itsfoss

<p>The Espressif-backed <a href="https://m5stack.com">M5Stack</a> has been keeping its Cardputer product line alive since 2023 by continuously updating it.</p><p>The original ran on an <strong>ESP32-S3</strong>, and the follow-up, the <a href="https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5stack-cardputer-adv-version-esp32-s3">Cardputer-Adv</a>, stuck with the same ESP32-S3 but brought in better audio, a larger battery, a 6-axis IMU, and more expansion options.</p><p>Both were decent microcontroller-powered devices, but <strong>neither ran a real Linux environment</strong>.</p><p>The <a href="https://shop.m5stack.com/pages/m5-cardputerzero">CardputerZero</a> is where that changes. It trades the ESP32 for a Raspberry Pi <a href="https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-zero/">Compute Module Zero</a> (CM0), and with that, the Cardputer platform goes from embedded tinkering territory into something you can do proper computing on.</p><h2 id="%F0%9F%93%9D-cardputerzero-key-specifications">…

<p>Microsoft's WSL allows people to use Linux inside Windows. It integrates well in the system allowing people to <a href="https://itsfoss.com/run-linux-commands-in-windows/" rel="noreferrer">use Linux command line Windows</a>. Linux GUI apps can also be used, which helps for editing config file in GUI-based editors.</p><p>Now reverse the situation. How about using Windows applications on Linux? Sure, WINE and Bottles are there but I came across a new tool that combines container technology with Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to give you native-app feel for Windows software on Linux.</p><p>I am going to share my experience with Winpodx for running Windows software on Linux in this article. But first, lets briefly understand its mechanism.</p><h2 id="how-winpodx-works">How Winpodx Works</h2><p>Under the hood, <a href="https://github.com/kernalix7/winpodx">Winpodx</a> relies on open-source tools like <a href="https://linuxhandbook.com/courses/podman/">Podman</a>, <a href="https://github.…

<p>The <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck">Steam Deck OLED</a> has been largely off the shelves since mid-February, being among the casualties of the RAM and storage shortage that has been driving up prices across consumer tech since late 2025.</p><p>It recently <a href="https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steam_hardware/announcements/detail/672869045073085539">came back on May 27</a>, just not at the prices everyone was hoping for.</p><p>Valve bumped the pricing for the 512GB OLED from <strong>$549 to $789</strong> and the 1TB model from <strong>$649 to $949</strong>; that is a near-50% jump on the top model, btw. The cheaper LCD variant is gone entirely, having been discontinued before any of this played out.</p><p>The company announced the price hike by saying that the "<em>Steam Deck itself hasn't changed; these new prices reflect the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole</em>."</p><h2 id="gone-in-under-…

<p>Good news on the age verification front, though. California and Colorado<a href="https://itsfoss.com/news/age-verification-open-source-exemptions/"> have both moved to exempt open source software</a> from their age verification laws after neither bill originally made any concessions for community-run projects.</p><p>Warp's Oz platform <a href="https://itsfoss.com/news/warp-oz-multi-harness-update/">has been updated with multi-harness support</a>, meaning teams can now run Claude Code, Codex, and Warp's own agent side by side under unified access controls and audit logs.</p><p>The SFC has formally <a href="https://itsfoss.com/news/bambu-lab-caught-violating-agplv3/">accused Bambu Lab of two AGPLv3 violations</a>, shipping a proprietary networking library alongside AGPLv3 code without releasing its source, and threatening a developer with a cease-and-desist for building a compatible fork that didn't even touch the proprietary parts.</p><p>For a few days, German rail operator <a href=…

<p>If you've been holding out for a next-gen Raspberry Pi, the wait just got a lot longer.</p><p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/ebenupton/">Eben Upton</a> joined fellow Raspberry Pi honchos, <a href="https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/author/jamesadams/">James Adams</a>, the CTO of Hardware Engineering<em>, </em>and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/gordon-hollingworth-056a322/">Gordon Hollingworth</a>, the CTO of Software Engineering<em>, </em>for a Reddit AMA <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/engineering/comments/1tcyfvk/hello_rengineering_were_eben_upton_ceo_james/">on r/engineering last week</a>, and <strong>the Pi 6 release timeline</strong> was among the top things to come up.</p><p>Eben's response put the Pi 6 on a 4 to 4.5-year cycle from the Pi 5 launch, meaning <strong>early 2028</strong> at the absolute earliest. He didn't seem in any particular rush either, noting the Pi 5 is still a capable flagship that could comfortably hold that position beyond even that window.…

<p>Mozilla has received plenty of flak for adding AI features to <a href="https://www.firefox.com/en-US/">Firefox</a>, like a chatbot in the sidebar, automatic alt text in PDFs, AI-powered tab group suggestions, and whatnot.</p><p>It's been one thing after another, and while people might appreciate that these can be disabled, the sheer pace of the additions does make one wonder where it all ends.</p><p>Their latest experiment in this space is the <a href="https://www.firefox.com/en-US/smart-window/" rel="noreferrer">Smart Window</a>, <strong>currently in beta</strong> and rolling out to users in the United States and Canada on Firefox 150 and newer. I got access recently, and here's what I found.</p><div class="kg-card kg-callout-card kg-callout-card-yellow"><div class="kg-callout-emoji">&#128203;</div><div class="kg-callout-text">The feature showcased here is of pre-production quality. Expect things to break.</div></div><h2 id="good-enough-for-daily-use">Good enough for daily use</h2…

<p>Large data transfers are one of those things that always seem to find a way to be annoying. Tools like <a href="https://itsfoss.com/news/localsend/">LocalSend</a> make it easier over a local network, but wireless is not always an option, and some transfers are simply too important to leave to a Wi-Fi connection.</p><p>In such a scenario, a wired solution that does not require setting up networking at all would be ideal.</p><p>Intel's Thunderbolt maintainer Mika Westerberg and fellow Intel engineer Alan Borzeszkowski have been <a href="https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/westeri/thunderbolt.git/commit/?h=next&amp;id=6db21d817b43f8ce5654ccc7aff80d40e4dba4ac">working on exactly that</a>.</p><h2 id="usb4stream-explained">USB4STREAM explained</h2><p>The two have put together a new protocol called <strong>USB4STREAM</strong> and a matching Linux driver called <code>thunderbolt_stream</code>. The approach is <strong>to let two or more machines transfer data directly over a USB…

<p>Age verification laws have been spreading fast, and <a href="https://itsfoss.com/news/age-verification-pandemic/">we have been keeping tabs on them</a> for a while now. California's Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) was the first to land, signed in October 2025, with Colorado following with its own version (SB26-051).</p><p>Neither made any concessions for open source software in the original language, which left Linux distributions and other community-run projects in a very uncomfortable dilemma.</p><p>Both have since moved to fix that, with Colorado having wrapped it up earlier this month and California heading for a full <a href="https://www.assembly.ca.gov">Assembly</a> vote.</p><h2 id="whats-california-doing">What's California doing?</h2><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://itsfoss.com/content/images/2026/05/california-age-verification-ab-1856-bill.png" class="kg-image" alt="a cropped screenshot of the california ab-1856 bill for age ver…

<p>Big tech companies have a habit of offering something for free, watching the user base grow, and then quietly walking it back once people are too invested to leave easily. A <strong><em>bait-and-switch</em></strong>, so to speak.</p><p>Redis did exactly this <a href="https://redis.io/blog/redis-adopts-dual-source-available-licensing/">back in March 2024</a>, dropping its long-standing BSD license for the more restrictive dual licensing model, and the blowback was severe enough that <a href="https://itsfoss.com/community-strikes-back-with-forks/#10-valkey-forked-from-redis-as-it-changed-license">the community forked it into Valkey</a> almost immediately.</p><p>Linux tends to get hit hardest by these moves. Its comparatively smaller user base means less commercial pressure, making it an easy target to throw under the bus whenever companies feel like cutting costs or boosting profits.</p><p>One such case has now surfaced that will make you wonder if this particular company's decision …

<p>The GNU Affero General Public License version 3, or <a href="https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html">AGPLv3</a>, is one of the strongest <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft?ref=itsfoss.com">copyleft</a> licenses in the open source world.</p><p>Published by the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/" rel="noreferrer">Free Software Foundation</a> in 2007, it requires that any software built on an AGPLv3-licensed project must make its complete source code available under the same terms.</p><p>That applies even when the software runs as a network service rather than being distributed as a standalone binary. I say that because what follows are <strong>two violations</strong> that the Software Freedom Conservancy <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2026/may/18/bambu-studio-3d-printer-agpl-violation-response/">has dug out</a> after investigating <a href="https://bambulab.com">Bambu Lab</a>.</p><h2 id="what-the-investigation-found">What the investigation found</h2><figure cla…

<p>Firefox's built-in PDF viewer has been adding useful features for a while now. You can annotate, fill out forms, draw, insert images, and sign documents without leaving the browser. </p><p>The recent <a href="https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/151.0/releasenotes/">Firefox 151</a> release adds merging documents to that list.</p><p>If you've ever searched "<em>merge PDF online</em>" and ended up wading through ads and signup walls just to get your own file back, then you should know that there's a privacy angle worth thinking about too.</p><p>Every time you upload a document to one of those sites, you're handing your files over to a server you know nothing about.</p><p><a href="https://www.firefox.com/en-US/">Firefox</a> handles everything locally, so your documents stay on your machine.</p><h2 id="merge-pdfs-using-firefox">Merge PDFs using Firefox</h2><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://itsfoss.com/content/images/2026/05/firefox-pdf-merge-tool-new-file-add.png…

<p>Since a few days now, people trying to plan a trip on Deutsche Bahn's (DB) <a href="https://www.bahn.de/">main booking website</a> have been getting stopped by <em>error 751</em>. The site accused their web browser of acting like a bot, and even logging into accounts made no difference.</p><p>So, what was actually triggering it? Just the word "<em>Linux</em>" in the <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Headers/User-Agent">User-Agent</a> string it looks like. <a href="https://www.heise.de/en/news/Deutsche-Bahn-No-information-under-Linux-11300847.html">heise online</a> tested this by setting a <em>Linux User-Agent</em> on Firefox under Windows and on Safari under macOS, and both got blocked.</p><h2 id="people-noticed">People noticed</h2><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://itsfoss.com/content/images/2026/05/deutsche-bahn-linux-loading-error.png" class="kg-image" alt="an error page is shown here for the deutsche bah…

<p>As long as I've been a Linux user, I can remember one of the biggest issues being firmware support on the kernel. </p><p>The issue has been notorious, with a lot of new users being discouraged immediately after joining, and the benevolent dictator Linus Torvalds himself <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4SWxWIOVBM" rel="noreferrer">giving the bird to Nvidia</a>, a sentiment shared by almost every user who had tried to make Nvidia work on Linux a few years ago.</p><p>Things have been getting better recently, though, especially with <a href="https://fwupd.org/" rel="noreferrer">LVFS</a> (Linux Vendor Firmware Service) on the scene now, providing hardware vendors a portal to upload firmware updates, which can then be downloaded and installed by users through clients such as GNOME Software or <a href="https://itsfoss.com/update-firmware-ubuntu/" rel="noreferrer">fwupdmgr</a>.</p><h2 id="why-does-lvfs-matter">Why does LVFS matter?</h2><p>The relief and effort of LVFS cannot be u…

<p>The folks over at Warp have been busy building out their Oz platform since we covered the <a href="https://itsfoss.com/news/warp-launches-oz/">initial launch</a> back in February. The service takes care of the infrastructure side of running coding agents at scale, covering sandboxing, scheduling, monitoring, and team governance.</p><p>This week, the developers pushed <a href="https://www.warp.dev/blog/multi-harness-cloud-agent-orchestration">a notable update</a>. Oz <strong>can now serve as a unified control plane</strong> for <strong>Claude Code</strong>, <strong>Codex</strong>, and the native <strong>Warp Agent</strong>, all manageable from a single dashboard.</p><p>This allows teams to compare how each <a href="https://www.langchain.com/blog/the-anatomy-of-an-agent-harness">harness</a> performs, assign the right one according to the task, and maintain consistent access controls and audit logs across all three.</p><div class="kg-card kg-callout-card kg-callout-card-red"><div clas…

<p>The Fedora AI Developer Desktop initiative that passed unanimously <a href="https://itsfoss.com/news/fedora-ai-developer-desktop-stalled/">is now blocked</a>. Two council members retracted their votes after community pushback, with contributors arguing the CUDA focus contradicts Fedora's free software foundations and that significant kernel policy changes hadn't been cleared with the right people.</p><p><a href="https://itsfoss.com/news/fedora-ditches-deepin/">Fedora has also removed Deepin desktop</a> from its offering due to security concern.</p><p>Someone <a href="https://itsfoss.com/news/vibe-coded-adobe-lightroom-cc-linux/">got Lightroom CC running on Linux</a> via Wine without writing a single line of code themselves. An AI agent did the whole thing autonomously, fixing DLL gaps and Wine incompatibilities.</p><p>LibrePlan is a self-hosted open source project management tool that just got its <a href="https://itsfoss.com/news/libreplan-1-6-0/">1.6.0 release</a>. The additions …

<p>You might remember that the KDE folks have been busy working on <a href="https://linux.kde.org">KDE Linux</a>, their own Linux distribution that is still very much in active development. I tried its Alpha build <a href="https://itsfoss.com/news/kde-linux-alpha/">last year</a> and found the experience surprisingly smooth for something so early.</p><p>Fast forward to today, and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanielgraham/" rel="noreferrer">Nate Graham</a>, a well-known KDE name, has put out <a href="https://pointieststick.com/2026/05/31/this-month-in-kde-linux-may-2026/">a progress report</a> covering a pretty busy May for the project, with security fixes, build system changes, and a notable app swap all making the cut.</p><h2 id="a-lot-of-work">A lot of work</h2><p>The most significant infrastructure work this month came from contributor <a href="https://invent.kde.org/kde-linux/kde-linux-packages/-/merge_requests/94">Hadi Chokr</a>, who reworked how KDE software gets built…

<p>If you have been following <a href="https://almalinux.org/">AlmaLinux OS</a>, you know it is one of the more popular free enterprise Linux distributions out there.</p><p>Born out of <a href="https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/">the CentOS chaos</a>, it has steadily grown into a community-governed project with a clear focus on stability and compatibility for production use.</p><p>Now, the <a href="https://almalinux.org/members/" rel="noreferrer">AlmaLinux OS Foundation</a> is taking things to <em>Los Angeles</em>, with an event squarely aimed at the studios and engineers who keep the entertainment industry running on Linux.</p><h2 id="almalinux-day-los-angeles">AlmaLinux Day: Los Angeles</h2><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://itsfoss.com/content/images/2026/06/almalinux-day-los-angeles.png" class="kg-image" alt="a dark blue-colored banner that shows some details for almalinux day: la " loading="lazy" width="1200" height="6…

<p>I may hate AI slop but I am not a AI hater. I have found decent use of the AI tools and I try to include these tools in my workflow wherever it makes sense.</p><p>While mainstream LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity have decent free offering, they leach on the user data. "If you are not paying for the product, you are the product".</p><p>That's why I am loving the idea of exploring local AI and I have spend my fair share of time <a href="https://itsfoss.com/testing-local-llms-without-gpu/" rel="noreferrer">experimenting with LLMs that can be run on normal systems</a>. </p><p>Recently, I discovered Jan AI. It is a polished, genuinely usable desktop app that runs entirely on my machine. In fact, I once tried replacing <a href="https://itsfoss.com/ollama/" rel="noreferrer">Ollama</a> and <a href="https://itsfoss.com/llama-cpp/" rel="noreferrer">llama cpp</a> with Jan AI, but later changed my mind. </p><p>I'll explain why I switched back to Ollama in the later sections. First, let's learn…

<p>A Vim fork has arrived, and it exists because of AI. <a href="https://drewdevault.com/about/">Drew DeVault</a>, the developer behind SourceHut, announced Vim Classic <a href="https://drewdevault.com/blog/Forking-vim/">back in March 2026</a> after becoming unhappy with the direction both <a href="https://www.vim.org">Vim</a> and <a href="https://neovim.io">NeoVim</a> were heading.</p><p>His gripe was that generative AI had started creeping into their development, and he wanted no part of it.</p><p>The NeoVim side of that concern is the project's labeling of AI-assisted pull requests as "<a href="https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pulls?q=label%3A%22AI%20assisted%20%F0%9F%A4%96%22"><em>AI assisted &#129302;</em></a>," which has now stacked up a fair number of requests, many of which have already been merged.</p><p>With Vim, the situation is a bit murky. Drew points to <a href="https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/18800#issuecomment-3568099543">a GitHub issue</a> where community members su…

<p>Microsoft just shipped coreutils for Windows. Yes, you read that right.<br><br>ls. grep. cat. cp. find. The same commands that have powered Unix and Linux systems for over 50 years are now available natively on Windows, maintained by Microsoft itself.<br><br>In case you are not already familiar, GNU coreutils are the foundational utilities that every Linux and macOS system relies on for basic file operations, text processing, and shell scripting. They are the foundation of Unix computing. Tens of millions of scripts, pipelines, and workflows depend on them every day.<br><br>And now Microsoft is shipping and maintaining a build of them for Windows.<br><br>This is not <a href="https://itsfoss.com/tag/wsl/" rel="noreferrer">WSL</a>. You do not need a Linux subsystem running in the background. These "Linux commands" run natively on Windows, with the exact same flags and behavior as on Linux. <br><br>Microsoft's ultimate goal seems to make moving between Linux, macOS, WSL, containers, a…

<p>Tuta, the German encrypted email and calendar provider, <a href="https://tuta.com/blog/tuta-joins-euro-office">has officially joined Euro-Office</a>.</p><p>Unless you have been living under a rock or were trapped in some freaky dungeon, <a href="https://github.com/Euro-Office">this collaborative effort</a> has brought together many notable European companies. </p><p>The participating names include Nextcloud, IONOS, Proton, XWiki, Soverin, EuroStack, BTactic, Open-Xchange, and a few others who are jointly developing an open source document handling solution.</p><p>It is in the works as a web-based, AGPL-licensed fork of <a href="https://www.onlyoffice.com/">ONLYOFFICE</a> that is expected to support real-time collaborative editing across documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs, with wide format support.</p><p><strong>Don't think of it as a standalone office suite</strong>, though. It is designed to be plugged into existing platforms like Nextcloud Hub, Proton Drive, XWiki, …