We are used to seeing Murena roll out new devices every now and then. Their whole sales pitch revolves around a de-Googled, privacy-focused Android experience. Not everyone is sold on that approach, sure, but the company has managed to stick around for quite a few years now, which says something.

The latest addition to their lineup is the Fairphone (Gen. 6+) with /e/OS. It sits right next to the standard Gen. 6 model, which is still on sale. The new variant packs better hardware and carries a higher price tag to match.

The new device

The most significant change is the Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 processor, paired with 12GB of RAM. The base model makes do with the older Gen 3 chip and 8GB of RAM. Though storage stays at 256GB across both, expandable via microSD up to 2TB.

Everything else on the hardware carries over from the base model, including the 6.31-inch 120Hz LTPO OLED display, the 50MP main camera with a 13MP secondary and 32MP selfie shooter, the 4,415mAh removable battery with 30W charging, IP55 water resistance, and Gorilla Glass 7i to protect the display.

There's also a new Cobalt Blue colorway that ties into Fairphone's fair-mined cobalt supply chain efforts. It joins the existing Forest Green and Horizon Black options. The modular design is unchanged, so you can still swap out 12 key components with a regular screwdriver.

The software itself has not changed for this launch. It is still the same privacy-first build Murena has been refining for a while now.

That means no Google tracking baked into the OS, an Advanced Privacy widget that lets you control what data individual apps can see, and a running Wall of Shame that calls out installed apps leaking the most personal information.

The founder and CEO of Murena, Gaël Duval, spoke about the device, saying that:

With devices like Fairphone (Gen. 6+) with /e/OS, users can have a truly ethical device both in terms of hardware and software.

When I developed Mandriva Linux back in the 90s, it was my mission to make the operating system usable for the everyday, non-techie user. This is my goal with Murena – to give the average user access to smartphones that do not hold their privacy to ransom.

Get yours

Pricing depends on which region you order a Murena Fairphone (Gen. 6+) from. For EU, it costs €699, more than the €649 Murena charges for the standard Gen. 6. In the US, the Fairphone (Gen. 6+) is priced at $699, which is more than the standard Gen. 6's $649 price tag.

People who order during the limited-time launch window of 18 August-1 September 2026 get a few extras. In the EU, that's two free accessories of your choice, where you get to pick from a case, screen protector, finger loop, card holder, or lanyard. US buyers get a case and screen protector bundle.

Everyone gets a year of 1TB Murena Workspace and a year of Murena MDM.

Availability differs by region too. The device is shipping now in Europe, with the US listed as a backorder.

Closing thoughts

The ethical smartphone market is still tiny, and it mostly survives on partnerships like this one. Fairphone builds the hardware, Murena handles the software, and together they keep proving that a privacy-first phone does not have to mean a phone stuck in the dark ages.

Whether that is enough to pull people away from Google remains the same open question it was the last time Murena updated their lineup.

Atomic distros work differently from the Fedora or Ubuntu install you're probably used to. Instead of layering individual packages on top of each other, the entire base system ships as one image, and updates land as a whole swap rather than a slow stream of package changes.

As a result, you get a system that's hard to break, where updates apply cleanly or not at all, rolling back a bad patch is easy, and there's no dependency hell to wade through since every install starts from the same known-good state.

The trade-off is flexibility. You lose the ability to tinker with individual system packages the way you can on a traditional distro, and anything outside the base image needs a workaround instead of a quick apt install or dnf install.

stillOS wants you to consider the upside of that trade-off. It calls itself a "maintenance-free" Linux desktop, built on an AlmaLinux 10 base with bootc handling the atomic updates.

Behind it is Cameron Knauff, who goes by the name "PizzaLovingNerd" in the Linux community, and this isn't his first distro.

His earlier project, risiOS, a Fedora-based distro aimed at smoothing out the rough edges for new users, picked up a solid following before it was absorbed into Nobara Linux, freeing him up to start stillHQ and, down the line, stillOS.

It has potential

I tested stillOS 10.2 on a virtual machine in GNOME Boxes, running on my Fedora Workstation setup. Installation felt familiar right away. stillOS uses the same Anaconda installer AlmaLinux ships with.

If you've installed Fedora, RHEL, or any of their downstream distros before, you already know the steps involved here.

Onboarding is quick and doesn't waste your time. A short welcome screen kicks off Quick Setup, which walks you through installing apps, picking a browser, and grabbing essentials before dropping you onto the desktop.

Once you boot into stillOS, you will see that while the desktop is GNOME underneath, the distro ditches the usual top-panel layout for a taskbar-first interface, closer to Windows 11 than anything GNOME ships by default.

The taskbar carries the usual options like the app drawer, pill-shaped workspace switcher, an update notifier, pinned apps, the calendar, the clock, and quick settings.

Unlike vanilla GNOME, stillOS' version lets you drop icons straight onto the desktop.

Right-clicking gives you quick access to creating new folders and documents, undoing an action, selecting everything, arranging icons, opening the terminal, and some important settings.

The file manager keeps most of that same right-click menu, folders, documents, select all, opening a terminal, alongside the usual "Properties" entry found on Nautilus (Files).

The document creation option is the one that I find very useful, as that’s something I miss on the vanilla GNOME experience. The catch is that it only hands you three formats through ONLYOFFICE: docx, pptx, and xlsx. Considering what The Document Foundation has been pushing for lately, a locked-down proprietary-only shortcut feels like an odd choice.

Installing LibreOffice and removing ONLYOFFICE didn't fix it either. The shortcut still generates files in those same formats; it just opens them in LibreOffice instead.

The file manager looks different too, even though it's the same GNOME Files under the hood. When you launch it, the app opens a "Computer" page that lays out your folders, disks, and removable media in one clean view.

The default app selection is generous. You get ONLYOFFICE, Gear Lever, Warp, Mousam, and a good spread of the usual GNOME-focused apps alongside them.

stillOS also ships its own lineup of "still" branded tools. stillTerminal is the default terminal app, built around a customized ZSH setup with container and SSH support.

stillCenter is the curated app store, pulling from Flatpak and other sources with its own stillRating system grading how well an app runs with stillOS.

stillControl handles GNOME layout customization, letting you switch between 12+ preset layouts and manage extensions without digging through GNOME Tweaks. Then there's stillOS Forums, which isn't a native app at all. It's the community forum wrapped as a SWAI web app, so it behaves like part of the desktop instead of a browser tab.

Running other software worked without any surprises. I selected Zen Browser during onboarding specifically to see how it handled a non-default browser, and it ran cleanly, without any visual bugs, lags, or crashes to speak of.

The pill-shaped workspace switcher held up well through all of this too, letting me flip between workspaces and open apps without any lag or fumbling. Though this was a given seeing that it is a well-tested component from GNOME.

And before you assume that this is some obscure Linux distro that will fade into irrelevance very soon, know that development is still quite active. The recent stillOS 10.2 release introduced most of what's covered above.

Cameron says that:

stillOS has now reached the point where it fits that initial vision. There is obviously more work to do, and there always will be, but the foundation is here. Now I want to focus on building the community around it.

The goal is to keep stillOS innovative while also building a Linux system that literally anyone can use. Those ideas do not have to conflict. Linux can try new things without becoming confusing, and it can be approachable without becoming boring.

Download it now

You can grab the latest stillOS ISO from SourceForge, which lists all the images released by the project so far.

Once you're up and running, know that updates aren't handled through AlmaLinux's usual dnf-based flow.

Instead, you can rely on the distro to handle it for you, as it checks for updates automatically 15 minutes after boot, then every 24 hours after that for as long as your machine stays on.

If you can't wait, then you can run the following command in the terminal to force an update check:

sudo bootc upgrade

Xen is a hypervisor that runs on various kinds of hardware, where a crash can have massive consequences. It is deployed in fields like automotive, industrial automation, robotics, and avionics. These are all safety-critical fields where certification matters.

So far, it has been on a good trajectory with increasing adoption and enhancements that keep it relevant for enterprise use. What it hasn't had is a structured, collaborative way to help the companies building on it actually get certified for that kind of work.

It has launched the Xen Safety Committee, a group tasked with building the safety documentation and test evidence that member companies can lean on instead of starting from scratch.

The committee's job covers software safety requirements, architecture specifications, MISRA-related engineering, DFMEA analysis, testing frameworks, tooling, code coverage, and process documentation.

Founding contributors AMD, EPAM, and Renesas are credited with doing most of the legwork for the above, forming the initiative's early foundation.

The point is to stop every company from solving the same problem on their own. Sharing this foundation should cut costs, avoid duplicated effort, and get products through certification faster for anyone building on Xen.

Nothing changes about how Xen itself gets built. Source code, licensing, and the existing open contribution and review process stay exactly as they are. The Safety Committee runs as a parallel governance layer, not a replacement for how maintainers already work.

Though joining the committee isn't all that open. Organizations will need to sign up for the right kind of membership. More on that below. 👇

A call for new members

Membership at Xen Project works like most Linux Foundation projects. It funds shared infrastructure, test environments, events, and coordination, while day-to-day technical decisions stay with maintainers through open contribution.

Paying to join doesn't buy influence over the codebase. 🤓

AMD, ARM, AWS, Boeing, EPAM, Ford, Honda, Renesas, Vates, and XenServer are all listed as current members. These represent chipmakers, cloud providers, automotive, aerospace, and a few other sectors.

A new membership tier, "Premier Plus" sits above the existing tiers, granting voting representatives on both the Xen Advisory Board and the Safety Committee, a say in setting priorities and roadmap, and access to the committee-managed safety artifacts.

This way, instead of producing every requirement and test in house, members can hand the committee's existing artifacts to their own safety assessors for audits and assessments.

Speaking on the topic, Kate Stewart, Vice President, Dependable Embedded Systems, The Linux Foundation, stated that:

Systems with safety considerations need a trusted hypervisor to provide the foundation for other open source components, such as Zephyr and Linux, to support mixed criticality embedded applications.

The Zephyr and Xen projects have been exchanging best practices over the last few years as a pathway to achieve safety certification of open source components. We welcome the Xen Safety Initiative to accelerate the journey of Xen achieving formal certification.

Suggested Read 📖: Proxmox Virtual Environment Officially Runs on ARM64

One thing that always comes up in the GNOME vs KDE debate is how easy it is to customize KDE. You can surely customize GNOME but not to the extent of KDE.

But that doesn't deter us GNOME users from trying new looks and visuals, does it? In that regard, I recently came across a super cool GUI tool that lets give an altogether different look to your GNOME desktop.

Take a look at the screenshot below. Looks like Archcraft or Omarchy, right?

That is the magic of Rewaita, a GUI app worth adding in your customization toolbox.

Rewaita: Add custom color tint to GNOME Adwaita

Rewaita is not a standalone theme or icon. It keeps GNOME’s familiar Adwaita design but replaces its colours and adds optional visual effects like changing the transparency to windows.

As you open Rewaita, it very helpfully gives you a user guide to help you through the process of changing the theme on GNOME.

Once you're through that process (that I'll describe later), it gives you a good range of choices that include 14 light themes and 24 dark ones (all hail dark mode), followed by 6 Window Control themes. Many of these themes are well-known standard themes around Linux, like Breeze, Nord and Catppuccin, etc.

Which is great because they're all tried and tested to suit the popular tastes of Linux users. After all, most Linux ricing screenshots you see on various communities use those color themes.

The Window Control themes are more of the same that include Breeze, Mint and MacOS-styled button themes.

All you need to do is choose the theme, and the change is immediate in all newly opened windows.

Under the hood, it generates CSS overrides and related assets inside directories such as

~/.config/gtk-3.0/
~/.config/gtk-4.0/
~/.local/share/themes/

Note that it will only affect GTK applications. Qt (from KDE) and Electron apps may not adhere to the changed color theme.

Using Rewaita

To activate Rewaita, you have to ensure a few things first.

Make sure you have the gnome-shell-extensions package installed, which allows you to extend the capabilities of GNOME.

And then the User Themes extension (I would also recommend installing the Extension Manager, that makes it easier and more fun to explore various extensions that GNOME has to offer), as well as the GNOME Tweaks application (where you actually choose the theme).

When you're done with all that, finally install Rewaita, which is available on Flathub. If you prefer terminal, here is the command:

flatpak install io.github.swordpuffin.rewaita

Other ways of installation on distributions such as Arch, OpenSUSE, and NixOS are listed here.

After that, go into Rewaita and choose a theme. Once you do that, reboot your system, go into GNOME Tweaks and choose Rewaita as the Shell theme.

Flatpak Override

Since Flatpak applications are treated separately sandboxed, these settings are not applied to them by default. You can, however, make them apply by overriding the settings:

sudo flatpak override --filesystem=xdg-config/gtk-3.0:rw
sudo flatpak override --filesystem=xdg-config/gtk-4.0:rw

The first command takes care of GTK-3.0 applications, the second does that for GTK-4.0.

More customization options

If you desire a more manual and methodical approach, you can even choose the exact colors that you want there to be on the interface on the Custom tab.

Accent colors, interface colors, button colors, successful, dangerous or warning action colors, etc. can all be manually chosen, alongwith manual color naming and extra CSS code. You can even save these settings as themes on your system for future use.

Fine Tuning

The Fine Tune section is another wonderful aspect where you can put in use some extra settings apart from the colors on your system. These include things like transparency, window borders, sharpening corners, etc. There's an option to toggle Rewaita running in the background in case you swap between light and dark modes throughout the day.

Firefox

You can choose to apply the theme to your Firefox window as well (great edge for the full open source application pack) by enabling 'Generate Firefox CSS Theme' in the Fine Tune tab. After that, Firefox only needs to be fully quit and restarted for the settings to apply.

Wrapping Up

Rewaita is really, really, really convenient. It makes it extremely easy not to only apply pre-made themes, but also create custom themes of your own with colors and CSS code.

More options are just a toggle switch away, and the user guide that is present right as you open the application is extremely helpful, telling you all that you need.

Thoughtfully constructed and beautifully applied, Rewaita is a must use for anyone wanting to make GNOME look aesthetically pleasing.

Back in April, Jon Seager, Canonical's VP of Engineering, spoke with The Pragmatic Engineer (paywalled), telling them that Ubuntu inside Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is growing faster than native Ubuntu desktop installs.

Jon was speaking on the topic of how AI is reshaping Ubuntu when the topic of WSL came up, where he pointed out that:

In a year, the growth in our WSL numbers is significantly higher than the growth in Desktop usage numbers. WSL enables Windows users to “install” Ubuntu for use within their Windows environment.

Once installed, users interact with Ubuntu through the Terminal app, and what you’re running literally is Ubuntu. Your home directory is mounted with Ubuntu and you can pull windows out of this terminal to your desktop; as in actual windows as on-screen windows.

I expect to see more Ubuntu WSL users than “native” Ubuntu users over the coming months. This is especially true for anyone doing ML or AI work. We’re already hearing from lots of devs who have no choice but to get a Windows machine from their employer, but then find themselves needing to do AI or ML work. With WSL, this is a lot simpler.

Since then, Jon has clarified those comments.

Speaking to Steven Vaughan-Nichols at ZDNET, he said the growth comparison was only ever about rate, not absolute numbers.

He meant Ubuntu Desktop's growth rate on WSL against Ubuntu Desktop's growth rate on bare metal, specifically, not WSL against Ubuntu as a whole, which also runs on servers, cloud instances, and containers.

Canonical shouldn't be bothered

Ubuntu Pro, Canonical's paid security and support subscription, already covers WSL instances the same way it covers native installs. Subscribers get to take advantage of up to 15 years of CVE patching, toolchain coverage for Python, Go, and Rust, and fleet management.

Simply speaking, a WSL user on Ubuntu Pro and a data center running Ubuntu Server are the same kind of customer to Canonical; the company gets paid either way.

And, as you saw earlier, Jon also points to why demand keeps climbing. Plenty of developers don't get a say in their work laptop, and once AI or ML work lands on their plate, WSL becomes the easiest way to get a working Linux environment without a fight over IT policy.

Craig Loewen, WSL's product manager at Microsoft, called the Ubuntu Pro arrangement a "fantastic partnership" when it launched, further stating that:

This work will benefit enterprise developers who use WSL to build production Linux solutions.

What does it mean for native Linux?

This is where it gets tricky if you are rooting for the Linux desktop specifically.

If WSL satisfies the demand that would otherwise push developers toward dual-booting or switching entirely, does that take pressure off IT departments and hardware vendors to ever approve native Linux at all?

Of course, running Ubuntu on bare metal will still be better than WSL for anyone who wants full hardware control, maximum performance, and a Linux-first setup.

Via: Windows Latest

Whether you're a developer, system administrator, or simply someone who spends a lot of time in the terminal, juggling multiple terminal sessions can be messy and frustrating.

A terminal multiplexer helps you keep everything organized, letting you manage several sessions from a single interface while making your workflow much more efficient.

While tmux and GNU Screen are the names most Linux users are familiar with, there are many more similar terminal multiplexer tools available. As someone who like to explore new tools, I spent some time and came up with this list for you.

Zellij

Zellij describes itself as a terminal workspace rather than just a multiplexer, with an emphasis on delivering a polished experience from the moment you launch it.

It aims to provide sensible defaults while still leaving plenty of room for customization.

One of the things that sets Zellij apart is its focus on usability. Built-in layouts, a plugin system, and collaborative sessions are all part of the experience, but the project's philosophy is that you shouldn't have to trade simplicity for advanced functionality.

This makes it approachable for newcomers while still offering enough flexibility for users who want to tailor their workspace.

While this is not a ranking list, Zellij is the first one on this list because I have used it on a daily basis for the past several months.

TUIOS

While most terminal multiplexers focus on helping you manage terminal sessions, TUIOS takes that idea a step further by presenting itself as a terminal window manager.

TUIOS tries to bring concepts you'd expect from a tiling window manager, such as workspaces, automatic tiling, and window management, into your existing terminal.

The workflow is centered around a modal interface inspired by Vim, letting you switch between managing windows and interacting with terminal applications.

Alongside features like a command palette and workspace organization, TUIOS also supports automation through tape files, making it suitable for users who want to build repeatable terminal workflows instead of just juggling multiple shells.

Wezterm

You probably know WezTerm as a feature-rich terminal emulator. But there's more to it than meets the eye.

WezTerm includes a built-in multiplexer, allowing you to create and manage persistent sessions without relying on a separate tool.

It integrates multiplexing directly into the terminal and supports local domains. While it lets you connect to remote domains over SSH and other tmux like features, this requires you to spend some time configuring.

Kitty + Abduco

If you're already using Kitty as your terminal emulator, you don't necessarily have to switch to a traditional multiplexer. Pairing it with abduco gives you a lightweight way to keep terminal sessions running in the background while letting Kitty handle everything on the frontend.

It's a simple combination that sticks to the Unix philosophy of using small tools that do one job well.

The primary job of abduco is to detach and reattach terminal sessions, leaving the rest to your terminal emulator.

Kitty complements this nicely with features like tabs, splits, and a polished interface, giving you a workflow that feels familiar while still providing session persistence.

tmate

Rather than reinventing the multiplexer experience, tmate builds on tmux and adds secure session sharing, making it easy to collaborate, troubleshoot problems, or provide remote assistance without asking someone to install extra software.

The biggest addition is the ability to generate a connection string that others can use to join your session.

By default, these shared sessions are relayed through tmate's public servers, although you can host your own relay if you prefer to keep everything under your control. If you never need to share your terminal, however, plain tmux is likely the better fit.

Boo

At first glance, boo might look like just another GNU Screen alternative. In reality, it's a fairly different take on terminal multiplexing.

Built on Ghostty's terminal emulation library, boo keeps track of the actual terminal state, allowing it to recreate a session exactly as you left it, even after you've detached and reattached.

The project also leans into automation. Besides keeping sessions alive, it includes commands that let scripts and AI agents inspect or interact with detached sessions without needing a live terminal connection.

Okena

Okena combines terminals, tabs, panes, and projects into a single interface, with a strong focus on helping you pick up exactly where you left off.

Close the application, reopen it later, and your workspace is restored much like you never left.

That persistence model is what makes Okena different. Unlike tmux or GNU Screen, it doesn't keep sessions running in the background after the application closes, nor is it designed for detached SSH workflows or remote session management.

Instead, the emphasis is on restoring your local workspace, making it feel more like a modern development environment than a server-backed multiplexer.

Seance

Seance, built with GTK4 and libadwaita, takes a desktop-first approach to terminal session management. It feel more like a modern Linux application than a traditional keyboard-driven multiplexer.

It offers a clean interface with configurable key bindings, workspace management, and session persistence across restarts, so you can reopen the application and continue where you left off.

However, it isn't designed around detached server sessions or remote SSH workflows. Instead, it focuses on providing a polished experience for managing terminal workspaces on your local Linux desktop.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, there's no shortage of ways to organize your terminal workflow. Some of these tools have been around for decades, while others are reimagining what a terminal workspace can look like. The thing is that there's no single "right" choice. It all comes down to how you work.

Whichever you choose, learning to use a terminal multiplexer is one of those skills that pays off over time. Once it becomes part of your workflow, your muscle memory, there is no going back to normal terminal sessions.

By the way, you might be interested in exploring various terminal emulators as well.

The newest point release for Linux is here a few months after the last one, and the time in-between was not spent idly. Scheduler work that took over a year finally came together, several pieces of hardware got proper support, and a series of 2023 MacBooks can finally boot Linux.

During all this, Linus Torvalds' transition from treating AI as noise for years to slowly warming up to it has been something of a wildcard entry.

Anyhow, let's see what this point release has to offer.

What's new in this release?

AMD's platform driver changes lean heavily on Zen 6 prep. The Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI) driver adds v3 ranking table support for dynamic core rankings, and the power management controller driver adds support for Family 1Ah Model 80H SoCs (a Zen 6-focused change, basically).

What Ubuntu's OEM kernel had been carrying out of tree is now in. The long-awaited AMD ISP4 driver completes webcam support for the HP ZBook Ultra G1a and other upcoming Ryzen laptops.

Similarly, AMDGPU has gained initial HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link support (FRL), years after the HDMI Forum blocked the feature from the open source driver.

For Intel, most of this round's EDAC work targets next-gen Xeon Diamond Rapids chips, adding sub-memory channel awareness and Rank Retry Logic to preserve data integrity during memory errors. Nova Lake H and Panther Lake H gain in-band ECC error reporting through the IGEN6 driver.

Linux 7.2 also continues clearing out old i486 chunks that started disappearing in 7.1 and makes TSC and CX8 support unconditional on x86. TDX modules can now update at runtime, similar to CPU microcode, so security fixes no longer force a full reboot on TDX-enabled systems.

Another highlight of this kernel release has been Cache Aware Scheduling, which was merged after more than a year of work, landing behind the CONFIG_SCHED_CACHE option.

Without cache awareness, the scheduler can end up scattering related tasks across zones on chips with multiple last-level caches (LLCs). This feature groups those tasks onto cores within the same LLC instead.

Laptop support also sees some improvements that include new ASUS ROG Strix G16 2025, Zephyrus G14 2023/2025, and TUF Gaming F16 support. Lenovo laptops gain more configurable attributes along with WMI battery charge limiting, and Microsoft's Surface Pro 12-inch gets platform driver support.

A few smaller changes round things out:

• Nouveau adds support for the NVIDIA GA100 compute accelerator via GSP.
• Btrfs large folio support left experimental status and is now on by default, and huge folios up to 2M arrive as a new experimental option.
• RISC-V builds now enable the ESWIN SoC by default, letting them boot on SiFive's HiFive Premier P550.
• Networking brings more Wi-Fi Aware and WiFi 8/UHR groundwork, plus 10Gbit and EEE support in the Realtek R8152 driver.
• Apple M3 MacBooks can boot the mainline kernel for the first time, though only to a serial console so far. The Asahi Linux devs worked hard to deliver this.
• A new USB4STREAM protocol that lets two machines move data directly over a USB4 or Thunderbolt cable.

Announcing the release, Linus Torvalds said that:

Well, this last week of the release was - once again - bigger than I would have wished for, but hey, with the whole "new normal" thing, if I delayed releases for that reason we'd probably never have a release at all.

There are a number of fairly late reverts - the drm scheduling reverts stand out, but there's a few other ones in here too. It may not be pretty, but it's the correct way to deal with "oh, that code wasn't ready and caused problems". People will be trying that again later.

Is it for you?

It's good to get excited about a new kernel release, but compiling the kernel or installing a new one is usually considered for intermediate to expert levels of skill. If this release fills some gap you faced with earlier kernels, then you should definitely go for it.

But not without knowing the risks. Our guide for installing the latest Linux kernel on Ubuntu clearly spells out the pitfalls.

Proton has launched AI Paper Trail, a free tool that shows people what their AI chatbot conversations reveal about them. It runs on Lumo (partner link), the company's privacy-focused AI assistant, and works by digging through exported ChatGPT or Claude conversation history.

Once you upload your content, the tool starts building a personal report around four categories. There's a "Privacy Type," a personality label based on how someone approaches their own data. Then comes an "AI Exposure Score," a number built from how many personal data points got pulled out of the conversations and how revealing they are.

The report also breaks down what the AI actually knows about you, covering identity, habits, relationships, and interests. On top of that, it puts a monetary figure on what this information could be worth to an AI provider.

And none of the uploaded data sticks around on Proton's server; the company says that it gets deleted right after analysis, and the resulting report stays visible only to the person who generated it.

The reasoning behind AI Paper Trail comes down to how casually people treat individual AI prompts. A single question about travel plans or a work email draft might seem harmless on its own.

But stack up months or years of conversations covering someone's job, relationships, health concerns, and finances, and a surprisingly complete picture starts to form.

Eamonn Maguire, Director of Engineering at Proton, notes that:

People understand that AI collects data, but most don't realize how revealing their conversation history becomes over time. AI Paper Trail makes that invisible profile visible.

We want people to understand what they're sharing with AI systems so they can make informed decisions about the tools they use.

What they have done here is hit two targets with one shot, offering people a privacy-focused tool that pushes them toward more conscious decisions when interacting with AI chatbots, while steering them straight into Lumo in the process.

This is a superb way to market a chatbot that focuses on privacy instead of mining every inch of your soul, erm, personal data.

It works well

I wanted to see for myself how the tool worked, so I first ChatGPT some information about how I approach certain subjects, saved it into memory, and then got back into Proton's AI Paper Trail to see what it could make of it.

The tool first told me to export my data from ChatGPT via the "Data controls" section in the Settings menu. I had to re-verify my ChatGPT session by giving it a one-time password and got the export started, but the files never showed up on time for me to use.

Instead, I asked it to generate me a dummy one taking in data from memory. 😆

When that was done, I uploaded the dummy export, and Lumo got to work behind the scenes all while promising not to store any of it on its servers.

A minute or so later, my report was ready. It gave me a personality-style rundown, labeling me a "Technical tester exploring AI profiling and ethics," complete with a fake handle and a summary pegging me as someone running structured experiments on AI behavior, focused on data extraction limits and ethics.

My AI Exposure Score came out to 21 out of 100, along with a "Hard to read" privacy type. Interests ended up being my biggest giveaway on the breakdown, while everything else landed at medium to minimal.

The part that actually got me was the "Most revealing" note (first picture above, right-hand side). It noticed I'd asked for a structured personality profile, tried to get it to infer my identity from barely anything, and even caught me trying to force it to remember something via a direct command.

Since I'd gotten ChatGPT to build that dummy file straight from its own memory of me rather than pulling random filler, the report had real clues to chew on, and it still managed to call out the testing motif buried in there.

Scrolling further down, there's a "What we identified" section that splits everything into categories like technical proficiency, ethical and philosophical inquiry, and privacy awareness, each with its own reasoning attached.

At the end, it dropped a few privacy tips and nudged me toward trying Lumo (partner link, hehe). There's also a shareable card option if you want to showcase your exposure score for some validation or gloating.

Don't think that this move came out of the blue. Nitrux has been busy building this up since last year, when it swapped out KDE Plasma for Hyprland and told everyone that they were headed towards 'a new beginning' that was not for everyone.

The project now has a name for what it has been creating, the "Workspace Environment." It ties together four new in-house developed components as pieces of a five-layer architecture, presenting a very different desktop experience for Nitrux than we are used to.

Uri Herrera, Nitrux's founder, describes it as filling a gap, where a window manager gives you almost nothing beyond window placement and a full desktop environment like GNOME or Plasma bundles everything into one tightly coupled process tree.

The Workspace Environment sits in between as a cohesive shell built from independent, single-purpose components that don't share a process lifecycle with the compositor or with each other.

The four components

Valenz is the new workspace bar, handling media controls, tray, notifications, and indicators for network, Bluetooth, battery, and power profile, plus weather, a calendar view, and system resource widgets.

Whereas Marina is the new dock that tracks and groups open windows across workspaces on Hyprland while handling pinning, auto-hide, and horizontal scrolling. It also adds unread message badges for pinned apps that expose a launcher count.

Workspace Settings replaces KDE System Settings entirely, covering user accounts, locale, networking, and MauiKit configuration without any Plasma dependency.

Desklock completes the set as a native QML lock screen built on the QMLGreet codebase, with PAM authentication, per-output lock surfaces, and CPU, memory, and network monitors alongside MPRIS playback controls.

All four are QML-based and built with MauiKit, though only Valenz and Marina share LayerShell-Qt, so the stack still ends up with one visual language instead of stitched together toolkits.

Does it make sense?

The switches aren't just cosmetic, and alternatives were considered.

Uri writes that Waybar and SwayNC leaned on GTK and CSS styling, which clashed with the QML-first approach he had already committed to with QMLGreet.

Crystal Dock had a similar limitation, built on legacy Qt Widgets instead of QML, and its broad feature set worked against Nitrux's preference for narrowly focused tools. Hyprlock got replaced too, over a visual mismatch with MauiKit and a bug that left it in a bad state after suspend or hibernation.

The pattern across all three swaps is consistency. Uri picked first-party QML tools over external options like Quickshell specifically to avoid depending on a construction framework he doesn't control.

There's a maintenance aspect associated with the lock screen choice too. In Uri's words:

Because Desklock derives directly from the QMLGreet codebase, the two components share the same secure lifecycle and visual identity. This shared foundation minimizes maintenance overhead while strictly enforcing our unified architectural philosophy.

It provides a native QML session locker that executes its single responsibility perfectly, completing the visual and functional ecosystem of the Workspace Environment.

You'll have to wait

Nitrux Workspace Environment marks the end of Maui Shell, the project's old convergent shell concept. Nitrux has already archived its GitHub repository and is looking forward to their next developmental milestone.

One catch worth knowing before you go looking for these tools is that Valenz and Marina both list Nitrux 7.0.0 as a requirement, and the current stable release is still 6.1.0. So you will have to wait.

Whether the wait is worth it will depend on how these components hold up once regular users actually get their hands on them.

There's something satisfying about watching a Linux project everyone assumed had quietly died come back with a fresh commit. It happens more often than people expect, and it's usually worth celebrating when it does.

One of those revivals has been the return of LightDM, the display manager Canonical built more than a decade ago.

LightDM is alive

Released last week is LightDM 1.33.0, which rolls out a bunch of improvements as well as introduces the two new maintainers who are taking over. The last release, 1.32.0, came out way back in July 2022, marking a four-year gap in which the project barely went anywhere.

You see, LightDM's original maintainer, Robert Ancell, had already called the project "essentially unmaintained," and questions about its future eventually popped up on various forums over the years.

Luckily, two people willing to keep the project going stepped up, making it a community-maintained affair rather than a Canonical-maintained one.

Joshua Peisach and Neal Gompa are both known for their work across a string of open source projects. Joshua leads Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix, and Neal doesn't really need an introduction; he has spent years contributing to Fedora, openSUSE, and CentOS.

As for what 1.33.0 actually delivers, the maintainers say its purpose is mainly to tag the fixes that piled up since 1.32.0 and clear out pull requests that had been sitting for years.

There are no breaking changes and no dependency changes, so existing LightDM setups should upgrade without any surprises. The biggest addition worth flagging is Qt6 support for the client library, though that doesn't mean Qt5 is going anywhere. Greeters built on the older toolkit will keep working just fine.

There's a long list of smaller fixes too. VNC server handling has been patched, the flood of log errors from missing PAM modules is gone, and a batch of multiseat and FreeBSD-specific bugs got cleared out.

Help is needed

If you didn't know, LightDM is a lightweight, cross-desktop display manager. It's the software behind your login screen, the one that authenticates you and hands things off to your desktop session once you're in.

Canonical built LightDM to replace GDM, and it debuted back in Ubuntu 11.10 as the login screen behind Unity. Ubuntu itself moved back to GDM in 2017 when it dropped Unity for GNOME Shell, but LightDM never really went away.

Linux Mint adopted it that same year and pairs it with its own slick-greeter, and elementary OS runs it through Pantheon Greeter. Several Ubuntu flavors and Fedora spins still depend on it as well.

If you think you can help LightDM evolve into something more, then know that Joshua and Neal are looking for new contributors to join in. You can reach them directly over Matrix.

They also point out that signing the Canonical CLA is no longer required.

Though I have something more to add here.

Don't unleash your army of clankers (I believe the formal term is 'AI agents') on this project; it's already happening to many open source projects lately, and this one has just been revived. It doesn't need to be inundated with hallucinations and pointless fixes.

The maintainers also request that anyone opening a pull request for a bug fix show a way to reproduce the problem first.

Linux Mint is getting automatic old kernel cleanup in the next release, a feature Fedora has handled through DNF's installonly_limit for years. And I did not even know that Mint doesn't do it.

The Document Foundation has put up a write-up (part 1 for now) of how the Austrian Military migrated 16,000 PCs from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. The part worth noting is that ~8,000 users installed it on their own before it was mandated. Now that's a pleasant surprise.

CachyOS released their August update, and the two things that stand out are Shelly v3 and the Server Edition groundwork. Running a cutting edge distro on a server? Old school sysadmins will shiver at that thought.

Apparently, VLC takes around 30 seconds to play an MP3 on Windows. But don't blame VLC when it is Microsoft's fault.

Proxmox VE now officially runs on ARM64, with the same codebase, release cycle, and support window as the x86-64 build. NVIDIA Grace and Vera systems are fully validated, and other UEFI-based ARMv9-A hardware gets best-effort support.

An open source project called Xodus is working through the hardest parts of bringing Xbox Game Pass to Linux. They have already figured out Xbox authentication and game downloads.

KGamma is getting a Wayland replacement that works with Night Color, supports independent per-monitor values, and applies settings on the first frame.

Illinois signed the Children's Online Social Media Safety Act, which requires device makers and OS providers to collect a child's age bracket at setup and expose it via an API for apps to query.

Omarchy Linux is going all in one with AI with its version 4.0 releasing this week.

There are a few more AI-related stories that we covered this week. But I am not going to include all of them here. They get covered in the Local AI Weekly newsletter, and you can also read them if you follow the feed. I'll try to keep the AI buzz to the necessary minimum in FOSS Weekly.

🤝 This edition of FOSS Weekly is supported by TuxCare.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

I had a good chat with Bianca Lewis, OpenSearch's executive director, talking about how OpenSearch has spent the past few years trying to shed the "Elasticsearch fork" label.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

A beginner's guide to installing software from source on Linux. It covers clone, configure, make, where to install things so cleanup isn't painful, and how to fix the missing compiler errors you'll almost definitely hit the first time.

A decade of hopping through Mint, Ubuntu, Kali, Arch, AntiX, and EndeavourOS, and the conclusion is that it was never really about the distro.

Six backup tools for different kinds of Linux users. The highlights include Déjà Dup for GNOME desktop with zero setup, Kopia if you want an open source GUI, Restic and BorgBackup for terminal-native control.

If you regularly deal with PDF, try a tool like PDF Arranger that allows you to split, merge, rearrange PDF docs.

In the same regards, in the situation where you have to convert multiple images into a PDF, use LibreOffice or gscan2pdf. I do this when I have to upload IDs and documents to a government portal.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

This corner may still have some local AI stuff for now. A practical setup guide for running Hermes agent on a Raspberry Pi as an always-on backend while controlling it from a laptop using Hermes Desktop's remote gateway feature.

🎓 Linux Foundation certification offer

Linux is turning 35 this month. The Linux Foundation, the official organization behind the Linux kernel project, has a catalog of industry-oriented training and certifications.

And they are offering 35% off on all of it, including the instructor-led classes that contain very technical topics like performance tuning. Popular certifications like LFCS and CKDA

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

Censor is a PDF document redaction tool. When you want to hide part of information from a PDF, you can use this tool.

📽️ Videos for You

Enjoy customizing GNOME desktops with extensions. Take a look at some of the good ones in action in this video.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

Ubuntu's Tiling Assistant has an experimental layout editor, which allows you to create tiles and assign windows to those tiles. First open the Extensions app and go into the settings for "Tiling Assistant."

Here, click on the "i" button and go into "Advanced..." and enable "Advanced/Experimental Settings." Now, inside the new "Layouts" page, you will find multiple layout entries without keybinds assigned.

Click on the "Disabled" box and enter a keybind, and use the downward arrow nearby to fine-tune the layout.

Once these are set, whenever you press any one of those shortcuts, any open windows can be opened in that layout for you. You can read how it works in the official documentation.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Our Scrambled Linux Editors crossword will test your grasp of Linux editors.

Those pesky clankers sure do know how to trick us. 🤖

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On August 5, 1858, Cyrus West Field succeeded on his fifth try at laying a telegraph cable across the Atlantic. Queen Victoria and President Buchanan traded congratulatory messages soon after. Though the celebration was short-lived, as the cable died within a month.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: Pro FOSSer Xander is asking other FOSSers what they like about Linux; do you have anything to add?

The world of open source is split when it comes to AI, while a big project like Linux is seeing its leader warming up to it, telling those who object on the mailing list that Linux "is not one of those anti-AI projects."

Projects like Rust, GCC, and Codeberg are going the other way, banning AI from writing meaningful chunks of their code, though none of them draw that line in quite the same place.

Omarchy doesn't care about any of that. Its upcoming release, Quattro (4.0), is skipping the debate over whether AI should write code and is building AI agents into the desktop itself.

As a refresher, the project calls itself a "Beautiful, Modern & Opinionated Linux," and the opinionated part shows up in how the distro configures itself with minimal input from the user during installation.

Its creator, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), has now decided that AI agents belong in the defaults too, saying that this is how they will "truly democratize Linux," and predicting that Linux adoption among developers is going to explode.

Enter, Quattro

While Omarchy 4.0 is still in the beta stage, DHH is calling it their biggest release yet.

He is teasing all kinds of new agent-facing features, such as a crash watcher that briefs your AI agent the moment something breaks, a dedicated agents usage widget, and nine different agents to pick from.

The crash watcher is the one DHH teased on X first. Let's say a process crashes. Omarchy catches it off the systemd-coredump journal and pops up a toast. Click it, and your default agent gets briefed on the whole thing through a diagnose-crash skill built to make sense of the backtrace.

Don't worry, it still asks you for confirmation before reporting anything upstream, and it checks for duplicates too.

Quattro also lets you pick a default coding agent under Setup > Defaults > Agent, giving you nine options that include the likes of Claude, Codex, Gemini, Grok, and Copilot.

None of them come pre-selected either. During first boot, a notification nudges you to pick your default agent, and if you skip it, the agentic features stay disabled.

When I configured Gemini using an API key, I asked the agent what it could do for me, and it said that it could help with Linux configuration and window manager setup through Omarchy.

It also brought up crash diagnosis using the same diagnose-crash skill from earlier, on top of the usual code reading, writing, and command execution any coding agent handles.

There's even a model-usage widget that tracks usage against weekly limits, though it is only available for Claude Code, Codex, Pi, Oh My Pi, and OpenCode sessions.

And, if you go looking through the contributors list for the project, you will see that Claude has contributed a fair bit, further cementing where Omarchy as a project is headed.

Not everyone will be happy

Depending on where you stand on AI, this is where people start picking sides. One of them, a developer who goes by the name IroncladDev, has decided they won't be updating to 4.0.

He says that Omarchy is what got him off macOS and onto Linux in the first place, but that's not enough to keep him around for Quattro. His issue is that he isn't interested in any of the "AI/Agentic additions." He just wants a terminal, a browser, and working USB ports, nothing more.

That kind of pushback was inevitable. Move a distro this hard, this fast, and you lose the people who signed up for something simpler. Baking agents into the OS is a bigger ask than a new theme, and DHH made that call for everyone whether they wanted it or not.

Closing thoughts

I believe that DHH is making a well-timed call before the rest of the ecosystem catches up. Omarchy went with Hyprland back when tiling window managers were a niche pick. Betting Quattro on AI agents looks like the same instinct that's paid off before.

While many open source projects are left arguing whether using AI and providing AI-focused features is a good call, Omarchy looks to be on track to become something we can call an "AI Linux distro."

It all started with a tweet by video game designer Jonathan Blow. Blow is the developer behind games like Braid and The Witness.

He mentioned that he had stopped using VLC on Windows because it took about 33 seconds to start playing a simple MP3, and he had switched to Microsoft Media Player instead.

And he also shamed open source software, framing it as a sign that large part of open-source software is in bad shape.

A large sector of open source software is in a truly embarrassing place now...

This quickly turned into a heated discussion, with people joining from both sides.

VLC's official Twitter account clarified that this delay was not a core VLC regression but a side effect of a Windows 11 / Microsoft Defender update that quarantined VLC’s plugin cache. Their suggested solution is reinstalling VLC or regenerating that cache.

Jonathan argued that it is the developer's responsibility to fix. He cited his own experience of fixing an issue caused by AMD in his game Braid.

Linux user jumps in with solid evidence

A Linux user who goes by the X account @VoxelPrismatic jumped in with concrete evidence that it is not a core VLC issue but a Windows issue.

In this tweet, the user shared a recording of what seems like a Linux distro running KDE. Recording clearly showed VLC started playing an MP3 file in 1-2 seconds.

But some people were still not satisfied because VLC being slow to open MP3 files on Windows is a real issue but they kept on blaming it on VLC.

The solution to the problem

VLC suggests the following fixes

• Regenerate the plugin cache (e.g. launch with vlc --reset-plugins-cache, or clear VLC’s cache under the user profile and relaunch)
• Reinstall VLC from the official build

However, a better suggestion came from a few users who noted that excluding vlc.exe in Microsoft Defender solves this problem. And I like this one better because it seems to address the problem where it originates, Microsoft Defender. And if the cache builds up, VLC may be slowed down again (I think).

The same was vouched by several people. So this sure looks like the workaround worth trying.

Asking the right question

Among all this, someone asked the real question; how come VLC not working for a single person becomes "a large sector of open source software" being an embarrassing place?

Blame Defender, not VLC

I understand the frustration. Waiting half a minute to play an MP3 should not be acceptable on a modern system, even if it is on Windows.

It is also okay to blame it on VLC when you don't know the real backstory and are unaware of the root cause.

But giving it a “open source is broken” narrative is highly far fetched.

I haven't tested it myself. Not going to jump into Windows just for this, but from what I see, the onus of fixing it lies on the Microsoft side. And from what I know about Microsoft, they won't do a thing.

What's your take on this episode? Share it in the comments.

The world is in a messed-up state where surveillance and eroding people's rights are rewarded, and those who oppose are labeled unpatriotic, anti-national, radicals, criminal sympathizers, and what not.

Yet, that doesn't stop people from investing time and money in securing their data by opting for open source mobile operating systems like GrapheneOS and taking steps to improve their privacy in the online world.

One of those steps is to go for a private messaging app that doesn't give out your data to feed some AI or a governmental agency that asks for your data nicely. SimpleX Chat is one such option, a messaging network that doesn't ask for phone numbers, emails, or user accounts.

I tried it out myself back in 2024, and it left a strong impression. The team behind it has kept building since, and now it wants its users to also have a stake in where the project goes next.

Looking for investors

The founder of SimpleX Chat, Evgeny Poberezkin, reached out to us recently, saying that they were looking to give users "the opportunity to get a stake in SimpleX Chat and benefit from its growth."

This investment is possible under regulation crowdfunding via Wefunder, and all the terms are available on the SimpleX Chat page. People who invest $500 or more would receive public SimpleX names that SimpleX Chat is currently testing.

Until August 15, these names would be for 10 years, and for 5 years for early bird investors after that.

The company behind the app isn't quite what it used to be either. SimpleX Chat Ltd, the UK entity that built the app, is now a wholly owned subsidiary of a new US company, SimpleX Chat, Inc.

Keep that in mind if you consider where a firm is based out of before investing in it.

SimpleX Chat also recently pivoted to public channels and infrastructure payments for large channels as their core commercial strategy, publishing a whitepaper about Community Credits that would allow private payments for infrastructure via prepaid credits.

Other planned sources of revenue include public names in the network for channels and businesses and business messaging via browser.

To further explain, public names use blockchain contract on the Ethereum mainnet and are fully controlled by the users’ keys. You can test the temporary names in the mobile apps for SimpleX Chat.

Before you go ahead and invest, do understand that this comes with the usual risks of backing a company this early.

There's no guarantee of a return, and what you invest isn't something you can sell easily if you change your mind. The company's filing says that they have enough cash for the next 12 months.

A similar occurence

We already had an instance of a messaging app asking its community for help earlier this year, where Session nearly shut down after it ran out of funding, needing $1 million to keep going.

By June, the foundation confirmed development had resumed, backed by two to three developers instead of the dozen-plus it once employed. SimpleX Chat raising money through equity now, rather than an emergency donation drive, gives it a strong start.