It's FOSS

FOSS Weekly #26.24: Dank Linux Review, BitWarden Alternative, Mint Tips (And an Important Message)

Abhishek Prakash — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:57:39 +0530

It's FOSS turns 14 tomorrow. Incidentally, my son turns 1 tomorrow as well. Two milestones the same day call for celebration, right?

But there is something important that I wanted to share with you and it relates to the future of It's FOSS.

The thing is that Google Search is gone. Not broken but gone. What replaces it is an AI that reads the web, summarizes it, and hands you the answer directly. No links. No clicks. No visits to the sites that actually wrote the content.

This is not a minor update. This is a structural shift in how the internet works.

For the past two decades, a quiet but fair deal powered the open web: you search, you click, we earn a little from ads, and we use that to keep writing. That deal is over. Google now takes our content, serves the answer, and the publisher gets nothing. Not even a visit.

Since the launch of ChatGPT, It's FOSS has already lost 80% of its Google search traffic. And it's alarming now.

I built It's FOSS because I love Linux and open-source software. Not to get rich. I built it because I wanted a place where people could learn Linux for free, stay informed, and feel part of a community that actually cares about what open-source software means. For years, that worked. Ad revenue kept the lights on. We kept creating informational content that helped Linux users all around the world.

That model is now broken, and no tweak to our content strategy will fix it. This is not an algorithm we can optimize around.

The big publishers will survive this. They have corporate backing, licensing deals, and investors to absorb the losses. We don't. What we have is you.

If It's FOSS has ever helped you, fixed a problem, taught you something new, saved you a frustrating hour, this is the moment to return the favor. You want us to continue for 14 more years, right?

Becoming a Plus member keeps this alive:

The newsletter you're reading right now
The tutorials, guides, and news on It's FOSS
A small, independent voice in a world where content is increasingly written by non-humans for non-humans

To mark 14 years of It's FOSS (and my son's first birthday), I'm offering $30 off the lifetime membership this week. This one-time payment also solidifies the trust you have in It's FOSS and keeps us going in the age of AI slop.

Get Lifetime Membership ($30 off)

Not in a position to subscribe? A one-time donation helps too. Every contribution, whatever the size, is a vote for keeping It's FOSS alive, keeping the open web alive.

Make a one-time donation

I've spent years writing about open source because I believe software freedom matters, using a free operating system matters. I still do. But this freedom also needs people willing to sustain the communities that talk about it.

I'm asking you to be one of those people.

📰 News That Matter

Proton has given us some back-to-back updates. There's an encryption overhaul that makes uploads up to 3x faster and downloads up to 2x faster, thanks to a cryptography rewrite. News on how a native GUI client for Linux is in the works, and an official CLI offering for Drive that works on Linux, Windows, and macOS.

A lot has landed in the DocSpace 3.7 release. You get AI-generated files, DeepSeek, xAI and Google AI support, a complete rework of form filling rooms that now handle PDF creation, room tagging, bulk deletion, and new admin controls.

Similarly, Collabora have introduced CODE 26.04, possibly their biggest release yet. It includes AI assistance across all three editors, a reworked document comparison tool in Writer, per-user sheet views in Calc, 14 new spreadsheet functions, and a follow-me presentation mode in Impress. Yeah... AI everywhere.

You know what else is everywhere? systemd. Well... almost. KaOS has decided to distance itself from systemd and opted for dinit instead.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

ProtonMail is a solid Gmail alternative for privacy-conscious users, but the absence of canned responses is still a daily pain point for me.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

Man pages are famously dense, but they're also the most accurate and complete documentation Linux has.

Need to send a large file without uploading it to someone else's server first? CheezyPizza does it browser to browser over WebRTC, with no account, no size cap, and no middleman.

Not open source software but Melia is a new Linux desktop email client that takes privacy seriously in ways most clients don't bother with. Tracking pixels are neutralized, incoming emails are verified against SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and senders whose display names don't match their addresses get flagged automatically.

If you find Linux Mint running slowly, try disabling animations and window effects. It may improve the performance a yiny bit and tiny bits help when you are struggling with performance.

On the contrary, if you have decent hardware, you can add eye candy to Linux Mint by adding more desktop effects.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

Bambu Lab has been on a path to vendor lock-in, and even after outcry from the community over some of its recent moves, they don't seem to be learning anything.

Luckily, the open source community knows how to respond to such predatory behavior.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

Dank Linux is in the Arch+Hyprland zone. It gives you a preconfigured Hyprland to enjoy.

AliasVault can be a refuge from your escape from Bitwarden, seeing how they have been pulling off some major moves quietly.

📽️ Videos for You

If you use top to monitor processes in Linux, you ought to know some of its lesser-known commands.

Subscribe to It's FOSS YouTube Channel

💡 Quick Handy Tip

If you are on a GNOME setup, then you can enable certain user interface settings on the Resources app to display important usage and hardware-related details in the sidebar at all times.

Go into the "Preferences" menu via the hamburger button (looks like three lines), then under the "General" tab, look for these options and enable them:

Show Usage Details in Sidebar
Show Device Descriptions in Sidebar

Suggested Read 📖: Mission Center vs. Resources

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

There have been many instances of the open source community striking back at projects that locked down. We have a puzzle that will test your knowledge of such occurrences.

Can you help this Arch user? 🤣

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On June 7, 1954, Alan Turing, the mathematician who conceived the theoretical blueprint for modern computers and helped crack Enigma cipher at Bletchley Park, reportedly took his own life at age 41.

His work helped shorten World War II and laid the foundation for every computer running today.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: A newcomer is asking which web browsers his fellow FOSSers are using. Care to contribute?

DOCX, PDFs Were Not Built for AI. This New Open Standard Wants to Change That

Sourav Rudra — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:54:52 +0530

The LF AI & Data Foundation has announced the formation of the DocLang Specification Working Group, kicking off a collaborative effort to build an open, AI-native document format standard.

The working group operates under the Joint Development Foundation's vendor-neutral governance model, ensuring that no single company controls the roadmap.

The founding members are IBM, NVIDIA, Red Hat, ABBYY, and HumanSignal. Though, the spec documentation also credits Forgis as a founding member, but the announcement didn't mention them.

By the way, DocLang is not the only thing in play here. Combining its open document format specification with Docling, IBM's open source document processing toolkit also under LF AI & Data, the initiative is looking to build a more complete open source document AI stack under one roof.

Together, the two cover the full pipeline from document ingestion and parsing through standardized representation and downstream consumption by language models and agentic AI systems.

As for the specification itself, it is already at v0.6, is available under the Apache 2.0 License, and covers document structure and semantics, geometric layout, pagination, and complex components like tables, charts, formulas, and code blocks.

There's also native support for audio, image, and video content, and governance metadata like privacy flags and model training constraints are embedded directly in the document rather than stored in a separate file.

Who is it for?

The primary target is enterprises running generative AI and agentic workflows on large document sets. Formats like PDF, DOCX, and JPEG were designed for human consumption, not machine interpretation.

When such files are fed into AI pipelines, their reading order gets mangled, tables flatten into plain text, and figures disappear entirely. The result is a scenario where the document quality becomes the bottleneck, not the model itself.

DocLang is meant to fix that by giving pipelines a single, unambiguous representation where the same document always produces the same output regardless of which tool processed it.

It is also relevant to anyone building with LLMs and vision-language models on real-world content. Docling and ABBYY FineReader Engine already support DocLang output natively, so existing pipelines can adopt the standard without overhauling their tooling.

You can go through the specification for DocLang on GitHub.

DocLang Specification

Suggested Read 📖: Open Standards for What AI Actually Costs

KaOS Releases First Dinit-Based ISO, but It's Not Ditching Systemd Entirely

Sourav Rudra — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:38:32 +0530

We are used to seeing systemd as the default init on most Linux distributions, but not everyone is a fan.

Some users and developers take issue with its broad scope, preferring init systems that do one thing and do it well rather than one that reaches into session management, logging, device handling, and more.

To escape it, people often find refuge in systemd-free distributions that feature a diverse selection of init systems.

While we are yet to see a widespread trend where mainstream distros ditch systemd, smaller projects have the flexibility to do so, with the decision usually being made only after discussing such a major change with the community.

KaOS, the independent distro built around Qt, has successfully embarked on its move away from systemd, introducing the first release candidate (RC) for what will be the next chapter in its developmental cycle.

Their motivation boils down to upstream changes that left the team in a tight spot. Systemd 254 dropped support for its split /usr setup, later versions killed AUFS compatibility, and KDE Plasma's increasing systemd dependency made things worse.

In the end, switching init systems became the only real option for the project. 🤷

KaOS' Dinit Image Debuts

The KaOS Dinit 2026.06 RC image ships with a new startup stack where Dinit takes over as the init system and service manager, Turnstile handles session and login tracking, and seatd takes care of seat management. Together, these cover what systemd previously handled as a single unit.

Just so you understand what the fuss is about, Dinit (source code) is a lightweight, open source service manager that can also act as a system init. It handles starting services in parallel, respects dependencies between them, and is designed to work with other system components rather than replace them fully.

It already powers Chimera Linux and eweOS as the default init and is one of the init options available on Artix Linux and antiX.

That said, KaOS is not going fully systemd-free with this release. Systemd's udev and tmpfiles stay in place for now, and elogind is still present. The devs plan to keep these components around for the forseeable future.

What else does the ISO offer?

New bootloader

For the display manager, SDDM has been ditched in favor of greetd with tuigreet, which is said to integrate better with the new seatd-based session setup. The Calamares installer has also been updated to run cleanly on a pure Wayland session, with fixes applied to QML modules that had lost text input capability in areas like the user creation screen.

Likewise, Limine is now the default bootloader, with other UEFI options remaining available through the installer, and for partitioning, the automated setup in Calamares now covers most popular filesystems.

There's also a new welcome utility, Croeso, which walks new users through around 15 common post-install settings after installation. And for the sound backend, phonon-mpv is now the default, replacing the previous VLC-based one.

Try the RC

This is a release candidate, not a stable release. Rough edges are expected, so it is best treated as a testing build rather than something for everyday use. The ISO is available for download from the KaOS RC portal via mirrors hosted across regions like France, U.S., and Japan.

Moreover, existing non-Dinit ISOs are still around and will be for sometime. The KaOS developers have not confirmed when or if these will be phased out.

KaOS Dinit 2026.06 RC