PINE64 has been building budget-friendly ARM and RISC-V hardware since 2015, when the original PINE A64 single-board computer launched on Kickstarter. The community-driven outfit has since put out devices like the PinePhone, the ROCK series of SBCs, and the Ox64 RISC-V board.

And now with the PineVoice, they are stepping into the smart speaker space, going the Home Assistant way instead of bundling Alexa or Google Assistant.

What does it pack?

Built specifically as a voice satellite (basically a relay) for Home Assistant and not a general-purpose smart speaker, the PineVoice's horsepower comes from the Bouffalo Lab BL606P.

Which is a RISC-V SoC that pairs a 480 MHz 64-bit T-Head C906, a 320 MHz 32-bit T-Head E907, and a 150 MHz 32-bit T-Head E902 core.

For the memory, PINE64 includes 32 MiB of pSRAM and 788KB of SRAM, along with 16 MiB of XSPI NOR flash for storage, and wireless connectivity is handled via 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 5.2 (BT+BLE).

Wake word detection runs locally through MicroWakeWord, currently using the "Hey Jarvis" model from ESPHome instead of routing audio through a cloud server. The firmware speaks the Wyoming Protocol, which is how Home Assistant's voice interface talks to satellite devices like PineVoice.

A dual microphone array handles audio capture, a built-in speaker outputs audio with physical buttons for volume, and a hardware switch handles mic mutes. A center LED ring shows what PineVoice is doing at any given moment, and these light patterns are said to replace spoken responses from the speaker for most actions and states.

The whole thing measures 65 mm x 65 mm x 66 mm and connects over a single USB-C port that handles both power and data.

Get one

PineVoice is in stock now for $49.99 at the Pine Store's community price, with a $59.99 retail price for those buying elsewhere. It ships with a USB-A to USB-C cable in the box (as shown above), and PINE64 backs the device with a 30-day warranty.

Additionally, the source code for PineVoice's firmware can be found on Codeberg and the specification sheet on the documentation portal.

Suggested Read 📖: ArmSoM Sige6 is The First Sige Board to Ditch Rockchip

A few weeks back, I invited Brian from the iodé, a de-googled Android project, to have a quick discussion on the project, its achievements and the futuree challenges. I was meant to be in video/audio format but part of discussion suffered from poor audio quality and hence I switch it to nour usual text format.

I hope you enjoy this conversation.

It's FOSS: iodé sits at an interesting crossroads of privacy and sustainability. For those who haven't come across the project before, what is it and what is it trying to accomplish?

Brian: iodé is a project that is interested in making sure that there's a privacy-based Android distribution that is also very easy to use. Very easy for normal users to feel they can use it conveniently.

We also feature a tool which is a tracker blocker, so both your apps and your browser when you're browsing the internet have a sort of firewall that allows you to know exactly which connections your device is making, which connections the apps are making, the browser is making when you're visiting websites, and it prevents ads and trackers from following you around the internet.

That's the main goal and while it's not a Linux device in the classic sense of a Linux mobile device, it's an Android device, it gives you all the usability of an Android device.

It's FOSS: App compatibility is usually the first thing that worries someone considering a de-Googled phone, especially banking apps and anything they'd normally get from the Play Store. Since iodé doesn't ship with Google Play, how do you handle that?

Brian: We have two app stores. We have F-Droid, which is a free software app store that comes by default. And we also have Aurora Store, which is basically a front end for the Google Play Store.

So you can install any app that's on Google Play without Google knowing which apps you're installing it doesn't track you the same way Google Play does, but still gives you all the usability of Google Play.

And the difference is you can also spoof different devices. So if something is not available for your device, you don't have to go to some random APK store and risk downloading something that maybe is a dangerous file. You can just simply change the device settings and spoof another device and download that.

So it gives you all the usability of Google Play, maybe even more so. And like all of our pre-installed apps, you can uninstall any of them and install another app store if you want. You can even install the official Google Play if you want.

It's FOSS: If a non-technical person, someone who just wants their phone to work, switched to iodé tomorrow, what would their day-to-day experience actually look like?

Brian: There may be issues with some banking apps because Google has this integrity API, it's more about monopoly than it is about security.

So there are a few issues users may find with some apps not playing well with Play Integrity API. What we have is called MicroG. It's a Google Play Services emulator, and that usually works for almost any app. All the common apps that you would expect,Instagram, TikTok, all these things, they still work on iodé as you would expect.

So for the average user, unless you have problems with a banking app, and that's not that common, most banking apps continue to work. The only occasional thing I've seen is some apps that are from OEMs, like Samsung Watches, may not work. But in general, most users won't notice a big difference moving over from Android.

The difference you will notice is you don't get a lot of notifications and advertisements and just junk you get in a standard Android distribution, there's an incredible amount of bloatware and ads, especially if you're on something like Xiaomi or OPPO.

It's FOSS: Sustainability is something that sets iodé apart from a lot of other privacy-focused Android projects. You offer refurbished devices alongside new ones. Can you walk us through your thinking on that?

Brian: We're very interested in sustainability and so we encourage people to use refurbished devices when possible. Even some of the Fairphones we offer are refurbished. When you're using a very minimalistic image like iodé, it doesn't have a lot of the bloat and unnecessary software, things that you can't uninstall on a regular stock Android device, which is just running in the background and using up your CPU and using up your RAM.

The system itself is much bigger on stock because of Google Play Services and any other add-ons that OPPO or Xiaomi or any other manufacturer puts in. Because iodé is more minimal, it can run on older hardware, on hardware with lower specifications. So that's why we encourage people to use refurbished devices.

But people are asking, saying, "hey, we want new devices as well." So we have begun to add more new devices to our shop. Initially, we only wanted to work with Shift and Fairphone because they're sort of ethical manufacturers. They look at the entire supply chain, the conflict minerals that are involved in building the phones, and make sure that workers get paid well and that the materials are fairly sourced, and try to make a more sustainable model. Because obviously the best device you can always use is a device that's already been built, in terms of sustainability and ecology. So this is why we focused on refurbished.

It's FOSS: The privacy Android space isn't exactly crowded, but there are notable players like /e/OS, LineageOS, GrapheneOS. Do you see them as part of the same broader community, or more as competitors?

Brian: Honestly, I think anything that's good for any of these projects is going to help the other projects. Of all the Android hardware that's out there, there are very few devices to choose from, probably less than 1% of all Android devices can be de-Googled. There was more interest in custom ROMs back in the day when Android wasn't as useful and when people wanted to customize it. With Play Integrity and the Google Play APIs coming out that made it more difficult to use banking apps and things like that, there was a loss of interest. And also people began to see it as a security problem with unlocked bootloaders.

Now, we try to respect the locked bootloader, which makes us different from other projects like Lineage. Whenever we can relock the bootloader, we do. We have relocked bootloaders on four or five manufacturers. The rest of the manufacturers simply don't allow it. We're trying to work with these other operating systems. We have an agreement through the unified attestation to try to come up with an alternative to Google Play Integrity.

I think there's a big market for these devices. A lot of people just don't know that they can get a device that isn't spying on them, that isn't constantly sending data back to Google or to Apple. And just the fact that these devices exist and work out of the box, many people don't even know or realize this, or they think that it's going to be a huge amount of work to install it. That's why we have a shop, that's why we sell our devices. And if we can help these other projects, I think that's great.

I'd like to see more collaboration, and it would be really good if these groups didn't see each other as competitors. I think the same thing is true of Linux distributions. It would be very absurd for Fedora to be attacking SUSE Linux or Linux Mint. People often distro-hop, and I think the same will be true of privacy-based Android distributions.

It's FOSS: GrapheneOS has at times been quite critical of other projects in this space, including iodé, particularly on security grounds. How do you view that?

Brian: Graphene has been very vocal about saying that we've been attacking them. Actually, I don't think we have. This is probably the first time we'll ever say anything about Graphene. And I think the only thing I will say is that they have a great project, and that it's only available on Pixels. There are some people who want other devices. It is important to have a locked bootloader, but not all hardware manufacturers permit it. While we do lock bootloaders when possible on every system that allows bootloader re-locking, we also want to offer other hardware. And that can lead to security issues on those people's devices.

As for whether we also support end-of-life devices — we do. There's a billion people in the world who are running end-of-life devices, and those devices are vulnerable to attacks that have been found in the code base and aren't getting fixed by manufacturers. We continue to support those devices. I think people should know that if they are worried about security, they shouldn't be running end-of-life devices. But we also don't want people to throw them in the bin. They may have other uses for the device and they may not want that device to be constantly sending data back to Google. So there's a balance here.

There's also the question of the firmware. The firmware is updated by the manufacturer and a lot of those device drivers are actually closed source. We don't have access to be able to change it even if we wanted to. This is kind of one of the problems with the Android ecosystem. It's the same problem that the Linux mobile space is also facing.

We do want to support 60 devices; we don't just want to support Google Pixels. All power to them. I hope that Graphene can also make an agreement with Motorola to allow re-locking bootloaders on their devices. We've already begun to support Motorola devices. We do provide monthly security updates, and we're much more up to date than some of the other custom Android distributions out there. All of these projects are working with very limited resources, and it would be wise if we didn't do any sort of infighting. There's no custom ROM developer that has 30 developers. We're all working with very limited resources.

It's FOSS: Without tracking your users, getting a real picture of adoption must be tricky. What do you actually know about how many people are running iodé?

Brian: We do not really get any information on our user base. We don't keep any information. We just know what happens on the forum. We do know that in the last two years there's been a quarter of a million downloads. There's probably well over 10,000 people running iodé as a daily driver. It's almost doubled in the last year, we think, because there's been a great increase of users, including in the United States. We don't actually sell our devices in the US, so this is a bit of a surprise.

Basically the only thing we can see is the IP of the person downloading the file, and we log this in the sense that we just keep some statistics on which countries are downloading. We have people in the United States, in Germany, and France. And we wipe out these IPs. We just know which country it's coming from.

It's FOSS: To close, if someone is weighing iodé against other privacy-focused Android options, what's your pitch? What makes it worth choosing?

Brian: Aside from monthly security updates and the fact that you can install it on many different devices, we have over 60 devices supported now. I think one of the big things that's really going to interest people, like why to choose iodé over something like Lineage, is that you get an iodé blocker. So you get an integrated tracker blocker, and it's also not going to fill up your VPN slot. On most operating systems, if you install a DNS blocker or an ad blocker, those will usually take up your VPN slot and the VPN slot is also useful for your privacy. So you get kind of the best of both worlds.

One of the things we also focus on is we want there to be a complete suite of apps that's pre-installed, and we want all of those apps to be uninstallable. If you don't like our music player, you just uninstall it. If you don't like the default map app, we use Comaps as a default map app, you can install Google Maps if you want, you can have them both. And you still get all of the privacy advantages of Lineage, because our base is Lineage, with some more improvements. The standard Firefox browser doesn't have any connections back to Google, for instance. But if you wanted to use a different web view, you can also do that.

So you have a lot of choice. But for the average user who doesn't know anything about configuring a device besides "I want to install these four apps," it will still give you much better privacy than a standard stock Android, privacy by default, and the choice to do whatever you want to do with the phone.

I would like to thank Brian for sharing interesting insights about the iodé project. I strongly recommending checking it out, who knows perhaps your next smartphone is powered by iodé.

And if it interests you, you may checkout:

• List of Linux-based smartphons
• Other de-googled Android distros
• and choice of open source smartphone OS

Brave browser released Origin, a striped down, non-crypto version of the Brave browser. It's basically Brave browser without the bloat but still with ad-block and anti-tracking.

Here's the good thing which you will lke a s Linux user. This Brave Origin costs $6o for Windows and macOS users, but it is free for Linux users. Not everyday we Linux users get such privilege.

Epic Games open-sourced Lore at State of Unreal 2026, a Git alternative built specifically for projects that mix code with huge binary files, the kind of thing Git LFS handles awkwardly.

NVK, the open source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA cards, can now run DLSS in games. The catch is it's experimental and needs a special flag to turn on, so don't expect it to just work out of the box yet. Full stable support lands with Mesa 26.2 in August.

Remember Canonical's "implicit/explicit AI" framework from a few months ago? Myna is the implicit half taking shape as a local speech-to-text dictation tool that's expected to land in Ubuntu 26.10.

ArmSoM's Sige series has always shipped on Rockchip silicon, until now. The Sige6 swaps in an Allwinner A733 instead, an octa-core chip with a 3 TOPS NPU, LPDDR5 RAM up to 16GB, and an M.2 slot for NVMe storage.

Fruit Ninja's developers are making a dungeon crawler, and the demo already runs on Linux through Proton without a hitch.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

If you're running ARM64 servers on Ubuntu, you can finally patch kernel vulnerabilities without scheduling a reboot, something AMD64 has had for years.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

Most people use Firefox for browsing and nothing else, which is a shame given how much is actually packed in. There are many features that you might've missed, like split-screen tabs, a PDF editor with merge support, the built-in eyedropper tool, and full-page screenshots.

If you've ever wondered how LVM actually works under the hood rather than just clicking through an installer's defaults, we can walk you through it command by command.

Niri rearranges nothing when you open a new window; it just adds another column to an endless horizontal strip, and you scroll over to it. After a few weeks of daily use, Bhuwan admits the real appeal only showed up once they stopped trying to use it like a normal tiling WM.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

I briefly tested Terramaster F4-425 Pro NAS. The device is good but there are some rough edges to handle on the software side.

Raspberry Pi-powered handhelds are cropping up regularly now. Our list covers six such options that you could look into.

PINE64's latest offering is PineVoice, a $49.99 smart speaker that skips Alexa and Google Assistant entirely in favor of being a dedicated Home Assistant voice satellite.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

Audiophiles, this one's for you. Astra is a music player that lets you play locally stored music files with many controls to fine-tune playback.

📽️ Videos for You

There's a simple command that can save you some considerable space on your Linux server.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

In KDE Plasma System Settings, go to Window Management -> Virtual Desktops. Here, enable the "Switch desktops independently for each screen" option to easily switch between the different virtual desktops on multiple monitors.

This was introduced with the recent Plasma 6.7 release and should be very convenient for people who like to multi-task.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Can you match terminal shortcuts with their actions?

Selective outrage, I guess, right Brave Linux users ;)

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On June 18, 1997, the DESCHALL Project cracked the 56-bit Data Encryption Standard. Managed by a modest i486 server, online volunteers pooled their idle computer power to brute-force the key in 96 days, proving DES was obsolete.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: A developer has posted on our forum showing off their new GNOME shell extension called Snap Text for OCR.

One of the biggest strengths of KDE Plasma is its customization, and the System Monitor is no exception.

I have shown this with KDE Konsole tweaks earlier and now I am here to do the same with KDE System Monitor.

Like most other parts of the Plasma desktop, the System Monitor offers plenty of customization options that are easy to overlook.

Let me show you how to transform the default KDE Plasma System Monitor into a clean and powerful system monitoring dashboard.

Understanding the System Monitor Layout

Before we start customizing the System Monitor, let's first understand how KDE Plasma System Monitor arranges sensors on the page.

Take a look at the sample layout diagram below.

This gives you a general idea of how different elements are organized inside the System Monitor.

At the top is the window layer, where everything is arranged in rows. Inside each row is a column layer, where items are arranged into columns.

Within each column, you'll find sections. These sections hold the individual widgets that display system information.

When you enter the System Monitor's edit mode, which we'll cover in the next section, you can hover over the layout to identify these different layers.

As you add or modify widgets, clicking on a particular layer only shows the options available for that layer.

For example, clicking the column layer lets you add more columns, but not sections.

Likewise, clicking the section layer lets you add additional sections, but not columns.

Keeping this layout in mind will make it much easier to customize the System Monitor without any confusion.

As mentioned earlier, KDE Plasma's default System Monitor includes a few pre-built pages that display essential system information.

If you look closely, you'll notice that each item on these pages is essentially a widget, similar to the widgets you can place on the Plasma desktop.

In other words, the System Monitor app works like a canvas where you can add widgets and configure them however you like.

Add a New Page

By default, the Plasma System Monitor includes four pages:

• Overview: A dashboard that displays multiple system statistics.
• Applications: A list of running applications and their resource usage.
• History: Live graphs for CPU, GPU, memory, and network activity.
• Processes: A list of running processes and their resource usage.

For this guide, we'll create a new page instead of modifying the existing ones.

Click the menu button in the top-left corner and select Add New Page.

In the dialog that appears, enter a name for the page and choose an icon.

Next, set Load this page to During application startup.

Finally, click Add.

The new page will now appear in the sidebar. Select it to open it.

You'll be greeted with an empty page. This is where we'll build our custom system monitoring dashboard.

Edit the Page

Now that the new page is ready, it's time to customize its contents.

Open the new page and click the Edit Page button in the top-right corner.

Since the page currently contains only one system monitor widget, click on it. This opens a sidebar where you can configure the selected widget.

Let's turn it into a horizontal bar chart that displays the load on each CPU core.

In the sidebar, change the following settings:

• Title: CPU Load Graph (or any name you prefer)
• Display Style: Horizontal Bars
• Sensors: Select the usage percentage for all CPU cores, as shown in the clip below.

Selecting Sensors

Choosing the right sensors is the most important part of building your dashboard. Most System Monitor widgets work similarly to Plasma desktop widgets and let you display different types of system information.

Depending on the widget, you'll usually find two sensor fields:

• Sensors: Displays the selected sensors as charts, graphs, or other visual elements. You can select multiple sensors.
• Text-only Sensors: Displays the selected sensors as plain text instead of charts or graphs.

Clicking either field opens a categorized list of available sensors.

For example, CPU-related sensors, such as usage percentage, per-core statistics, and CPU temperature, are available under the CPU category.

Likewise, RAM-related sensors are grouped under Memory → Physical Memory.

Here are some of the main sensor categories you'll come across:

• CPUs: CPU usage, per-core statistics, temperature, and related metrics.
• Disks: Disk usage, free space, read/write activity, and other storage information.
• GPU: GPU usage, temperature, video memory, and related statistics.
• Memory: RAM and swap usage.
• Network Devices: IP address, download and upload speed, and other network statistics.
• Operating System: Kernel version, hostname, uptime, and other system details.

The exact sensors available will depend on your hardware and system configuration.

Adding a New Row

Now that we've added the first widget, let's create a new row to add another one.

While still in edit mode, click Add Row. A new empty system monitor widget will appear below the existing one.

This time, we'll configure it as a pie chart to display used and free physical memory (RAM).

If you'd like to see the complete process, check out the short clip below.

Otherwise, configure the widget with these settings:

• Title: RAM Usage
• Display Style: Pie Chart
• Sensors: Used Physical Memory Percentage and Free Physical Memory Percentage

You can also customize the chart colors if you like, but we'll leave them at their default values for this guide.

Add a Column

If the first section looks a bit too wide, you can split the available space by adding another column.

While in edit mode, click the topmost layer of the widget. This opens the menu for that layer.

From there, select Add → Add Column. The process is shown in the clip below.

A new system monitor widget will appear to the right of the existing one. At the same time, the original widget will automatically resize to make room for the new column.

Using the same editing process as before, I configured this new widget with the Color Grid display style to show additional system information.

Change the Position of a Widget

After setting up the dashboard, I felt that the Color Grid would look better before the CPU Load graph.

To move it, I clicked the topmost part of the widget to open that layer's menu.

From there, I clicked on Move and simply dragged the widget to the left of the CPU Load graph.

That's all there is to it.

Organize Widgets with Sections

So far, we've added rows and columns and rearranged widgets.

There is one more organizational feature in the System Monitor called Sections.

Sections let you group related widgets together. For example, you can keep all hardware-related sensors in one section and system information in another.

Let's see how it works. I'll demonstrate this on a new page. By now, you should already know how to create one.

In edit mode, click the top part of the section layer, located just above the widget title.

From the layer menu, select Add → Add Section. A new widget will be added to the right of the existing one.

Both widgets now belong to the same section and share a single section header.

To separate them visually, click the section header and select Add → Add Separator.

Save Your Changes

Once you're happy with the layout, click the Save Changes button in the top bar.

This saves all your modifications and exits edit mode.

Your newly created pages and customized widgets will now be available whenever you open the System Monitor.

Start with Your Custom Page

After creating your custom dashboard, you may want the System Monitor to open with that page by default. Fortunately, that's easy to set up.

Click the menu button in the top-left corner and select Edit or Remove Pages.

In the Start with drop-down menu, select the page you created.

Click OK to save the changes.

From now on, the System Monitor will open directly to your custom page every time you launch it.

Remove a Page

If you no longer need a page, you can remove it at any time.

Click the menu button in the top-left corner and select Edit or Remove Pages.

A dialog listing all available pages will appear. Click the Delete button next to the page you want to remove.

Once you're done, click OK to save the changes.

If you don't want to delete a page completely, simply uncheck it in the list. This hides the page without removing it.

Download Community Pages

You don't have to build every dashboard from scratch. The KDE community has created many custom System Monitor pages that you can download and use.

As with any third-party content, install these pages with caution. They are community-created and may not have been tested by the KDE developers for security or stability.

To browse available pages, click the menu button in the top-left corner and select Get New Pages.

This opens the online catalog, where you can click the Install button next to any page to download and add it to your System Monitor.

Export or Import Pages

If you frequently switch between systems, exporting and importing pages can save you from recreating your custom dashboards every time.

To export a page, first open the page you want to save. Then click Menu → Export Current Page. Choose a file name and click Save.

The page will be saved with the .page extension in your chosen location.

To use it on another system, open the System Monitor and select Menu → Import Page. Then choose the exported .page file to add it to your System Monitor.

Wrapping Up

KDE Plasma's System Monitor is much more than a tool for checking CPU and memory usage. It offers a level of customization that many graphical system monitors simply don't provide.

Despite being a GUI application, it gives you plenty of flexibility to build dashboards that suit your workflow.

Have you customized the KDE Plasma System Monitor before, or do you prefer a different system monitoring tool?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Terramaster F4-425 Plus was the first NAS I ever used in my hoemlab setup. It's a solid device for a NAS. Not too expensive, silent and has a decent operating system. The hybrid HDD+SSD model along with TRAID and built-in backup tools makes it a good NAS choice.

Now Terramaster has refreshed their F4-425 series with a Pro model. The main thing that changes here is the CPU. There is also a revamped operating system in the form of TOS 7 but that should be available on previous F4-425 models, too.

The new F4-425 is still a solid device, hardware wise. Operating system has rough edges and hopefully it will improve in the future updates if Terramaster is serious on this product. They usually are.

I have used the device for a few days as it's a new device and I have been travelling to other cities for most of the past few weeks. So what I am sharing here are more of first impressions. A more thorough review with extended daily use will follow.

Still, there is enough here to give you a useful picture of where the F4-425 Pro stands right now.

The hardware

Visually, the F4-425 Pro is identical to the Plus. Same aluminum chassis, same front layout with four HDD bays and a single USB-A port, same rear port arrangement. There is no design refresh here. You cannot distinguish between the two by just looking at them from the outside.

What changed is the processor primarily. The Plus had an Intel N150 with 4 cores. The Pro moves to the Intel Core 3 N350 with 8 cores and a 7W TDP. The integrated GPU gains 32 execution units versus 16 to 24 on the Plus, which matters for hardware-accelerated transcoding. My unit is the top configuration with the N350 and 16GB DDR5.

The 8-core upgrade is meaningful for a NAS running multiple Docker containers, simultaneous services, and media transcoding. There is also a cheaper N305 variant at $699.99 with 8GB less RAM, but given how much a NAS tends to do in parallel, I would lean toward this configuration.

One constraint worth noting is that there is only one SODIMM slot. If you want to upgrade beyond 16GB later, you will need a single module of single-rank DDR5.

First, a discovery that changed how I think about TerraMaster migration

Before the hardware rundown, I want to share something I stumbled into during setup that I did not know before and found genuinely useful.

Terrmaster's operating system, TOS, does not live on the NAS device itself. There is no onboard eMMC storage. The operating system is installed directly on one of the user-inserted disks.

When I moved some of my existing drives from the Plus into the Pro, it booted straight into TOS 6 with my old user credentials already present. The Pro just picked up where the Plus left off because the OS was on the drives, not the device.

If that was amusing, the story gets better.

I then inserted those same drives into my ZimaCube Pro as I wanted to format them. And the strangest thing happened. The ZimaCube started presenting itself as a TerraMaster NAS running TOS. The TOS installation on disk was only about 280 MB but that was enough to 'hijack' the boot process.

I formatted the SSDs by putting them in my Terramaster D1 SSD enclosure and connecting it to my Ubuntu laptop. I formatted the drives using GParted via my TerraMaster USB DAS, reinserted them in the Pro, and it initialized fresh with TOS 7.

The OS installation experience

No, I am not talking about installing an open source NAS OS on the Terramaster F4-425 Pro. I am talking about TOS itself.

Since the device doesn't come with on-board storage, the OS is installed when you boot (with fresh hard disks).

I used two SSDs to test the NAS. Only SSDs, no HDDs (don't judge me). I think in total, I have 8 SSDs of various size. I started buying them 2 years back when I started exploring homelab setup. My collection of disks would have grown as my interest and devices grew in my homelab but the increased price have put a stop on them for now. From what I see, the SSDs that I bought 2 years ago, cost 2 to 3 times more these days. I'll wait for the prices to come down.

Enough of my sob story. So, I used two disks and they were combined into one with TRAID.

The TOS 7 was downloaded and installed in 25 minutes or so.

Once it is installed, you get the option to create a "super user" locally:

And then you get the option to add an email account. You have to provide an email address and you may provide a fake or temporary one and skip verification, I think. However, this email address is used to send notification about certain events like NAS being rebooted, shutdown and more. You can also configure custom notification for when disks are full or they encounter issues.

Here's a video of the TNAS OS installation and initilization. It's a raw, unedited video of about 35 minutes. Mostly the first and last few minutes are of interest.

You'll notice some errors when I first log in to the TOS. Those errors went away after the reboot.

Using TOS 7: Improvement on TOS 6, but the "AI-native" label is not justified (yet)

TOS 7 is surely an improvement over the previous TOS 6. The interface is cleaner, navigation is more intuitive, and the storage management tools feel more coherent. The addition of system monitor in the sidebar is a good move and overall, the TOS seems to have a good user interface at first look.

The redesign is evident, sepecially if you have used TOS 6 in the past.

That said, TerraMaster is marketing TOS 7 as "the world's first AI-native NAS OS" and I think that's more of marketing than actual AI features.

The "Ai-native" tag needs a lot more work

The main AI feature is the inclusion of OpenClaw, which lets you interact with the NAS using natural language. Sounds compelling. But OpenClaw is an orchestration layer, not an AI model itself. It acts as a middleman between you and whatever LLM you connect it to, which could be a cloud service or a local model running on current or another device. The NAS itself is not doing any AI inference. So "AI-native" means "designed to connect to AI", which is a different thing.

The idea Terramaster showcased in their TOS7 video was that OpenClaw could be used to manage the NAS more easily by asking the AI to configure a few things instead of doing it all by yourself.

If that was the idea, it would have made more sense to include some open source model pretrained data on Terramaster docs or at least have some custom skills added to it (for the lack of good enough GPU for local AI). There is no scope for adding a GPU for more local AI capabilities.

I tried pointing OpenClaw at Ollama running on my ZimaCube Pro. The configuration is not straightforward. There are networking details to sort out and Ollama's API endpoint format matters. It is doable (and I'll revisit this scenario later), but it is not the one-click experience the marketing implies.

Of course, OpenClaw can be connected with Claude and other cloud LLMs but then it won't be native, local AI. I also don't have Claude Max plan to connect it to OpenClaw.

Personally, I would not trust AI automation with my private data, especially when I plan to use this as my primary local data backup. That said, the idea of including AI assistance is not entirely bad. People are increasingly using AI and they want it built into the tools they already use, rather than switching to a browser tab or a terminal.

The other AI feature is in the Photos app. It scans your library to recognize faces, places, and scenes. This is useful but nothing new or revolutionary, it was already there in TOS version 6. Tools like Immich and PhotoPrism already do this, and they are both open source options you can install on the NAS itself. What would actually differentiate this is something like OCR on scanned documents, which neither Photos nor most self-hosted tools handle well. That opportunity is sitting right there.

The AI recognition in Photos is also not enabled by default. You have to go into settings and turn it on manually. Once enabled, it takes a while to process a large library.

There is a Linux terminal, too

TOS 7 provides terminal access to a Linux environment running underneath. I guess this is good for people who do not want to rely on the provided graphical user interface and want to take matters into their own hands by using the command line.

Now, the Linux environment is Ubuntu. Ubuntu 22.04 specifically. That version reaches end of life in April 2027, almost a year from now. For a device just launched in mid-2026 and expected to run for years, shipping with a near-EOL Ubuntu base is not a good move. I would have expected 24.04 at minimum.

Another thing is that I could see pending updates in the terminal but it threw a warning when I tried to run apt upgrade.

Which makes sense to some extent. Terramaster doesn't want you to upgrade the system on your own. Rather, they will provide OTA updates. If you install a package on your own, you can upgrade it with "apt install package_name" way. And of course, the terminal is at your disposal to configure docker, development tools etc from the command line because a few things are rather easy in the terminal than fiddling around in the GUI menu.

Easy remote access through

Terramaster also has this new feature (I think) calles TNAS.online remote access. So, if you register an account with Terramaster, you can enable remote acces to your NAS device. This makes it easier for you to access data when you are not on your home network.

Rough edges worth knowing about

These are not dealbreakers but they add up and are worth calling out early. I hope Terramaster team reads this and provides software updates to address these issues.

Global search has a scope problem. TOS 7 has a distinction between your personal space (home directory) and the shared public space. A global search only returns results from your home directory. Files stored elsewhere on the device did not appear. Even files I copied into the home directory did not show up in search results immediately, possibly due to indexing time. But the lack of clear guidance on what the two spaces mean, and which one search actually covers, will confuse new users.

Jellyfin cannot browse subdirectories inside the home directory. I set up a Movies folder inside my home directory but Jellyfin would not display subdirectories when I tried to add it as a media library. It wanted to use /Volume1/jellyfin by default, which means media gets tied to the application path. If Jellyfin gets uninstalled, the data location becomes a concern.

No keyboard navigation in Photos. Browsing photos requires mouse clicks throughout. You cannot use arrow keys to move between images in the viewer. The app search bar launched from the top bar also does not dismiss with Escape. These are minor but they signal a UI that was not fully tested for keyboard users.

The absurd need to enable apps after each reboot. Unless Terramaster really want to discourage shutting down the NAS device, I see no reason why an installed application needs to be enabled again after rebooting the device. I noticed it with OpenClaw, Jellyfin and even Terramaster's Photos application. It makes no sense to me.

Still excellent hardware wise

I liked the previous F4-425 Plus device. This one is not much different other than a (needed) CPU upgrade. It's the same aluminium chasis, same small form factor and the same silent device.

Yes, F4-425 Pro is also a 'silent machine'. You'll probably won't notice it running even if it is sitting on your disk and its fan is running.

The hybrid model to include 4 HDDs and 3 SSDs is good. It's just that you need to pull out the outer casing to access the SSD compartment. HDDs can be easily accessed from the front.

It seems that TOS's software is capable of handling the hot swap. I could not test it for the lack of disks.

It measures 181 mm wide, 219 mm deep, and 150 mm tall. Basically a small form factor device that doesn't take much desk space.

The USB-C port is still at the back. I said this in my F4-425 Plus review, too. The single USB-C port is on the rear of the device. For quick external SSD connections, this is inconvenient for a lazy person like me.

I added around 125 GB of pictures and watched the resource consumption. It remained under 20% CPU and RAM load.

Similarly, I streamed a 4K movie in mkv format. The load remained under 10%. So the processor is quite capable here as a NAS and a casual media hub.

I am not a professional and don't really run benchmark tests. Just sharing what I observed as a novice homelabber.

Verdict: promising hardware, software still maturing

Based on a few days of use, the F4-425 Pro is a capable device with a hardware upgrade that makes sense. The 8-core processor and improved iGPU are relevant improvements for anyone running multiple services. The TOS-on-disk design makes migration genuinely easier than it has any right to be.

TOS 7 is a better version of TOS 6 by a clear margin. But the AI features are far from a finished product. OpenClaw requires external configuration to work so the native AI part is not there yet.

I will be putting the Pro through more extensive use as a daily driver and sharing a full review a few month later perhaps. There is more to test, including sustained performance under load, RAID behavior with multiple disks (if I can afford them), mobile apps and whether Ollama installed directly on the device makes OpenClaw actually useful. Stay tuned for that.

The NAS itself is $799.99 for this configuration. That is the entry point, not the total cost. If you do not already have drives, HDDs and SSDs have increased substantially in price over the past year. Building a usable NAS with populated bays is a meaningfully larger investment than the device price alone suggests. Factor that in before buying.

If you already have the previous F4-425 model, I don't think you should upgrade just because there is a new model. If you are buying a NAS for the first time or upgrading your NAS for several years, F4-425 Pro is an option worth considering. Sure, the provided operating system may not be to everyone's liking but you can always install a different operating system. The hardware is solid.

Origin is Brave's stripped-down browser, built for people who never touch most of what the company packages with Brave Browser. It drops the AI assistant, the rewards program, the crypto wallet, and the VPN, leaving the ad and tracker blocking in place.

Don't let that fool you into thinking that this is some half-baked browser; you still get regular security upgrades, Chromium-specific patches, and general browser updates.

Though, for most users, Brave Origin costs $59.99 for a one-time license purchase for use across Windows, Android, macOS, and iOS. However, people running a Linux distro on their computer do not have to pay a dime or sign up for an account.

Announcing Origin earlier this month, Brave explained that they:

Built Brave Origin in response to requests from users who wanted to support Brave’s industry-leading work on Web privacy and open-source adblocking, without having to manage or remove features they weren’t interested in using.

I wanted to see for myself what Brave Origin was about while also comparing it to their flagship offering. So, would you like to come along as I explore it? 🤓

This is what's on offer

The first thing Origin showed me was a choice built right into onboarding; pay for a license to support Brave, or proceed for free since I was on Linux. I went with free, and right after came the usual first-time setup screens.

First came the prompt to set it as my default browser.

Next came the request to import settings from other browsers, offering to pull bookmarks, extensions, and saved passwords over from whatever browser Brave found on the system (Firefox in my case).

After that came the reporting of crashes or freezes (aka Stability) dialog; basically some telemetry that would be sent over to Brave when Origin behaved erratically during use.

Good to see that it was disabled by default. 😄

Those were the only things asked of me during onboarding, and I started browsing right away. Brave Search is the default here, same as any other Brave install, though it can be swapped out for something else if you prefer something like DuckDuckGo or Ecosia.

I left it as is during testing, and it held up well. Searching for "YouTube" even pulled in recent coverage from high domain authority sites like the BBC and Google's own blog under the news results.

Brave Shields performed quite well too! It did its job without me needing to configure anything. While playing a video on YouTube, it caught 16 trackers and ads on that one page alone, with fingerprinting protection switched on by default.

Nothing about the page felt broken or stripped down because of it either.

I also ran a Speedometer test on BrowserBench, running Origin inside my test setup of an Ubuntu 26.04 LTS virtual machine, and it scored a 23.3 without any extensions or themes installed.

For a comparison, I ran the same test on my daily driver Vivaldi installation on Fedora Workstation 44 (non-VM setup), and the score came in at 23.2, close enough to call a tie.

While it's tempting to say this proves Origin is incredibly lightweight, Speedometer mostly measures responsiveness of Web applications, where modern virtual machines actually perform nearly as fast as real hardware.

Because the two tests ran on entirely different operating systems, the near-tie mostly shows that both browsers handle web code at the same fundamental speed. To truly prove Origin is lighter, I'd need to test them side-by-side on the exact same setup.

I didn't have the chance to do that while working on this piece. 😅

Why not Brave Browser?

Well, the regular Brave Browser already does almost everything Origin does, plus a lot more. Out of the box, it bundles in features like:

It also has an opt-out telemetry system, which, if skipped, will quietly send back a daily usage ping, crash logs, and P3A analytics in the background.

If you use even a couple of those extras, like asking Leo a quick question, the VPN, or the rewards program, stick with regular Brave, since it already does this for free on all platforms.

Brave Origin, on the other hand, removes every item on that list, either compiling them out of the build entirely or switching them off by default, depending on how it's installed.

Simply speaking, Origin is for people who never touched most of those features and want them gone rather than just tucked away in a menu. It's also for the ones who skipped Brave Browser altogether because of all that extra stuff (or bloat).

Running both side by side isn't a problem either. I ran the standalone Origin install alongside a Brave Browser install during testing, and neither one interfered with the other at any point.

Installing Brave Origin on Linux

There are two ways to get Brave Origin running on your Linux computer.

The first is installing the standalone app (we talk about this in detail a bit later), where a dedicated application is downloaded into your system, and you just launch it to use it.

The second method is to upgrade your existing Brave Browser installation by going into Settings > System and scrolling down to the "Brave Origin" entry.

Here, you only need to click the "Proceed with Origin for free on Linux" button, and the browser switches over to the Origin experience, with the option to manually re-enable any of the disabled features.

Switching back to the normal browser doesn't need a reinstallation either. You can do that by disabling the Brave Origin flag at brave://flags.

Ubuntu

If you already have Brave Browser installed via apt, then you can skip the last step in this section.

If not, then you can follow these steps to get Brave Origin. First, you have to ensure that you have cURL installed via the following command:

curl --version

If it shows an error, run:

sudo apt install curl

Next, you have to add the GPG keyring for Brave's APT repository to your system:

sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg

Then, you have to add Brave's APT repository to your system's sources list:

sudo curl -fsSLo /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brave-browser-release.sources https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/brave-browser.sources

And refresh apt's package index:

sudo apt update

Now, it is just a matter of installing the browser using:

sudo apt install brave-origin

Fedora

On Fedora 41 or later machines with DNF5+ (non-atomic), you can run the following commands to get Brave Origin:

sudo dnf install dnf-plugins-core

sudo dnf config-manager addrepo --from-repofile=https://brave-browser-rpm-release.s3.brave.com/brave-browser.repo

sudo dnf install brave-origin

Arch Linux

For Arch Linux and derivatives, the way to get Brave Origin is via an AUR helper like yay or paru. The official instructions mention how to get it using yay:

yay -Sy brave-origin-bin

There's also a cURL command that handles installation on most Linux distros that goes like:

curl -fsS https://dl.brave.com/install.sh | FLAVOR=origin sh

You won't find the source code for Origin in a separate repository on Brave's GitHub, and that's because there isn't one. Origin is just a stripped-down build of brave-core, and doesn't have its own codebase.

Canonical's Livepatch can now patch the Linux kernel on ARM64 systems without forcing a reboot. This has been possible on AMD64 machines for years, but ARM64 users had no equivalent option until now.

It is available for users on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Ubuntu Core 26, and if this sounds familiar, that's because Canonical has already talked about this before. The first time was when the Ubuntu 26.04 release was out, back in April, and the second instance was when Ubuntu Core 26 arrived.

We are covering this now because they have put out a dedicated writeup explaining the effort that went behind getting this ready.

Work started back in 2023, where the company ran a gap analysis (a study of what's missing) on what ARM64 needed to support live kernel patching, and the results weren't very encouraging.

The issue was that the upstream ARM64 kernel lacked a stable implementation of reliable stacktraces, a feature livepatching depends on to know when it's safe to swap code in a running kernel.

The compiler toolchain wasn't ready either, with GCC, objdump, and Kpatch all missing stable ARM64 support at the time. Work picked up through 2024 and into this year as Arm processors became more common in cloud and edge deployments.

Upstream kernel maintainers, hardware vendors, and Canonical's own engineers had to step up for closing those gaps. By late February, the ARM64 Livepatch client was already applying patches in Canonical's test environments for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Ubuntu Core 26.

Why should you Livepatch?

Livepatch comes as part of Ubuntu Pro, Canonical's subscription that bundles security patching, support, and compliance tools all while also covering the kernel by patching critical and high-severity vulnerabilities.

You don't need to pay for any of this if you just want to try it out, since Canonical offers Livepatch free for personal use on up to five machines. That should cover most home setups and small server fleets without forking over payment details.

The real advantage shows up once you are managing more than a handful of machines, because instead of scheduling downtime to patch a kernel vulnerability, Livepatch applies the fix in-memory and lets administrators decide when each machine gets the update.

It isn't a complete replacement for patching, though, since Livepatch only touches the kernel. Canonical still recommends rebooting every so often regardless, because long uptimes pile up memory leaks and other state issues that a livepatch can't clear.

None of this really matters if you are a desktop user who restarts their machine fairly regularly, since Livepatch is built for systems where a reboot means real downtime and risk of cost overruns.

When I first heard about Niri, a Rust-powered, scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor with a supposedly different take on window management, I was both skeptical and intrigued.

But after a few weeks of daily driving it and pairing it with the excellent Dank Linux desktop suite, I have a lot to say.

What Exactly Is Niri?

Niri is not your typical tiling window manager. It describes itself as a "scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor," and that one word, scrollable changes everything.

Traditional tiling WMs like i3 or Sway divide your screen into a fixed grid. Every time you open a new window, all the existing ones get reshuffled and resized. If you have ever lost track of your editor because Firefox decided to squish it into a 200-pixel-wide column, you know exactly how jarring that can be.

Niri works differently. Windows are arranged in columns on an infinite horizontal strip that extends to the right. Opening a new window never causes existing windows to resize. You simply scroll sideways to bring other windows into view, much like flipping through pages on a tablet.

The project is inspired by PaperWM, a GNOME Shell extension that brings scrollable tiling to GNOME. The motivation behind writing a standalone compositor, rather than another GNOME extension, was to isolate workspaces per monitor properly. With Niri, each display has its own discrete set of workspaces that never bleed into one another.

And crucially, it is written entirely in Rust. Which could be a deciding point for some.

Installing Niri

Niri's availability varies across distributions. I found it packaged on Fedora, Arch Linux, and Ubuntu.

If you are on Ubuntu, you will need to install it from a custom PPA or build it from source.

On Ubuntu 25.10 and above, there is a PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:avengemedia/danklinux
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:avengemedia/dms
sudo apt install niri dms

On Fedora, installation is as simple as:

sudo dnf install niri

On Arch:

sudo pacman -Syu niri alacritty dms-shell-niri
systemctl --user add-wants niri.service dms

Once installed, you can get a first impression of Niri by simply running a command niri while staying in the current Gnome or XFCE session. Later, you can launch Niri from your display manager (login screen).

At first boot, you are greeted by a hotkey overlay, a quick cheat sheet of default keybindings that I found genuinely useful. If you prefer to skip it on subsequent launches, a single config line handles that.

To get a feel, you can start pressing Alt+T a couple of times. This will open multiple instances of your default terminal emulator, allowing you to navigate different windows by pressing Alt + arrow keys, the Alt+hl Vim binding, or using the mouse scroll button.

The Scrollable Tiling Experience

I discovered the real appeal of Niri only after I stopped trying to use it like a traditional tiling WM. This mental model shift is important.

Rather than dividing my screen into regions, I started thinking in terms of a horizontal timeline of work. On the left, my text editor. Scroll right a bit in the terminal. Further right, browser, documentation, another terminal. Each workspace is its own infinite strip, and each monitor has its own independent set of workspaces. It felt a lot like having a very wide desk that you can slide across.

In traditional tiling setups, every time I opened a new window, I would mentally recalculate where things had moved. In Niri, nothing moved. What was on the left stayed on the left. New things appeared to the right.

Window resizing is still possible. You can adjust column widths and toggle preset sizes with keybindings. Niri also supports floating windows, which can be toggled per window via a keybinding or set as default through window rules. I used floating windows for things like file manager dialogs and calculator apps that feel awkward in a tiled layout.

The workspaces are dynamic and arranged vertically (similar to GNOME's workspace model), while windows scroll horizontally within each workspace. It is a two-axis system, and I experienced it as surprisingly intuitive once the initial learning curve passed.

Configuration

Niri uses a KDL-based configuration file, typically located at ~/.config/niri/config.kdl. KDL is a document language similar in spirit to JSON or TOML but with a different syntax. I found it clean and readable, though it is not something every user will be familiar with right away.

The configuration is comprehensive. You can define:

• Keybindings for almost every action
• Window rules to set default sizes, floating state, or opacity per application
• Animations for window open/close, workspace switching, and scrolling
• Input settings for keyboard, touchpad, and mouse
• Output configuration for multi-monitor setups, including scale, mode, and position

There is dedicated documentation on configuration. It walks through the config format with clear examples. Hot-reloading the config works via niri msg action reload-config, which makes tweaking much less painful than the "restart and hope" workflow of some other WMs.

One area I noted needs third-party tools: bars, notification daemons, and app launchers are not included. Niri is strictly the compositor. You bring your own Waybar, your own mako or dunst, your own wofi or rofi-wayland.

For experienced users, that modularity is a feature. For newcomers, it can feel like a lot to wire up.

That is precisely where Dank Linux comes in.

Enter Dank Linux: Turning Niri Into a Complete Desktop

Setting up a full Niri desktop from scratch, including bar, launcher, notifications, and theming, can take hours of configuration. I discovered Dank Linux as a project that elegantly solves this problem.

Dank Linux is not a distribution. It is a modern desktop suite built primarily around Niri (with also support Hyprland, Sway, MangoWC, labwc, and Miracle WM). At its heart is DankMaterialShell (DMS), a complete desktop shell featuring dynamic theming, smooth animations, a spotlight-style launcher, a control center, a system monitor, and beautiful widgets.

Getting started is almost embarrassingly easy:

curl -fsSL https://install.danklinux.com | sh

That single command brings up an interactive installer that handles dependencies, sets up DMS, configures your chosen compositor (I selected Niri), and even lets you pick your preferred terminal from the list: Ghostty, Kitty, or Alacritty.

Step 1

At first glance, the Dank Linux installer will ask you to choose your favorite window manager. Currently, it provides you with two options, i.e., Niri and Hyprland. Of course, I'll go with Niri this time.

Step 2

Next, choose your default terminal emulator from the list.

Step 3

It will provide you with a dependency check if any additional necessary needs need to be installed. You can toggle your selection for installation with the Space key.

Step 4

Dank Linux installer will prompt for privilege escalation. I'll go with the sudo option.

Step 5

The installer will also prompt you to replace the existing Niri config.kdl file.

Step 6

Finally, after the setup is complete, you'll get to see the message saying "Your system is ready" and be provided with a couple of commands to view its logs.

Now, it's time to log out and log back into our new Dank Linux environment. You can even first test the whole setup while staying on the Gnome desktop environment.

I tried booting directly into Niri and got stuck on the black screen issue for a couple of days. The issue was that I had been testing it in a VM, and I first needed to enable 3D acceleration in the VM.

Make sure to set Listen type to None and tick the checkbox next to OpenGL in Display Spice options to enable 3D acceleration if you're using QEMU/KVM.

Also, you need to make changes to Video Virtio.

What DankMaterialShell Brings

After the installer finished, I experienced one of those rare moments where a Linux desktop setup just looks good out of the box. Here is what DMS provides:

Dynamic Material You Theming

Powered by matugenDMS extracts a colour palette directly from your wallpaper and applies Material Design 3 colour schemes across the entire desktop, including system applications. Switch your wallpaper, and the whole UI recolors itself. It supports automatic light/dark mode switching too, and I found the color transitions genuinely elegant.

Dank Dash

A sidebar dashboard that surfaces media controls, weather, a calendar, and system information at a glance. It is the kind of widget panel that looks like it belongs on a premium Chromebook, not a tiling WM.

Spotlight Launcher

An application launcher that supports filesystem search and is extensible through plugins. I discovered it launches apps noticeably faster than rofi on the same hardware.

Settings

Quick toggles for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, night light, and other system settings. It mirrors the kind of control center you see in macOS or GNOME.

System Monitor (Dank GOP)

Real-time monitoring of CPU, memory, GPU, disk, and network is presented in a clean overlay that does not require opening a separate terminal window.

Dank Search (dsearch)

Though you need to install it manually, it's a blazingly fast filesystem search tool, available both from the launcher and as a standalone CLI. When using from the launcher, you can use / to begin file search.

Dank Greeter

A polished login screen (greetd greeter) that matches the rest of the DMS aesthetic, so the visual consistency starts from the moment you boot.

In case you're still getting the default gdm3 login screen or failed to install Greeted at the installation prompt, you can do so with the following command:

dms greeter install
sudo systemctl start greetd

The DMS documentation is well organized and covers compositor-specific setup, keybind configuration through IPC, theming, plugin development, and CLI usage. Running dms setup After installation, it generates starter configs for both Niri and your chosen terminal, and dms doctor runs a diagnostic if something goes wrong.

For Niri specifically, DMS integrates tightly, including IPC-based keybind hooks and compositor blur support. The Niri community maintains a Discord server, and DankMaterialShell has its own subsection there, which I found active and helpful.

In The End...

Niri's scrollable tiling approach solves real friction in the traditional tiling workflow. It gives you a compositor that is both memory-safe (It's Rust afterall) and impressively stable.

Paired with Dank Linux's DankMaterialShell, it becomes a complete, visually coherent desktop that can genuinely compete with mainstream desktop environments on aesthetics while leaving them far behind on efficiency.

Is it for everyone? Nah! If you are new to Linux desktops, the setup complexity (even with Dank Linux's one-liner) assumes some familiarity. But if you are a tiling WM user who has ever been frustrated by windows jumping around when you open something new, Niri is worth your afternoon or night, depending on whether you are a day or night person.

If you liked horizontal scrolling but don't want to go with Niri window manager and Dank Linux together, you can consider two actively maintained projects like Scroll (a fork of Sway enabling horizontal scrolling) and PaperWM, the GNOME Shell extension I mentioned in the beginning.

Enjoy the variety in the Linux desktop offering 😸

In the general trend of "back to the future past" that we've been experiencing these days, a lot of users want to roll back from the streaming-based consumption services now, days of physical media or digital files that are locally present on their systems (I still miss my iPod).

So what do we need again? Physical and/or offline digital media players. At the same time, the technology encoding these files have enhanced exponentially, bringing the need for software that can adequately process all that information.

And so, I bring to you Astra: an open source music player that can play your high quality, high fidelity audio without breaking a sweat, and show you information about it that you had no idea you wanted.

First, the Abilities

Formats

Astra is quite versatile, supporting all the major formats natively, which include FLAC, MP3, WAV, OGG, AAC, M4A, OPUS, WMA and AIFF. FLAC, WAV and MP3 are the most common formats that high definition audio is available in. If you wish to play audio of any other format, there's a background FFmpeg net it falls back to support it, so you'll be taken care of, anyway.

Dolby Atmos

"Dolby Atmos" is probably something that you've heard of, it is technology that makes your music sound more three-dimensional, giving it a more surround feel. Astra claims to decode audio made for that even if your hardware doesn't support it. It adapts the audio settings to the output you own. I don't have Doly Atom speakers but I felt that the sound was pretty surround quality.

Playback Continuity

Offline audio players often tend to cross-fade between tracks, or buffer before the next track plays which is really annoying, but Astra deals with that by pre-buffering the next track before the one playing ends. The audio flows the way it was meant to, like how it would on a physical vinyl. A beautiful touch, if you ask me.

Parametric Equalizer

"Parametric EQ" are two words that get every producer's tail wagging. First off, there are presets already that include a flat EQ, vocal focus, bass focus, treble focus and so on. The parametric part is that you can configure the EQ manually with up to 10 bands, which is a lot of control for a music player. Usually something like that is present in a production setup. In any case, the volume of the frequencies are displayed in the background of the EQ panel to help you find your settings even more easily.

Visualizers

Moving on to the most visually engaging (or distracting, take your pick) elements of Astra, it offers three visualizers, each highlighting a different element of the music you're listening to. Each of these visualizers are configurable, with technical settings which you can choose depending on how much your system can handle before it becomes too much to handle.

Spectrum Analyzer

The spectrum analyzer shows the relative volume of the frequencies in the audible range that the song has, which go from 20 Hz to 20000 Hz. In other words, it shows you how loud the bass is on the left of the spectrum, and how loud the treble is on the right. It changes with the audio in real time, being extremely helpful for finding problematic frequencies and creating an equalizer profile.

Oscilloscope

As we know, sound is all made of waves. These waves can be visually depicted as a simple graph, denoting the frequencies, wavelengths and amplitudes. In pure physics terms, all sounds can be made of adding different sorts of sine waves, one of which looks like this:

If you add enough of them in the right way, you can even make a square wave, which looks like this:

So all in all, every sound can be seen visually as this sort of wave, which is made by "superimposing" many sine waves together, and the oscilloscope shows the wave that you're hearing when you play it. As a physics nerd, this is really fun. As a producer, this is really helpful for spotting clipping or distortion and monitoring dynamics.

Vectorscope

The vectorscope shows stereo correlation, meaning it shows how well spread out the audio is. A straight diagonal line means a mono signal, but a diagonal blob means a standard stereo mix. If it is wider or something very abstract, or vivid patterns, it means there are stereo, reverb or phase effects. This helps gauge how well spread out the audio is.

Interface

The interface is quite remnant of an older style that was trying to be futuristic, think GOM Player or some VLC skins. It comes with 5 themes inbuilt, which doesn't change any of the elements, just the color schemes. A little tile on the home page shows a new text every time you start the app, which are sometimes genuinely hilarious, that adds a lot of personality to it.

The home, the library, the equalizer, the playlists are all very easily accessible. All the music you add are automatically categorized by album and artist. The favorites and history of the playback are automatically tracked. The bar on the bottom shows the usual name of the track, the seek, volume, and the unusual EQ curve and the technical data such as the bitrate, format and the sampling frequency. It even shows the resources being consumed on top of the window.

The interface is a little too low-contrast on the dark mode, however. Combined with the small font, there comes a need for some squinting to see what is where on the window.

Playback

The fullscreen view of the playback is rather pleasing with a clean frequency graphed seek, the information of the track and the lyrics (if enabled). The accent colors of the background are picked up from the album art, making it even more immersive.

Alternatively, or rather oppositely, there's also a mini player that you can use to keep control of your music playback while working on something else.

Integrations

Astra provides the integration of several services to make your life even easier, some of which are:

Last.fm

You can connect your Last.fm account on Astra, where it "scrobbles" (which is Last.fm lingo for tracks and records) your listening history, with the ability to keep up with it right within the app.

Lyrics

The most important thing to me personally, Astra can show you embedded lyrics within a song, which, if missing, will be retrieved from LRCLIB. Synced lyrics are available for most of the fairly known songs, but the interface of the scroll of the lyrics (in the non-fullscreen mode), unlike the rest of the interface of Astra is a little lackluster. But you know, if it ain't broke and all that.

Discord

You can sync your Discord Rich Presence, showing what you're listening to on your Discord profile along with the cover art.

Local API

You can even play media from any local servers you might have through the local API option, including Jellyfin and Navidrome media systems.

Get Astra

Astra is available as an AppImage (don't worry about it being an on Electron framework because that's what Astra is built on anyway, no matter how you install it) for the easiest installation method. Other than that, there is also a .deb package available.

Cuing the Outro

Astra delivers very well on every single thing it claims. The playback is flawless, the interface is gorgeous, the visualizers are spot on accurate and very helpful and all the configurations available exceed the possibilities even more.

It is a little heavy on the resources with everything going on (Claude, make no mistake and optimize the code), but won't break your system (or so do I hope).

This is when I find the good old music players available for Linux a better fit.

If you're looking for a cutting-edge, high-performing music player, this might just be the one that will satisfy your needs. Try it out and let yourself drown in the music. Cheers!

Ever since it first appeared as a credit card-sized computer, the Raspberry Pi has quietly reshaped how we think about cheap, hackable hardware. Its ability to run fully-fledged Linux distros and GPIO pins for wiring up sensors and motors all while being cheap is what drew people in.

Of course, recent hikes across its lineup have made things harder for tinkerers, but that's the price they have to pay for access to a well-established ecosystem.

That ecosystem covers a lot of ground too. Between the standard boards, the Zero line, and the Compute Modules meant to sit inside custom carrier boards, there is a Pi suited for nearly every kind of project.

Makers and small companies have leaned on this range to build all sorts of things, and some of the results barely look like the underlying device anymore.

With this list, we will be taking a look at a few handhelds that will make you wonder what more a Raspberry Pi can do.

The List

1. Hackberry Pi CM5

The Hackberry Pi CM5 is an open source handheld built by Zitao, an engineering student at the Technical University of Dresden in Germany.

At the front sits a 4-inch 720x720 touchscreen, paired with a repurposed BlackBerry keyboard (Q10, Q20, or 9900 layouts), and the keys can be remapped through Vial if the default mapping does not suit you.

Powering it is a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5, running on a quad-core Cortex-A76 chip clocked at 2.4GHz, and a 5000mAh battery keeps it running for roughly five hours on standby or three to four hours of active use.

There are two ways to get one. Elecrow sells a barebones kit for $158 to $168, but you will need to source your own Compute Module 5 and put it together yourself. If you want it ready to use, Carbon Computers sells a fully assembled version starting at $449, with prices climbing to $1,049 for higher RAM and storage.

2. PocketTerm 35

You will notice further on that most handhelds on this list trade the standard Raspberry Pi board for a Compute Module to save space. The PocketTerm35 is Waveshare's pocketable Linux terminal, built around a full Raspberry Pi 4B or Pi 5.

It features a durable 3.5-inch 640x480 display and a 67-key silicone keyboard that can be used for code entry, command execution, and general editing. An RP2040 chip handles input, screen brightness, and volume control.

The device itself measures 93.5 x 168.5 x 37mm, with an aluminum faceplate on the front and a plastic cover on the back.

Prices on the Waveshare store start at $87.99 and go up to $181.99. The cheap end is the bare accessory kit, useful if you already have a spare Pi board to drop in. The higher end gets you a fully loaded setup with a Pi 4B or Pi 5, a 64GB card, and a 5000mAh battery.

3. Pi Slate

The Pi Slate is Carbon Computers' take on a portable cybersecurity workstation, built around a Raspberry Pi 5 in a shell slim enough for daily carry. Two integrated antenna mounts sit at the top corners, so GPS, LoRa, or SDR radio modules can be bolted on without modifying the case.

The 5-inch touchscreen runs at 1920x720, and below it sits an RGB backlit keyboard with a gyroscopic cursor built in for pointer control. You get a 10,000 mAH battery as well, which is rated for 3 to 5 hours of use.

Carbon Computers sells the Pi Slate fully assembled, starting at $449 for the 2GB/32GB Pi 5 configuration, climbing to $749 for the 16GB/128GB version with more storage. A barebones kit without the Pi 5 goes for $299, and a separate radio kit with GPS, LoRa, and SDR support costs $149.

4. uConsole

The uConsole does not lock you into one chip. ClockworkPi sells four interchangeable core modules for the same shell, and which one makes sense depends entirely on what you want to do with the thing.

The Raspberry Pi CM4 core is the ideal choice for daily use, coding, emulators, and anything that benefits from Raspberry Pi's software support. Complementing that, you get a 5-inch display running at 1280x720, with a 74-key backlit keyboard, a trackball that doubles as a mouse, and a D-pad with four buttons wired in for emulator controls.

An optional 4G LTE module adds cellular data, and the whole thing runs on replaceable 18650 Li-Ion batteries rather than a sealed battery pack. Plus, schematics and other design-related files can be found on GitHub.

5. Cybert.

Cybert. is yet another Carbon Computers offering; this one traces back to a concept called the MC01. Initially, it was built around the Raspberry Pi CM4, but later versions added support for the CM5 along with a custom QMK-compatible keyboard and a BlackBerry touch sensor for a cursor.

The handheld is now at v3.2, powered by a CM5, offering two additional USB 3.0 ports along with a standard M.2 SATA slot for adding things like an SSD, AI accelerator, LoRa, or a 4G LTE module.

For the display, it features a 4-inch 720x720 touchscreen and has wide Linux distro support, ranging from Raspberry Pi OS, Kali Linux, to other popular distros.

It is sold as a bare PCB and case, not a finished device, priced at $199 when in stock. You will need to source your own Compute Module, the display, a LiPo battery, and even a BlackBerry 9900 touch sensor separately to finish the build.

6. Strike

This handheld has a built-in SX1262 LoRa radio, letting you join Meshtastic mesh networks and talk to ATAK, the tactical mapping software used by military and first responder teams.

None of the other handhelds on this list have a radio like this built-in.

A Compute Module 4 sits inside, powering it all, with a 4.3-inch touchscreen and a QWERTY keyboard for tackling daily use, and GPIO, I2C, and SPI headers for anything else you want to wire up.

There are two editions on offer; the Base Edition ships without an SD card, and you have to manually install an operating system like Raspberry Pi OS, RetroPie, or emteria.OS, while the Ready Edition comes preloaded with Raspberry Pi OS and Meshtastic already configured.

At the time of writing, SpecFive only listed the Ready Edition of Strike for $434.99, though every color is currently sold out.

Suggested Read 📖: 11 Interesting ESP32 Microcontroller Projects

Firefox is my daily driver, my main browser. I have been using it for years and I also pay attention to the features it adds with new releases.

I find it surprising that many people use it just for browsing websites but not utilizing many other features it offers. Trust me, you will be surprised by just how much power and convenience is packed into this browser beyond simple web surfing.

From clever productivity hacks to handy built-in tools, it is packed with features that can help enhance your online experience. You don't need to visit third-party websites for several day-to-day tasks.

Let me share these "lesser known" (if I may call that) features of my favorite open source browser.

Tab Split View

For a long time, the lack of a native split-screen viewing mode was a notable gap in Firefox's feature set. However, modern ultrawide monitor users can now view two tabs simultaneously side-by-side without needing to arrange separate OS windows.

While the feature is currently limited to splitting two tabs at once, rather than tiling multiple layouts, the implementation is clean and works exactly as intended.

To use it, simply hold CTRL key and click on the two tab titles you want to view together. Right-click either of the selected tabs, and choose Open in Split View from the context menu.

Once active, you can easily swap their positions or resize the dividing line to allocate more screen real estate to a specific page.

PDF Viewer and Editor

Firefox offers more than just viewing PDF files. It allows annotating PDF documents with tools such as adding highlights, hand-drawings and texts. The browser also enables signing PDF documents and inserting images within PDF files.

One of its most interesting features is merging multiple PDF documents directly within the application. To do this, navigate to the Pages view, click on the Plus button to select additional PDF files.

Ensure that the last page of the current document is selected for appending. Once all PDFs are added, save the file to create a merged PDF without relying on external websites.

This capability makes Firefox an attractive option for managing and editing PDF documents, as it provides a convenient and accessible way to annotate, sign, and merge files.

I mostly use Firefox as the PDF viewer, because it can highlight and comment PDFs, that is accessible everywhere, like inside my Obsidian PDF viewer.

Built-in Color Picker

Web developers and designers frequently spot colors they want to capture while browsing. Having a color picker built directly into the browser eliminates the need for third-party extensions.

Firefox includes a native Eyedropper tool that allows you to easily pick colors from any webpage. To access it, open the main Firefox application menu, navigate to More Tools, and select Eyedropper.

Once activated, your cursor transforms into a magnified circle with a precision pointer at the center, making it easy to isolate specific pixels. Simply hover over the exact color you want to capture and left-click. Firefox will instantly copy the corresponding hexadecimal color code directly to your clipboard.

If you find yourself using this tool frequently and want to bypass the menus, you can add the Developer item directly to your main Toolbar.

This gives you one-click access to the Eyedropper whenever you need it.

Screenshot Tool

Firefox features a powerful, built-in screenshot tool that removes any need for separate screen-capture extensions or external utilities. To activate it, simply right-click on an empty space within any webpage and select Take Screenshot.

One of the tool's best feature is its ability to intelligently align to individual DOM elements on a page. For instance, if you hover your cursor over an image, a specific text block, or a column, the tool automatically snaps its bounding box to perfectly capture that exact element.

Click on the Download button to save that selection as a PNG file.

Beyond element snapping, the tool offers great flexibility:

• Click and Drag to manually select a specific region of the page.
• Save Visible button to capture exactly what is currently shown on your screen.
• Save Full Page is the standout capability. It captures the entire webpage from top to bottom, even the portions buried far below the fold.

I absolutely loved the full website screenshot, which allow us to capture everything all the way to the very bottom of the page. This is best used when you enable Firefox's reading mode.

Whenever I find an important article, I usually take a full screenshot in reading mode and then annotate the important parts later! It is such a cool feature.

Text and Websites Translation

Newer versions of Firefox have the capability to translate website contents to your favorite language. While translations cannot always be top notch, as far as I read, those are decent and get the job done well enough.

It provides a considerable amount of languages to translate to and from, making it easy to parse international sites.

Also, when you go to Menu -> More Tools -> Translate, you can translate specific words or sentences of your choice to other languages.

This is incredibly handy when you don't need the whole page converted but just want to figure out a specific phrase.

Reading Mode

Firefox has a reading mode, which removes most of the distracting components and gives you a nice readable text. It really cleans up the page, stripping out messy blocks and sidebars so you can just focus on the content.

It takes this even further, too! You can adjust the font, the width of the text, and line spacing by using the Text and Layout settings right inside the reading mode.

Also, you can set a different reading theme like Sepia, Dark, or Light depending on your environment and what's easiest on your eyes.

There is a read it aloud feature as well, which is useful when you want to listen to the article while multitasking.

When you are on articles that can be read in a reader mode, a reader mode button appears on the address bar adjacent to the URL of the article.

Click on it to enter the reading mode, and simply click on it again when you want to exit.

AI Summaries

AI summaries are helpful when you are in a hurry and want to know what an article is all about without reading the entire piece word for word.

Firefox now includes an AI button that allows you to quickly summarize contents and get AI help right inside your browsing workflow. A major advantage here is flexibility.

It lets you choose from and connect to multiple different AI service providers rather than locking you into a single model.

You can sign into your existing accounts with these chat services, which means you can seamlessly access your chat history and previous conversations while you work.

Link Previews

Firefox uses small local models to create link previews and keypoints of links.

You can enable this feature in the General Settings under the Browser settings section. Once you toggle it on, it will take a few seconds for the initial setup.

You will also see a noticeable increase in memory usage when it's running, which happens because a small model is executing entirely locally on your machine rather than sending your data to a cloud server.

Once it is up and running, you can simply left-click and hold on any link for a second to pull up a quick preview of the destination page along with its core keypoints.

If you want to tweak how these features behave, there is now a dedicated settings section specifically for AI-related configurations inside the main Firefox Settings menu.

Tab Group and AI

Firefox offers a powerful tab grouping feature to help you manage numerous open tabs efficiently.

You can manually create tab groups, for instance, by gathering all "It's FOSS" links into an "It's FOSS" group and assigning it a distinct color.

Even more interesting is the AI-powered tab grouping. If you have many tabs open and want to organize them quickly, Firefox's AI can assist with the heavy lifting.

To use this feature, right-click on any tab and select the "Add tab to a new group" option. Choose "Suggest more of my tabs".

Wait for the AI to analyze your open tabs. If related tabs are found, the AI will present a selectable list. You can then toggle which tabs to include in the group, provide a name for the group, and click "Done" to finalize it.

Picture in Picture Mode

Firefox makes it super easy to watch videos without getting distracted. Picture-in Picture (PiP) mode lets you shrink your video down to a little window that floats on top of everything else.

To turn it on, head to the Firefox settings and look in the "General" section under "Browser". You'll find an option to enable PiP mode there.

You can also choose to automatically switch videos to PiP when you switch tabs. This is handy if you want to keep a video playing while you work on something else.

My personal favorite way to use PiP is during online courses; it keeps the video right there in my view while I code alongside searching documentation in tabs.

Vertical Sidebar

Firefox gives you the option to switch up your tab layout with a handy vertical sidebar.

To turn it on, just right-click anywhere on the tab bar and choose "Turn on vertical tabs".

Then, click the settings icon at the bottom of the sidebar. From there, you can customize it to expand and collapse when you hover your mouse over it.

I personally find this layout helps me keep track of a lot more tabs without feeling cramped. Plus, it looks pretty cool!

Quick Forget

To quickly erase browsing history of a short period, Firefox has a quick solution, Forget!

You can access this feature by clicking on the Forget toolbar item in your browser's toolbar. You have to add it first to the toolbar by customizing the toolbar.

From there, you have three options to choose from:

• Forget the last 5 minutes: Removes your browsing activity from the past 5 minutes.
• Forget the last 2 hours: Removes your browsing activity from the past 2 hours.
• Forget the last 24 hours: Removes your browsing activity from the past 24 hours.

Keep in mind that once you clear your history, it cannot be undone, and you will be logged out where ever you signed in.

Browsing History Dashboard

The Firefox View dashboard is like a personal history book for your browsing. It gives you more than just a simple list; it lets you see all your recent activity in detail!

Here's what you can do with it:

• Get a clear view of every site you visited, including tabs from other devices.
• Organize your history based on which sites you visit most often or those that are important to you.
• Easily remove specific browsing history if you need to clean up your online activity.

These are some of the cool features I use frequently, that make Firefox View a great way to keep your browsing organized and in control!

Multiple Profiles

Firefox natively supports using multiple profiles, which makes it incredibly easy to manage your home and work browsing in completely separate environments.

Profiles can be created by going to the main Menu and selecting Profiles -> New Profile. From there, you just give the profile a name, select a distinct color theme if you want to visually distinguish it, and click on Done Editing.

Creating multiple profiles and switching between them is incredibly seamless with Firefox, allowing you to keep your cookies, history, and extensions completely isolated between your different workflows.

Task Manager

With the built-in task manager, you can easily view exactly which tab is consuming your memory, CPU, and other system resources. Being able to sort sites according to these metrics is incredibly useful.

Especially when you are running heavy AI tabs and video streams together and need to track down what's lagging your system.

To pull up the task manager instantly, you can use the keyboard shortcut Shift + Esc. It is also available via the main application menu if you prefer using your mouse.

Copy Link to Highlight

A feature that was absent for a long time, Firefox now supports link to highlights!

You can select a part of the text on a webpage, right-click on the selection, and select Copy Link to Highlight.

When you share this link with others, it will take them directly to that exact spot on the page and they can see the highlighted text instantly in the shared article!

It's incredibly convenient for pointing people straight to the most relevant information without making them scroll through a massive page.

Keyboard Based Controls

Did you know that there's more to the Firefox address bar than meets the eye? By pressing a few key combinations, you can access a set of powerful actions that can help you customize your browsing experience.

To get started, press CTRL+L to focus on the address bar. Next, enter > and press a space. You'll see that an Actions criteria is enabled.

This feature offers several useful actions, including Open a private window, Restart Firefox, etc.

To access these actions, simply use the keys as shown in the table below:

Built-in Game

Are you looking for a fun way to pass the time while waiting for your internet connection to kick in? You're not alone! Many browsers have hidden games that can keep you entertained.

Google Chrome has its popular Dino game, and Microsoft Edge has Surf. But what about Firefox?

The answer is yes, Firefox does have a game mode! But it's not as obvious as the others. To find it, follow these steps:

Go to Menu -> More Tools -> Customize Toolbar. Drag all the items in the bottom of the toolbar to the overflow section. What remains will be the Flexible spacer.

And that's when the magic happens! Click on the small game button in the bottom. The interface transforms into a ball game, where you can bounce the ball and have fun.

It may not be as flashy as some other games, but it's a cool way to pass the time while waiting for your internet connection to stabilize.

Experimental Settings

Now, let's see some experimental settings. Be cautious when using these, as these are either in experimental stage or cause unexpected issues.

Get a rounder corner

Firefox has an experimental feature that allows you to round off the corners of your browser, giving it a more cohesive look across all devices and operating systems, like GNOME desktop.

However, be cautious when using this feature, as it may cause unexpected issues or affect other parts of your system. To enable it, follow these steps:

Open Firefox and type about:config in the address bar. Press Enter to access the experimental settings page. You'll be warned that changing these settings can have serious implications. So proceed with caution!

In the search bar, enter rounded and find the setting called widget.gtk.rounded-bottom-corners.enabled. Toggle its value to true to enable rounded corners.

Now, go to Menu -> More Tools -> Customize Toolbar and disable the titlebar, as shown below.

After making this change, close and restart Firefox.

Customize Keyboard Shortcuts

Want to take control of your browsing experience with custom keyboard shortcuts? Firefox allows you to do just that!

To get started, open Firefox and type about:keyboard in the address bar. This will bring up the experimental page for keyboard shortcut settings.

From here, you can alter key combinations for actions, remove existing keybindings and make any other changes you like.

Firefox Labs

Want to get a sneak peek at some cutting-edge features before they're widely released? Firefox has a section called "Firefox Labs" right in the settings menu.

This is where you can experiment with experimental features that are still under development. Don't worry, your usage data isn't automatically shared just for trying
these out. It only gets sent if you have technical and interaction data turned on in Privacy settings.

I'm currently running Firefox 151, and there are a few cool new features I can try.

Tab Notes seems really handy, but the List and Timer features are also pretty neat. They remind me of the homepage widgets in Vivaldi.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, Firefox is packed with a surprising number of features that go far beyond basic browsing, making your daily online tasks smoother and more efficient.

You don't need to go to Google Translate and copy paste text there. Simple right click works. Need quick screenshot, that' there. PDF reading and editing capabilities are additional blessings.

I can go on and on but I have to stop somewhere. So I stop here and I also let you explore lesser known features of DuckDuckGo search engine. I have a feeling that if you liked this article, you'll like that one too.

And don't forget to share your favorite Firefox feature in the comments below.

ArmSoM is known for designing and manufacturing development boards and embedded solutions for a range of use cases that range from multimedia and IoT to AI and industrial applications.

We have covered a few of their products here at It's FOSS, and they have generally been a good pick so far. Their flagship SBC lineup is the Sige series, which has so far shipped with Rockchip silicon.

The Sige6 is the first to break from that, swapping the Rockchip for an Allwinner chip, targeting use cases like AI inference, edge computing, cloud computing, and mini PC builds.

📝 ArmSoM Sige6: Key Specifications

The Sige6 runs on the Allwinner A733, a 12nm octa-core chip with two Cortex-A76 cores at 2.0 GHz and six Cortex-A55 cores at 1.8 GHz. ArmSoM went with this SoC because they had to tackle certain pain points.

They point to three gaps in the SBC market. Boards either skip AI hardware entirely or bolt it on as a pricey add-on, entry-level and mid-range options are often stuck on older LPDDR4 or DDR3 memory, and the boards that are powerful enough to avoid those pitfalls tend to draw too much power for an always-on setup.

The A733 covers all three and then some without cutting down on capability.

Moving on to the GPU, it is an Imagination BXM-4-64 MC1, with support for OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan 1.3, and OpenCL 3.0, and there's also a 3 TOPS NPU for AI acceleration workloads.

The RAM goes from 2 GB up to 16 GB of LPDDR5, with eMMC storage options of 32 GB, 64 GB, and 128 GB.

The rest of the specs include:

• VPU (decode): H.265/VP9/AVS2 up to 4K@60fps; H.264 up to 4K@30fps
• VPU (encode): H.264/H.265 up to 4K@30fps
• Storage (extra): SPI Flash (64 Mb to 256), microSD slot, and M.2 Key M (PCIe 3.0, 2-lane) for NVMe SSDs.
• Networking: 1x Gigabit Ethernet (PoE via external HAT), Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, and external antenna connector.
• Video Output: 1x HDMI 2.0 (4K@60fps), 1x 4-lane MIPI DSI
• Camera: 1x 2-lane + 1x 4-lane MIPI CSI
• USB: 1x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.1, 1x USB Type-C (OTG/Power)
• Audio: 1x audio jack, 1x HP-OUT
• Expansion: 40-pin header (GPIO, UART, SPI, I2C, PWM)
• OS Support: Debian, Android 13; Armbian (third-party)
• Dimensions: 89 mm × 56 mm
• Weight: 47.2 g

With the 3 TOPS NPU and hardware video decoding up to 4K@60fps, the Sige6 can handle lightweight AI inference at the edge as well as media server and digital signage workloads.

The M.2 slot with PCIe 3.0 gives it room for fast NVMe storage, and the PoE-capable Ethernet port makes it a decent fit for network appliance builds too.

Moreover, ArmSoM has also committed to keeping the Sige6 in production through January 2036, which is worth noting for anyone deploying it in a long-running setup.

🛒 Get the ArmSoM Sige6

You will have to wait until August to get your hands on one, when the Sige6 should be available to purchase from the official store and from third-party retailers like Aliexpress and Taobao.

For OEMs and ODMs, they will need to get in touch with the company via email at sales@armsom.org to procure units.

Suggested Read 📖: ArmSoM Sige7 Review

Halfbrick Studios reached out to us recently, and they were hyped to show off their newest project, Guncrypt, a dungeon crawler built around loading bullets in the right order instead of chasing better gear.

If that name sounds familiar to you, they are the ones behind a string of popular mobile games like Jetpack Joyride, Fruit Ninja, and Dan the Man.

In-game, the weapons system has three guns with over 60 bullet types and 80 relic types that can be combined to change the gameplay according to your playstyle.

Load a Corrosive Shot right before a Heavy Shot, and it lands completely differently than loading the Heavy Shot first. Fuse two bullets together for a new combined effect, or rearrange your whole magazine between rooms if your current setup isn't working.

Tarot cards add passive bonuses to your starting loadout between runs, and the Curse Level pushes things further across five tiers once a run stops feeling threatening. All of this plays out across four procedurally generated floors, each with its own enemies, hazards, and a boss waiting at the end.

The demo plays nice

I got the demo version of Guncrypt up on my Nobara Linux setup, and the game ran without downloading any additional files. So this was simply Steam Play leveraging Proton to get the game running on this non-native config.

Anyhow, the opening cutscene sets the stage. The town of Guncrypt used to be a quiet, well-off town, until an evil wizard showed up, cursed it, and stole everyone's souls, leaving the townsfolk busy bickering among themselves to actually act (sounds like current events ☠️).

Resulting in the job being handed to the player instead. ⚔️

Then came the tutorial, and it was a curveball since I'm used to WASD movement. There's none of that here; instead, I had to hold down left-click and drag to move my gunslinger around while shooting at whatever was in front of him.

Once I was in, I interacted with a few NPCs like the Pirate and the Blacksmith, then I entered a crypt, which immediately showed me the quest list with some quests visible. The main one was to uncover the mystery behind the curse put on by the evil wizard.

I entered a dungeon, where it was straight into combat, dodging enemies while keeping an eye on my reload timer between rooms. At the end of a run that got the best of me, I was shown a scoreboard with info like the floor I died on, the bullets used, and a detailed list of the various scoring criteria.

Bullet pickups work similarly. I ran into three options at one point and picked Spark, a 110-damage round that throws lightning on enemies during reload. A bit further in the game, the pirate, "Plunderin' Pete" handed me bombs, a useful right-click ability for blowing up enemies and obstacles.

Release, when?

As of writing, Guncrypt doesn't have a release date or price yet. The Steam page just lists it as "Coming soon." Meanwhile, you could try out the demo, which ran just fine on my test setup.

And, to wrap this up, a native Linux build is in the works too, arriving sometime after the launch.

In April, Jon Seager of Canonical laid out the company's plan for handling AI in Ubuntu. The framework split things into two groups, implicit AI that quietly improves what you already use and explicit AI that are features you'd actually summon on purpose.

Back then, Jon gave speech-to-text and text-to-speech as one of the examples of what an implicit feature could look like. Weeks later, one piece of that puzzle has materialized in the form of Myna.

While the tool is early in the development cycle, it is set to debut with Ubuntu 26.10, due out in October.

AI-powered accessibility begins

Jean-Baptiste Lallement, Canonical's Director of Engineering for Ubuntu Desktop, posted the announcement, saying that voice dictation has become a common feature across modern platforms.

For Ubuntu 26.10, the initial version of Myna is expected to be a desktop dictation tool built around GNOME on Wayland with a push-to-talk mechanism gatekeeping when your microphone accepts input.

Using it means holding a hotkey, speaking, and letting go. A small activity indicator shows while it is listening, and the transcribed text lands wherever the cursor was sitting when dictation started.

How will it work?

Recognition itself happens inside a sandboxed component called the Canonical Inference Snap, while a Speech Orchestrator manages the session and an Audio Adapter handles whatever the microphone picks up, denoising and chunking it before it ever reaches the model.

The snap is meant to carry speech models in three sizes, lightweight, default, and quality, along with a runtime to match whatever hardware is being used to run Myna. May it be an NVIDIA GPU, an Intel NPU, or just a CPU.

And before you yell, "my data would be sent to cloud servers!" know that speech recognition will happen locally, and an internet connection is not needed once the appropriate model is installed.

Moreover, text only appears once it is finalized, so you won't see half-formed words flicker the way some assistants show live captions. The audio data won't be sticking around either, being stored in a small in-memory buffer that gets discarded the moment the session ends.

Features like dictation into password fields, wake words, continuous listening, voice assistants, voice commands, translation, speaker identification, and automatic language detection are all off the table.

The fine print

None of this is locked in yet. The GitHub repository holds nothing more than a license, a README, and a folder for the documentation and architecture specs.

And, going by how past features have landed on interim Ubuntu releases, we could see Myna show up in the daily builds of Ubuntu 26.10 in the coming weeks.

You should also know that Canonical is looking for feedback before the specs for Myna are finalized, especially from people who already rely on dictation or assistive tools on Linux.

Epic Games used its State of Unreal 2026 keynote to announce Lore, an open source version control system the company built in-house and is releasing for free.

You see, game and film projects have a workflow where they have to mix source code with large binary files such as build inputs, big data files, and other generated content. The problem is that most existing version control tools were not built to handle that kind of combination well.

Git handles large binary files through an add-on called Git LFS, rather than treating them as a built-in part of the system. Perforce manages binaries better, but it needs a live connection to its server for routine tasks, and it is a closed, proprietary system that other companies cannot build tools on top of.

Epic Games says none of the available systems combine binary handling, offline work, and a fully open specification together, which is why it built its own.

Suggested Read 📖: GitHub Alternatives to Host Your Open Source Projects

How does it work?

Lore keeps a server running as the authority for who can access a project and how conflicts get resolved, but everyday work like saving changes, recording a commit, or switching branches happens entirely on your machine, without needing an internet connection.

Every piece of content is given a unique fingerprint and stored only once, so identical data is never duplicated across files or branches.

It also has a verification system, so the structure of every revision can be checked for tampering or corruption. Large files are broken into smaller pieces, so editing one part of a multi-gigabyte file does not require re-uploading the whole thing.

And, by default, your machine only holds the files you are actually using, since Lore pulls down a file's data only when something asks for it.

The core library, server, and CLI are all written in Rust, with official SDKs for JavaScript, Python, C#, and Go. Everything routes through the same interface, so the CLI is not a special, privileged way of using Lore.

Any tool built using the same interface can do everything the CLI does.

Get started quickly

The project has not reached a stable release yet, with the most recent release being 0.8.3, and Epic Games is warning that interfaces and storage formats could fluctuate from release to release.

You do not need to have Rust installed or set up a container to try it out. One install script does the whole process of grabbing the CLI and server binary, dropping them into your PATH, and spinning up a server on your machine.

The official guide lists the script to get it configured on Linux:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EpicGames/lore/main/scripts/install.sh | bash -s -- --demo

Beyond that, if you have any questions or are just looking to have a conversation surrounding it, there's a Discord server you can join that has people from the development team and the Lore community.

Last week I shared something personal and something I was way too hesitatnt to share. It was the fact that the ad-driven model that kept It's FOSS running for 14 years is breaking down, and that YOUR support is the most direct way to keep this going.

The response was overwhelming and I cannot thank you enough to all the well wishers and supports. From what I see, so far 112 readers opted for the lifetime Plus membership. Several readers, even existing paid members, bought coffees (a metaphor for donation).

Several readers wrote in to share how It's FOSS helped them make the switch to Linux, sometimes years ago, and that it finally felt like the right moment to "give back". Thank you 🙏

There were a few concerns raised as well so let me answer them here for everyone.

"Will It's FOSS continue to publish? Will it survive?"

Fair concern. Here is the thing: the 112 people who joined last week made a real difference. They showed their confidence in It's FOSS, in the work we do and that's a huge confidence booster for me. It shows that there are good people out there who are willing to actively support us and no big tech can take this community support from us. The more Plus member we have, the stronger we become. So, yes, We are not just going to survive, we are going to thrive. Just keep supporting us 💪

"I already get the newsletter and content for free. What do I actually gain by paying for the Plus membership?"

Honestly, not a lot of extra features. There are a few eBooks to download, though. But this is intentional. I never wanted to lock Linux content behind a paywall. The tutorials, the news, this newsletter, they stay free. What the Plus membership does is make sure they stay free, for you and for everyone else too. You are not buying a product for yourself, you are doing it for everyone. For students who canot pay, for someone who has just lost a job, for people who do not even earn $119 in an entire month.

The $30 discount on lifetime membership will continue till 25th June. If you have been on the fence, this is the week to get off it. Our goal is to reach 200 lifetime member by the next week. Do help us please.

Not ready for a lifetime commitment? A one-time donation helps too.

Thank you for 14 years. Let's make it 14 more.

📰 News That Matter

Linux 7.1 does a lot for a feature release. The new NTFS driver is the main talking point here, but Intel FRED switching to on-by-default and a long-overdue Steam Deck OLED audio fix are worth knowing about too.

Another new release this week is KDE Plasma 6.7. There are a few improvements here and there and the two vintage themes make a comeback.

With Ubuntu, Fedora, and soon KDE all dropping X11, yserver is a strange but interesting counter-move, arriving as a new X11 server, written in Rust, assisted by Claude. It intentionally drops decades of cruft to focus on what modern desktops actually need.

Session, the private messaging service that doesn't require a phone number, has managed to avoid getting shut down thanks to the community stepping up and donating the funds required to keep things running.

A new open standard called DocLang wants to be the format AI pipelines actually need instead of fighting with PDFs and DOCX files that were designed for human eyes. This vendor-neutral working group has already released v0.6 of the specifications with more work already underway.

In contrast, a compromised Fedora contributor account let an AI agent run loose across Bugzilla unsupervised, mass-reassigning bugs to the wrong person, closing reports it had no business closing with hallucinated LLM-generated comments.

Commodore and Jolla have joined to create anti-doomscrolling flip smartphone. It uses Linux-based Sailfish OS.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

Arch User Repository, the community contributed repo, suffered supply chain attack.

Arch had to shut off new AUR registrations after three separate malware waves tore through the community repo in the span of a week. More than 1,500 AUR packages were hit. AUR helper Yay released a new version with some measures to spot malicious packages.

A few lesson from this incident:

• It is always better to install packages from official repoistories your distro provides.
• If you are erelying on AUR, looking at the PKGBUILD is more important than ever.
• There is little end users like you and I can do in case of supply chain attacks. It is up to distributions to secure the users.
• Supply chain attacks are going to be a bigger problem for the open source ecosystem. No wonder IBM-Red Hat is coming up with a $5 billion project Lightwall for this purpose.

Proton has launched Easy Switch for Business, a six-step migration tool that moves a company's emails, calendars, and contacts from Google Workspace to Proton Mail (partner link) seamlessly.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

CachyOS swapped out Octopi for a homegrown Rust package manager called Shelly, and it looks like a useful upgrade. One window handles repos, AUR, AppImage, and Flathub together; search spans all four at once; and it just looks like something built in 2026.

If that doesn't interest you, then we have a list of GTK themes that cater to a wide variety of tastes, ranging from the warm retro tones of Gruvbox to the macOS-inspired looks of WhiteSur and McMojave, and even a pitch-black option in Flat Remix for OLED screens.

If you use GNOME, explore this list of GNOME Extensions. Perhaps you will find some good ones for your usecase.

And here is the Dank Linux review I mentioned in the last newsletter but forgot to add the link.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

Raven Resonance has come up with something they call an ambient computer, which can easily be passed off as a smart glass. It is Linux-powered, not open source, and is called Raven Prism.

There's also a Linux cyberdeck that was in the news recently that you might've missed.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

Unhappy with KDE ditching X11 on Plasma? There's a fork that looks to preserve the experience while being init system agnostic.

📽️ Videos for You

If you ever feel the need to experience how bad Winslop is, you can create a bootable USB drive on Linux to get things going.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

If you are using the Clipboard Indicator extension on GNOME, then you can go into its settings, and under the "Behaviour" tab, enable "Paste on select." This allows you to automatically paste the selected clipboard item directly into your active text field when you click on it in the clipboard menu.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Can you name all the popular file managers in this crossword?

I am not complaining, are you? 🧐

🗓️ Tech Trivia: Last time we talked about Alan Turing and his unfortunate passing, but what often gets overlooked is Tommy Flowers' contribution to building Colossus.

Using 1,800 thermionic valves, his breakthrough dramatically shortened World War II while also proving that vacuum tubes could be reliable, forever changing modern computing history.

He did get some recognition in 2023, when a blue plaque went up at Dollis Hill in London, the former Post Office research site where he built Colossus using mostly spare telephone parts.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: A FOSSer is looking for pointers about an operating system called OpenIndiana. Have you ever used it?

As you might already know, the AUR has been going through a rough patch, where more than 1,500 packages were compromised across three separate waves of malware attacks before Arch developers could get a handle on it.

yay, the most popular AUR helper for Arch Linux, just put out a release aimed at tackling that mess on the user level, introducing two new features that make it easier to spot a risky package before you install it and to automate the review work yourself.

Let's check it out! 🤓

New tools to spot malicious packages

Search results, the yogurt prompt, and the upgrade menu all carry a new timestamp now, showing how long it's been since a package's PKGBUILD last changed. This gives you a heads-up on which packages might be worth a closer look before installing.

Jo Guerreiro, the maintainer of yay, clarified that the number by itself doesn't accomplish anything. Something edited last week isn't automatically dangerous, and something untouched for years isn't automatically clean.

This is meant to be just one extra signal to weigh before you commit to an install.

The other major addition here is support for Lua-based hooks and configuration, letting you script how yay behaves at different points in the install and upgrade flow. You can now drop a file at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/yay/init.lua, usually ~/.config/yay/init.lua, and yay will pull both settings and hooks straight out of it.

Leave that file out entirely and nothing Lua-related runs at all. config.json doesn't go away either, init.lua sits above it and can override what's already there, while flags you pass on the command line take priority over everything else.

One of the new hooks, UpgradeSelect, kicks in partway through yay -Syu, once yay has worked out what needs upgrading but hasn't yet put the package exclusion screen in front of you.

Two more hooks come into play before the actual install runs, just later in the sequence than UpgradeSelect.

AURPreInstall triggers right after a PKGBUILD is fetched, early enough to abort an install before you've seen any menus. By the time makepkg --verifysource finishes pulling and checking the source, AURPostDownload fires, and at that point a script can look at the PKGBUILD next to the actual files it downloaded, still ahead of the install.

Beyond those, the v13 release also adds hooks for filtering search results and for taking action once a package finishes installing. The rest of it is mostly cleanup work like restoring missing locale files, and the ALPM executor picks up a proper log callback and a new Debug method.

You can get yay running on your Arch Linux or Arch-based setup by cloning it from the AUR and building it with makepkg:

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
cd yay && makepkg -si

A year has passed since Commodore, the computer brand many of you know and love, came back from the dead under new ownership.

The comeback is picking up pace too, with a lineup that already includes multiple Commodore 64 Ultimate editions, a C64X PC, and a licensing program that invites outside builders to use the name.

Now, they have announced a return to the phone market, and not in the doomscrolling glass-slab avatar we are all used to, but in a retro, very equippable flip phone format.

Making Flip Phones Great Again

The Commodore Callback 8020 is what comes out when a flip phone skips Android and goes toward a privacy-respecting Linux-based mobile operating system instead. In this case, Jolla's Sailfish OS, known for having great Android app compatibility without Google's surveillance baked in.

Jolla's CEO, Sami Pienimäki, says that it was chosen after Commodore evaluated competing platforms, citing Sailfish OS' design language and stance on privacy as the deciding factors.

As for what else it offers in terms of software, browsers and social media apps are blocked at the system level, with no toggle to turn the restrictions off. WhatsApp comes preinstalled, and Signal, Telegram, and WeChat are all supported, with iMessage possible through a third-party bridge.

Additionally, the official material points out that over 99% of Android apps are supported. Users can even control a Commodore 64 Ultimate's LEDs from the Callback 8020, as long as both are on the same Wi-Fi network.

The Specs

The polycarbonate-bodied phone is powered by a MediaTek Helio G81 chip with passive cooling, paired with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage (expandable via microSD), which should be enough for a phone built around doing less rather than more.

Flip it up, and you will see a 3.25-inch IPS display featuring a 480x640 resolution inside and a 1.77-inch VFD-style screen on the outside. Below the main screen sits a tactile T9 keypad, with dedicated Fn keys flanking the big Commodore key.

Camera duties fall to a 48MP Sony sensor on the back, with autofocus on both the front and rear lenses for video calls. A removable 1550mAh battery keeps things running as you use the device and receive notifications on the Dome-LED system (look at the light bar below the keypad).

For connectivity, you get dual-SIM 4G support with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, hotspot, and GPS capabilities.

Get Yours

The Callback 8020 is being offered in five colorways: ProtoPET White, SX Silver, BASIC Beige, Starlight Edition, and Founders Edition. Swappable back covers and a protective case are sold separately for anyone who wants to change the look of their device later.

Pricing starts at $499 for ProtoPET White, SX Silver, and BASIC Beige. Starlight Edition runs $549.99, and the Founders Edition tops out at $640. These are discounted prices, and signing up for the waitlist unlocks an extra $50 off that will apply on June 30 when pre-orders open.

Units are set to ship this winter, though Commodore hasn't given a specific date, and the window could easily run into early 2027.

KDE's 30th anniversary is closing in on us, and the developers have spent these past few months getting things ready for the occasion, set to take place in October. Two of those things are Oxygen and Air, two classic Plasma themes from the KDE 4 era that we talked about a few months ago.

The X11-free Plasma 6.8 is also due around the same time, barring any delays, of course.

But, yeah, that's looking somewhat further into the future. For now, let's focus on the Plasma 6.7 release, which has arrived with those themes as well as a number of upgrades that make the desktop experience more refined than before.

🆕 KDE Plasma 6.7: What's New?

Before we get into the highlights of this release, let's talk about the various usability and quality-of-life upgrades that ship with Plasma 6.7.

If you use Plasma's virtual keyboard, holding down a key now brings up the special characters tied to it instead of you having to dig through a separate symbols screen.

The Discover software center also gets some attention, where the "Install" button has been redone to make it clearer and harder to miss, and app listings carry more useful descriptions on each card.

Similarly, the printing workflow has been improved with a new print queue management tool, the system tray icon for printers now showing the number of print jobs in a queue, and quick connections to shared printers on Windows networks.

Plasma's calendar options grow too, with the Vietnamese lunar calendar joining the other non-Gregorian calendars already on offer.

And if you've already set up custom Global Themes for day and night, you can now flip between light and dark instantly via a toggle inside the "Brightness & Color" quick settings.

Now, for the rest of the changes. 👇

Two Classics Make a Comeback

If you remember, Oxygen and Air both go back to the KDE 4 days, when Oxygen was the default theme starting with KDE 4.0, and Air took over that role once KDE 4.3 arrived.

Ahead of their anniversary, a restoration effort led by community contributors looked to bring them back into proper shape.

We covered that restoration effort in detail back in April, and a good chunk of it has now landed in Plasma 6.7, including reworked panels, a minimized window indicator, new switch designs, and adaptive opacity for both themes.

These now ship as full Global Themes too, with light, dark, and twilight variants. The two wallpapers that shipped with KDE 4 (Air and Horos) are part of the package as well.

Per-Screen Virtual Desktops

Next in line is one of the most sought-after features that has arrived after 21 years of requests. Plasma has had virtual desktops for ages, but they were always tied globally across every monitor you had connected.

That changes now. You can finally set up separate virtual desktops for each screen, so your laptop display and your external monitor no longer have to share the same set. It might sound like a small change, but anyone running a multi-monitor setup knows how essential this is.

Apart from that, switching between virtual desktops got faster too; now you can pull up the Overview screen with Super+W and with a simple scroll or a tap of Page Up / Page Down move between desktops.

Suggested Read 📖: This New Project Gives You Plasma With X11

Arrival of Union

Plasma's theming has been a fragmented affair behind the scenes, with different toolkits needing different styling approaches.

With this release, a new theming system, Union, is being introduced that wants to assimilate all of that into one CSS-based system. So Plasma, QtQuick software, and QtWidgets software can pull their looks from the same set of style files instead of three separate ones.

In its current state, it is disabled by default and only touches the QtQuick side of the stack, arriving here as a tech preview rather than a finished feature.

📥 Get KDE Plasma 6.7?

Users of Plasma on rolling release distros like Arch Linux or EndeavourOS will be getting this the earliest. If you can't wait or are on a non-Arch distro, then you can build from source.

On the other hand, if you just want to see how this release performs before committing to it on your main setup, then you could always go for the User Edition of KDE Neon.

💬 Have you been on KDE Plasma for a long time? How has it been for you?