraging code contributions and lacking transparency.

So, Euro-Office aims to offer the same base software but with a “Made in Europe” label.

ONLYOFFICE is understandably unhappy with this fork. A European alternative offering essentially the same product could impact their business significantly.

ONLYOFFICE has accused Euro-Office of violating the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPLv3), stating:

Any argument that a modified or derivative version of the software may be distributed under a “pure” AGPLv3 license, excluding the additional conditions imposed pursuant to Section 7, is legally unfounded.

The right to create and distribute derivative works arises solely from the license grant. Such a grant is conditional and indivisible. Accordingly, any derivative work based on the original ONLYOFFICE code may be created and distributed only in compliance with all applicable license terms, including the additional conditions.

The creation of a derivative work does not give rise to an independent licensing regime free from the conditions under which the original code was obtained.

Conclusion

ONLYOFFICE integration is already available in Nextcloud and many other collaboration platforms. These platforms want to offer an office suite that works seamlessly with popular Microsoft file formats.

By forking ONLYOFFICE, they no longer have to rely on it. Instead, they can build and control their own “Made in Europe” solution. This could make it easier for them to offer their platforms to government administrations and organizations with strict data sovereignty requirements.

So, who's side are you on? ONLYOFFICE or Euro-Office?

Ubuntu MATE creator Martin Wimpress has announced that he no longer has the passion he once had, nor the time, to work on the project:

As another development cycle passes, I find myself lacking the time I once had to work on Ubuntu MATE. And, to be frank, I don’t have the passion for the project that I once had. When I have time to tinker, my interests are elsewhere.

He is now looking to handover the project:

I’m interested in handing over the reins to contributors who do have the time and energy to work on Ubuntu MATE.

What happened?

Martin Wimpress created Ubuntu MATE back in 2014. A fork of the classic GNOME 2, MATE was preferred by people who liked the traditional desktop layout and disliked the newer GNOME 3 design.

Ubuntu MATE was made an official Ubuntu flavor in 2015 and soon gained a fairly decent sized user base.

Things were going well until they were not. Like many side projects created as a hobby, the passion can fade over time or the work may no longer feel challenging enough.

Eventually, Martin decided to step away.

Back then, Martin was working at Canonical as an Engineering Director. He no longer works at Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu.

He has also switched to NixOS, which is clearly more interesting and challenging for someone with his technical skills.

Martin still makes cool stuff when he gets time. His GitHub repo is a proof of that.

Maintaining a distro takes more effort than most think

Lubuntu has struggled with a lack of contributors. The Ubuntu Unity lead also stepped away.

Not all distros are just a custom-themed desktop environment on top of a base distro. A well-established project like Ubuntu MATE requires significant time and effort. There is upstream code to track, features to test, and much more.

The complexity increases when it is associated as an official flavor of a larger project like Ubuntu. There are standards to follow, quality to maintain, meetings with other Ubuntu flavor developers, strict release schedules, and more.

Then there are additional responsibilities like maintaining documentation and managing the community. It may not seem obvious, but these tasks also take a considerable amount of time. I can relate, as we have to do the same for our forum and nearly ten social channels.

Another thing is that the MATE desktop itself has not seen as much active development as other mainstream desktop environments like KDE and GNOME. The last MATE release came out two years ago.

This could have resulted in a dwindling userbase for Ubuntu MATE. And if that's the case, then it is surely a demotivating factor for any project.

Is this the end of Ubuntu MATE?

For now, there will be no Ubuntu MATE 26.04 LTS release. Ubuntu 24.04 will be here till April 2027. So we still have a year left before the distro actually becomes unsuable, if it comes to that.

Hopefully, someone will step in. As long as MATE desktop is being developed, no matter how slowly, Ubuntu MATE should live on. I mean it's not the first time it has happened that a project lead moved away and someone else filled the spot.

Let's hope the same happens with Ubuntu MATE.

There is a new merge on the Wayland GitLab repo. This new merge (of an old pull request) adds xdg-session-management protocol to Wayland. This is a big development and certainly a feature Linux users will enjoy.

As per the brief message in merge request:

For a variety of cases it's desirable to have a method for negotiating the restoration of previously-used states for a client's windows. This helps for e.g., a compositor/client crashing (definitely not due to bugs) or a backgrounded client deciding to temporarily destroy its surfaces in order to conserve resources.

This protocol adds a method for managing such negotiation and is loosely based on the Enlightenment "session recovery" protocol which has been implemented and functional for roughly two years.

In simpler words, session recovery is finally coming to Wayland.

What is the xdg-session-management protocol?

Basically, it's a set of rules that is used by your desktop environment and applications for talking to each other for saving and restoring the window state.

With this fresh new protocol, written natively for Wayland, the concept of session management existed in the previous X11 display server but it is finally coming to Wayland.

If you are curious, XDG stands for Cross Desktop Group. The X could have been Xorg or X11 once upon a time. Actually, it's all under the freedesktop.org organization that creates standards that work across all desktop environments in Linux.

What kind of advantages can you expect?

I see two major benefits of the session management:

Restore your windows after a crash or restart

You'll be able to restore the previous state and size of an application. This is like the usual "do you want to restore last session" thing you see in web browsers. But this one is for all your apps and windows and works automatically.

Save the desktop layout

This will be interesting as well. Your Linux desktop will be able to remember window positions and sizes across restarts. So if you are meticulous about an organized layout where the terminal is on the left and the browser is on the right, it will be the same even after your system restarts. Note that session survives temporary app closures, too.

There is a demo of this protocol with Chromium shared in the video below:

It took 6 years, but the pull request finally got merged

If you look at the repo, you'll notice that the pull request was created on February 17, 2020. That was six years ago. The pull request was finally merged on March 23, 2026.

Linux users, or should I say Wayland users, waited so long for this feature to arrive. Note that session-management is not a new thing. If you use Xfce desktop with the classic Xorg display, it saves the session.

I think that KDE's KWin window manager already added this new protocol in one of the releases last year. Although I don't recall using it.

This change finally fills a gap that has existed ever since Linux distros started moving from X11 to Wayland. Session restore is now being properly implemented for the modern Wayland world. Hopefully, all desktop environments should be able to adopt it easily and Linux users get to enjoy the option of saving and restoring sessions.

For years, many Ubuntu users have felt that traditional .deb packages were being gradually sidelined in favor of the Snap ecosystem.

It started quietly. Double-clicking a downloaded .deb file would open it in Archive Manager instead of the installer. Then came controversial changes. Apps like Chromium, Thunderbolt and Firefox began defaulting to Snap packages, even when users tried installing them via the apt command in the terminal.

It continued further as Ubuntu introduced its new Snap Store. In Ubuntu 24.04, it ignored .deb packages completely. Double-clicking a .deb file would open the App Center, but wouldn’t actually install the package and just hang there. That behavior was later reverted after I highlighted it through It's FOSS.

While Canonical’s obsession for Snap isn’t going away anytime soon, there is some good news for debian package lovers.

With the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, the App Center will begin displaying Debian packages installed from official repositories. Until now, it only showed Snap apps, making it unnecessarily difficult to manage .deb packages through the GUI. In fact, uninstalling a .deb from the App Center required manually searching for it and navigating to its listing page.

This change won’t end the Snap vs Deb debate, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.

Manage deb packages from App Center

In the new app center, when you click on the "Manage" option from the sidebar, it shows all the installed packages.

On this screen, you can use the "Package type" filter to show only the debian packages, or snap or a combined list of both..

You can sort the packages based on date updated, name, etc. A good little feature.

Not only that, you can also uninstall Deb packages from the manage view. This is the main feature. Before Snap era, App Center used to show the installed (debian) packages and allowed people to remove them with mouse clicks.

You can now update deb packages using App Center along with Snap updates.

Snap continues to enjoy special favors

It is no secret that Canonica, Ubuntu's parent company, still prefers their Snap packaging. And thus it is not surprising to see Snap packages having extra features in the App Center than their deb counterparts.

For Snap applications, an ‘open’ button is shown on the listing page itself:

Or, from the managing page:

On the app listing page of a snap app, a ‘revert’ option added to the drop down.

A merge request is open to add support for purging app data when uninstalling snaps through the App Center. This is indeed a good thing as it will help people recliam disk space.

Quick tip: Choosev Deb (or Snap) while searching for packages to install

Just so that you know, App Center already lets you search and install deb packages. When you search for an application, there is option shown to choose between the Snap and Deb versions.

Snap still is the first class citizen in the Ubuntu-verse. But it is still good to see the good, old Debian packages getting some space.

Ubuntu 26.04 has many more new features you should definitely check out.

Source: Via OMG! Ubuntu.

Age verification has suddenly become the most heated topic in the Linux world and it’s not slowing down anytime soon.

Distributions are already picking sides. Void and Garuda Linux have outright rejected the idea. The privacy-focused Android distro GrapheneOS isn’t entertaining it either. Meanwhile, Fedora is exploring whether an Apple-style API could be a compromise, though whether that satisfies anyone is another question.

Right in the middle of this, systemd introduced an optional birthDate field in its user records. On paper, it’s just metadata. In practice, it could become the foundation for age verification across Linux systemd and that’s exactly why it has triggered such a strong reaction.

What makes this situation more intense is the human side of it.

The developer behind the change has found himself at the center of the backlash. In our exclusive interview, he talks about the intent, the misunderstandings, and what it feels like to suddenly become the focus of one of the community’s most divisive debates.

And, in true open source fashion, the forks have already begun.

A new project, Liberated systemd, removes the birthDate field entirely. It’s currently more of a statement than a solution, a protest fork rather than something you’d realistically deploy but it shows just how strongly people feel about this direction.

This isn’t just another technical discussion. It’s about where Linux draws the line between compliance, privacy, and control.

And right now, that line is being tested.

Here are other highlights of this edition of FOSS Weekly:

• LibreOffice donation banner change.
• Germany backing the Open Document Format.
• Open source tools for improving docker workflow.
• Yazi file manager in action.
• A new crossword.
• And other Linux news, tips, and, of course, memes!

📰 Linux and Open Source News

LibreOffice is adding a donation banner to its Start Center in the upcoming 26.8 release. It will sit at the bottom of the screen, showing a short message and an image, and the plan is to display it after each update or once a month.

Germany's new Deutschland-Stack, the country's sovereign digital infrastructure framework, has named ODF and PDF/UA as the only permitted document formats for public administrations at every level, federal, state, and municipal.

Canonical has joined the Rust Foundation as a Gold Member, backing the organization with $150,000 a year. Given that Ubuntu 25.10 already shipped with Rust rewrites of sudo and Coreutils, the move formalizes what was already a clear strategic direction.

The Thunderbird team has launched public roadmaps covering Desktop, Mobile, and Services, all written in non-technical language and organized around goals rather than bug lists.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

Two versions of the LiteLLM Python package, 1.82.7 and 1.82.8, were briefly live on PyPI before being pulled after researchers found a backdoor planted by the hacker group TeamPCP. The payload harvests SSH keys, cloud credentials, Kubernetes secrets, and environment files.

This is another instance where supply chain attacks targeted open source projects.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

If you've ever hit a full root partition while home sits half empty and wished Linux could just borrow space from where it's available, Btrfs subvolumes are the answer. Unlike fixed partitions, subvolumes share a single storage pool and draw from the same free space as needed.

If you've been meaning to try a shell that doesn't require hours of dotfile tweaking before it feels usable, Fish is worth a look. Syntax errors are highlighted in red as you type, commands autocomplete from history, and tab completion pulls descriptions straight from man pages.

I ran into an issue related to appimage and shared my experience in this troubleshooter.

If you use Docker heavily, these open source tools can help your container workflow.

📚 eBook bundle on AI

Inside this 20+ eBook library (partner link), you’ll gain expert insights from practical lessons like RAG-Driven Generative AI and the LLM Engineer's Handbook.

Your purchase supports the World Central Kitchen organization.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

CZ.NIC has launched the Turris Omnia NG Wired, a fanless rack-mountable router running OpenWrt. This is an expansive device and it has come at a time when non-US made routers are being banned in the United States.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

Vykar is a new open source backup tool from the BorgBase team that does encrypted, deduplicated backups configured through a single YAML file.

📽️ Videos for You

It’s not every day you find a terminal tool that even non power users can enjoy. In this video, I showcase a terminal-based file manager that makes file navigation and search surprisingly fast.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

In Okular, you can change the highlighting style. Go to Settings -> Configure Okular. Here, in the "Annotations" tab, select the highlighter you want to tweak.

Now, click on the Edit button on the right, and under "Styles," change the highlighter's name, type, color, and opacity.

You can also use the Add button to create a new highlight style. Give it a name, configure its appearance and then click on Ok and Apply to set it.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

A new crossword after ages; this one will test your knowledge of systemd ctl commands.

Meme of the Week: Brave heroes!🗿

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On March 28, 1986, computers made their debut in the fight against AIDS. A team at Roche Laboratories published a groundbreaking paper in Science magazine laying out the theoretical basis for the HIV protease molecule, one of the first times computational methods were used to study the virus.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: One of our FOSSers has started a thread on privacy-focused content creators worth following. If you have any suggestions, be sure to add them!

Dylan M. Taylor is not a household name in the Linux world. At least, he wasn’t until recently.

The software engineer and longtime open source contributor has quietly built a respectable track record over the years: writing Python code for the Arch Linux installer, maintaining packages for NixOS, and contributing CI/CD pipelines to various FOSS projects.

But a recent change he made to systemd has pushed him into the spotlight, along with a wave of intense debate.

At the center of the controversy is a seemingly simple addition Dylan made: an optional birthDate field in systemd’s user database.

The change, intended to give Linux distributions a lightweight, optional mechanism to comply with emerging US state laws on age verification, was immediately met with fierce resistance from parts of the Linux community. Critics saw it not merely as a technical addition, but as a symbolic capitulation to government overreach. A crack in the philosophical foundation of freedom that Linux is built on.

What followed went far beyond civil disagreement. Dylan revealed that he faced harassment, doxxing, death threats, and a flood of hate mail. He was forced to disable issues and pull request tabs across his GitHub repositories.

He has shared his opinions in a blog post that the change is not "age verification":

A common misconception about this change is that it introduces "age verification" to Linux. It doesn't. None of the PRs I submitted involve ID checks, facial recognition, or third-party verification services. You can enter any value, including January 1st, 1900.

So, we interacted with Dylan over email to ask him about the controversy, the code change, and the personal toll it has taken.

Q: A lot of backlash isn't about the code change, but about what it represents. Do you (also) think this is the first step toward OS-level surveillance, even if unintended?

A: Moving towards OS-level surveillance is definitely not the intention. This field is almost completely inconsequential for surveillance because the signal reported in most cases will be “yes, this user is 18+”. One interesting thought I’ve had is actually that if we strip this signal to websites/apps and do not report an age range at all, but the vast majority of users DO, that actually gives us a more unique and trackable browser fingerprint. Privacy-wise, it’d be wise to “blend in” and always report the most common value. Tor browser thinks this way to make users less fingerprintable. Also, most users have something much more trackable and sensitive on their computer stored in a way that is usually unencrypted: their browser cookies.

Q. You say this is "just attestation, not verification" but we know that infrastructure always gets repurposed later. This is where the legit fear lies. Today it's birthDate. Tomorrow could it be location, identity, or verification tokens? I understand that you are providing a workaround but where should we draw the line between compliance and resistance?

A. Funny you mention that, location is already a field in userdb. Like birthDate, this field is also trivially nullable, stored locally, and can be set to anything. As long as we are talking about a user self-attesting a date - especially with the ability to enter any value we want - we aren't in the realm of identity tracking. I draw the line at when a third party internet-connected service is doing validation of ID. Let’s be honest though, I strongly believe such a thing isn’t possible on a FOSS operating system environment unless they could control what was bootable on the device at a firmware level, enforce signatures to ensure that you couldn’t boot something unrestricted, remove the ability to be root, and block LD_PRELOAD so signals couldn’t be faked. There’s probably more ways to circumvent that. What I’m trying to say is real ID verification on Linux would be awfully hard to implement, and I guarantee you, nobody would put up with it. They’d fork to a version that doesn’t have it immediately as a protest. Right now, we’re considering implementing something akin to the date pickers that were ubiquitous when signing up for internet services in the early 2000s where it’s just an honor system. Things like actual ID checks and/or facial scanning + age estimation would be just too incompatible with Linux where we have the freedom to change whatever we want to.

Q. Let's be direct. Should FOSS projects adapt to laws they fundamentally disagree with? Because these kinds of laws are certainly in conflict with what a lot of Linux users believe in.

A. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, the answer is yes – at least for any distribution with corporate backing. The small independent distributions are much more flexible to refuse as a protest. If we ignore regulations entirely, we risk Linux being something that companies are not willing to contribute to, and Linux may be shipped on less hardware. I’m talking about things like Valve and System76 (despite them very vocally hating these laws). That does not help us; it just lowers the quality of software contributions due to less investment in the platform and makes Linux less accessible to the average person. We need Linux and other free operating systems to remain a viable alternative to closed systems.

Q. Do you think regulations like these will reshape desktop Linux in the next 5-10 years where we might have "compliant Linux" and "Freedom-first Linux"?

A. Unfortunately, yes, to some degree this is likely. I imagine the split will be mostly along the lines of independent distributions and those with corporate backing. We’re already seeing it as far as which distributions plan on implementing some sort of age verification and which ones are not, and that sucks. I’d rather nobody have to deal with this mess at all, but this is the reality of things now. As I said in the previous response, the corporate-backed distributions really have no choice in the matter. Companies are notoriously risk-adverse, but something like Artix or Devuan? Those are small and independent enough where the individual maintainers may be willing to take on more risk. I was actually thinking about what this would look like if we added it to Calamares and chatting about that with the maintainers before that thread got brigaded by bad actors posting personal information and throwing around insults. I completely support the freedom for the distro maintainers to choose their risk tolerance. If the distribution is based out of Ireland or something (like Linux Mint) without these silly laws in the jurisdiction the developer operates in, I think that we should leave it up to them to make a choice here. If we add a date picker to the installer (and I think we should), it has to be built in a way that at build time there is a flag to enable or disable the feature. We can even default it to off, and corporate distributions using Calamares or those not willing to take the risk could flip it on if they need to. That way if maintainers of the distributions do not wish to collect the birth date, they won’t have to, and no forking is required to patch it out. I do strongly feel we need to enable the user to modify their own system as they see fit.

Q. Were you surprised by the intensity of the backlash? Did the criticism make you rethink your decision?

A. I understood that the change was not going to be popular, but I was expecting civil discourse and a level-headed response. Things like death threats and harassment are not okay, especially when it negatively impacts unrelated third parties. However, the doxxing (and I am NOT just talking about my name, email and resume – that stuff is on my website, and is reasonably public. I don’t commit with a pseudonym and I think it’s reasonable to critique my contributions), hate mail, racism, homophobia, anti-semetism, editing of my photo, turning my profile picture into memes and making fun of my appearance, etc. made me lose a bit of faith in the FOSS community. I’m really disappointed at the reaction. We should do better than this. There are plenty of people I strongly disagree with. Reacting in this manner is childish and uncalled for. If you’re trying to convince someone they are wrong, being aggressive about it and trolling is not exactly compelling. It will make them feel even more justified in some cases.

Q. How are you personally dealing with being at the center of a controversy like this?

A. Honestly, not super well. The death threats are extremely unwelcome and trying to get my social security number, phone number, and address taken down from pastebins and anonymous imageboards is not exactly how I planned to spend my time, to put it lightly. I am just trying to filter out the noise and focus on addressing the constructive feedback, but people have been posting my information and harassing me on basically any repo I have on GitHub, in the issues/PR tabs. I’ve had to disable those. I find it disgusting that people are willing to place takeout orders with my information which makes businesses waste food, and it really wasn’t funny sending Mormon missionaries to my house. They pay for their own gas, and that nonsense isn’t fair to them. It’s not fun to see the nasty side of humanity, and people were saying some pretty unhinged stuff to me and about me. Nobody appreciates that. On a positive note, I know a good bit of other maintainers and developers in the Linux community and all of them were super supportive and reached out to see if I was doing okay. I appreciate that. Shoutouts to those of you from the Arch Linux project and Universal Blue/Bazzite who made sure I was doing well. Thank you for that.

Q. Would this backlash demotivate you from continuing your contribution to Linux and open source in the future?

A. I still love Linux and free and open source software, and would like to stay involved. Whenever I find something that is personally useful to me and I identify a way I can improve it or add functionality, I love to contribute back to the original authors and the community. It’s great to be able to be involved, and I still plan on doing so. It’s very obvious that those harassing me are a very small but vocal part of the FOSS community and I try to see the better side of people. I would really appreciate if the personal attacks stopped though. It’s childish and unconstructive.

Closing Thoughts

Wherever you stand on age verification laws or Dylan's code change, the response he received is unwarranted. Harassment, doxxing, and death threats have no place in any community, let alone one that prides itself on openness and collaboration. There are more civilized ways to disagree.

Dylan's answers reveal the real dilemma: how does an open source ecosystem, built on the principals of freedom and decentralization, respond to legal pressure from the real world? His position is that corporate-backed distributions may have no practical choice. That is rational, even if it is uncomfortable for many to hear.

In my scenario, I had downloaded VidBee video downloader in AppImage format on my Fedora Linux. It was integrated well with the system with GearLeaver.

However, one day, it suddenly stopped opening. I could see the icon in GNOME search but clicking on it did not do anything. The app was not opening.

My instinct was to jump in the terminal, go to the directory where AppImage file for this application was located and run it like a bash file. Yes, that's a legit way to run AppImages from the terminal.

And when I did that, it showed me "AppImages require FUSE to run".

abhishek@fedora:~/AppImages$ ./vidbee.appimage 
dlopen(): error loading libfuse.so.2

AppImages require FUSE to run. 
You might still be able to extract the contents of this AppImage 
if you run it with the --appimage-extract option. 
See https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/wiki/FUSE 
for more information

The key part in my case was this line:

error loading libfuse.so.2

It was missing libfuse version 2. The solution that worked for me was to install fuse2 lib and dev package. If you are facing this issue on your system, that's what you have to do.

And you must pay attention to the libfuse version it is complaining about. As it turns out there is libfuse2 and libfuse3 and some AppImages use version 2 while some version 3.

I'll come to the installation instructions in a moment.

Understanding the "fuse" confusion

The AppImage applications require a software library called Filesystem in Userspace (or FUSE in short).

Now, the thing is that most Linux distributions already come with FUSE support. But the version becomes a problem.

Recent distro versions have fuse3 installed. And many developers package their applications in AppImage using fuse3. In my case, Ghostty terminal worked fine as its AppImage needed fuse3 and it was already installed on my Fedora:

I checked the list of installed applications on Fedora and I was surprised to see that fuse2 was also installed already. As you can see below, package fuse.x86_64 has version 2.9.9.

abhishek@fedora:~/AppImages$ dnf list --installed | grep -i fuse
fuse.x86_64                                          2.9.9-24.fc43                        <unknown>
fuse-common.x86_64                                   3.16.2-5.fc42                        624cbc92582d4ecfae4c58749abde4f8
fuse-overlayfs.x86_64                                1.13-4.fc43                          <unknown>
fuse3.x86_64                                         3.16.2-5.fc42                        624cbc92582d4ecfae4c58749abde4f8
fuse3-libs.x86_64                                    3.16.2-5.fc42                        624cbc92582d4ecfae4c58749abde4f8
glusterfs-fuse.x86_64                                11.2-4.fc43                          <unknown>
gvfs-fuse.x86_64                                     1.58.4-1.fc43                        updates

So, my system had both fuse2 and fuse3 installed and still one AppImage worked (Ghostty) and other (Vidbee) did not.

What's even more strange is that the same Videbee AppImage was working a few weeks ago.

Anyways, when something like this happens, my gut feel which comes from years of experience is to either reinstall the software library or install the associated development package.

And that's what I did here as well and it worked for me.

Installing fuse2 and fuse2-dev

If your system was complaining about libfuse2, you should install libfuse2. You must know which Linux distro and version you are using here.

On Fedora, I installed the following packages that fixed the issue for me:

sudo dnf install fuse fuse-d

As you can see in the screenshot above, it said fuse-2.9.9 was already installed but it also installed fuse-devel and fuse-libs in the process.

On Ubuntu 22.04, it should be available as libfuse2:

sudo apt install libfuse2

On Ubuntu 24.04 and newer, use:

sudo apt install libfuse2t64

Did it help you?

I would like to know that. Basically, all you have to do is to pay attention to what missing library and version it is complaining about and install it.

There is a troubleshooting page in the official AppImage documentation that you may want to check out.

If you are still facing issues with AppImage, please let me know in the comments and I'll try to help you out.

Systemd powers most modern Linux distributions, and with it comes a family of powerful ctl commands like systemctl .

These tools help you manage services, inspect logs, control system time, and dig deep into how your Linux system behaves under the hood.

But how well do you really know them?

This crossword puzzle is a fun way to test your familiarity with common systemd ctl commands. Whether you're a beginner trying to remember commands or an experienced user brushing up your knowledge, this challenge is for you.

🧠 Hint: All answers are related to systemd or its associated ctl utilities.

👉 Got a perfect score? Share it with your Linux friends and challenge them!
👉 Want more puzzles like this? Let us know!

If you are stuck 🫣

We've got you 😄

As a member of It's FOSS, you can access the answers and see whether you got them all correctly or not.

Please attempt all the questions first before peeking at the answers. Otherwise, what's the fun and where's the challenge? 😸

In the previous newsletter, I discussed how various distros are handling the age verification laws. At the end of the article, I speculated that we would see a few existing or new distros coming up with "no age verification" as their unique feature.

Guess what? We have a new distro called Ageless Linux which is created specifically to refuse compliance with OS-level age verification laws.

But it's more than just a distro; the project also maintains a tracker of where various distros and organizations stand on age verification and a $12 RISC-V hardware project aimed at putting non-compliant devices in the hands of schoolchildren. I am glad that it exists.

Here are other highlights of this edition of FOSS Weekly:

• Things you can do Linux but not on Windows
• Chrome on ARM Linux (aka Raspberry Pi).
• A new web browser for Linux users.
• GNOME 50 and Fedora Ashahi releases
• And other Linux news, tips, and, of course, memes!

📰 Linux and Open Source News

GNOME 50 is here and X11 is not. Wayland is all the way in this new release. Upcoming distros like Ubuntu 26.04 and Fedora 44 will have it. Rolling distros like Arch should also get it soon.

Google has officially announced Chrome for ARM64 Linux, with a release targeted for Q2 2026. That means Raspberry Pi users, Snapdragon laptop owners, and anyone else running ARM hardware will get the Chrome experience on Linux.

Although, not open source, Kagi's Orion browser has made it to Linux as a public beta, and it's genuinely interesting because it's one of the browsers on the platform not built on Chromium or Firefox's engine. It is based on WebKit and works okayish on GNOME.

A significant chunk of the Manjaro team has gone public with the "Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto," signed by 19 members, calling for the project to separate from its parent company and restructure as a nonprofit.

Fedora Asahi Remix 43 arrives with Mac Pro support. In case you did not know, Asahi is the project bring Linux to Apple's Silicon processors.

AI companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta etc have put $12.5M into Open Source Security, managed by Linux Foundation. This is funny in a way. They are putting together a fund to fix the problem their AI tools created in the first place.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

Google wants every Android developer to register using their real identity before their apps will install on certified devices, but not everyone's on board.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

A clean beginner's guide to Markdown covering the core syntax: headings, text formatting, links, images, lists, and block quotes. It comes with a downloadable cheat sheet and a few recommendations for online editors if you want to try it without installing anything.

Windows users have been conditioned to ask, "But can Linux do X?" This piece by Roland flips it around and asks what Linux can do that Windows can't. The answers range from practical (live sessions, moving installs between machines, reviving old hardware) to genuinely impressive (swapping kernels, choosing filesystems, replacing every layer of your stack).

📚 eBook bundle on AI

Inside this 20+ eBook library, you’ll gain expert insights from practical lessons like Learn Python Programming, 4E and the LLM Engineer's Handbook. These massively efficient tools save you time and effort so you can prioritize other important tasks and systems.

Your purchase supports the World Central Kitchen organization.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

If your Raspberry Pi homelab is freezing up under load, the default 200 MB swap is probably the first thing worth looking at.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

If your GNOME top panel has turned into a wall of icons, Veil is worth a look. It's a shell extension that lets you hide panel items behind a toggle arrow.

📽️ Videos for You

You could move away from Google today if you wanted to, and DuckDuckGo is one of the good ones to consider.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

In Nautilus file manager, you can press CTRL+F to start a search in the current directory and CTRL+SHIFT+F to search across the other system folders. To go even further, you can add new search locations via the Search settings.

And, if you use the shortcut CTRL+ALT+O after selecting a file or folder, you can go to it's location in the file manager. Do note that this works in the Search and Recent pages of the file manager.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Do you know the brain behind Debian? This Ian Murdock quiz will test your knowledge.

🤣 Meme of the Week: We must protect it at all costs!

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On March 17, 1988, Apple sued Microsoft for copyright infringement over the look and feel of the Windows GUI. Apple's argument was that Windows borrowed too heavily from the Macintosh interface it had debuted in 1984. The case dragged on for years before a judge ruled that Apple had only limited rights to the design elements in question.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: One of our regular Pro FOSSers is having an issue with CUPS on antiX Linux; can you help?

A new Linux distro has appeared.

Not surprisinhg. We get new Linux distributions almost every month, sometimes even every week.

This one is based on Debian. Again, not surprising. Debian has long been the mother of countless Linux distros.

But the interesting part isn’t the base. It’s the reason this distro exists.

It was created as a symbol of resistance.

That’s also not new in the Linux world. Many distros have been born out of disagreement or protest. For example, Void Linux emerged during the heated systemd controversy, offering a system that avoided systemd entirely.

The new distro, called Ageless Linux, follows a similar idea. It’s essentially Debian Linux but without age verification.

Age verification… what?

A new trend is quietly spreading across the United States: laws that require age verification at the operating system level.

It started with California, and states like Colorado, New York, and Illinois have proposed similar legislation. Reports also suggest that Brazil may be moving in the same direction.

What makes this development even more interesting is that Meta, the company behind Facebook, reportedly lobbied heavily for these laws.

Until now, governments mainly pressured social media platforms to verify users’ ages to prevent young children and teenagers from accessing certain services.

Meta’s proposal shifts that responsibility. Instead of every app or website verifying a user’s age individually, the operating system would verify it once.

Then, through an API exposed by the OS or its app store, applications could simply ask the system for the user’s age or age category.

In other words, your operating system becomes the age gatekeeper for every app you install.

And that idea has sparked a lot of debate in the tech community especially among Linux and open-source developers.

Why age verification is 'incompatible' with Linux ecosystem?

At first glance, age verification sounds reasonable. Governments argue that it helps protect children from harmful online content. But many developers and privacy advocates see serious problems with pushing this responsibility to the operating system.

The biggest concern is privacy. Linux distributions traditionally collect little to no personal information about users. Unlike Apple and Microsoft, you are not forced to create an online account before using an operating system. Introducing age verification could mean that operating systems must store or process sensitive identity data, something many Linux projects have deliberately avoided for decades.

Some critics suspect the push is less about child safety and more about control, warning that once operating systems begin verifying identity or age, it becomes easier to expand such systems to regulate broader online activity.

Another issue is security risk. If operating systems start storing age or identity information, it creates a new type of data that could potentially be misused, leaked, or exploited. Even if only age categories are shared with apps, it still introduces a form of system-level user profiling.

There is also a philosophical concern. Many of us in the open-source world believe an operating system should remain a neutral tool, not a platform that enforces identity verification or government regulations.

Because of these concerns, some developers and users see OS-level age verification as a step toward turning operating systems into identity gatekeepers, which runs against the long-standing Linux ethos of user freedom and minimal to no data collection.

Ageless Linux

Unsurprisingly, the age-verification proposal has raised serious discussions in the open-source world. From what it seems, most mainstream distros will enable this feature in one way or another. That includes Debian.

I anticipated this situation. I had a feeling that there would be some new distros offering “no age verification” as their main feature.

That’s precisely what Ageless Linux has done.

The project positions itself as a statement against OS-level age verification. Instead of building systems that identify and categorize users by age, Ageless Linux sticks to a much simpler idea: an operating system should run software, not act as a digital identity checker.

Ageless Linux is a registered operating system under the definitions established by the California Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043, Chapter 675, Statutes of 2025). We are in full, knowing, and intentional noncompliance with the age verification requirements of Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.501(a).

In practical terms, Ageless Linux is basically Debian with the age-verification pieces removed or avoided. The goal isn’t to reinvent Linux, but to ensure that users who oppose these laws still have a distribution that does not participate in age-verification frameworks.

More than just another Linux distro actually

I am glad that Ageless Linux did not stop at "Debian without age verification". Browsing the website, it seems they are more of a project that stands against age verification.

They have a dedicated page, and hopefully a database in the future, that lists the stance of various distros and organizations on the age verification issue. There is a page that lists US state laws that require operating system providers to collect age data from users.

So it’s not just a distro; it’s becoming a full-fledged portal documenting and opposing age-verification laws.

In addition to that, they also have an ambitious hardware project that is "designed to satisfy every element of the California Digital Age Assurance Act's regulatory scope while deliberately refusing to comply with its requirements."

This hardware is basically a $12 RISC-V ARM board. They have named it "Ageless Device" and the aim is to give it to children in schools.

And I’m glad they are not restricting themselves to just a distro, but are moving toward becoming a non-profit organization that educates people about the potential dangers of age verification turning into surveillance infrastructure.

Do check them out.

Here is the big news. Google plans to bring its flagship Chrome browser for ARM64 Linux devices. The release is set for the second quarter (April-June) of 2026.

Which means you should be able to use Google Chrome on Raspberry Pi and other single board computers and laptops with Snapdragon processors.

Google highlighted this in the announcement:

Launching Chrome for ARM64 Linux devices allows more users to enjoy the seamless integration of Google’s most helpful services into their browser. This move addresses the growing demand for a browsing experience that combines the benefits of the open-source Chromium project with the Google ecosystem of apps and features.

But there is Chromium available already

Many FOSS purists prefer Chromium over Chrome, as it is the open-source project that serves as the foundation for Google Chrome. In fact, many Linux distributions, even on non-ARM devices, ship Chromium as the default browser.

However, Chromium is not the same as Chrome. DRM playback support is often limited, Google account sync typically requires workarounds to function properly, and several proprietary features are missing. It is undoubtedly a solid browser, but it doesn’t offer the same level of mainstream convenience and integration that users are accustomed to with Google Chrome.

Took a real long time due to Google's apathy towards Linux

Chromium has been available for ARM devices for years but Google did not care for offering Chrome for Linux users. Emphasizing on Linux because Google quickly released Chrome for Apple's ARM devices in 2020 itself and it was followed by Windows ARM devices in 2024.

This is when Chromebook with ARM perocessors have been in existence since 2012. Google's Chromebook run a cutsomized version of Linux in the form of ChromeOS. And these Chromebooks had Chrome browser. Surely, not much was required for bringing Chrome to Linux ARM devices.

Thank you, NVIDIA?

The announcement blog has an interesting mention of NVIDIA.

Last year, NVIDIA introduced the DGX Spark, an AI supercomputing device that packs its Grace Blackwell architecture into a compact, 1-liter form factor. Google is partnering with NVIDIA to make it easier for DGX Spark users to install Chrome.

So, was it NVIDIA who pushed/inspired Google to work on bringing Chrome to Linux ARM devices? Maybe.

Source: Chromium blog

If rumors and Reuters are to be believed, SUSE Linux us up for sale again. Again because it has changed owners several times in the past. IBM bought Red Hat Linux for $34 billion 6 years ago. It would be interesting to see who grabs SUSE. I hope it's not Microsoft.

By the way, not seeing new articles from It's FOSS in your feed reader? That's because there is an ongoing issue with the RSS feed as I am migrating to FeedPress. Please bear it with me.

Here are other highlights of this edition of FOSS Weekly:

• EA slowly moving towards Linux.
• Firefox's redesign has been leaked.
• Linux Mint keyboard shortcut video.
• MidnightBSD saying no to age verification.
• And other Linux news, tips, and, of course, memes!

📰 Linux and Open Source News

EA is hiring an anti-cheat engineer to bring Javelin to ARM64, and tucked into the job listing is a mention of exploring Linux and Proton support in the future. After ditching Linux for Apex Legends in 2024, it's a surprising turn. But I wouldn't hold my breath on this.

Firefox's Proton UI has been around since 2021 and honestly looks it. Leaked internal mockups show Mozilla is working on something called "Nova," a significant visual overhaul. Tabs, the address bar, and the toolbar are merged into a single floating strip; rounded corners are everywhere; flat grays are out in favor of gradients, and the private window gets a full dark-purple makeover.

MidnightBSD has updated its license to bar residents of Brazil and California from using the project, with Colorado, Illinois, and New York on the list if their respective pending age verification bills pass.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

The age verification laws spreading across US states are making distro maintainers uncomfortable, and responses are all over the place. Ubuntu and Fedora are working on minimal local APIs to tick the compliance box without doing anything too invasive. MidnightBSD is outright banning people from using it (as mentioned above).

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

Wordcloud is a Python tool that turns any list of words into a visual word cloud image, right from the terminal. You can feed it a text file, tweak the resolution, swap the font, change the background color, or use a mask image to shape the output around a custom silhouette.

Some practical privacy tips that don't require a computer science degree or a paranoia spiral. Our article covers the basics well, from securing your email and browser to picking better cloud storage and messaging apps.

Ever wanted a desktop that looks like it belongs on r/unixporn? We have an i3 customization guide that covers a lot, from basic keybindings and color schemes to transparent status bars and per-workspace app assignments.

GSConnect is the GNOME-friendly way to link your Android phone and Linux machine, built on top of KDE Connect. Once paired, you can transfer files, share the clipboard, get phone notifications on your desktop, and use your phone as a remote mouse.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

Prefer your local AI neatly containerized? This guide shows how to get Ollama running in Docker.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

FRANK OS is a full desktop operating system, complete with a Start menu, overlapping windows, Alt+Tab switching, and a ZX Spectrum emulator, running on an RP2350 microcontroller.

Foot is a minimal Wayland-native terminal emulator that focuses on speed and simplicity. A hidden gem worth exploring.

Keith Curtis spent a week building what he calls "Cursor for LibreOffice," an AI extension that lives in a sidebar and actually edits your documents.

📽️ Videos for You

Sharing some of the essential keyboard shortcuts for Linux Mint, this time in video format.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

On GNOME, first install Tiling Shell. Then, when you right-click on the titlebar of a window, you get various tiling options. Do keep in mind that not all apps will support this.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Match Linux apps with their functions in this puzzle. And yes, fresh new puzzles are coming soon 😄

🤣 Meme of the Week: Winslop doesn't know what consent means.

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On March 9, 1955, a program called "Director" was demonstrated on MIT's Whirlwind computer—automatically managing system resources while user code ran. It's considered one of the earliest rudimentary operating systems ever created.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: Can you help one of our regular FOSSers decide whether to keep Secure Boot enabled or not?

If Reuters report is to be believed, SUSE Linux is again up for sale in the market with a price tag of $6 billion.

This is about enterprise-oriented SUSE Linux. openSUSE, on the other hand, is community-managed but heavily funded by SUSE. I like to think of SUSE Linux as Red Hat and openSUSE as Fedora.

So any decision taken by SUSE Linux impacts openSUSE, more directly than indirectly. We will have to see what direction it takes if SUSE is sold again.

Notice how I am reusing the word 'again'? That's because this is not the first time SUSE Linux has been sold.

Long history of changing hands

SUSE was founded in 1992 and provided the distribution along with support and services to enterprises. In fact, it was the first company to market Linux to enterprises.

It was first purchased by Novell in 2004 for $210 millions. Novell did put a lot of effort in popularizing Linux, pitching it against Windows and Apple. They even ran ads that some veteran Linux users might remember.

It was a good run until Attachmate purchased Novell in 2011 for a hefty $2.2 billion. SUSE was part of Novell and thus Attachmate took the ownership of the project.

And then in 2014, Micro Focus acquired Attachmate for $2.35 billion and thus once again SUSE saw a new owner.

Come 2018 and a private equity group EQT bought Micro Foucs for $2.535 billions. Needless to say, SUSE was part of the deal.

Except for the first one, the rest of the deals were for the parent company, not necessarily for SUSE. However, the current report suggests that EQT is only selling SUSE this time for approximately $6 billion.

Red Hat went for $34 billions

Red Hat is often considered SUSE’s closest competitor, as both primarily focus on enterprise customers. In 2019, IBM acquired Red Hat for $34 billion, making it one of the largest software acquisitions in history. Since then, Red Hat has become a central pillar of IBM’s hybrid cloud strategy, helping drive growth in areas where IBM had been struggling to maintain momentum.

Who could buy SUSE?

We can only guess, and if it were up to me, here are a few big names that could take advantage of SUSE:

• Amazon: Although Amazon has its own Linux distros for deploying AWS internally
• IBM: It already has Red Hat in its kitty. Getting SUSE means near monopoly in enterprise Linux. But this could also be blocked by regulators.
• Oracle: Oracle has its own Oracle Linux for enterprise. With SUSE, it can expand its business.
• Broadcom: They have already gotten VMWare and thus they already have one foot in the enterprise Linux market. With SUSE, they will only consolidate their position.
• Microsoft: They have Azure but that's primarily for cloud servers. For a company like Microsoft, $6 billion is not a huge amount. They can expand their enterprise offering with SUSE.

These are all guesses. For all we know, an unknown player could enter the scene, or it might not be sold at all.

Your turn now. What do you think of SUSE being in the market again. Which company should buy it?

The US states of California, Colorado and Illinois are passing new age verification laws that require operating systems, including Linux and BSD distributions, to implement age attestation during account setup and provide an API for apps to query user age brackets.

This is 'intended to help' apps filter content for minors, but it relies on self-reported ages without mandatory ID checks. Similar proposals exist in New York and Brazil.

While enforcement on community-driven distros remains unclear, several have begun addressing the laws through compliance planning, rejection, or exclusion strategies.

Here's the situation so far.

Some distros are planning to comply

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is reviewing the legislation with legal counsel but has not announced concrete changes yet. Community developer discussions include proposals for an optional D-Bus interface (org.freedesktop.AgeVerification1) to handle age brackets locally without privacy-invasive telemetry, potentially influencing other distros if adopted.

Aaron Rainbolt, Ubuntu Community Council Member and contributor to Whonix, said:

We're currently looking into how to implement an API that will comply with the laws while also not being a privacy disaster...

elementary OS seems to be relying on Ubuntu's implementation too. Danielle Foré, elementary's lead developer and founder, was also in the same discussion expressing their willingness to address the issue before the law comes into effect.

The Fedora community is exploring non-intrusive implementations, such as a local API or an /etc/ file populated during setup to provide age brackets to apps without online verification or data sharing. Former project leader Jef Spaleta mentioned that it is not telemetry but a minimal adjustment to meet legal requirements.

System76, Linux system manufacturer and the company behind Pop!OS, noted that the laws do not mandate robust verification, only self-attestation and warned that non-compliance could lead to restricted app access for users. They are also considering minimal changes to provide age signals, focusing on avoiding unintended consequences like a "nerfed internet."

If there is any solace in these two laws, it’s that they don’t have any real restrictions. There is no actual age verification. Whoever installed the operating system or created the account simply says what age they are. They can lie. They will lie. They’re being encouraged to lie for fear of being restricted to a nerfed internet.

Some distros are resisting

The bold step came from DHH and his Omarchy Linux as it outright rejected compliance, with DHH stating that he had no plans to respond to the "retarded" California law.

Adenix GNU/Linux distro has declared it will not implement age checks, aligning with a principled stand against such requirements.

MidnightBSD has taken a firm stance against compliance by updating its license to explicitly exclude California residents from using it for desktop purposes starting January 1, 2027. The project's lead stated this is a temporary measure until a better solution emerges, emphasizing the impracticality of age verification for open-source OSes.

What about the rest?

There are no official statements from Linux Mint yet, so any conclusion here is merely speculative. Given its close alignment with Ubuntu, I think it will follow whatever direction Ubuntu takes, possibly adopting the same shared API approach.

Arch Linux has remained publicly silent on the issue as well. Some forum discussions briefly appeared in my web search results but they seem to be removed, leaving no clear indication of the project’s stance. SUSE has also not made any public comments so far. Since the legislation originates in the U.S., European-focused distributions like SUSE may not feel immediate pressure to respond.

Meanwhile, discussions in the NixOS community suggest that they are waiting to see what larger distributions decide. That is not surprising. Much of the Linux ecosystem ultimately traces back to Debian, Arch, Ubuntu, and Red Hat (Fedora). Whatever technical approach these major players adopt will likely influence dozens of downstream distributions.

And we should also see a few existing or new distros coming up with "no age verification" as their unique feature that distinguishes them from the rest. After all, Linux community is known to take a stance, right?

U.S. states keep passing age-verification laws that sound reasonable until you read the fine print. Colorado, for example, wants operating systems to broadcast age data to every app you install, and California has already passed a similar bill.

As governments push age checks deeper into apps and operating systems, what once sounded like a safety measure is starting to feel a lot like surveillance.

And it’s not just happening in the U.S. Reports suggest Brazil is also moving toward similar regulations. While this model may fit ecosystems like Apple and Microsoft, where operating systems are tightly tied to online accounts, the Linux world works very differently. Yet developers from projects like Fedora and Ubuntu are already discussing how such requirements might affect Linux.

We’ll be keeping close eye on how this evolves. Stay tuned.

Here are other highlights of this edition of FOSS Weekly:

• Longer support for certain Linux kernels.
• systemd troubleshooting tools
• Xfce customization.
• Microsoft hates Microslop.
• LibreOffice quick tip.
• A new consortium to unify the Arm software ecosystem.
• And other Linux news, tips, and, of course, memes!

📰 Linux and Open Source News

The web's most popular UI library has outgrown Meta's ownership. React is now part of the Linux Foundation with neutral governance and eight platinum members on board. Technical decisions are independent from the board, of course.

Arm software got too complex for any one company to handle alone. CoreCollective just launched to fix that fragmentation problem. Free membership for anyone building on Arm. AMD, Google, Microsoft and Red Hat are already in.

LTS kernel support windows just got extended after being cut to two years back in 2023. Linux 6.6 and 6.12 now get four-years of support instead. Greg Kroah-Hartman updated the schedule after discussions with companies and maintainers.

AI's RAM appetite just killed another hardware project. Orange Pi and Manjaro spent two years building a Linux gaming handheld, cleared regulatory approvals, and got everything ready to ship. Now it's sitting on ice because DDR5 chip prices are absurd.

Motorola just partnered with the GrapheneOS Foundation, and it was announced at MWC 2026. The two plan to collaborate on research, software improvements, and new security features in the coming months. If you did not know already, Graphene is an Android distribution that ditches Google's data collection layer entirely and has long been the go-to for anyone serious about privacy.

And a funny thing happened this week when Microsoft locked down its Discord server because people kept on calling it Microslop.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

Few Linux distributions attract as much criticism as Ubuntu. From Snap complaints to Canonical decisions, the internet seems to have a long list of reasons to dislike it. But Ubuntu may not deserve nearly as much hate as it gets.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

When stuff breaks on Linux, systemd already knows what happened. Systemctl shows which services crashed, journalctl has the error messages, and systemd-analyze tells you what's hogging boot time. Coredumpctl keeps snapshots of apps that died completely.

Got an old PC or Raspberry Pi collecting dust? Batocera, Lakka, and RetroPie turn them into plug-and-play retro consoles via USB or SD card.

A quick tip if you love to use LibreOffice. If a document has way too many images and you have to save multiple or all images from it, save it as an HTML document in a new folder. You'll get all the images from the document. Pretty neat 😄

By the way, we are working on a "Linux Mint Starter Pack" series for beginners. I'll share with you when it is done. In the mean time, you can get familiar with the Linux command line.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

Tired of feeding your photos to Google's AI? PhotoPrism runs locally on Docker, handles face recognition and tagging on your hardware.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

A Czech-based dev built a data center sim where you rack servers and run cables. No native Linux support but works with some FPS issues

📽️ Videos for You

Xfce can be customized to look (more) beautiful. This video shows how:

💡 Quick Handy Tip

Brave browser allows you to set a shortcut to copy the URL of the current tab. For this, go to Brave Settings -> System -> Shortcuts. Here, search for Copy URL and add a keybind to it.

In the screenshot above, CTRL+SHIFT+C is added as the shortcut. This overwrites the default inspect function, which it was mapped to earlier. So tread with caution and try to add a non-conflicting shortcut.

If your browser does not support this, you can use CTRL+L to access the address bar and then CTRL+C to copy the URL of the current tab.

📚 Don't Miss! Linux eBook bundle

Humble Bundle has brought back the "Linux for Seasoned Admins" ebook bundle offer (partner link). From the classic Linux Pocket Guide and my favorite, Efficient Linux at the Command Line, the bundle also has ebooks on Docker, Ansible, Kubernetes and other devops aspects of Linux.

And your purchase also supports the Code for America initiative.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Can you beat this crossword and become the Daemon Hunter?

🤣 Meme of the Week: The pain is real. 🥲

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On March 1, 1960, the first LISP Programmer's Manual was released by John McCarthy's group at MIT. McCarthy had built a recursive, symbolic language that would go on to become the foundation of AI programming and outlast nearly every other high-level language of its era.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: FOSSers are talking about the upcoming secure boot changes, and how it might affect those on Linux.

I know not everyone wants to hear about AI all the time. But at this point, it’s impossible to ignore what’s happening.

It has been just a year since Anthropic launched Claude Code and the impact has been staggering.

In recent months, engineers at Anthropic reportedly stopped writing code manually for large parts of their workflow. Instead, they’ve been shipping feature after feature with AI-assisted development. The velocity is unlike anything we’ve seen before.

And the market noticed. Claude’s latest model release this month reportedly wiped out trillions of dollars from IT stocks globally within a single week.

Then came another shock.

A week later, Anthropic published a blog post claiming its AI can now modernize legacy COBOL codebases. IBM’s stock dropped 16% in a single day. Why? Because IBM still generates significant revenue maintaining mainframe systems that power banks, airlines, and critical financial infrastructure.

And don’t assume this only affects programmers. This shift touches all of us.

A recent research paper showed that tools like Claude and ChatGPT can de-anonymize your anonymous online identity with surprising ease.

The barrier to uncovering digital identities is collapsing. AI isn’t just changing how code is written. It’s changing privacy, security, and the economics of entire industries.

But here’s the important part.

Every major computing shift felt destabilizing at first; from assembly to high-level languages, from physical servers to the cloud. We’re witnessing the beginning of a new era. And we’re still early.

Here's the highlight of this edition of FOSS Weekly:

• Red Hat open-sourcing a tool.
• Some dock options for your system.
• Lightweight OpenClaw alternatives.
• New KDE Plasma release with many upgrades.
• And other Linux news, tips, and, of course, memes!

Humble Bundle has brought back the "Linux for Seasoned Admins" ebook bundle offer (partner link). From the classic Linux Pocket Guide and my favorite, Efficient Linux at the Command Line, the bundle also has ebooks on Docker, Ansible, Kubernetes and other devops aspects of Linux.

And your purchase also supports the Code for America initiative.

📰 Linux and Open Source News

Here's a summary of the news this week.

Red Hat has open-sourced a digital sovereignty assessment tool under the Apache 2.0 license. It asks 21 questions across 7 domains and scores organizations on a four-level maturity scale.

KDE Plasma 6.6 just landed with some practical upgrades. Spectacle now does OCR so you can pull text straight from screenshots, there's a new setup wizard for fresh installs, and WiFi QR code scanning works if you've got a camera.

Colorado's pushing a bill that would force operating system makers to ask users their age at setup, then share that info with every app they install. The bill never explains how age gets verified. Anyone could just lie.

Independent web browser Ladybird just ported 25,000 lines of its JavaScript engine from C++ to Rust in two weeks using Claude Code and Codex AI. The code passed 52,000+ tests with zero failures.

Australia's cyber agency recently open-sourced Azul, a malware analysis platform for incident responders. It stores samples indefinitely, automates reverse engineering with reusable plugins, and clusters patterns across malware families.

ONLYOFFICE's latest desktop editor release brings improvements to its PDF editing capabilities among other things.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

App stores work great until you need real package control. This opinion piece by Roland argues Linux needs a modern Synaptic replacement for power users, but built with the Wayland security model in mind instead of running everything as root.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

Our comprehensive guide to keyboard shortcuts in Linux Mint covers everything from basics like Super for the start menu and Ctrl+Alt+T for the terminal to workspace management, window tiling, screenshots, and session control.

Looking to replace your Linux desktop's default dock? We covered seven options ranging from lightweight Plank to the heavily customizable Latte and the old-school Cairo. Also includes a window manager-friendly pick like Tint2.

Linux distros are switching to Wayland by default, but legacy apps still need Xorg, so knowing which display server you're running matters when troubleshooting. A quick terminal command reveals whether you're on Wayland or X11.

echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

OpenClaw's memory hunger kills it on Raspberry Pi and cheap SBCs. Here are some projects that remedy it by building an AI agent architecture for constrained hardware.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

To-do apps usually mine your data for ads. Super Productivity doesn't collect anything, just asks for notification access. It also offers Jira sync, Pomodoro timers, and time tracking.

📽️ Videos for You

In the llatest video, I share how I clean up systemd logs on my Linux systems, both desktop and servers.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

In Linux Mint (Cinnamon desktop), you can right-click the title of a window and enable "Always on Top" and "Always on Visible Workspace". This ensures that the currently open window stays on your current workspace, and will be above every other app window.

You will also find this on other modern desktop environments like KDE Plasma and GNOME as well.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Can you correctly guess these legendary open source projects?

🤣 Meme of the Week: Oh, how the times change. From Arch Linux to Debian.

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On February 25, 1959, MIT and the U.S. Air Force debuted APT (Automatically Programmed Tool) (I know you thought about the Linux one). It was the world’s first "English-like" programming language for machinery, effectively birthing Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM).

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: The Apache Software Foundation is looking for people to present at Community Over Code 2026 in Glasgow. Are you up for it?

If that's not your cup of tea, why not talk with a fellow FOSSer about their kernel panic issue.

Imagine this: You're on Reddit, Hacker News, or some forum, posting with a silly username like GamerCat2025 or SecretCoderX. You think you are anonymous, and no one knows you and so you can freely express your thoughts.

Well, a brand-new research paper just blew that idea apart. It's called "Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs" which is a fancy way of saying "figuring out the real person behind a secret online name".

The researchers include people ETH Zurich and, Anthropic (parent company of Claude), and a research group called MATS and they proved that today's super-powerful AI chatbots can play detective and unmask people way better than ever before.

How does it work?

Think of the AI as a detective like Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes. Only this detective is super fast and super smart. It has read every single post ever written online. Here's how their system works in simple steps:

1. Read and spot clues: The AI looks at your posts and pulls out little hints about you. Things you that are part of your personality. Like it can see that this person talks a lot about coding games in Python, loves Marvel movies, complains about school in Seattle, and types with a certain style.
2. Search the whole internet: It quietly checks LinkedIn, Google, other Reddit accounts, etc., to find possible real people who match those clues.
3. Think hard and double-check: The AI reasons like "Is this a match? The writing style is the same, the hobbies line up, the timing fits... yep, 90% sure!"

The researchers called their method ESRC which stands for Extract clues, Search, Reason, Calibrate how sure they are. No human needed; it's all automatic.

Pretty (scary) impressive results

If you think it's all theory, you are going to be disappointed.

On real Hacker News users, the AI correctly linked the secret username to the real person 67% of the time, and when it made a guess, it was right 90%. The paper also states that matching the same person's Reddit posts from different years or groups met with 68% success.

That's not the scary part. The thing is that it costs only upto $4 to check a person. Anyone with a good chatbot (think future ChatGPT or Claude) could do it.

One of the main researchers, Simon Lermen, said it straight:

Could a team of smart investigators figure out who you are from your posts? If yes, these AI agents can likely do the same – and the cost is only going down.

Private life becomes less private

Until now, staying hidden online was pretty easy because it took human experts hours or days. Now? One person (or a bad guy, a bully, a stalker, a company, or even government) can run this on thousands of accounts super fast.

This means that someone could find your real name, school, city, or job from just a few comments. Stalkers or bullies could dox you. Companies could secretly link all your accounts and track everything you do.

The old idea that "if I use a fake name, I'm safe" doesn't work anymore. It's the end of practical obscurity. Meaning you used to be kind of hidden in practice, but not anymore. Welcome to a new kind of 1984!