Innehållsförteckning för March 2026 från Linux Magazine

Dear Reader, The world moves quickly and you have to keep on making choices. I guess we all know that, but in the high tech industry, those choices move billions of dollars and affect thousands of lives. In some ways, they affect the culture and history of the whole planet. We like to think that those choices are made with lots of analysis – and maybe they are, but it does seem sometimes that a lot of this is about tech billionaires chasing rabbits and living out their sci-fi fantasies. This past month, Meta announced massive layoffs in their Reality Labs, the division dedicated to building the company’s vision of “the metaverse.” Reality Labs was launched in 2020, with much hype of course (hype being the rocket fuel for this…

Gnome developer Jordan Petridis submitted proposals to both GNOME and Firefox (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1747207) for disabling what he called the “abomination“ that is middle-mouse paste. In the Firefox proposal, titled “Get `middlemouse.paste` from system,“ there were comments such as, “Middlepaste is bad and needs to be disabled by default,“ but several commenters made it very clear that they’d like to see it remain. There are those who claim that middle-mouse paste is a security issue, with one commenter saying, “middle-clicking could paste sensitive information (e.g., passwords from a password manager) into a page when the user does not intend to and without the user’s knowledge.“ The thing is, that can happen with Ctrl+V as well. Given that this feature has been around for a very long time, it’s my opinion (as someone…

Mozilla has a new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, who’s determined to revive trust in the organization. Oddly enough, Enzor-DeMeo plans on doing that by evolving Firefox into an AI browser. Enzor-DeMeo says very clearly (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next-chapter-anthony-enzor-demeo-new-ceo/), “Every product we build must give people agency in how it works.” That’s great, but what does it mean? He continues with, “Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off. People should know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it.“ The ability to disable AI in Firefox is a smart move, because there’s a large chunk of the Linux community that does not want AI sullying the open…

If you’re looking for Linux pre-installed on a laptop, you have several options, one of which is TUXEDO Computers. The Germany-based company has been selling Linux hardware for some time, and it shows in the quality of its builds and the state of its in-house distribution, TUXEDO OS. Recently, TUXEDO announced Gemini 17, a fourth-generation laptop. Gemini 17 is a beast of a laptop, complete with a 17" screen, an Intel Core i9-14900HX CPU (with 24 cores, 32 threads, 36MB cache, and up to 5.8GHz clock speed). It can be configured with up to 96GB RAM, up to 8TB PCI Express 4.0 SSD storage, and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti graphics card, complete with 12GB GDDR7 VRAM. As far as the display is concerned, you’ll get a 38.3x21.5cm screen…

Anyone who lives in an American apartment building like I do is likely to experience a thousand adventures every day. One of them takes place in the building’s small laundry room, where nearly 30 occupants share two washing machines. I don’t know how many times I have taken the elevator two floors down with a bulging laundry basket in tow, only to find that both machines are occupied, leading me to shout “This is a job for the German engineer in the house!” (Figure 1). In response, I built a system that now displays all the activities in the laundry room for everyone to view on the web. To do this, I first glued two batterypowered Tapo T100 motion detectors to the walls of the laundry room (Figure 2); these…

I have a reputation as a moody loner who spends more time with horses and computers than with people. In reality, people who think such a thing of me would be surprised to know I host a weekly retro gaming party every Friday, in which soft drinks, junk food, and old video games are the protagonists. LAN (local area network) parties – events in which nerds meet at a location to play multiplayer games within a local network – may be out of fashion, but they are as fun as ever. The problem with LAN parties is that people need to attend physically for them to be real LAN parties, which means that if the group cannot meet on a given day, there is no party. Life has a tendency…

Today’s widely used digital cameras and smartphones have made our photos more accessible and easier to distribute. As a result, nowadays it isn’t difficult for an photography amateur (or really anyone) to create a personal gallery with 1TB or more of multimedia. To help manage all of your photos, popular services such as Dropbox, Google Photos, and Apple’s iCloud Photos support photo gallery management and provide tools like duplicate removal and advanced image editing with AI. However, there are several potential risks when you store personal photos in the cloud, even with big, established services. The first potential risk is privacy – cloud services can potentially scan and analyze images for their own purposes and extract sensitive information. Data breaches are another serious potential problem: A cloud service can be…

If you’re a Linux Mint lover (of which there are plenty), you’ll be thrilled to know the development team has made the latest iteration available for you to download and install. Linux Mint 22.3 “Zena” has plenty to offer for those who like a bit extra in their new releases. Of course, you’ll find the usual software updates, such as the latest Warpinator that supports IPv6 and the ability to send texts. There’s also an addition by way of a name change. System Reports has been rebranded as System Information, which is a tool for troubleshooting hardware-related issues. This same tool can also be used to install multimedia codecs and set up a system restore. System Information also collects information for USB, GPU, PCI, and BIOS. Then there’s a brand…

Manjaro 26.0 (aka “Anh-Linh“) has been released with plenty of upgrades and a major change. The upgrades are the usual suspects: kernel, pre-installed software, desktop environments, and toolchains. You’ll get kernel 6.18, Xfce 4.20, Gnome 49, KDE Plasma 6.5, KDE Gear 25.12, KDE Frameworks 6.21, the NVIDIA 590 Linux driver, Mesa 25.3 graphics drivers, LibreOffice 25.8.4, Firefox 146, GStreamer 1.26.10 multimedia framework, WirePlumber 0.5.13 policy manager for PipeWire, ALSA 1.2.15.1, and more. In addition, this is also the first Manjaro release to include System76’s COSMIC desktop environment. The big change, however, has to do with Wayland and X.Org (http://x.org/). Starting with Manjaro 26.0, both KDE Plasma and Gnome now default to Wayland. If using Wayland isn’t your top priority, the only option you have for X.Org is Xfce. This is…

Shell extensions are a crucial part of the Gnome desktop. Without shell extensions, Gnome would not be nearly as customizable, which would very likely send users packing. Recently, Gnome extension reviewer Javad Rahmatzadeh, who spends nearly six hours a day reviewing extension code, has noticed a rise in submissions that contain AI-generated code https://blogs.gnome.org/jrahmatzadeh/2025/12/06/ai-and-gnome-shell-extensions/?ref=itsfoss.com. The Gnome extension team is not amused. According to Rahmatzadeh, the team has noticed “unnecessary lines and bad practices. And once a bad practice is introduced in one package, it can create a domino effect, appearing on other extensions. That alone has increased the waiting time for all packages to be reviewed.“ In other words, poorly written AI code is causing trouble for legitimate extensions. To that end, the team has created a new rule (review-guidelines.html#extensions-must-not-be-ai-generated)…

Linux doesn’t force you to install updates, it doesn’t force you to reboot and interrupt your work, and it’s very verbatim about all that’s going on under the hood: If you’re interested, you can take a look, both at log files and at the kernel message buffer, and you can modify many aspects of its daily operation on your computer. ◼ For this article I’ve compiled a few tools and also some suggestions to help you keep the system running. ◼ We’ll look at etckeeper which tracks changes to your configuration files, ◼ and you can run the Caffeine applet that bans your screensaver and energy saving modes so that your display keeps on displaying. ◼ Regular backups are important, as we all know, but they’re also a bit annoying,…

#303/February 2026 Pixel Tracking If you spend time on the Internet, you probably already know you're getting followed. One of the biggest sources of online data collection is pixel tracking technology. This month, we look at pixel tracking and tell you about some tools that could help minimize its effects. On the DVD: Linux Mint 22.10 MATE and MX-25 Linux Xfce The big mainstream game vendors have gotten better at supporting Linux in recent years, but independent, open source games still play an important role in the FOSS community. This month we show you some of the best-loved indie games. On the DVD: Lubuntu 25.10 Desktop and Fedora 43 Workstation #302/January 2026 Indie Gaming The big mainstream game vendors have gotten better at supporting Linux in recent years, but independent,…

Linux malware isn’t something that’s always on the mind of admins. However, a new framework has been discovered, called VoidLink, that is far more advanced than your typical malicious code. VoidLink is a framework with over 30 modules that can be added or removed to customize its capabilities for specific targets and meet an attacker’s goals. There are modules for stealth, reconnaissance, privilege escalation, and even movement within a network. As a malware campaign evolves, so too can the malware, thanks to its modular design. VoidLink’s focus is Linux installations found on cloud hosts, such as AWS and Google Cloud – a list that continues to grow. VoidLink uses a vendor’s API to discern which cloud service is hosting a particular machine. Check Point Research discovered VoidLink, and they’ve explained…

Linux Magazine www.linux-magazine.com ADMIN Online http://www.admin-magazine.com/ Optimizing File I/O • Andreas Scheumann, Philipp Koester, and Rainer Keller File I/O is a limiting factor for many applications and can become a bottleneck for data-intensive computing. We analyze different file access functions and present a script that visualizes and optimizes inefficient file I/O. AI and the BooM Stack • Joe Casad openEuler prepares for the AI future with a complete software stack tailored for artificial intelligence. Develop a Simple Scanning App • Andrea Ciarrocchi A NAPS2 PDF scanner, the C# language, and the. NET Framework set the stage for a CLI app for scanning documents. Automating Migration to openEuler • Rubén Llorente Easily migrate your old CentOS 7 systems to the modern openEuler with the x2openEuler migration toolset.…

Parrot OS, a security-focused Linux distribution, is migrating from MATE to KDE Plasma, starting with version 7.0, now available in beta. Based on Debian 13, Parrot OS’s goal is a shift toward ”modernization, focusing on clearing technical debt and future-proofing the system,“ (https://parrotsec.org/blog/2025-12-09-parrot-7.0-beta-release-notes/). One big under-the-hood change is that the/tmp directory is now automatically mounted as tmpfs (in RAM), as opposed to the physical drive. By making this change, Parrot OS enjoys improved performance and reduces wear on SSDs. This shift also means that all data in/tmp is lost during a reboot. Parrot OS 7.0 also includes a more readable text interface with APT, with the help of colors, aligned columns, and clearer missing dependencies. Of course, the big change is the adoption of KDE Plasma as the default desktop…

Linux in the Community I recently read a posting on Facebook that talked about a retired man named “George” who decided, one year after his wife died, to start fixing things for people for free. If they brought him the thing, he tried to fix it and afterwards the person walked away happy. This effort grew, expanded, and warmed the cockles of the reader’s heart. However one of the commentators questioned whether the story was true, or simply a fable, made up to make people feel good. After all, “George” did not charge for his help and the town name given “Maple Grove” was too common, with no state and no dates given. Other commentators joined in his doubts. I do not know if there ever was a “George” or…

Sparkling gems and new releases from the world of Free and Open Source Software Terms and Conditions Apply Since Qualcomm’s acquisition of Arduino in October 2025, it’s been quick to update its Terms and Conditions, as well as the privacy policy for its cloud and AI offerings. Adafruit Industries addressed this in aLinkedInpost (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/)that didn’t pull any punches, saying that some of these changes “effectively reshape Arduino from an open community platform into a tightly controlled corporate service with deep data extraction built in.” These are harsh words, given Arduino’s long tradition of publishing files detailing PCB schematics and use of open source firmware. In a blog post in late November (https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/11/21/the-arduino-terms-of-service-and-privacy-policy-update-setting-the-record-straight/), Arduino sought to assure users that only attempts to reverse engineer its SaaS applications are forbidden and that…

Users, developers, and vendors meet at Linux events around the world. We at Linux Magazine are proud to sponsor the Featured Events shown here. For other events near you, check our extensive events calendar online at https://www.linux-magazine.com/events. If you know of another Linux event you would like us to add to our calendar, please send a message with all the details to info@linux-magazine.com. CloudFest 2026 Date: March 23-26, 2026 Location: Europa-Park, Germany  Website: https://registration.cloudfest.com/?code=8SR8ZdmC CloudFest is the #1 internet infrastructure event in the world, connecting the global cloud computing industry: you’ll form the partnerships that help you reach your business goals, and have a great time doing it. PyCon US 2026 Date: May 13-19, 2026 Location: Long Beach, California  Website: https://us.pycon.org/2026/ PyCon US 2026 offers an amazing program filled with tutorials, sponsor…

AI agents can be quite powerful, but when it comes to security, they are sometimes susceptible to attack. We’ll show you why and what to do about it. Other Highlights: • Generative Art in the Terminal • Universal Media Server • Manage Digital Negatives with Darktable • Blender Animation • And much more! Please note: Articles could change before the next issue. Available Starting March 13 BE THE FIRST TO SEE WHAT’S NEXT The Linux Magazine Preview is a monthly email newsletter that gives you a sneak peek at the next issue, including links to articles posted online. Sign up at: https://bit.ly/Linux-Update…