The vote passed with +7, 0, 0 at a May 19 meeting. On top of that, the release engineering team has been told not to reinstate any of these packages unless they go through a fresh review.

A year in the making

The story starts with openSUSE. In May 2025, their security team published a detailed report on Deepin's packages, stating that they had pulled them from their repos after a review had flagged serious problems across multiple components.

The deepin-file-manager daemon had significant D-Bus interface issues, some of which stayed unfixed even after partial patches. Both deepin-api and deepin-system-monitor were found using deprecated Polkit authentication in an unsafe way.

That report prompted Adam Williamson of the Fedora QA team to open a ticket with a pointed question attached. If SUSE's security team found all of this, what did Fedora's situation look like?

Turns out Fedora had been shipping these packages without any meaningful security review, and the project's own package review guidelines were found lacking without any requirements, tools, or instructions for reviewers to consider security issues.

A thing to note here is that some security-related guidelines did exist at one point but were deleted years ago.

Was already on life support

By the time FESCo cast its vote, the Deepin packages were already in rough shape on their own. Core packages had been failing to build across Fedora 42, 43, and 44.

The desktop environment had already been pulled from Fedora spins and fedora-comps months earlier because essential packages simply could not build.

The ones who were supposed to be the stewards of this effort in Fedora, the DeepinDE SIG, lost many of its key members over time. One of the original maintainers, Zamir Sun, who had served as the SIG's coordinator, confirmed as much in a reply to FESCo's outreach email:

To make a long story short, all the initial packagers of the Deepin DE packages(namely felixonmars, mosquito(no longer with Fedoraproject) and cheeselee in FAS, and me as the coordinator) are being too busy for the vast amount of work in maintaining DeepinDE. And we never got active packagers to take the effort so we have to see it going away from Fedora.

That left a certain Felix Wang (topazus) as the one person still actively touching the packages, who has not been replying to bug reports, maintainer pings, or direct emails.

And whenever Fedora's build failure policy automatically orphaned a package, topazus would simply reclaim it without fixing anything.

FESCo sent its formal outreach on May 5 and gave four weeks for a response. With nothing substantive coming back, the committee moved to retire the full package set. Release Engineering has also been told not to reinstate any of these packages unless they go through a proper review first.

So that is the end of line for Deepin on Fedora, for now. If, in the future, some people step up and take the packages through a fresh review, maybe this desktop environment will make a comeback.

But given the state things were left in, that is not a bet anyone should be making just yet.

Since then, things got a little complicated for the project. Nextcloud and IONOS launched Euro-Office, a European fork of ONLYOFFICE, citing concerns about the project's Russian development roots, lack of transparency, and resistance to outside contributions.

ONLYOFFICE hit back, accusing the fork of violating the additional conditions attached to its AGPLv3 license.

Now, the developers have released ONLYOFFICE Docs 9.4, which covers a fair bit of ground across all the editors and introduces a licensing update.

🆕 ONLYOFFICE Docs 9.4: What's New?

Starting with form management, you can now assign specific recipients and track their filling status directly within the editor. Previously, that meant going outside the editor entirely, making the whole experience more clunky than it needed to be.

Horizontal lines in documents are in too, which was apparently a frequently requested feature on their social media pages. You can insert them to visually separate sections via the "Borders" button in the Home tab.

Similarly, the signature field in forms now defaults to the last image you used. Thanks to this, you don't need to dig around for the same file each time you sign a batch of documents.

Then there's the Presentation Editor, which picks up 25 new ready-to-use themes, covering a fairly wide range of styles, accessible from the Design tab. There are also 20 new slide transitions under the Transitions tab for adding a bit more polish to your next pitch.

The Spreadsheet Editor gets a dedicated Dark Document mode. With the general dark theme on, the spreadsheet canvas can be switched to a dark background as well via the View tab.

The community version (for self-hosting) also sees some structural work. The code is no longer minified, making it easier to read through, and it now runs as a single process with no reliance on RabbitMQ or databases.

That trims down what the host machine needs to run, and starting with this release, the 20-connection cap is gone.

Finally, the licensing terms have been updated. ONLYOFFICE has clarified its AGPLv3 conditions, with clearer language around attribution, copyright notices, labeling of modified versions, and trademark rights under a separate Trademark Policy (was error 404 at the time of writing).

If you recall, the Euro-Office dispute was specifically about whether a fork could drop those additional Section 7 conditions. The developers haven't said this update was a response to that, but we can confidently infer that from what has happened so far.

📥 Download ONLYOFFICE Docs 9.4

Like usual, you will find there are two main flavors. One is for self-hosting users who want to deploy ONLYOFFICE on their infrastructure, and the other one is for people who want a reliable office suite on their computer.

For more details on this release, you can refer to the changelog.

Suggested Read 📖: The TDF Questions Whether Euro-Office is Truly Sovereign

But that comes at a cost; any hit to its image matters a lot when we are talking about software that holds extremely sensitive information.

So when things start looking a little off, people pay attention. And over the past few months, a few things have looked a little off.

Some things changed at the top

The first change worth noting happened in February. Bitwarden's longtime CEO, Michael Crandell, stepped back to an advisory role. The company said nothing about it publicly, and one would have to check his LinkedIn profile to find out.

The new CEO is Michael Sullivan, who was previously CEO of Acquia and, before that, InsightSoftware. What got people worried was his experience of working across "all facets of mergers and acquisitions," with named private equity firms, including Hg, Vista Equity Partners, and TA Associates.

That is a very particular background for someone to be stepping into a head honcho role at a password manager company. Bitwarden's CFO also changed, where Stephen Morrison left in April and Michael Shenkman, who previously ran InVision, came in as his replacement.

None of these major executive changes were officially announced.

Quiet changes

I referred to the Wayback Machine and found that the term "Always free" had been on Bitwarden Personal's product page for a long time, sitting inside the plan comparison table.

It disappeared sometime in mid-April and was only restored sometime after May 14.

According to a company employee who posted on the r/Bitwarden subreddit, all of that was supposedly due to an oversight by the Bitwarden marketing team.

Then there's the other issue of values being quietly changed. Bitwarden has used the GRIT acronym to describe its company culture for years, standing for Gratitude, Responsibility, Inclusion, and Transparency.

I again checked the Wayback Machine, and the values were still intact as of March 14, 2026. At some point after that, they were quietly changed. GRIT now stands for Gratitude, Responsibility, Innovation, and Trust.

The 2022 blog post Crandell wrote laying out the original GRIT values was edited to reflect the new ones. Except the editing stopped halfway. The explanatory paragraph further down in the same post still describes Inclusion and Transparency as the values.

Bitwarden's stance

Sullivan published a blog recently, laying out his first 100 days at Bitwarden and also hashing some things out.

The free tier is not going anywhere. He ruled out a trial model or bait-and-switch and said that the open source foundation and the ability to audit the code, self-host, and verify are what make Bitwarden different from everything else in the space.

He also acknowledged that changes are coming, but those would be explained properly.

Should you be worried?

The post referenced above is the most direct on-record statement Bitwarden has about the free tier. But a pattern of ambiguity has already been established.

For such a sensitive piece of software, unannounced leadership changes and a values rewrite are the kind of thing that should make you nervous. But unless Bitwarden does something drastic like axing the free tier or pulling a Cal.com, there is not much to act on just yet.

Suggested Read 📖: Bitwarden vs. Proton Pass

Brendan Burns, co-founder of Kubernetes and Corporate VP for Azure OSS and Cloud Native at Microsoft, delivered a keynote on their technological shift from cloud native to what the company is calling the "AI native era."

The announcement covered quite a bit of ground, so here's a breakdown.

What was announced?

The Linux part of the announcement has two updates. Azure Linux 4.0 is coming to Azure Virtual Machines as a public preview, though it is still in active development and no downloads are available yet. Microsoft has a sign-up form open for early access.

Azure Container Linux is now generally available, with a full rollout planned during Microsoft Build on June 2. It is an immutable, container-optimized OS, which by design means no package manager and a read-only system image.

This is aimed at teams handling regulated or security-sensitive deployments, with the intent to keep the attack surface relatively limited while Microsoft maintains the supply chain end to end.

For agentic AI, Microsoft is pushing several building blocks for what it calls an open agentic stack. The Microsoft Agent Framework is an open source SDK and runtime for multi-agent systems, consolidating earlier work from Semantic Kernel and AutoGen into one foundation.

Alongside that is the Agent Governance Toolkit, which covers identity, policy, and audit controls for AI agent deployments and A2A (agent-to-agent) protocols for cross-vendor, cross-framework agent communication.

We saw this coming

The announcement doesn't mention Fedora once, but the Azure Linux 4.0 branch on the project's GitHub paints a different picture.

The README file for 4.0 explicitly describes Fedora as an "upstream base" for Azure Linux, describing the distro as a set of TOML configuration files and targeted overlays applied on top of Fedora.

Likewise, packages come straight from Fedora's upstream repositories, with any deviations from that kept minimal and clearly documented.

Last month, we reported on discussions from a Fedora ELN SIG meeting where it became clear Microsoft was backing a proposal to build x86-64-v3 packages for Fedora 45.

Kyle Gospodnetich, a Linux engineer at Microsoft, was co-authoring the change proposal, with the motivation tied directly to Azure Linux's need for x86-64-v3 performance gains.

There was also talk of Microsoft forking the distribution entirely at one point, but they were guided toward working within the Fedora ecosystem instead. We called it "a big if" at the time.

Now, the 4.0 branch confirms it. 🤓

As for why Microsoft stayed quiet about the Fedora connection in its announcement blog post. Fedora is effectively Red Hat's upstream, and Red Hat is both an Azure partner and a competitor in the enterprise Linux space. I presume that it would make for an awkward read in that context.

Suggested Read 📖: Fedora Hummingbird Debuts As a Hardened Linux Distro

They range from quick CLI scripts to full-blown graphical applications. Some focus on browser data; others go deeper into system logs, package caches, and temporary files.

One of the more popular offerings among those is BleachBit, which is a free and open source system cleaner for Linux and Windows that handles all that. It's developers have now given everyone an early look into how its text-based user interface (TUI) is shaping up.

BleachBit TUI works well

The TUI is simple to navigate. The space bar toggles cleaning options on or off, and Enter expands a category to show the file list underneath.

For previewing what would be cleaned, there are two options: lowercase p runs a full preview across all selected items, while uppercase P previews just the focused component.

Once done, d handles deletion for everything selected, and D deletes the focused component specifically. On my first attempt, the deletion failed because I had not launched the TUI with elevated privileges.

Re-launching with sudo python3 bleachbit_tui.py fixed that. Once initiated, I had to press Y to confirm the action, and when it completed, a dialog appeared in the bottom-right showing the files deleted and space recovered.

There is also a palette menu, accessible via Ctrl+P. From there, you can search commands, maximize a selected component, quit BleachBit, save a screenshot, and bring up the keys/help side panel.

Since the TUI shares its backend with the regular BleachBit GUI, it picks up all the same settings automatically. That covers your selected cleaning options, keep list, custom cleaning list, and cookie keep list.

It also supports changing display themes and some mouse interaction alongside keyboard navigation, including the scroll wheel. On Windows, the TUI ships as both an installer and a portable package, compiled as a native 64-bit binary, unlike the 32-bit stable GUI and CLI builds.

If you want to try it out on Linux, the official announcement has quick-start instructions for running the TUI on Ubuntu, and if that doesn't suit you, then you could build from source.

It can handle project planning, resource allocation, time tracking, and progress reporting, and its target customers are organizations that want full control over their own infrastructure and data.

Now, they have introduced a new release that adds some useful features around collaboration, project tracking, and a pretty notable expansion of language support.

What's new?

The 1.6.0 release arrives with email support for major user groups, per-project document repositories, and configurable email templates with notification support.

Project managers also get a few new visibility tools. There is now an issue and risk log, a pipeline overview, project margin tracking, and traffic light-style status indicators in the project list view.

The last addition in particular should be handy, letting you spot which projects need attention at a glance without you needing to click through each one.

Moving on to the highlight of this release, we have the expanded language support, which takes the earlier four languages supported number all the way to 19.

These include Czech, Chinese, German, Persian/Farsi, Russian, Italian, Norwegian Bokmål, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Simplified Chinese.

None of these new additions have been through manual review, though. They were put together using AI tooling, and the project is counting on the community to spot mistakes and tighten things up.

Get LibrePlan

LibrePlan 1.6.0 is available now, with Docker images for the Community Edition available on Docker Hub, and a live demo environment is accessible on the official website.

There's also a separate enterprise-focused version called LibrePlan Enterprise for organizations looking to deploy this release, and the source code for the Community Edition lives on GitHub.

You can learn more about this release in the announcement blog.

Suggested Read 📖: Fedora's AI Move Hits a Roadblock

Sander Hilven, a developer, has put together a working recipe that works on Wine 11.8 staging with Lightroom CC 9.3.1. Interestingly, they have not done any of the actual work themselves.

The dev just told Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.7 what the goal was and left it to figure out the rest, while providing an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription for the AI to work with.

The AI dug through crash logs and Wine compatibility issues autonomously, figuring out what needed fixing. It verified its own work by screenshotting the running Lightroom instance and clicking through the interface to confirm whether each fix held up.

Though, several fixes were needed to get things going. Some Windows APIs that Wine doesn't implement were bringing down the entire Creative Cloud process on launch, some DLLs Lightroom depends on simply did not exist in Wine, and there were naming mismatches between how Lightroom looks for its files and how Adobe actually ships them.

The Remove/Heal tool was the trickiest fix. It kept crashing mid-use, and the AI traced it back to a dependency that Wine ships in the wrong place.

Currently, browsing, editing, exporting, and the Remove/Heal tool all work. Not everything is perfect though; tutorial videos don't play, some GPU-accelerated effects may not render correctly, and there's a bug with double-clicking thumbnails.

I won't touch it

The sole human developer's GitHub has no bio to speak of, and outside this repo, there is nothing that tells you much about who they are.

The entire project, including the patched DLLs and the assurance that they work, was produced by an AI agent. No human has looked at those binaries independently.

That is a lot of trust to put in AI-generated Windows DLL patches running inside your Linux computer.

I won't be testing this due to all that and because I don't have an Adobe subscription. But if you have one and have a spare machine lying around, why not give it a try and post your findings on our forum?

Yeah, that is a not-so-subtle nudge to visit it and interact with the other FOSSers. 😉

Think of them as a local home for your inbox that comes equipped with the necessary tools for composing, organizing, and syncing your content. 📥

I had one of my earliest experiences with these through Thunderbird, which I used at a previous workplace. It did the job well enough at the time, and I have no real complaints about it from back then.

Eventually I drifted toward just using the web apps of whatever email service I was on. So, when I came across Aerion, I thought to myself, why not give email clients another shot?

Aerion: A Home For Your E-Mails

This is an open source, lightweight desktop email client maintained by a team of developers that is sponsored by 3DF, which covers the infrastructure and human resource-related costs.

The project takes inspiration from GNOME's email client Geary, with a focus on being resource efficient and offering a clean interface without the baggage that tends to weigh down the older solutions on Linux.

Before you blurt out "Electron!," know that Aerion uses Wails and Svelte under the hood. It also comes with a CASA Tier 2 certification, which was assessed by TAC Security, a Google authorized assessor under the App Defense Alliance.

This means that the app's codebase has been scanned and verified against the OWASP ASVS standards by an independent third party. For a small indie project that handles your email credentials and account access, that is a big reassurance.

Feature-wise, it covers the essentials like support for multiple accounts, conversation threading, a WYSIWYG composer powered by TipTap, contact sync (via CardDAV, Google, and Microsoft), multiple color themes, and keyboard navigation with vim-style shortcuts.

For email providers, Aerion works with Gmail, Microsoft 365/Outlook, Proton Mail (via paywalled Proton Bridge), iCloud Mail, GMX Mail, and generic IMAP/SMTP setups.

Yahoo, Fastmail, Zoho Mail, AOL Mail, and Mail.com are listed as well, though these were marked as untested at the time of writing.

I Used It

Getting started meant adding my Gmail account, and that process was smoother than I expected. Aerion hands you off to the browser for the OAuth flow, where you go through Google's usual permissions and disclaimers routine, at the end of which you land back in Aerion, authenticated and ready to go.

There's a nasty catch here, though. If you accidentally click somewhere outside the "Add Email Account" window while it is open, the whole thing closes and discards whatever progress you made. You won't get any warning or confirmation popup; it will just f*ck right off.

When Aerion finishes fetching your emails, you will notice that remote image loading is blocked by default. You can manually allow loading per email or add specific domains to an allowlist to avoid having to do it every time.

With Gmail connected, I spent some time sending and receiving mail, and the basics work as you would want them to. The composer has all the tools you need to put together a well-written email, and new messages are delivered with proper sync happening with the Gmail servers.

Below is a quick example of me sending a test mail from Aerion to my Proton Mail account. It landed without issue, showing up in Gmail's sent folder and in the Proton Mail inbox.

Where things got a bit less clean was with notifications. When I received new mail, I received no notification in Aerion's interface or GNOME's notification dropdown.

I had to manually hit the sync button to get the mail to appear, though Aerion does auto-sync in the background. The catch is that there is no way to configure how often it syncs, at least for Gmail, so if you are used to mail showing up the moment it lands, adjust your expectations accordingly.

What I missed was that there is a way to configure sync intervals. It is hidden away under the Accounts settings, where one has to click on the pencil icon for a specific account and go into the "Server" category and look for "Sync Options."

And if you like keeping your mailbox clean, Aerion has you covered. You can mass delete emails that land in the "Bin" first, or you can go the extra step and permanently wipe them to free up cloud storage. Either way, the changes reflect on Gmail's servers without issue.

Though there's one more inconvenience that some of you might not like. Before you can start using Aerion, you are asked to agree to its Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

The terms are fairly standard. It is pre-release software, so bugs and shifting features are part of the deal, there are no warranties, and the whole thing is provided under the Apache 2.0 license.

On the privacy side, things are more reassuring. Aerion does not collect or transmit any of your data to external servers, so no telemetry, no analytics, and no ads to worry about. When it connects to Google or Microsoft APIs, that access is limited strictly to the email functionality you configured.

Install it Now

People running Linux-powered distributions can get Aerion from Flathub. Those on platforms like ARM64, Windows, and macOS will have to visit the releases page to get the relevant packages.

If neither of the options are your thing, then you could always build from source.

The Fedora AI Developer Desktop Initiative, a proposal to build an official platform for AI and machine learning workloads on Fedora, has been blocked after two Fedora Council members retracted their earlier approval votes.

The initiative was proposed by Red Hat engineer Gordon Messmer, aiming to deliver an Atomic Desktop with accelerated AI workload support, covering developer tools, hardware enablement, and building a community around AI on Fedora.

Why the withdrawal?

As you already know, at the May 6 council meeting, the members unanimously voted to approve this new initiative. After which a short, lazy consensus window was left open until May 8 to accommodate absent members, after which the decision was to be ratified.

But that last bit never happened, as council member Justin Wheeler (Jflory7) was the first person to change their vote to -1. He pointed to the LTS kernel component of the proposal as a "massive structural shift" that had not been cleared with the relevant legal and engineering parties.

He also noted that feedback from Fedora kernel subject-matter experts had not been properly incorporated into the plan and that new developments, particularly the Nova driver work (for NVIDIA GPUs), would introduce technical and legal complexities that need proper vetting.

Following that, fellow council member Miro Hrončok (churchyard) put in his -1, saying that he had originally assumed the proposal was purely additive and therefore uncontroversial.

But seeing the community's response, he realized that he was mistaken about that. As an elected representative, he felt the need to reflect on this major proposal before signing it off.

A community divided

Over 180 replies have piled up in the proposal's discussion thread, with many well-known Fedora contributors pushing back on things like kernel policy, proprietary software, and project identity.

Hans de Goede from the packaging team called out the proposal's emphasis on CUDA support as going against Fedora's foundational commitment to free software, arguing that open alternatives like AMD's ROCm and Intel's oneAPI should be the focus instead.

Another Fedora contributor, Tim Flink, questioned whether the initiative amounted to little more than a mechanism to get CUDA onto a Fedora-adjacent system.

Neal Gompa raised similar concerns, saying Fedora has historically leveraged its stance on proprietary software to push vendors toward open solutions and that this proposal would undercut that effort.

What happens next?

Part of what made this blow up the way it did was a communications gap. Fabio Valentini of the FESCo noted that he only became aware the proposal was being voted on after stumbling across the council meeting on Matrix accidentally.

The initiative is now listed as blocked in the council ticket, with a new escalation deadline of May 22. Gordon (the proposal submitter) has said a revised draft is coming, telling the thread he plans to have a few people look it over before posting it.

Luckily, fixes have arrived for it in the Linux kernel, as well as Fedora and Pop!_OS. I suggest you make the necessary updates or risk being open to a highly publicized exploit.

Seeing the rise of such exploits, there is now a new kernel proposal called killswitch, which would allow system administrators to disable a vulnerable kernel function at runtime.

In addition to that, there is a proposal for a scheduler in kernel that promises frame time improvements on aging hardware under heavy CPU load.

A few weeks ago, we reported about LVFS turning up the heat on vendors who didn't pay their fair share. Now, Dell and Lenovo have both signed on as Premier sponsors at $100,000 a year each, making them the first vendors to reach that tier.

Ubuntu announced local-first AI plans, and now Fedora has approved its own AI Developer Desktop initiative with a unanimous council vote. Three Atomic Desktop images are planned, two of them CUDA-enabled, and none of them would be phoning home to cloud services.

Fedora has also announced Hummingbird, a distro that ships the entire OS as a bootable OCI image with atomic updates and rollback support.

Debian has made reproducible builds a hard requirement for the Forky cycle. Since May 9, any package that can't be compiled byte-for-byte identically from its source is blocked from entering testing.

Here are other highlights of this edition of FOSS Weekly:

• How moving away from OneDrive looks like.
• Yazi file browser (that I missed to include last week).
• A Ratatui terminal.
• And other Linux news, tips, and, of course, memes!

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

My colleague Sourav, a long-time OneDrive user, had to move away from it over fears of Copilot messing around with his photos and videos. Ente Photos was the alternative he went for.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

Yazi is a Rust-based terminal file manager that does a lot more than ls and cd. You get a three-pane layout, image previews, syntax-highlighted code previews, and archive peeking without extraction.

Most KDE users know Dolphin does split view and tabs. Fewer know it can verify file checksums, restore recently closed tabs with Ctrl+Shift+T, and paste images directly from the browser.

If you have been eyeing a move to Fedora, then our Getting Started with Fedora series is the one for you. This curated resource page covers everything from first boot to enabling RPM Fusion, NVIDIA drivers, Steam setup, and upgrading between versions.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

Sanctions pushed Huawei to build their own mobile OS. Five years later, it's on 55 million devices and growing fast.

If you are coding with AI agents, here's a new open source tool that works like git but for the AI coding agents.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

Terminal can be scary. Terminal can be fun. Terminal can be weird. This week, we came across a new terminal that is amusing, absurd and fun. It shows terminals can have 3D effects.

If you live in the terminal and use Discord, Concord can be a TUI client replacement for it. Keep in mind that it is a relatively new offering, so verify this before installing it on your computer.

📽️ Videos for You

You can run Arch Linux apps on Ubuntu by using Distrobox.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

In Kate text editor, you can compare two files for differences in content. First, open two files in separate tabs. Then, right-click on the title of the inactive tab and select the "Compare it with Active Document" option.

This will open a new tab, highlighting the differences between the files.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Do you know all the Apt commands? You can test your knowledge with our package management quiz.

Newbies have a hard choice to make nowadays. 😆

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On May 10, 1954, Texas Instruments engineer Gordon Teal stunned attendees at an IRE conference in Dayton, Ohio, by announcing the first commercially produced silicon transistor, moments after other speakers had declared such a device was still years away.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: Pro FOSSer Ernest shares how he has created a home-brewed, cross-platform reminders system.

I like Kitty and I am pretty happy with it. But then I came across a new Rust-based terminal that grabbed my attention.

No, it's not because it's written in Rust. It's because the terminal has a rat as the mouse cursor.

Sounds weird, right? But Ratty shows the unusual capabilities of a terminal.

What is Ratty, again?

Ratty is a modern terminal emulator written in Rust that brings a unique twist to the command line. Unlike traditional terminal environments, Ratty is GPU-rendered.

It supports viewing 3D models directly inside the terminal window, and a lot more!

The design is inspired by TempleOS, giving it a retro look while still maintaining modern performance.

Let's take a look at this cool project and see what makes it stand out in the crowded field of terminal emulators.

Amusing features of Ratty

Ratty stands out by merging traditional terminal functionality with modern graphics rendering. Here are some of the most notable features I noticed in this experimental project.

Customizable 3D Cursor

Ratty uses terminal protocols, Ratatui and the Bevy game engine to create a 3D representation for the cursor. Instead of a traditional block or line, the cursor can be a 3D rat or other customized objects.

When you install Ratty, you get a spinning rat as the cursor by default. This 3D object moves along with your text input, providing a unique visual experience that blends a game engine's rendering capabilities with a standard terminal workflow.

3D Mode

Ratty includes a dedicated 3D Mode that transforms the entire terminal into a canvas within a 3D scene. In this mode, the terminal window is no longer static. You can pull, warp and view your terminal output from different angles!

To enter 3D mode, you can use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+ALT+Enter.

Additionally, there is a "Mobius mode" accessible via CTRL+ALT+M. This twists and bends the terminal output to form a continuous Mobius strip, showcasing the project's integration with the Bevy game engine.

While you are in 3D Mode, you can press the Super+CTRL+ALT+Up to increase warp and Super+CTRL+ALT+Down to reduce warp.

Inline 3D Objects

This feature allows developers to register 3D assets and anchor them to specific text cells in the terminal. Because they are anchored to the cells, the 3D models move seamlessly as the text scrolls or changes position.

To make this work, the project uses a dedicated Ratty Graphics Protocol. This protocol handles the communication between the terminal data and the 3D engine to ensure the models stay synced with the text on your screen.

Builtin Image Support

Ratty also supports the Kitty Graphics Protocol, which allows it to display standard images directly in the terminal window.

This compatibility means that tools like fastfetch or yazi can show real images and icons alongside your text. By supporting this established protocol, Ratty ensures that modern terminal utilities work as expected while still offering its own specialized 3D features.

Live 2D to 3D Split Pane Drawing

Ratty includes a 3D drawing demo that showcases its unique rendering capabilities. This feature uses a split-pane workspace where you can draw on a traditional 2D canvas on the left side of the terminal.

As you draw on the flat surface, Ratty instantly generates a live 3D preview of your creation on the right side. The preview rotates in real-time, allowing you to see how your 2D input translates into a 3D object without leaving the terminal environment.

Interactive Document Mode

Ratty also features a document editing mode inspired by TempleOS. This mode allows you to type standard, editable text directly alongside embedded 3D objects.

Because these 3D models are animating in real-time on the same screen as your text, the terminal functions more like a spatial document editor than a simple command prompt. It provides a unique way to interact with data where text and 3D assets coexist in the same workspace.

Installing Ratty

The best way to install Ratty is using Cargo, the Rust package manager. It's a Rust application, after all.

cargo install ratty

For Arch Linux users, there is a package available in the official repositories. You can install it by running:

sudo pacman -S ratty

If you prefer not to compile from source, prebuilt binaries are available for direct download on the GitHub releases page.

It is important to note that Ratty requires a GPU to function properly. If you are trying to run it inside a virtual machine, it will not open unless you have configured GPU passthrough settings.

⚠️ Troubleshoot

I installed Ratty on Arch Linux and noticed it was missing from the application menu. I had to manually create a desktop entry. Here's how you can do the same.

Create a file at ~/.local/share/applications/ratty.desktop with the configuration provided below, the terminal will appear in your app launcher just like any other program.

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Ratty
Comment=A GPU-rendered terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics
Exec=env TERM=xterm-kitty ratty
Icon=utilities-terminal
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Categories=System;TerminalEmulator;

While this manual method worked for me, if you know of an alternate solution or a more official way to handle the menu entry, feel free to mention it in the comments.

Configuring Ratty

Ratty can be configured using a TOML file located at ~/.config/ratty/ratty.toml. If the directory and file do not exist yet, you can create them using the following commands:

mkdir -p ~/.config/ratty
cd ~/.config/ratty
touch ratty.toml

Once you have created the file, you can copy and paste the default configuration template provided by the project. This allows you to customize the behavior and appearance of the terminal to suit your preferences.

You can find the default config file for Ratty here.

Impressive?

Clearly, Ratty is an experimental project focused on pushing the boundaries of terminal development and testing innovative ideas. Because it uses a game engine for rendering, it is currently heavy on system resources.

Orhun, Ratty creator, explicitly notes that it is not intended as a "daily driver" for standard productivity and hopes to optimize the performance in the future.

The use of 3D sprites and game-like graphics inside a terminal may not appeal to everyone. However, it offers unique possibilities for designers and developers who want to see their assets living directly inside source files or within the terminal workspace.

What is your impression of Ratty? Share it in the comments please,

Red Hat looks like the latest to act on this front. Fedora's recent announcement introduces Fedora Hummingbird, a new rolling release distribution that ships the entire OS as an OCI image.

It is built on the security-first pipeline behind Project Hummingbird's existing container catalog, with the foundational project itself being something Red Hat introduced as an early access program for subscribers back in November 2025.

The main idea behind the project is to ship a catalog of minimal, hardened, distroless container images kept at near-zero CVE status. When a vulnerability gets patched upstream, the build pipeline finds it, rebuilds the affected image, and ships it.

Fedora Hummingbird is applying the same logic but to a full-size operating system, using a Konflux-based build pipeline, drawing over 95% of packages from Fedora Rawhide.

Whatever Rawhide doesn't have yet gets pulled from upstream, and any fixes made along the way feed back into Fedora.

Moreover, Red Hat's Product Security team maintains a vulnerability feed for each package, so instead of a generic CVE list, you get a clearer picture of what actually affects your setup.

The kernel powering it is the Always Ready Kernel (ARK) from the CKI project, which follows mainline Linux and already ships in Fedora. And, to wrap up, all updates are atomic with rollback support, the root filesystem is read-only, and writable state stays in /var and /etc.

How's it different from Fedora Atomic?

If you're already running Silverblue, Kinoite, or any of the other Fedora Atomic Desktops, then the "immutable OS" moniker might feel familiar to you. But Hummingbird and those are not the same thing.

Fedora's existing Atomic Desktops are rpm-ostree-based desktop variants built from the standard Fedora package set, released on Fedora's regular six-month cycle.

They are built for end users who want a stable, immutable desktop experience.

Fedora Hummingbird ships no desktop environment and is a rolling release that tracks Fedora Rawhide directly, built through its own dedicated pipeline where every package carries independent CVE tracking and its own lifecycle.

The target here is developers and cloud-native workloads, not the desktop market.

Download Fedora Hummingbird

The image is available to download for the x86_64 and aarch64 platforms with no subscription or registration required. The project's source code lives on GitLab, and is open for contributions.

The download page also has step-by-step instructions for spinning up a virtual machine.

Suggested Read 📖: Dirty Frag Exploit Fixed in Fedora

Linux kernel developer Peter Zijlstra has posted the second version of a patch series called "sched: Flatten the pick," aimed at fixing gaps in how the Linux scheduler handles cgroup scheduling.

Calling it "a pain in the ar*e," he has tracked the issue down to a formula that fragments a task group's total weight across every CPU on the system.

On a 64-core machine, Peter says, a cgroup is already down to roughly a nice 19 task worth of priority per CPU, and at 256 cores, which is not unusual in servers today, the margin gets even tinier.

He breaks the rest of the problem into two parts, where the usual fix for the first is to inflate the group weight by the CPU count, but when all of a group's load lands on a single CPU, that weight balloons well past nice -20 (priority value of the process), and the math starts breaking down.

The second is how the scheduler picks the next task to run. It currently has to step through multiple cgroup levels to get there; the fix collapses all of that into a single level instead.

He ran what he calls a little experiment, using an older configuration with an Intel Core i7-2600K and AMD Radeon RX 580, loading up Shadows: Awakening from GOG through Lutris, using GE-Proton10-34 and Steam Runtime 3 (sniper).

To properly stress the setup, he threw 8 spinner processes at it alongside the game, one per CPU thread, and watched it go from playable to "almost unplayable, as in proper terrible."

He then restarted it with a shorter scheduler time slice set to one-tenth of the default via chrt and recorded both sessions using MangoHud. This is what he got. 👇

Closing the proposal, Peter said that he has not compared to a kernel without flat on, just wanted to run non trivial workloads and play with slice to make sure everything 'works.'

Should you be excited?

If you game on Linux, especially on older hardware, this kind of fix can be beneficial.

The stress test Peter ran is not that far from what happens in normal use. Discord, a web browser with a dozen tabs, a system update running in the background. They all compete for CPU time the same way those spinner processes did.

And while his test rig is old, the scheduler problem is not limited to old hardware. High core counts make the weight fragmentation issue worse, not better. If this lands, modern rigs with 16 or more cores could see gains too.

You should also know that this has not made it into the mainline Linux kernel yet. The patch series still needs review from the concerned kernel maintainers. It will almost certainly go through some revisions before it lands in a kernel release.

Via: Phoronix