Google is switching off Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Search for K-12 student accounts by default. They stay off until a school admin turns them on, and each service can be manually enabled on its own.
As you already know, Google has built AI into it. They say that AI Mode and AI Overviews will guide students through problems step by step in school accounts. That leaves schools that want no AI without Google Search.
Google's VP for Education, Chris Phillips, told The New York Times (paywalled) that students at such a school would be shown a notice from the school saying Search is unavailable.
Some more details
Just a placeholder image of Google Classroom.
Starting 2027, schools whose admins turn on AI will get two Search options, one similar to the consumer version with AI overviews and chats available and the other built around Guided Learning, the student version of Gemini.
It would work as a study coach that asks students questions and breaks problems into steps instead of simply handing over answers. Google's post promises schools more details are coming over the next few months before any of this rolls out.
The August changes
Gemini in Classroom opened to students of all ages in August, and the Gemini tab was on by default at schools that already allowed students to use Gemini, while schools that had it off for students kept it off.
Before that, Gemini had only been on for students 18 and older, and admins who wanted it turned off for under-18 users could place them in a separate unit and disable access there.
The change announced now reverses that default.
Two of the largest districts in the U.S. have already acted before this came about, with New York City announcing a ban on student-facing generative AI tools for preschool through eighth grade and Los Angeles Unified blocking them on district-issued devices.
Germans do it differently
A four-year framework contract awarded to IONOS after a recent public procurement process lets schools in Berlin, Hamburg, Hesse, Bremen, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Rhineland-Palatinate opt into a cloud built on Nextcloud's open source software.
No school or school authority is mandated to use it, and the tender specifically asks for software released under an open source license approved by the OSI, citing digital sovereignty and the freedom to change providers.
The distinction that I am trying to make here is that a school in the U.S. that wants Search from Google will have to take its AI along once the changes roll out, whereas the German framework lets schools opt in or stay out.
Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, said it's "quite terrible" that so much of the world's limited DRAM sits in personal computers that use it maybe 5% of the time. In his view, it would do more work in a data center.
My take? Idle RAM is the price of owning your computer. Nobody can rent it out from under you, raise its price or switch it off. That ownership is the reason this newsletter exists.
This is a short edition, though. I've been busy lately and couldn't explore much. But there's still enough here to keep your RAM busy for more than 5% of the time. Take that, Altman.
🔍 Discover AI tools
Superwhisper is now on Linux. The popular Mac dictation app now has a native Linux app for system-wide voice input. You can transcribe locally on your own CPU or GPU, or send audio to the cloud for speed. It is NOT open source software.
voiceio is for anyone who'd rather stay open source. This MIT-licensed offline dictation app streams text into whatever app you're using, on both Wayland and X11. It can also fine-tune its model on your own recordings while your computer is idle, and switches to the new model only if it scores better.
OpenKruise Agents is for running AI agent sandboxes on your own Kubernetes cluster. Interesting part is that your API keys never enter the sandbox. An egress proxy pulls them from Kubernetes Secrets and adds them to each request on its way out. It also adds L4/L7 egress rules and an allowlist for MCP tools, so a prompt-injected agent can't wander into your internal network. Overkill for a laptop. Worth a look if you self-host agents for a team.
Torvalds credits a wave of fixes for bugs that AI found. He'd rather get them during the merge window than as late fixes in the RC stage, and called that a much healthier model. He also admits it may not be all AI. 7.4 is expected to be the next LTS kernel, and a third of the patch is AMD GPU register headers.
👀 Big Tech Watch
Now you know why Altman is eyeing your RAM.
Nikkei Asia reports that off-balance-sheet AI obligations at Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Oracle grew 90% in six months, to about $3.2 trillion. All those signed data center leases that haven't started yet, plus orders for chips and servers. If they show it in the balance sheet, their shares will tank even further.
Trillions of dollars in data centers need a lot of RAM to fill them. Yours included, apparently (as per Sam Altman).
🗂 AI Jargon: KV cache
When a model generates text, it stores some working data for every token in the conversation so it doesn't have to recalculate it. That store is the KV (key-value) cache.
It grows with context length. That's why a model that runs fine in a short chat can run out of memory once you paste in a long document.
The story starts when Linus Torvalds opened the Linux 7.4 merge window more than two weeks ago when he was headed out for his annual family vacation, resulting in some temporary disruptions to his work.
He warned that his schedule would be unusual and that merging might need an extra week, but RC1 still arrived according to the usual two-week schedule.
None of that made the window any smaller. By his count, it brought in almost 20,000 commits, where 15,000 or so is the usual number, while the shortlog alone ran to 24,000 lines.
Phoronix went back through every merge window since Linux 3.1 in 2011 and counted the commits in each, with Linux 7.4 coming out on top at 19,671 and Linux 7.3 holding the previous high at 16,267.
That did not come out of nowhere, since every window after 7.0 has topped the one before it, with 7.4 beating 7.3 by more than 3,400 commits.
Development cycles across kernel releases show the same trend, with Linux 7.3 being the first to pass the 20,000 commits mark at 20,260 and the 7.4 window coming quite close to it.
Why?
Linus thinks AI is the reason, pointing to a surge of work set off by AI tools, including bug fixes and a growing number of patches the tools suggested, although those often end up rewritten.
He prefers receiving that work up front in the merge window over dealing with it as late fixes during the release candidate stage. He also hopes that the bigger window means AI fixes are turning into an ordinary part of development.
AI is not his only explanation. He says the expectation that 7.4 will be the next long-term support release may have played a minor role in its size, treating it as a separate driving factor.
What's included?
AMD GPU header files, which hold register definitions, account for about a third of the patch, and Linus tells people to ignore them. Drivers make up about half the patch, or roughly two thirds with the AMD headers counted.
The rest covers core areas such as networking, Rust, BPF, and memory management, along with filesystems, tooling like perf and selftests, and architecture updates.
The source tree grew along with it. By Phoronix's cloc count, the tree stood at 41,605,120 lines ahead of RC1 on November 1, up from 41,019,555 when Linux 7.3 came out.
Actual code accounts for roughly 455,000 lines of that, with the rest being blank lines and comments.
My homelab runs on 5 machines with around 30 Docker containers. For a long time, the way I reached them was a bookmarks folder full of entries like http://100.101.12.4:8096.
Tailscale took care of getting me into my network from anywhere, but once I was in, I was back to remembering which box ran what on which port.
The usual fixes each have a catch. A reverse proxy with your own domain works, but it's one more thing to maintain, and every new app means touching two config files instead of one. Giving each container its own Tailscale sidecar gets you nice names, but it also turns the Machines page into a list of containers, each with its own auth key and state volume.
When Tailscale released Services, it looked like the thing I had actually wanted: names for apps, not for machines. I've been running my containers that way since, and this is a write-up of how it works, how to set it up by hand, and the two things worth knowing before you start.
What a Tailscale Service actually is
A Service is a name plus a virtual IP on your tailnet, for example jellyfin.your-tailnet.ts.net. It doesn't belong to a device. Instead, one or more of your machines advertise it, and Tailscale routes clients to them.
So your Docker host stays a single machine in the tailnet, and the apps on it become Services. Access rules can point at a Service directly, so you can let someone reach Jellyfin without giving them the whole host.
Here is what a request looks like once it's set up:
Two details in that picture matter later: tailscaled on the host terminates HTTPS and talks plain HTTP to your app, and it adds an X-Forwarded-For header. To your app, Tailscale behaves like a reverse proxy.
Setting one up by hand
Before automating anything, it's worth doing it manually once for a single container. You need three things.
1. A tagged host. Services are advertised by tagged machines, so give your Docker host a tag:
sudo tailscale up --advertise-tags=tag:server --reset
2. A policy that allows it. In the admin console under Access controls, the tags must exist, and an auto-approver saves you from clicking "Approve" for every Service:
3. The Service itself. On the Services page of the admin console, choose Advertise, then Define a Service, name it jellyfin and give it the tag:container tag. Then, on the host, point it at the app:
This assumes Jellyfin publishes port 8096 on the host. If HTTPS certificates are enabled for your tailnet (DNS page in the admin console), https://jellyfin.your-tailnet.ts.net now works from every device that runs Tailscale.
For one app, that's fine. For 30, it gets old quickly: one definition in the console and one serve command per app, plus published ports again. And nothing updates by itself when you add, remove or move a container.
Why I ended up scripting it
The part that bothered me most was that the configuration lived in two places. The app was defined in a Compose file, and how to reach it was defined somewhere in the admin console and in tailscaled's state. Remove a container and its Service just stays there.
Traefik solved the same problem for reverse proxies years ago with Docker labels, and I didn't find anything like that for Tailscale Services. So I wrote a small Go program that does it, DockTail. It runs as one container per host, watches Docker events, and turns labels like these into the steps above:
With an OAuth client (Services: Write, Devices Core: Write, scoped to tag:server) it also creates the Service definition, so the manual console step goes away. Note that Jellyfin has no ports: section: the traffic goes straight to the container's IP on its Docker network.
That's also why this needs something that watches Docker. If you skip published ports and point serve at a container IP by hand, it breaks the next time the container is recreated:
DockTail is open source (AGPL-3.0). You don't need it to use Services, though, and everything in the next section applies either way.
Two things worth knowing
If a Service doesn't show up, it's almost always the tag. The host needs to be tagged (check tailscale status), and if you haven't set up an auto-approver, the Service waits for you on the Services page.
Apps that check proxy headers may complain at first, because Tailscale adds an X-Forwarded-For header. Home Assistant answers with "400: Bad Request" until you trust the proxy in configuration.yaml:
On a Docker bridge network, use the address Home Assistant names in its log instead of 127.0.0.1. Jellyfin has the same setting under Dashboard → Networking → Known proxies, but it works fine without it.
Was it worth switching?
For me, yes. What I like most is that the network config now sits right next to the app in the same Compose file. Adding an app means adding labels, removing it takes its Service with it, and my Machines page shows machines again.
I'd still use a reverse proxy for anything public with my own domain. Tailscale Funnel is great for a webhook or sharing one thing with a friend, but it's not a replacement for that. And if you run a handful of containers that rarely change, the manual tailscale serve route above is perfectly fine and needs no extra tool.
Personally, I have never owned an Apple device, mostly due to its pricey nature and how the brand loves to lock people in their walled garden. But that's just me ranting there for a bit.
There are many who do like what Apple has to offer and are willing to see what additional value they can get out of that hardware by breaking free from macOS.
This list covers six such options that ought to awaken the tinkerer inside you. 🧑🔧
📋
Every install route here boots directly on Apple Silicon hardware instead of a virtual machine, sitting alongside the macOS installation.
1. Fedora Asahi Remix
📋
Good to know: The flagship distro of the Asahi Linux project.
Fedora Asahi Remix is Fedora Linux with the Apple Silicon work from the Asahi Linux project built in. KDE Plasma on Wayland is the default desktop, and GNOME, Minimal, and Server images are there if you want something different.
On M1 and M2 Macs, almost everything works, from the webcam and microphones to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The graphics drivers also pass the OpenGL 4.6 and Vulkan 1.4 conformance tests.
M3 owners can try it too, but support is quite new. Sleep does not work, HDMI on MacBooks is unavailable, and 3D graphics don't run well yet. The M3 Ultra Mac Studio is not supported at all.
Installation begins in macOS. Run the following command in the Terminal app and follow the prompts to continue with the installation of Fedora Asahi Remix on your Mac:
curl -L https://alx.sh/ | sh
M3 owners are recommended to run dnf upgrade --refresh after the install finishes.
Good to know: Ubuntu's desktop and server images, built on Asahi Linux work.
If Ubuntu is already familiar to you, then this community project has ported it to M1 and M2 Macs by carrying over the Apple Silicon support from Asahi Linux.
The installer comes in four flavors, covering 26.04 and 26.10 for Ubuntu Desktop and Server. The goal is to provide the same feature set as Fedora Asahi Remix, while new hardware support only arrives after the Fedora base ships it.
As a result, you can expect system updates to be behind by a few weeks.
Like earlier, you get the installer as a script and run it in Terminal. It shrinks the existing macOS partition and lets you pick a release and build, leaving your macOS installation intact:
Good to know: An unofficial Debian port for M1 and M2 Macs, run by the Bananas Team.
Debian doesn't officially run on Apple Silicon yet, but the Bananas Team is working to change that. It packages the missing pieces and ships them from an unofficial archive of its own.
Official support is stuck on the kernel. The Asahi Linux patches it needs aren't upstream yet. Most other pieces, like the m1n1 bootloader and the audio stack, have been in Debian since Trixie.
The team's installer offers GNOME, KDE, or a console-only setup:
Good to know: NixOS on bare metal, configured through Nix files.
Write the whole system down in a Nix config file, rebuild, and the Mac matches it. That's the NixOS way, and this community port brings it to Apple Silicon. The maintainers keep versions close to Fedora Asahi Remix and turn away changes that stray far from it.
Hardware support follows whatever Asahi Linux supports, and setting it up is quite a hands-on affair. You’ll prep a UEFI environment from macOS with the Asahi Linux installer, boot a NixOS installer from a USB drive, and finish the job from the command line.
Good to know: Omarchy's Hyprland desktop for Apple Silicon, still in early stages.
Omarchy M is a dedicated team rather than a separate distro that has been put together to handle Omarchy support on Macs. It's bringing the Arch-based, Hyprland desktop to Apple Silicon while also giving some attention to older Macs.
The first release targets M1 and M2 Macs, along with their Pro and Max variants. On the roadmap are a native installer, full GPU support, USB-C external monitors, Touch ID, MLX, and disk encryption.
Support enablement work for newer Macs will take place alongside this too!
The native installer is a community-built app by team member Marcelo Alcantara, and it sets up Omarchy on a Mac machine without needing a USB stick.
Good to know: A Fedora remix aimed at M4 and newer Macs, currently an early alpha.
Gravity Linux is built to go away. It's a Fedora remix with KDE Plasma on Wayland, and the plan is to retire it once the drivers land upstream and any mainstream distro can run on supported Mac devices.
It started as a fork of Asahi Linux over a difference in policy on LLM use. Everything it offers comes from clean-room reverse engineering.
The first alpha release runs on the M4 Mac mini and is meant for developers. The display controller and GPU work, but suspend, USB-C display output, Thunderbolt, and USB4 don't; shutdown and reboot behavior is flaky.
You can install it on macOS with the command below, but do plan a full reinstall when the beta lands, as there's no established upgrade path.
Adobe charges $60 a month. Microsoft 365 keeps raising its price. Salesforce will take $150 per user without blinking. These are not tools you own. They are subscriptions that expire the moment you stop paying, often taking your files and workflows with them.
Their new project, called everything, is a single GitHub repository with one specific goal and that is to rebuild the world's software from scratch, free and open source.
This is what they are aiming for. Over 50 web-based applications spanning nine categories, including a photo studio, full office suite, CRM, CAD tools, video editor, and circuit design app. Every one of them is open source under the MIT-license. And they can be self-hosted, too.
Basically, it targets all the major Software as a Service (SaaS) companies.
Tapping Into Everything
The applications are all listed on the official GitHub page, they're all in a table, and very helpfully, the cell next to the application name states what popular software it is an alternative to. For example, "Notes" is an alternative to Microsoft OneNote, Evernote, Apple Notes. It is all put in well organized categories.
The apps are all hosted online, and can be opened by pressing the "Try it" link. They're completely usable, however, and in case you have a slow system that can't handle some heavy duty tasks such as video editing, this is genuinely a better option. Nevertheless, you have to remember that you'll be uploading your data to this service, and if that is a privacy concern then you may have to reconsider.
📋
Several features are only available to you if you make a Puter account and sign in. These include several AI features, such as auto-generation of captions in the video editor, but some applications require a sign-in straight away to use them in the first place, such as the Notes app.
For example, here I am running the Video Studio locally:
cd everything/src/video-studio/
npm install
npm run dev
This returns a link you can open up in your browser and use the application.
Storage
📋
Another important issue is that the free tier of the Puter account only gives you 25MB storage on the cloud, making it tough to work on larger projects, especially when it comes to video editing. To resolve this, you can buy a subscription, starting at $10/month for 100GB.
💡
The storage limitation kicks in only when you've logged into a Puter account and using the cloud storage. However, if you are not logged in, meaning you are only using local storage, it works with however large file you want.
Background
HeyPuter launched Puter in 2024 as a self-hostable internet computer: a full desktop environment running in a browser, with cloud storage, apps, and developer tools baked in. It was well received by the community.
With Everything, rather than building one great alternative to one piece of software, the project takes on the entire proprietary stack at once.
The logic is that the vendor lock-in does not come from a single app. It comes from an ecosystem. Adobe keeps you because Lightroom talks to Premiere talks to Acrobat. Microsoft keeps you because Word talks to Excel talks to Teams. Breaking one link does not free you. Everything is trying to break all of them.
The MIT license matters here. Unlike the GPL, MIT places almost no restrictions on use. You can take these apps, modify them, and run them anywhere without obligation. For businesses and developers worried about compliance, that removes the last excuse to keep paying for proprietary software.
Experiencing the Everything apps
I've tested some of the apps to check the quality of the production, and pretty much to see if the job gets done.
🚧
A major observation I made was that progress on projects can only be saved if you've logged in with a Puter account. If not, you have to get it all done in one go. Exporting is fine, either way.
PDF Editor
The PDF editor has great options, adding texts or links, images, stitching PDFs together and so on.
You can even draw diagrams to add to the PDF in the app itself. You can also add sticky notes, highlight text etc. These are quite basic features on a PDF editing menu, but they work seamlessly here, which is great to see.
Since the software is in early stages, there are some bugs. Like when I tried editing the preexisting text in a PDF file, it was not entirely accurate. The text doesn't always get detected in proper blocks, and the formatting gets all over the place as a result of that.
Video Studio
I tried some of the features, such as the AI caption generation, and the film grain effect, with transitions in between clips and it worked quite well.
It also generated captions and allowed me to edit them if a word was incorrect.
The export menu showed options to separately export the audio in a WAV file and captions in an SRT file, which is great.
I had an issue with one of my video clips where it said my browser couldn't decode the video file, but then there was no further information on how to fix it, which essentially rendered the video file uneditable.
Music Studio
Being used to Ableton myself, the interface was different here for me. Don't get me wrong, the app itself is pretty intuitive to navigate through, the major actions are all laid out in a great way.
It has all the effects you might need, such as compression, reverb, delay, parametric EQ, stereo and so on. They work quite well, and the options for each are ample.
Nothing too technical, but just as much as you need.
Interface of the Music Studio
Even the export showed options to export the stems as well as MIDI files separately, which is a great feature to have. Out of all the three that I tested, the music studio worked most to my satisfaction.
Conclusion
There is a new trend in the developer world these days to reverse engineer everything with AI. Puter's new project is part of the same trend.
The apps on The Everything Projects have their ups and downs but on the larger scale, they work incredibly well for the most part, giving features that almost match the professional level. At least for beginning professionals everywhere, who cannot afford expensive software, these apps are a great way to get things done.
It requires an account to access the AI features and to save the progress on projects unless you have an account, where you will probably need a Puter subscription because 25MB is too small a storage to actually get anything done.
That actually is understandable to avoid the service abuse but the 25 MB could have been 250 MB at least. In any case, self-hosting option is always there.
What do you think about this wave of reverse engineering apps and open sourcing them? Let us know in the comments. Cheers!
It is meant for schools and school authorities in the German states of Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Hesse. Other German states can join later, and schools are not mandated to implement it.
How the deal works
IONOS is the main contractor. It is tasked with delivering and operating the service, running the cloud infrastructure located in German data centers, and building it all on Nextcloud's open source software.
The tender notice for KoDaS sets a maximum value of 67.5 million euros and a maximum term of 48 months from the award. Nextcloud's announcement names the six states and their schools as the main parties who can order, leaving room for other states to be added later.
The announcement does not say what the contract will actually be worth. 📝
The notice calls for procuring software available under an OSI-approved open source license, citing digital sovereignty, lasting availability, and the ability to switch providers.
Among its asks for bidders are ISO 27001 certification, at least 10 million euros in turnover, liability insurance of at least 5 million euros, and a reference project with at least 10,000 active users and fully separated tenants.
For the features, the notice calls for central file hosting and sharing, a browser-based office suite for working on documents together, calendar and contact management, and an integrated email client.
Pricing depends on how many people actively use the service, and it is split into five tiers that start at the up to 50,000 users mark, ending above 500,000. No school authority has to commit to a set volume up front, so each can begin with its current users and grow from there.
Nextcloud's main argument is that public institutions should have alternatives to proprietary platforms so they keep control of their data. The company also believes students who start out using open source tools are less likely to reach for big-vendor products afterward.
We have seen this already
Other German institutions are also reworking their software. Last year, we heard that almost 80% of Schleswig-Holstein's state government workplaces had switched away from Microsoft.
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is replacing SharePoint with a self-hosted Nextcloud that around 5,000 employees use today, and the state plans to bring that to 50,000 across the public sector.
Then there's the federal Deutschland-Stack, published by the Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernization, which covers all levels of public administration and permits use of only ODF and PDF/UA for documents.
I anticipate more such moves across Europe as governments realize that keeping sensitive data with providers that fall under foreign law can expose it to access they have no say over, irrespective of where the servers are located.
The ongoing US midterms could also shift the conversation depending on who comes out ahead.
Suggested Read 📖: France's absurd per-gigabyte tax could cost VLC over €1 million a year.
