It's Foss News

Based on Arch Linux, SteamOS is a powerful and heavily customizable gaming distribution that's been optimized for Steam's vast library of games and handheld play.

It combines the bleeding-edge experience of Arch Linux with an intuitive user interface and a host of supporting drivers, delivering a portable gaming experience that's only matched by the likes of the Nintendo Switch.

While SteamOS was initially meant for the Steam Deck, it does run on other hardware, and now, with its latest release, there’s better support for third-party handhelds, making it easier for gamers to take advantage of what it has to offer.

SteamOS 3.7.8: What's New?

The Legion Go, ROG Ally, and the Steam Deck.

Starting things off, we have the Legion Go S, which is now treated as an officially supported handheld by Valve, marking a significant turning point for SteamOS's hardware compatibility efforts.

Alongside this, they've improved support for AMD-powered third-party handhelds, including better compatibility with the ROG Ally and the original Legion Go. To go with that, they have put out an FAQ, guiding users on how to install SteamOS on AMD-powered handhelds.

Moving on from the hardware side of things, this release brings several important upgrades. SteamOS now uses a newer Arch Linux base, alongside Linux kernel 6.11 and an updated Mesa implementation.

For the desktop experience, it makes use of KDE Plasma 6.2.5, with refinements like faster desktop/game mode switching, KDE Filelight being used for tracking disk usage, and tweaks for surround sound.

This update also enhances Bluetooth support by improving connectivity and stability for wireless controllers and accessories. Bluetooth devices no longer wake the Steam Deck from suspend mode when Bluetooth is disabled in desktop mode, and battery levels for supported devices are now displayed.

Additionally, a new battery charge limit feature is here, allowing users to set a charge limit for extending the battery life of their handhelds.

Some other notable highlights include:

Support for the ByoWave Proteus controller.The introduction of AMD P-State CPU frequency control.Better dual-booting, with duplicate boot entries no longer being a problem.Fix for an issue where corrupt configuration files would prevent system updates from applying.

You can refer to the release notes for more details.

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If that name sounds unfamiliar to you, GNU Taler is a free, open source digital payment system that has been built from the ground up to provide fast, secure, and privacy-respecting payments.

Don't think that this is a new currency or anything. It is just a tool for handling fiat currencies like euros, dollars, francs, etc. where the payer's identity remains anonymous, while the merchant/business who uses it remains fully auditable for tax and regulation purposes.

This makes it a natural fit for Switzerland, a country known for its strict standards on privacy, security, and financial compliance—values that closely align with GNU Taler’s core principles.

GNU Taler is Ready for Switzerland

GNU Taler live demo.

With the formation of Taler Operations AG, GNU Taler has legally entered the Swiss market, enabling it to operate its privacy-focused payment system using Swiss franc.

While the newly formed subsidiary is not directly supervised by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), it is a member of VQF, a FINMA-recognized self-regulatory organization (SRO), which allows it to operate in accordance with Swiss regulations.

This news coincided with the release of GNU Taler 1.0, the first stable release that marks a major milestone in the project's development. It introduces over 200 changes, with the highlights including:

Various bug fixes and user experience enhancements.Withdrawing now using a single signature instead of one per coin.Security issues found by an external audit of the iOS app being addressed.Per-recipient statistics being added to exchange for better anomaly detection.

The announcement blog has additional details if you are interested in learning more.

Get GNU Taler

For a quick peek at what GNU Taler has to offer, you can take the live demo for a run. It offers a bank interface, a wallet extension, a dummy online shop, and a few other things.

If that impresses you, whether as an individual user or an organization exploring payment integration, you can visit the official website to find out how to deploy it.

GNU Taler

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Fedora has been leading the way when it comes to Wayland adoption on Linux systems, well before any other major distribution went down that path. It was the first to ship with Wayland by default on GNOME, setting the stage for what will hopefully become the future of the Linux desktop.

With each new release, Fedora has doubled down on this approach, continuously polishing the experience, contributing upstream to GNOME, and pushing for broader Wayland adoption across the Linux ecosystem.

A recently closed issue sees them carry out a major change for the GNOME-equipped Fedora Workstation.

What's Happening: As part of the upcoming Fedora 43 release, Workstation will no longer feature an X11 session, defaulting to a Wayland-only policy, with all X11 packages being removed from the new release that is set to come equipped with GNOME 49.

Fastfetch output of Fedora Workstation 41 Wayland session.

The change proposal was pitched by Neal Gompa of the FESCo, who mentioned that:

Fedora Workstation has a long history of developing and promoting the Wayland experience for GNOME, and it has been the primary experience for all users (including those with NVIDIA cards) since Fedora Linux 36.

This continuation of the work in Fedora Linux 41 to drop the X11 session from the media reaffirms our commitment to the Wayland GNOME experience in furtherance of the goal to provide the highest quality GNOME experience through Fedora Workstation.

What to Expect: For starters, all GNOME X11 components will be removed from Fedora Workstation. As a result, the GNOME X11 session will no longer be available, and existing users will be automatically switched to the Wayland session.

Those who prefer using X11 will have to either switch to using a different login manager and desktop environment combo that supports X11 or move to Fedora Spins such as Xfce, Cinnamon, or MATE, which will continue to offer X11 sessions.

Plus, it’s only a matter of time before GNOME drops X11 completely. GNOME 50 is already targeting this change, having removed X11 session targets, with the full removal of X11 session code panned next.

That said, Wayland’s come a long way, but it still has some rough edges that can cause issues with certain apps and tools, disrupting a user's desktop experience.

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Linux Jargon Buster: What is a Display Server in Linux? What is it Used for?In Linux related articles, news and discussions, you’ll often come across the term display server, Xorg, Wayland etc. In this explainer article, I’ll discuss display servers in Linux. What is display server in Linux? A display server is a program which is responsible for the input and outputIt's FOSSDimitrios

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Designed to be simple, flexible, and non-proprietary, RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) that defines the set of instructions a processor can execute.

Developed and maintained by RISC-V International, a Swiss-based non-profit, RISC-V's open architecture allows anyone to design, implement, and fabricate custom CPUs without worries of licensing fees.

We were already seeing a steady rise in its adoption, and a recent slew of announcements has only accelerated RISC-V's upward trend.

RISC-V Adoption is on The Rise

RISC-V International's webpage.

In collaboration with SiFive, Red Hat is launching a developer preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (RHEL) for the HiFive Premier P550 platform, with the aim of gathering community feedback and accelerating support for RISC-V.

To go with that, they are also working on providing a CentOS Stream 10 version that supports RISC-V, giving developers early access so that they can build, test, and contribute to the platform.

Downloads for both are expected to show up on June 1, 2025. You can read the announcement blog to learn more.

On the other hand, Rocky Linux has announced that the upcoming Rocky Linux 10 release will officially support the RISC-V architecture, thanks to the work of their AltArch SIG (special interest group).

While they are not treating the RISC-V build (riscv64gc) as a "primary architecture", where build failures won't halt Rocky Linux releases for other architectures, the included support for RISC-V hardware is quite reasonable.

At launch, the StarFive VisionFive 2 will be fully supported; there will be partial support for the SiFive HiFive P550 platform; no support for boards from Milk-V or Banana Pi; and full testing and evaluation support via QEMU.

Undoubtedly, things are looking up for RISC-V when it comes to Linux. I am hoping that the platform eventually matures enough to be suitable for general-purpose use, not just specialized applications.

By contrast, Windows has focused its attention on proprietary ARM-based platforms and has given no indication that it will support the RISC-V architecture any time soon.

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📜TL;DRInstead of paying to the company behind XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra or opting for the self-manage open source version, a million-dollar company opted to create dummy accounts to exploit the 30-day trial policy for 10 years.

Open source projects are no stranger to organizations taking advantage of their offerings without any form of appreciation, support, or endorsement of any kind. This phenomenon is widely recognized as the "free-rider problem", where individuals or organizations benefit from open source software without contributing in any meaningful capacity.

A recent revelation by Olivier Lambert, CEO of Vates and the creator of Xen Orchestra and XCP-ng, shows how low some organizations can go when they are focused on cutting costs while completely disregarding the efforts of open source developers.

A $130M Cheapskate: What the Heck?

A fitting name for the offending unnamed organization.

Referred to as a semi-governmental organization of around $130 million in revenue that deals in building expensive space doodads, the unnamed organization is said to be running hundreds of physical hosts and nearly 4,000 virtual machines, with most of their IT stack running on Xen Orchestra.

Like many other open source software, Xen Orchestra offers managed services for a fee. So anyone who wants to use Xen Orchestra has two options: they download the open source version and host and manage everything on their own. Or, they pay a fee to Xen Orchestra and get full support from them.

Instead of opting for the self-hostable, fully open source Xen Orchestra and setting it up themselves, this organization has been abusing the free 30-day trial (formerly 15 days) for over a decade.

In the past, the Vates team has reached out to the offending organization, offering them support for their issues, and even spent nearly a full day assisting them during their early "we’re just testing, maybe planning to buy" phase.

But over time, it became clear that this organization wasn’t interested in a proper commitment, only in exploiting the free trial to avoid paying for the software.

Any Guesses on What's Happening?

Source: MasterChiefmas

A Redditor's theory on what could be happening caught my eye. They speculate that someone from the unnamed organization created a script a long time ago, but they left, and no one in the current pool of employees knows how to work it.

So, rather than risk breaking anything or paying for a license, they’re happy abusing Xen Orchestra’s free trial.

Even Olivier suspects that they are probably running some script to automate the creation of new trials with phony email IDs. But to use their organization's name in every new trial account they make? How shameless and ignorant can they be?

Anyway, we don’t know exactly who did this, but if anyone from their team or management is reading, it’s time to clean up your act. 🙂

💬 Which organization do you think is involved in this cheapskate behavior? Let me know in the comments below!

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Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux, or WSL, is a compatibility layer that allows people to run Linux distributions directly on their Windows machines, foregoing the need to configure a virtual machine or dual-boot setup.

So far, 2025 has been an eventful year for WSL, as major Linux distributions like Fedora and Arch Linux officially started offering images for it, with Ubuntu switching to its new tar-based distribution format earlier this year.

Just when it seemed things were settlWSLing down for WSL, Microsoft went ahead and open sourced it.

WSL Goes Open: What to Expect?

Just a placeholder image of WSL running Arch Linux.

Open sourced under the MIT License, WSL is now fully available for anyone to inspect, modify, and contribute to, with its very first GitHub issue, opened back in April 2016, now finally closed nine years later.

Microsoft says that it open sourced WSL to encourage community contributions and accelerate its development while improving Linux support on Windows.

This release joins their existing line-up of open source WSL components like the WSLg, which handles Wayland and X11 support, and the WSL2-Linux-Kernel, which is the source for the Linux kernel used on WSL2.

WSL's architecture as shared by Microsoft.

Microsoft also shared an overview of WSL's architecture, showing how it leverages the Linux kernel running inside a lightweight virtual machine with tight Windows integration.

This setup allows Linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch Linux, etc. to run on Windows with full system compatibility and access to files, networking, and graphical utilities.

If you're interested in exploring the source code, contributing to WSL's development, or forking it for your own projects, check out the official documentation and GitHub repository.

WSL (GitHub)

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Ubuntu 25.10 "Questing Quokka" is the next interim release that's on track to be a packed release, with the notable inclusion of sudo-rs and other Rust-based components signaling the oxidation of Ubuntu.

It is expected for an October 2025 release, but meanwhile, a development update by Canonical highlights what we can expect from it.

Ubuntu 25.10's New Terminal and Image Viewer

As revealed by The Questing Quokka Roadmap, Ubuntu 25.10 is set to arrive with the upcoming GNOME 49 release, which is expected to deliver many upgrades to further refine the desktop experience for users.

In line with that, they have set out to include two new applications, Ptyxis and Loupe, which will respectively be the default terminal emulator and image viewer on Ubuntu 25.10.

Fastfetch output when using Ptyxis on Ubuntu 25.04.

A modern terminal emulator for GNOME, Ptyxis has been designed with a strong focus on providing container integration and an intuitive user experience for both developers and power users alike.

It has some really interesting features like integration for container tools like Podman, Distrobox, and Toolbx; a terminal inspector for debugging issues when writing terminal apps; a GTK4-based interface; and support for themes.

Ptyxis installation on Ubuntu, both APT and Flatpak methods.

If you can't wait for Ubuntu 25.10, then you can install Ptyxis on your Ubuntu system by running any one of the following commands.

For getting it via APT:

sudo apt install ptyxis

If you have Flatpak configured on your system, then you can run this:

flatpak install flathub app.devsuite.PtyxisOriginal Pic: Matheus Bertelli

Similarly, Loupe is the modern image viewer for GNOME, which was introduced as a replacement to the aging Eye of GNOME image viewer. Written in Rust, it takes advantage of GTK4 and Libadwaita to offer a sleek and responsive user interface that doesn't feel clunky.

Key features of it include extensive file format support, GPU-accelerated rendering, support for touch and gesture, detailed metadata display, and sandboxed image decoding to prevent insecure image file shenanigans.

Loupe installation on Ubuntu, both APT and Flatpak methods.

You can install Loupe on your Ubuntu system by running one of the following commands:

sudo apt install loupe #For APTflatpak install flathub org.gnome.Loupe #For Flatpak

But Wait, There's More!

Fedora Workstation already adopted these two as the default terminal and image viewing apps a long time ago. It's good to see that Ubuntu finally made the switch, as in the past, it has preferred sticking to proven/older applications.

So, far, the Ubuntu 25.10 release is shaping up to be a big one. The roadmap mentions many other cool changes, too, like:

Full support for the RISC-V architecture.A better Wayland experience on NVIDIA GPUs.Further work on the experimental TPM-backed Full Disk Encryption.Full implementation of Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support for a smoother visual experience.

At the risk of stating the obvious, this interim Ubuntu release is paving the way for the next long-term support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 26.04, which is scheduled to arrive in April 2026.

Via: OMG! Ubuntu

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Visual Studio Code is Microsoft's flagship code editor that is known for its speed, flexibility, and a vast ecosystem of extensions that few other code editors can match.

However, as AI-powered development tools rapidly establish themselves in the space, VS Code has found itself playing catch-up with its AI-powered forks like Cursor in this new era of AI-first IDEs.

In response, Microsoft has announced plans to open source one of its most popular AI extensions, GitHub Copilot Chat, under the MIT License and integrate it directly into VS Code.

What's Happening: Going forward, the VS Code team aims to embed AI tech deeply within the editor itself, moving away from relying on extensions for such capabilities. To achieve that, they plan to integrate relevant components from the extension into VS Code core, offering AI functionality as in-built features of the editor.

We already know how hard Microsoft has been pushing AI across its products and services, and now they’re not stopping there, making sure VS Code keeps up when it comes to AI features.

Do keep in mind that they’re not open-sourcing GitHub Copilot itself, just the Copilot Chat extension that brings AI chat features into VS Code.

What to Expect: The developers intend to gradually move key parts of the extension into VS Code once it’s open sourced. After that, contributors would fix bugs, test features, and help improve the AI.

Meanwhile, you can keep an eye out on Microsoft's GitHub project page, where the source code for the GitHub Copilot Chat extension should show up eventually. You can track progress on this by visiting the issue for it.

They have also put up an FAQ page if you would like to learn more.

GitHub

If you ask me, Microsoft's move hasn't come out of nowhere. VS Code-based editors like Windsurf have been gaining traction by offering AI-first coding experiences that feel faster and more native, while also paving the way for vibe coding.

VS Code, despite its popularity, started to look like it was falling behind, but this new push signals a clear intent to catch up and stay relevant in the AI-powered IDE space.

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FFmpeg is one of the most widely used open source multimedia frameworks globally, with it powering audio and video processing for applications like VLC, OBS Studio, HandBrake, Jellyfin, etc. and being widely used in live-streaming, including platforms like Twitch.

On the other hand, rav1d is a new Rust-based decoder developed by Prossimo that aims to be a memory-safe reimplementation of the C-based dav1d decoder, which is widely recognized as the fastest software AV1 decoder in use across multiple platforms.

A recent post by FFmpeg has reignited conversation surrounding the trade-offs between performance, cost, and memory safety when building such critical systems.

FFmpeg is Not Impressed

Rust is so good you can get paid $20k to make it as fast as C:https://t.co/HVDokmLk5r

— FFmpeg (@FFmpeg) May 15, 2025

Commenting on Prossimo's recent performance bounty program for rav1d, FFmpeg mentioned that "Rust is so good you can get paid $20k to make it as fast as C". That looks like a direct jab at Rust and the rav1d decoder to me. 😲

The performance bounty has set out to close a performance gap where rav1d is ~5% slower than dav1d. Prossimo is offering a sizable $20,000 as a reward for anyone who manages to close the gap.

They have put out a bunch of rules that restrict pretty much most of the world from contributing, limiting this bounty only to certain regions and excluding a large portion of the global developer community.

Are they Right?

The information technology industry has been steadily moving towards Rust, a programming language known for its memory safety and performance. The U.S. White House even formally endorsed the shift towards memory-safe programming languages in a 2024 report from the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD).

However, the push for Rust adoption hasn't been without controversy. One such instance is the effort to integrate it into the Linux kernel, which has faced resistance and internal tension, with a recent occurrence causing friction and resulting in the creation of a Rust kernel policy to prevent future conflicts.

Despite growing adoption, many in the developer community continue to question whether Rust’s benefits truly outweigh those of longstanding languages like C.

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In a significant show of support for open source developers, major organizations like Canonical, the ones behind Ubuntu, and Zerodha, the Indian brokerage and financial services giant, have made substantial contributions to open source initiatives.

This growing trend of corporate support underscores a shift towards collaborative, transparent, and community-driven software development that benefits a global ecosystem of developers, businesses, and users alike.

Canonical to Donate $120,000

Canonical has announced its intention to donate $120,000 to open source developers, collaborating with thank.dev to disburse $10,000 every month, with an algorithm deciding which open source developer gets how much.

The donations have already begun since April, with Canonical donating to projects that it depends on to ship its products and services. So far, they have donated a total of $20,000 to open source projects, with the amounts ranging from $496.95-$20.

Thanks.dev allocates the funds based on how widely dependencies are used across projects, ensuring more popular packages receive a larger share. While the platform allows fine-tuning by programming language and GitHub organization, Canonical has chosen to adjust only the language-level weights for now.

For a better understanding of how the algorithm works, you can go through the official resource on this topic.

Zerodha joins Open Source Pledge

Zerodha, along with many other organizations like Posit, Sanity, Tideways, and a few others, have joined NASDAQ's Open Source Pledge, which is now 34 members strong.

It is a commitment by companies to help close the funding gap for smaller open source projects. Many of these projects are maintained by developers who receive little to no compensation, despite their software being widely used. The pledge offers direct, no-strings-attached financial support to help maintainers sustain their work.

According to their members page, companies have paid a total of $2,650,212 to open source maintainers over the past year.

If you ask me, it's good to see open source support moving from one-time donations to more regular, reliable contributions.

With companies using platforms like thanks.dev and joining efforts like the Open Source Pledge initiative, it's clear there's a growing understanding that open source needs steady, ongoing support, not just occasional contributions to stay healthy and sustainable.

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Having a good wallpaper on your Android smartphone is an essential part of personalizing your device. 🎨

Whenever you feel that the default wallpaper collection on your phone too limited, you're likely to end up with an ad-infested wallpaper app you downloaded from the Play Store that's too intrusive, forcing you to watch ads before you can download anything.

What if I told you there's an open source wallpaper app that doesn’t do any of that — and instead offers beautifully recreated Pixel wallpapers?

Doodle: A Collection of Pixel Wallpapers

Doodle's About, Main, and Appearance pages.

Developed by Patrick Zedler, a developer out of Germany, Doodle is a Java-based wallpaper app. It features the original Doodle wallpaper collection from the Pixel 4 and the unreleased Material You static wallpaper collection of the Pixel 6.

The "Appearance" page is where you will find all the wallpapers, with three distinct categories that have additional controls to select a wallpaper's variant, add an accent color to the smartphone's interface, set a daily random wallpaper, and toggle night mode.

If you go for one of the three live wallpapers, you have the option to enable the "Swipe" and "Tilt" effects, which makes the live wallpaper react according to the actions performed. If you swipe on the home screen, the live wallpaper will move; if you tilt your device, the live wallpaper will react accordingly.

As you saw above, it's very simple to set live and static wallpapers using Doodle.

If you prefer additional control, you can go into the "Parallax", "Shape size" and "Other options" menus to tweak the animation of live wallpapers, change the app color theme, set a higher level of contrast, and toggle hardware acceleration.

Doodle's Parallax, Shape size, and Other options pages.

I did face some issues with my test setup: an Android 14-equipped Samsung smartphone that was running One UI 6.1. I was unable to use the Swipe effect and Accent Colors. Doodle does mention that there are issues with how the default launcher, One UI Home, handles certain UI elements, so this was not a surprise for me.

When locking/unlocking my device, the live wallpaper sometimes bugged out, and the system's transition from light mode to dark mode required a relaunch of the app for the wallpaper to switch between its light/dark variant.

In the end, I think Doodle could really benefit from offering more non-Pixel wallpaper options. The current collection looks great, but having a few original or differently styled wallpapers would make the app even better.

Install Doodle

The source code is hosted over at GitHub under GPLv3 licensing, with F-Droid and the Play Store being the most straightforward way of getting the latest Doodle release.

Doodle

💬 Know of a wallpaper app that is open source and offers more choices? Let me know below!

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In August last year, dual-booting Windows and Linux on Secure Boot-enabled systems was broken due to a faulty security update that was meant to address a GRUB bootloader vulnerability that allowed malicious actors to bypass Secure Boot's safety mechanisms.

Luckily, there's now a proper fix for this, as Microsoft has quietly released a new patch on May 13, 2025, addressing the issue nine months after it was first reported.

Windows is Dual-boot Friendly Again

Just a placeholder image of the Windows Update page.

Labeled as KB5058385, the patch aims to mitigate the issues caused by the August 2024 security update by refining how Secure Boot Advanced Targeting (SBAT) detects and interacts with dual-boot systems, particularly those running Windows and Linux.

This improves the logic used to identify legitimate Linux bootloaders, preventing them from being incorrectly blocked or triggering "Security Policy Violation" errors during startup.

The fix is for affected Windows versions like Windows 11 23H2, 22H2, 21H2; Windows 10 21H2; and Windows Enterprise 2015 LTSB, Windows Server 2022, 2019, 2016, 2012, 2012 R2.

As for how to get this update, in usual Windows fashion, this patch will be automatically applied via Windows Update for affected installations. In my case, running Windows 11 24H2, KB5058385 doesn’t show up separately, so the fix might already be included, though Microsoft hasn’t confirmed this.

Closing Thoughts

While it's reassuring that Microsoft finally did something to address the issue, they took their sweet time getting there. Meanwhile, many dual-boot users were left with borked setups, having to use workarounds or disable Secure Boot altogether.

This occurrence highlights how slow they can be in fixing things when the issue isn’t related to their core Windows experience (read AI features), leaving niche, but important user groups like dual-boot Linux users in the dark.

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As a globally recognized nonprofit dedicated to fostering innovation and collaboration in the open source space, The Linux Foundation empowers IT professionals with its up-to-date training and certification programs.

Now, their May 2025 deal has surprised us by offering significant savings across most of their catalog, with discounts ranging from 10% to 50%. The deal covers a wide variety of topics like Linux system administration, Kubernetes, cloud native technologies, security, and more.

⏲️ The last date for the deal is May 20, 2025.

📋This article contains affiliate links. Please read our affiliate policy for more information.

This Spring, Invest in Learning

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Get 40% off on these by using the coupon code: MAY25.

Besides that, you can also browse The Linux Foundation's entire catalog if you are looking for something specific.

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Built for the needs of the seasoned developer, Warp (referral link) is a Rust-based, cross-platform terminal app that combines traditional shell workflows with a slick UI, AI-powered features, and real-time collaboration tools.

In its latest blog post, Warp introduces a range of enhancements that push its capabilities even further.

🚧Warp is not FOSS, we cover it because it is available for Linux.

MCP in Warp: What to Expect?

Available as an early preview, Warp now has experimental support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing it to process external services and data like files and repositories to deliver more relevant, context-aware AI assistance via its Agent Mode.

If you haven’t noticed already, MCP is rapidly gaining traction in the AI developer community as the go-to standard for connecting AI models with real-time, actionable insights, and Warp isn’t wasting any time jumping on board.

Beyond that, Warp's latest stable release also brings several improvements, like command searches via the Command Palette being faster than before, support for the kitty graphics protocol to render images directly in the terminal, support for syncing settings across devices, and ligature support for better readability.

A quick demo of the kitty graphics protocol in action on Warp.

There are also a few upgrades for Warp's AI, which now supports desktop notifications for Agent alerts, support for continuing past conversations, better codebase search for specific keywords (symbols, variables, function names), and the ability to efficiently handle edits on files with over 10,000 lines of code.

Get Warp

The latest builds of Warp are available on the official website (partner link), where you will find installable packages for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Warp

Existing users just need to update their Warp installation to get these new features (excl MCP). To do that, you can either bring up the Command Palette using Ctrl+Shift+P and search "update", or you can go into Settings ⇾ Accounts and click on "Check for updates".

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There's no dearth of self-hosted cloud platforms out there, but searching for one that's open source and reliable? The list shrinks considerably. Nextcloud is one such option that allows people to store, share, and manage their files, calendars, contacts, and various other data.

Unfortunately, they now find themselves at odds with Google, who refuses to budge on a critical issue that's been plaguing their Play Store application since September 2024.

Google's Double Standards on Display

Original pic courtesy of Nextcloud.

Since last year, the Nextcloud app hasn't been able to upload non-media files like documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, etc., due to Google's restriction on file access permissions. As a result, users can only upload images and videos using the Play Store version of Nextcloud.

Following widespread complaints from users, Nextcloud raised many appeals with Google, seeking a resolution to the issues. However, despite these efforts, they received no meaningful responses or solutions from them.

They have since put up a notice (as shown above) on their Play Store app, notifying users of the file upload issue. Nextcloud understands that filing a legal case against a company like Google is unlikely to yield results, as smaller organizations like theirs can't sustain lengthy legal battles.

Commenting on the situation, Johannes Poortvliet, Communications Director at Nextcloud, stated that:

Our nearly 1M users on Android can no longer upload files because Google denied us access in name of "security". Purely a technical decision, they said. Of course, their own apps, as well as those from Microsoft, Dropbox, Box and other US tech firms are not subject to this limitation. Just a coincidence, I'm sure.

Dear European Commission, when are you going to do something to protect European businesses against this anti-competitive behavior? Before answering, may I remind you that almost 4 years ago we filed a formal complaint about Microsoft's gatekeeping and you did nothing.

I understand Nextcloud’s frustration here. But this isn’t the first time Google has arbitrarily crippled the functionality of third-party apps it deems unworthy. In this case, it seems they’re either deliberately obstructing or are simply too incompetent to resolve the issue, neither of which reflects well on a company as massive as Google.

What to do Now?

You could bombard Google with requests to fix the issue, but unless this story blows up everywhere, the tech giant isn't likely to pay attention anytime soon.

If you are one of the people who was affected by this, Nextcloud recommends installing the F-Droid version of their app for unhindered access to all functionality. You can get the same from GitHub too.

Nextcloud Files (F-Droid)

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The researchers over at UC Berkeley have developed the Berkeley Humanoid Lite to cater to hobbyists, researchers, and educators. It is an open source humanoid robot that is cheap, 3D printable, and customizable as per one's needs.

The prices for such humanoid robots can range upwards of $100,000, but the Berkeley Humanoid Lite costs just under $5,000. All the components required for assembling the robot can be sourced from popular e-commerce platforms and fabricated using commonly available desktop 3D printers.

The team behind this project consists of UC Berkeley Ph.D. students who designed the robot to be affordable, modular, and open source, democratizing access to advanced humanoid robotics for education and research purposes.

This initiative comes at a time when the humanoid robotics field is often criticized for its lack of transparency, with customization of such robots being largely restricted due to the proprietary nature of most commercial models.

Going open source could be a game changer, as it removes the barriers of proprietary restrictions, allowing anyone to access, modify, and innovate on top of the underlying design.

DIY Neuroscience: Meet the Open Source PiEEG Kit for Brain and Body SignalsThe PiEEG kit is an open source, portable biosignal tool designed for research, measuring EEG, EMG, EKG, and EOG signals. Want to crowdfund the project?It's FOSS NewsSourav Rudra

📝Berkeley Humanoid Lite: Key Specifications

Weighing in at just under 16 kg (~35.27 lbs), the robot consists of a compact onboard computer, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), 3D-printed body parts, and a 6S 4000 mAh LiPo battery.

The robot features a total of 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) per leg and 5 DOF per arm, allowing it to perform a wide range of motions essential for adaptive tasks. These actuated joints enable it to walk, manipulate objects, and interact naturally with its environment.

Another standout innovation in its design is the use of 3D-printed cycloidal gearboxes. These components significantly reduce production costs and simplify both assembly and maintenance.

Source: Berkeley Humanoid

To demonstrate its adaptability, the team integrated a teleoperation system using SteamVR tracking, enabling intuitive, real-time control regardless of the operator’s position.

As demonstrated above, the Berkeley Humanoid Lite showcases impressive versatility, effectively performing a range of tasks such as walking, packing and unpacking items, solving a Rubik’s Cube, writing, and seamlessly responding to remote control commands.

At the core of its mobility is a reinforcement learning-based locomotion controller. Operating in a bipedal configuration, this controller can interpret user-specified velocity commands and execute stable, efficient walking behaviors.

By sharing all design materials openly, the project creators are inviting everyone to join their mission of accelerating innovation in humanoid robotics through collaboration, accessibility, and hands-on experimentation.

You can also go through the technical paper for the Berkeley Humanoid Lite if you are up for an in-depth read.

The affordable pricing makes me wonder if the time to 'own' robots for household chores is near. And if that happens, how long till we have the 'revolt of machines' at our hands? Maybe I should stop watching sci-fi movies. Your turn to share the opinion in the comments.

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A few days back, we reported how Oregon University's Open Source Lab was facing closure after a funding deficit threatened its existence, making them ask for support from the FOSS community and corporate sponsors.

Thankfully, the call for support worked, paving the way for the OSUOSL to look ahead, into what the future holds for them.

What's Happening: Focusing on two primary objectives, the OSUOSL is looking to build a stable financial backbone that keeps it self-sufficient beyond 2025. They aim to achieve this by pushing for annualized pledges, new avenues for a constant revenue stream, and other similar fund-raising measures.

The OSUOSL is also searching for a new location as their current data center is over 20 years old, with a focus on replacing the aging hardware with a few generations old, power-efficient, refurbished server hardware. This would be in line with their sustainable infrastructure strategy.

As for the location, they want a place that can accommodate 13–20 racks and is ideally situated between Eugene and Portland in the state of Oregon, with a low-cost/free hosting solution to keep expenses in check.

What's Next: With these prerequisites in place, the OSUOSL intends to expand their student program, strengthen their managed services portfolio for open source projects, introduce modern tooling like Kubernetes and Terraform, and encourage more community volunteers to actively contribute.

Wrapping up the announcement, Lance Albertson, the Director of OSUOSL, added that:

The recent encouragement has been fantastic. Now, help us build a truly sustainable foundation. Securing a cost-effective data center and robust multi-year financial partnerships are the critical next steps for the OSL’s future.Thank you for your continued belief in the OSL!

💬 It’s great to see that the OSUOSL received the support it needed, and I’m excited to see how they build on it. What about you?

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Usually, when a Linux user is configuring a fresh distro installation, they install VLC to handle media playback, and there's a good reason behind that. It's one of the best open source video players around, providing a reliable, feature-rich experience with support for a wide range of media formats.

However, the pre-installed video players in desktop environments like GNOME are quite capable for basic media playback. While most people ignore it, having such a utility as part of the stock experience is a great thing.

That being said, GNOME has decided to replace the aging Totem video player with the newer Showtime video player for its future releases.

They have been doing this for the past few releases. They replaced the legacy terminal, text editor and document viewer with a new breed of applications. It's time for the video player now.

Totem Out, Showtime In: What to Expect?

Original video by Vitaliy Bratkov.

Newly included in the Core Apps suite, Showtime is set to replace Totem as the default video player on the upcoming GNOME 49. The reasoning behind this move is quite straightforward.

Totem was getting old, both in terms of its GTK3-based codebase and lack of active development. This put it at odds with GNOME's push towards more modern, maintainable applications built with GTK4 and Libadwaita.

As with other GNOME Core Apps, Showtime will be renamed to “Video Player” when it is officially included in a GNOME release. This generic naming scheme helps with consistency across the GNOME ecosystem and makes it more accessible for new users.

Totem on the left, Showtime on the right.

I took a quick look at both Totem and Showtime, and I must say, Totem looks so dated. While it works fine, Showtime felt more intuitive, and its minimal, distraction-free design ensured that I didn’t have to stumble around looking for options.

Though, Totem does support DVD playback, while Showtime doesn't. This feature can still be useful for users who rely on physical media.

Want to Try it Out?

Showtime is available on Flathub for easy installation on Linux systems, with the source code being hosted over at GNOME's GitLab instance.

Showtime (Flathub)

You can also run one of the following commands to get it:

flatpak install flathub org.gnome.Showtimesudo apt install showtime #For Debian/Ubuntu

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openSUSE is one of the preferred choices for people who don't like using Ubuntu or Fedora. It is a community-driven Linux distribution backed by SUSE, the German multinational that specializes in open source software.

By leveraging the community repositories, openSUSE users have the option to install Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE), a modern-looking desktop environment that offers some novel features, catering to a sizable user base.

Though, that is no longer the case.

What's Happening: Announced two days ago, the openSUSE developers have decided to drop Deepin Desktop from their community repos, citing lack of package maintenance consistency and security concerns.

You see, there have been serious security issues in Deepin Desktop's D-Bus and Polkit (PolicyKit) components, which were compounded by repeated violations of openSUSE's security review and packaging policies.

The last straw was drawn when it was discovered earlier this year that one of the Deepin Desktop maintainers effectively "smuggled" a package called "deepin-feature-enable" into openSUSE back in 2021.

This package implements a license agreement dialog that, when accepted by the user, would automatically extract and install unverified D-Bus configuration files and Polkit policies directly into the system, completely bypassing openSUSE's security review and whitelisting process.

The license agreement in question. (Source: openSUSE)

This is not the first time openSUSE had issues with Deepin Desktop. In 2017, the file manager’s D-Bus service could be impersonated by any user. In 2019, any user could register the D-Bus service without restrictions. In 2023, there were security flaws that allowed the loading of unsafe config files.

What to Expect: For users of openSUSE Leap 15.6, the deepin-feature-enable package will be removed, but the other packages will be left intact. On the other hand, for new openSUSE Tumbleweed releases and the upcoming openSUSE Leap 16.0 release, they won't include any Deepin Desktop packages.

Despite the issues, the developers have left the door open%20How%20to%20Continue%20Using%20Deepin%20on%20openSUSE,-Given%20the%20security) for people who wish to use Deepin Desktop regardless of these glaring problems, but they do not recommend it and include a disclaimer that users are fully responsible for trusting any Deepin Desktop packages they install.

If you ask me, this looks like a leaky ship blown to smithereens, with every bit of damage caused by its own cannon fire. In this case, it’s the Deepin Desktop maintainers dealing the final blow to their openSUSE implementation by failing to carry out their maintenance obligations.

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Built on top of Apache Lucene, OpenSearch is an open source, distributed search and analytics engine designed for real-time monitoring, analytics logging, and website search.

It's highly scalable nature allows users to handle large volumes of data across distributed systems, providing fast and powerful search capabilities, making it ideal for a wide range of applications, including AI and machine learning.

On that note, a new major release has arrived after three years, marking a significant evolution of the platform with major improvements across the board.

OpenSearch 3.0: What's New?

A live demo of OpenSearch Dashboards visualizing sample flight data, featuring an alpha version of OpenSearch 3.0.

Taking advantage of Lucene 10, OpenSearch 3.0 delivers major improvements in search and index performance, alongside the introduction of sparse indexing, which allows OpenSearch to efficiently group similar documents together, resulting in better CPU and storage utilization.

For search, this release improves hybrid search by using Z-score normalization and setting a minimum score limit to make results more accurate. It also adds inner hits support to show detailed scores and speeds up aggregations with better star-tree indexing for faster query responses.

As for its vector database capabilities, OpenSearch 3.0 features substantial advancements, with the notable ones being the experimental integration of GPU acceleration using NVIDIA cuVS for powering vector searches, the introduction of native Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, and semantic sentence highlighting.

OpenSearch 3.0 also improves query monitoring with a new Live Queries API for real-time tracking of running queries, a verbose parameter for optimizing dashboard performance, and dynamic columns that adapt to filters. All of these together enable efficient performance analysis and easier identification of resource-heavy queries.

We wrap this up with the deprecation of support for Ubuntu 20.04, which is set to reach the end of its standard support lifecycle on May 31, 2025. The official announcement blog and the release notes have additional information if you are up for a longer read.

Get OpenSearch 3.0

If you liked what you read, then you can try OpenSearch 3.0 with Docker Compose or download the relevant package for your operating system from the official website.

There is support for Linux, FreeBSD, Docker, and Windows, and the documentation is a valuable resource if you need help configuring OpenSearch.

OpenSearch 3.0

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You may disagree, but we think that the Pironman is the best case for Raspberry Pi 5. It gives your Pi a miniature gaming rig look with RGB lights and tower fans. It also adds SSD option among other enhancements.

Specializing in STEM education, SunFounder is a company known for its Arduino kits, displays, and smart devices. Pironman 5 case is one of their most popular products.

Now, this awesome case is getting an upgrade in the form of Pironman Max.

Pironman 5-MAX Dual NVMe M.2 SSD PCIe PC Case for Raspberry Pi 5 NAS RAID 0/1 Hailo-8L AI Accelerator PWM Tower Cooler+Dual RGB Fans, 0.96″ OLED Module, Safe Shutdown, Standard HDMI, RGB LED, RTCRaspberry Pi 5-MAX PC Case: Unlock the full potential of your Raspberry Pi 5 with the Pironman 5-MAX — our most advanced case yet. Featuring dual NVMe M.2 slots with RAID 0/1 support, AI accelerator compatibility (e.g. Hailo-8L), a PCIe Gen2 switch, PWM tower cooling + dual RGB fans, dual transparent panels with RGB liSunFounderSunFounder

📝 Pironman 5-MAX: Key Specifications

On first look, you will notice that the Pironman 5-MAX has a much stealthier look with its black aluminum chassis when compared to the Pironman 5.

The differences don't stop there. 😃

The 5-MAX comes equipped with two plug-in M.2 NVMe slots that have a built-in PCIe Gen2 switch and support for RAID 0/1. It can also be used to attach one NVMe SSD and one Hailo-8L AI Accelerator, enabling it to handle lightweight AI workloads with up to 13 TOPS of performance.

The familiar OLED display makes a return, showing real-time insights of the Raspberry Pi, with metrics like CPU usage, memory usage, temperature, storage status, and networking being shown.

The OLED display has been upgraded to support tap-to-wake. So, now you can configure it the display to automatically go into sleep mode and then 'wake' it with a tap, thanks to the newly included vibration sensors.

As for the cooling, the PWM tower cooler is still around, but the two RGB fans have been upgraded with programmable RGB LEDs, offering more control over the lighting of the Pironman 5-MAX.

Pironman 5-MAX front and rear views.

We wrap this up with some other appealing aspects of the Pironman 5-MAX:

Video: 2x HDMI.PCle: 2x M.2 PCIe 2.0 x1.Power: 5V DC, 5A (via USB-C).Networking: 1x Gigabit Ethernet port.USB: 2x USB 2.0, 2x USB 3.0 (both Type-A).Storage: 1x NVMe PiP expansion board, 1x microSD slot.**Interfaces:**1x 4-pin CPU fan connector, 40-pin GPIO, 4x WS2812 RGB LEDs, and 1x IR receiver.

Note that Pironman case is a DIY product and you'll have to assemble it with a screwdriver. It's not complicated and doesn't require special effort.

🛒 Pre-order Pironman 5-MAX and save $23

Pironman 5-Max is priced at $94.99 but if you are among the first 500 people to order it, you'll get a 25% discount and the price will be reduced to $71.24.

The pricing includes the US duties, so that's a big relief if you are worried about the raised traffic. For EU residents, the pricing also includes VAT.

You can pre-order the Pironman 5-MAX from the official website, where SunFounder has mentioned that it will be shipping the case before June 15, 2025.

Pironman 5-MAX

Additionally, keep in mind that the pricing mentioned is the early bird special, which is limited to only 500 units. When the promotional period is over, the Pironman 5-MAX will be back to its retail price of $94.99 (excl accessories).

Hurry up ⌛

Pironman 5 Review: Best Raspberry Pi 5 Case You Can getIt’s a cooling case with RGB lighting but it turns your Raspberry Pi into a mini PC.It's FOSSAbhishek Prakash

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Used by developers who want to monitor, visualize, and understand their systems, Grafana is an open source platform that brings all the metrics, logs, and traces under one roof, facilitating easy troubleshooting, better performance insights, and more informed decision-making.

Grafana Labs is behind that and many other open source observability tools that help developers monitor, analyze, and improve system performance at scale. Every year, they conduct GrafanaCON in Seattle, Washington, a community-driven event where new launches drop and people get together to make new connections and share ideas.

As expected, this year's GrafanaCON hasn't disappointed, with a new Grafana release, the introduction of Grafana Assistant, a stable release for Grafana k6, and Grafana Beyla being given a new home.

Let's see what's in store. 😄

Grafana 12 Release

The latest release of their flagship open source product, Grafana, is here. With a focus on what the user needs, the developers have introduced a new JSON structure that separates general settings from dashboard content, making the overall layout much cleaner and easier to work with.

Based on that, they have brought in dynamic dashboards, which allow for more flexible dashboard creation and access to better customization tools.

Plus, there is now support for Git Sync,letting users automatically sync their Grafana dashboards to a GitHub repository, allowing them to review any changes, making way for more portable dashboards. There is also support for 15 new data sources: Azure CosmosDB, Cloudflare, Atlassian Statuspage, Amazon DynamoDB, and PagerDuty.

Grafana 12 is available from the official website if you are looking to deploy it on your systems.

Grafana 12

Grafana Beyla Handed Over to OpenTelemetry

Grafana Lab's Beyla has been donated to the OpenTelemetry project, with a new name being coined, "OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation". If you didn't know, Beyla is an open source tool that helps developers track how their apps are performing without the need for them to fiddle with any code.

However, this doesn't mean that Grafana Beyla will cease to exist. It has just become the downstream to OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation and will continue to exist in Grafana Lab's product lineup.

Speaking on this, Nikola Grcevski, Principal Software Engineer at Grafana Labs, added that:

About six months ago, Grafana Labs started on a journey to donate Beyla to the OpenTelemetry project. We realized that Beyla had one superpower: it was able to instrument and generate telemetry where all other approaches failed. This is when we understood that Beyla needs to become a true community-owned project under the OpenTelemetry umbrella.

If you are interested in learning more, the new upstream repository is over at GitHub.

OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation

Grafana Assistant in Grafana Cloud

Launched as a "context-aware chat experience", Grafana Assistant is a new AI-powered addition for Grafana Cloud users that can take in prompts about the user's observability data via an intuitive interface.

It helps the user carry out a range of tasks like navigating to a specific view, creating new dashboards according to natural language prompts, and making batch changes to dashboards.

As for availability, Grafana Assistant is being rolled out gradually, with a private preview being made available for limited users.

Grafana k6 1.0 Release

Finally, after nearly a decade of development, the first stable release of Grafana Labs’ open source performance testing tool, k6, has landed, bringing native extension support, TypeScript compatibility, a revamped end-of-test summary page, and a promise of production-grade stability.

You can get Grafana k6 1.0 from the official website, which has instructions for configuring it via Grafana Cloud and self-hosting it.

Grafana k6 1.0

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A few weeks ago, we got the first interim release of Ubuntu for 2025. The next one, Ubuntu 25.10, is due to come out in October, which is expected to offer new refinements that further improve the desktop experience on one of the most popular Linux distributions around.

Canonical has set out to "purposefully oxidize Ubuntu", by introducing Rust-based alternatives to existing components like Sudo, Coreutils, Findutils, and Diffutils with the help of a new command-line utility, oxidizr.

Now, they have announced that the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 release will be moving to a Rust-based alternative of sudo.

sudo-rs in Ubuntu 25.10: What to Expect?

Replacing sudo is sudo-rs, a Rust-based, memory-safe implementation of sudo and su that aims to get rid of memory safety vulnerabilities while improving the security of privilege escalation on Linux.

To put it simply, sudo-rs is a new, safer version of the classic sudo command, which you have most likely used to execute commands with elevated permissions to install or remove new packages on your Linux-equipped computer.

Some notable benefits of sudo-rs include:

A modern codebase that makes it easy to maintain.Improved error handling with concise error messaging.Focus on long-term maintenance and future improvements.Better security thanks to the use of a memory-safe language.

If you prefer sudo, then don't worry. It will still be around for the foreseeable future; it is just that now, sudo-rs is going to become the default mechanism to handle privilege escalation on Ubuntu.

I checked out how sudo-rs ran on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, and it handled common commands like apt update and apt upgrade without any issues, updating the system without any issues.

Canonical's Jon Seager mentions that the sudo-rs developers are collaborating with Todd Miller, the original maintainer of sudo, and to think of sudo-rs as a "handshake across generations of secure systems".

He also added that sudo-rs is not expected to bring over all the features of sudo, as the devs are taking a "less is more" approach, excluding features that are too niche or outdated.

This is the future, at least for Ubuntu. It remains to be seen whether other popular Linux distributions like Debian, Fedora, and OpenSUSE switch to sudo-rs in the coming months.

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The developers of AdGuard (partner link) have put in the work for a proper Linux release with a broad range of features being made available.

Compared to the nightly release that dropped back in February, the stable release is finally here with new features and better performance.

Let’s dive straight in.

🚧AdGuard is not FOSS, we report on it because it is now available for Linux.

AdGuard for Linux: What to Expect?

Unlike in other OSes like Windows and macOS, AdGuard is not offering a full graphical user interface (GUI), but a command line interface (CLI) on Linux. The terminal junkies in the house will like this.

We start with the new App Exclusion feature, where users can bypass AdGuard filtering for specific applications or browsers where they don't need ad-blocking. This can be useful in cases where applications misbehave or glitch out when AdGuard is enabled.

It also comes equipped with two pre-built lists of browsers and applications that can be excluded from HTTPS filtering. This simplifies the exclusion process without requiring much manual effort from the user.

Similarly, AdGuard for Linux now introduces an Interactive Setup Wizard, which enables an effortless initial configuration experience. This reduces effort for the user, who had to go through the documentation to get AdGuard installed.

And, during filter updates, AdGuard now retrieves only freshly upgraded portions of the filter lists rather than downloading the whole list every time. This optimized approach minimizes network usage while keeping all the filtering rules updated.

Seeing as we are on the topic, users can now manage filters with much more flexibility. In addition to adding filters from AdGuard’s official list or custom URLs, they can enable or disable specific filters as needed, or remove them entirely.

Lastly, AdGuard for Linux now supports both SOCKS5 and HTTP proxy modes, along with automatic proxy reloads whenever new filters or configurations are applied. This ensures that updates to blocklists, settings, or proxy rules take effect immediately—keeping tracker blocking consistently up to date without any gaps in protection or extra effort from the user.

For a more detailed overview of the changes, I recommend you go through the official blog.

How to Install AdGuard for Linux?

You can get AdGuard installed on your Linux system by following these steps. First, install the latest AdGuard version using the terminal:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardCLI/release/install.sh | sh -s -- -v

When prompted, enter your account password, wait for the download to complete, press y,and then the Enter key. Now, enter the following command to begin the AdGuard activation process:

adguard-cli activate

Use the arrow keys to select the desired option; go with "Get a trial license" if you just want to check out AdGuard. You will have to create an account and log in using the provided link (open it in a browser).

Thereafter, run the configuration wizard and follow the on-screen prompts:

adguard-cli configure

Now, use the following command to start AdGuard:

adguard-cli start

You can stop AdGuard protection or check its status by using one of the following commands:

adguard-cli stopadguard-cli status

Visit the AdGuard for Linux webpage or the documentation if you need more pointers regarding installation.

AdGuard for Linux

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curl is a powerful, widely used open source command-line tool for transferring data using URLs. It supports a wide range of internet protocols like HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and a few others.

Its developers run a bug bounty program in association with HackerOne, where security researchers can report vulnerabilities in exchange for rewards, helping the project quickly identify and resolve critical issues.

Sadly, the program has become swamped with AI slop, where people (or perhaps bots!?) are creating bug reports with AI-generated contents that don't offer any real value in helping the curl developers improve the tool.

Curl Faces The Plague of AI Slop

On LinkedIn, Daniel Stenberg, the creator of curl, has announced that going forward, if a bug report on curl's HackerOne page is found to be AI slop, then they will instantly ban the reporter.

He stated that:

We now ban every reporter INSTANTLY who submits reports we deem AI slop. A threshold has been reached. We are effectively being DDoSed. If we could, we would charge them for this waste of our time.We still have not seen a single valid security report done with AI help.

If you were wondering whether this was justified?

The short answer is YES.

A prime specimen of AI slop on curl's HackerOne page.

A quick search led me to a bug report filed by a user named "apol-webug", where they posted a seemingly legit report for a Buffer Overflow Risk issue with curl.

But when I took a closer look at it, the language they used in it reminded me of how ChatGPT usually blurts out a wall of text, being all polite, and adding necessary junk text that isn't really required for the topic at hand.

Scroll down, and you will see Daniel and another curl developer initially trying to help out the reporter with their issue, but when Daniel asked them a follow-up question, they again pushed out an AI-generated wall of text as a reply.

As expected, Daniel (bagder) didn’t have it. He quickly called out the reporter, mentioning how they receive AI slop regularly, that too in huge numbers, and how by doing so, they were increasing the workload of curl maintainers.

This occurred back in December 2024 and is one of several instances where the curl developers have had to deal with AI slop.

Closing Thoughts

I wholly agree with this move. If someone takes the help of AI to do their work, they should put effort into verifying the authenticity/value of the information and not just copy/pasting what a chatbot generated for them.

I remember another well-known open source project, Gentoo Linux, doing something similar, but for AI-generated code submissions. If contributors aren’t willing to put actual thought and effort into supporting open source projects, they’re better off stepping aside.

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