FOSS Weekly #26.14: Open Source Office Drama, Ubuntu MATE Troubles, Conky With Ease, Session Management in Wayland and More Linux Stuff

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

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

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

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

Here are other highlights of this edition of FOSS Weekly:

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

📰 Linux and Open Source News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

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

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

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

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

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

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

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

📚 Linux eBook bundle (don’t miss)

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

I highly recommend checking it out and getting the bundle.

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

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

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

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

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

📽️ Videos for You

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

💡 Quick Handy Tip

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

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

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

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

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

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

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

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

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