FOSS Weekly #26.21: Microsoft’s Distro, Bitwarden Drama, Adobe on Linux, New Email Client and More
The Fedora AI Developer Desktop initiative that passed unanimously is now blocked. Two council members retracted their votes after community pushback, with contributors arguing the CUDA focus contradicts Fedora’s free software foundations and that significant kernel policy changes hadn’t been cleared with the right people.
Fedora has also removed Deepin desktop from its offering due to security concern.
Someone got Lightroom CC running on Linux via Wine without writing a single line of code themselves. An AI agent did the whole thing autonomously, fixing DLL gaps and Wine incompatibilities.
LibrePlan is a self-hosted open source project management tool that just got its 1.6.0 release. The additions worth noting include email workflows, per-project document repositories, an issue and risk log, and traffic light status indicators in the project list view.
If you’ve ever wanted to run BleachBit over SSH without touching the CLI directly, the TUI is shaping up well. You get keyboard navigation throughout, two preview modes for checking what would be cleaned before committing, and full backend parity with the existing GUI.
Bitwarden got a new CEO in February, a new CFO in April, briefly removed “Always Free” from its pricing page, and quietly rewrote its core values. For most software, this would be unremarkable. For the app that holds your passwords, the bar for transparency needs to be much higher.
ONLYOFFICE Docs 9.4 lands with a mix of features and a licensing update that’s hard to read as coincidental given the Euro-Office fork dispute. It offers users a dark mode for spreadsheets, 25 new presentation themes, 20 new slide transitions, and form recipient tracking.
Linux’s second-in-command, Hartman, thinks that Rust could eliminate 80% of Linux kernel CVEs.
Here are other highlights of this edition of FOSS Weekly:
- Listening to music on the terminal.
- Microsoft having a Fedora-based offering.
- Configuring a smart bulb to run with Home Assistant.
- And other Linux news, tips, and, of course, memes!
🎫 Event alert: AWS Summit India Online
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The event is virtual and free to attend.
🧠 What We’re Thinking About
Microsoft spent its Open Source Summit announcement talking about Azure Linux 4.0 without mentioning Fedora once. The GitHub README for the 4.0 development branch uses the phrase “upstream base” to describe Fedora’s role.
🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings
Mission Center and Resources are both polished libadwaita system monitors, and both are genuinely good. But what makes them different from each other? A lot. We have a detailed writeup that should clear your doubts.
Splitting a string in Bash isn’t as intuitive as it should be. The trick is setting IFS to your delimiter and using read -ra to split the string into an array. Here’s a short explainer with a working CSV example and a breakdown of what each part is actually doing.
If cmus or MOC never quite clicked for you, Kew is worth trying. Written in C, it displays album art in the terminal, can search your music library with a single keyword, and handles playlists and shuffles without fuss.
Desktop Linux is mostly neglected by the industry but loved by the community. For the past 13 years, It’s FOSS has been helping people use Linux on their personal computers. And we are now facing the existential threat from AI models stealing our content.
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👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner
Eight LLMs benchmarked on a CPU-only Intel i5 laptop with 12GB RAM, using Ollama with Q4_K_M quantization throughout.
Also, here’s how I fixed a pesky error with a Tapo smart bulb on Home Assistant.
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✨ Apps and Projects Highlights
Aerion is a new open source desktop email client built with Wails and Svelte, not Electron, and it shows.
📽️ Videos for You
Using Xfce doesn’t need to feel like a trip down memory lane. You can customize it thoroughly to bring it up to current standards.
💡 Quick Handy Tip
In the Bitwarden desktop app and browser extension, you can set a pin instead of using the master password to log in. To do that, go into the Account Security settings and turn on the “Unlock with Pin option.”
Remember to turn off “Require master password on browser restart,” and set the session timeout to “On browser restart” for securing your vault against unauthorized access.
Though, do not forget the master password, since the PIN is not a replacement, and you will need it when signing into new devices.
🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse
Test your terminal knowledge with our Linux Terminal Emulators crossword.
Do you still shudder at the sight of a CLI? 🤨
🗓️ Tech Trivia: On May 21, 1952, IBM announced its first electronic computer, the Model 701, at a time when the company was better known as the world’s largest supplier of punched card equipment, with chairman Thomas Watson Sr. so resistant to the idea that engineers had to rebrand it a “Defense Calculator” just to get it built.
🧑🤝🧑 From the Community: Old time FOSSer Howard is looking for feedback and suggestions on how to clean the /home folder.
