Commodore's New Flip Phone Skips Android for Linux-Based Sailfish OS

A year has passed since Commodore, the computer brand many of you know and love, came back from the dead under new ownership.

The comeback is picking up pace too, with a lineup that already includes multiple Commodore 64 Ultimate editions, a C64X PC, and a licensing program that invites outside builders to use the name.

Now, they have announced a return to the phone market, and not in the doomscrolling glass-slab avatar we are all used to, but in a retro, very equippable flip phone format.

Making Flip Phones Great Again

The Commodore Callback 8020 is what comes out when a flip phone skips Android and goes toward a privacy-respecting Linux-based mobile operating system instead. In this case, Jolla's Sailfish OS, known for having great Android app compatibility without Google's surveillance baked in.

Jolla's CEO, Sami Pienimäki, says that it was chosen after Commodore evaluated competing platforms, citing Sailfish OS' design language and stance on privacy as the deciding factors.

As for what else it offers in terms of software, browsers and social media apps are blocked at the system level, with no toggle to turn the restrictions off. WhatsApp comes preinstalled, and Signal, Telegram, and WeChat are all supported, with iMessage possible through a third-party bridge.

Additionally, the official material points out that over 99% of Android apps are supported. Users can even control a Commodore 64 Ultimate's LEDs from the Callback 8020, as long as both are on the same Wi-Fi network.

The Specs

The polycarbonate-bodied phone is powered by a MediaTek Helio G81 chip with passive cooling, paired with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage (expandable via microSD), which should be enough for a phone built around doing less rather than more.

Flip it up, and you will see a 3.25-inch IPS display featuring a 480x640 resolution inside and a 1.77-inch VFD-style screen on the outside. Below the main screen sits a tactile T9 keypad, with dedicated Fn keys flanking the big Commodore key.

Camera duties fall to a 48MP Sony sensor on the back, with autofocus on both the front and rear lenses for video calls. A removable 1550mAh battery keeps things running as you use the device and receive notifications on the Dome-LED system (look at the light bar below the keypad).

For connectivity, you get dual-SIM 4G support with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, hotspot, and GPS capabilities.

Get Yours

The Callback 8020 is being offered in five colorways: ProtoPET White, SX Silver, BASIC Beige, Starlight Edition, and Founders Edition. Swappable back covers and a protective case are sold separately for anyone who wants to change the look of their device later.

Pricing starts at $499 for ProtoPET White, SX Silver, and BASIC Beige. Starlight Edition runs $549.99, and the Founders Edition tops out at $640. These are discounted prices, and signing up for the waitlist unlocks an extra $50 off that will apply on June 30 when pre-orders open.

Units are set to ship this winter, though Commodore hasn't given a specific date, and the window could easily run into early 2027.

Join The Waitlist

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KDE Plasma 6.7 Release Resurrects Two Themes From the KDE 4 Era

KDE's 30th anniversary is closing in on us, and the developers have spent these past few months getting things ready for the occasion, set to take place in October. Two of those things are Oxygen and Air, two classic Plasma themes from the KDE 4 era that we talked about a few months ago.

The X11-free Plasma 6.8 is also due around the same time, barring any delays, of course.

But, yeah, that's looking somewhat further into the future. For now, let's focus on the Plasma 6.7 release, which has arrived with those themes as well as a number of upgrades that make the desktop experience more refined than before.

🕊️

This release is dedicated to Eric Laffoon, a long-time supporter of KDE who passed away in May.

🆕 KDE Plasma 6.7: What's New?

Before we get into the highlights of this release, let's talk about the various usability and quality-of-life upgrades that ship with Plasma 6.7.

If you use Plasma's virtual keyboard, holding down a key now brings up the special characters tied to it instead of you having to dig through a separate symbols screen.

The Discover software center also gets some attention, where the "Install" button has been redone to make it clearer and harder to miss, and app listings carry more useful descriptions on each card.

Similarly, the printing workflow has been improved with a new print queue management tool, the system tray icon for printers now showing the number of print jobs in a queue, and quick connections to shared printers on Windows networks.

Plasma's calendar options grow too, with the Vietnamese lunar calendar joining the other non-Gregorian calendars already on offer.

And if you've already set up custom Global Themes for day and night, you can now flip between light and dark instantly via a toggle inside the "Brightness & Color" quick settings.

Now, for the rest of the changes. 👇

Two Classics Make a Comeback

Source: KDE

If you remember, Oxygen and Air both go back to the KDE 4 days, when Oxygen was the default theme starting with KDE 4.0, and Air took over that role once KDE 4.3 arrived.

Ahead of their anniversary, a restoration effort led by community contributors looked to bring them back into proper shape.

We covered that restoration effort in detail back in April, and a good chunk of it has now landed in Plasma 6.7, including reworked panels, a minimized window indicator, new switch designs, and adaptive opacity for both themes.

These now ship as full Global Themes too, with light, dark, and twilight variants. The two wallpapers that shipped with KDE 4 (Air and Horos) are part of the package as well.

Per-Screen Virtual Desktops

Source: KDE

Next in line is one of the most sought-after features that has arrived after 21 years of requests. Plasma has had virtual desktops for ages, but they were always tied globally across every monitor you had connected.

That changes now. You can finally set up separate virtual desktops for each screen, so your laptop display and your external monitor no longer have to share the same set. It might sound like a small change, but anyone running a multi-monitor setup knows how essential this is.

Apart from that, switching between virtual desktops got faster too; now you can pull up the Overview screen with Super+W and with a simple scroll or a tap of Page Up / Page Down move between desktops.

Suggested Read 📖: This New Project Gives You Plasma With X11

Arrival of Union

Plasma's theming has been a fragmented affair behind the scenes, with different toolkits needing different styling approaches.

With this release, a new theming system, Union, is being introduced that wants to assimilate all of that into one CSS-based system. So Plasma, QtQuick software, and QtWidgets software can pull their looks from the same set of style files instead of three separate ones.

In its current state, it is disabled by default and only touches the QtQuick side of the stack, arriving here as a tech preview rather than a finished feature.

📥 Get KDE Plasma 6.7?

Users of Plasma on rolling release distros like Arch Linux or EndeavourOS will be getting this the earliest. If you can't wait or are on a non-Arch distro, then you can build from source.

KDE Plasma 6.7 (source)

On the other hand, if you just want to see how this release performs before committing to it on your main setup, then you could always go for the User Edition of KDE Neon.

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💬 Have you been on KDE Plasma for a long time? How has it been for you?

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Arch Linux Pulls the Plug on New AUR Registrations After Malware Flood

Arch Linux has disabled new account registrations on the Arch User Repository (AUR) as they work to contain a malware campaign that swept through the community package repository last week.

The AUR is where Arch users look in for software that has not made it into the official repositories yet. It is community-run and unsupported, meaning packages are user-submitted with no safety guarantee from the Arch team.

Over 1,500 packages were hit in the first wave alone, and two more waves followed shortly after developers thought they had it cleaned up.

What happened?

On June 11, Arch developer Jonathan Grotelüschen opened a dedicated thread on aur-general asking the community to report compromised packages. A formal news post from Campbell Jones followed the next day, acknowledging "a high volume of malicious package adoptions and updates" in the AUR.

Community member a821 traced the initial packages to a malicious npm package called js-digest, which was embedded in post-install scripts. Shortly after, koraynilay ran a broader search against GitHub's AUR mirror using js-digest as the marker and found around 850+ packages that were affected, noting the count was already dropping as devs removed them.

By the end of the day, Jonathan posted that they had deleted all known malicious commits, linking to a document that listed over 1,500 packages.

That was not the end of it. On June 13, a821 flagged a new batch using a different technique. This time, the word "bun" was split across string literals as 'b''u''n' to slip past detection.

Around 50 packages were caught in this wave, spanning browser packages, a cluster of nodejs-* entries, plasma6-applets-fancytasks, a NeoVim plugin, and LibreWolf extensions.

A day later, Nicolas Boichat spotted another batch, this one more heavily obfuscated. He caught it using a locally-run Gemma E2B model, with htbrowser-bin among the packages he flagged.

What can you do?

Fast-forward to now, Leonidas Spyropoulos of the Arch Linux team announced on June 15 that new AUR account registrations had been disabled as they are busy cleaning up the AUR.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the core Arch Linux repositories remain unaffected, with the malicious commits limited to the AUR.

If you suspect malicious packages might've made it onto your system or you just want to be cautious, then the Arch team suggests reviewing every PKGBUILD and install script change before updating, particularly right now.

And if anything suspicious does show up, they encourage users to flag it via the aur-general mailing list by replying to the AUR REPORT THREAD (also linked earlier).

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To Make Things Easier, CachyOS Created a RUST-Based GUI Package Manager

CachyOS is a relatively new distribution that has gained mass popularity due to its cutting-edge software and features that focus on performance optimization, finding a very specific niche easily.

In its recent updates, CachyOS has changed the default package management system to the Rust-based Shelly from Octopi, so obviously, I was bound to check it out.

What does Shelly offer?

To start with, Shelly is a one stop solution to manage packages not only from CachyOS's own repositories, but also AUR, AppImage and Flathub, all at the same place. It also provides quite a nifty clean look that just makes sense, both of which give it a clear edge over Octopi already, which can manage the default repositories and AUR only, and looks a little dated.

Interface

The home page shows recent activity, a package dashboard which displays the number of packages installed through AUR and Flatpak, and the absolute total number of packages on the system. It also shows the percentage of packages which are totally updated, with the available updates on the right side.

There's a search bar on top which will search through the distribution's repositories, AUR and Flathub all at the same time. If a package is available from multiple sources, Shelly lists them in order of preference, first the distribution's repositories, then AUR and finally Flathub.

All the different possible sources are tabbed on the left of the window, which means you can manage the packages from all different sources separately and seamlessly.

🚧

On CachyOS with GNOME even when the system is on dark mode, the app doesn't seem to be. There's no internal option to change it, either. This is what I noticed in my testing.

Settings

The settings keep things to a minimal. There are toggle switches for AUR, Flatpak and AppImage management, as well as for the tray icon. These settings are confirmed on the first start of the application.

You can move around the left menu to the top, again with a toggle switch. In the advanced settings, you can enable the "No Confirm" button to slide through the confirmation for the installation, uninstallation or updating of any package. You can also limit the number of parallel downloads, with the default being 10. There's an interesting option called "Purify Packages" which gets rid of any corrupt packages on the system.

How well does it work?

In most aspects, Shelly works really well. Package management from the distribution's repositories, AUR and Flathub are virtually error-free. Search works really, and so does the installation and uninstallation.

AppImage is a little patchy, though. I tried to install balenaEtcher's AppImage and Raspberry Pi's Imager, the former was not installed and embedded into the system menu, but the latter was.

How does it compare to Pamac and Octopi?

With the first look itself, the interface, Shelly looks like it is several steps ahead from both Pamac and Octopi. It looks like it belongs on a modern system, is sleek and intuitively accessible unlike the other two.

As for the functionality, Pamac and Octopi work reliably well at what they do. Shelly works fairly well, too, while providing more options at the same time, with some aspects being a little troubling, perhaps.

Final Thoughts

The change to Shelly as the default package manager is very promising, it seems to suit CachyOS much better than Octopi in my opinion. It offers a lot of new, interesting features, and delivers on them fairly well. Let us know what you think about this change in the comments. Cheers!

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Flipper One is a Pocket-sized Linux Cyberdeck

Pocket-sized computer tools are the definition of cool, recruiting many people over to the developer side of things, including your humble writer.

A project like Flipper One, which is intended to be a device that features the full mainline Linux kernel in a small package with a full range of connectivity, not to be used as a full-fledged computer (not all the time, at least) but rather a cyberdeck that can be used for development, experimentation and last but not the least, pentesting, is such a dream come true.

With its radical philosophy of complete openness, both in terms of hardware and software, and the ability to do whatever is possible with the hardware on board, it is a project that would have sent my 14 year-old self into a hyperventilating fit. So what exactly can it do? And how do you fit into the picture? That's exactly what we will tell you today.

Flipper One at a glance

Flipper One hasn't been released yet, but there are some ambitious features that have been planned for it. While Flipper Zero was more of an offline access tool, with emphasis on NFC, RFID infrared, UART and so on, Flipper One is intended to be a network connected Linux system. So obviously, we start with:

Connectivity

Flipper One self proclaims as a "Swiss Army knife for IP networks across all OSI layers", which include:

• 5G modem
• Wi-Fi 6E
• Two Gigabit Ethernet ports
• Upto 5 Gbps wired connectivity over USB-C Ethernet

All this results in Flipper One being usable as anything from a multi-hotspot bridge, an inline Ethernet sniffer, a VPN gateway, or a USB Wi-Fi/Ethernet adapter for another device.

Hardware

The hardware is a particularly interesting aspect of Flipper One, as it is has a completely custom, unique build. We will describe the technical aspects later, focusing first on the build of the device. It has a small monochrome 256x144px display, designed to show all necessary information from the custom software onboard, a touchpad, a 5-button D-pad, a back button, an app-switching button, and 5 buttons used for further navigation to power, edit, run or escape programs, and to view other options. Oh, there's a push-to-talk button as well for a pre-installed offline AI assistant. Fancy, eh?

As for the ports, it has the following:

• Two USB-C, one multipurpose, one only for power
• USB-A
• HDMI
• Two Ethernet
• 3.5mm audio jack
• MicroSD card slot
• Nano SIM card slot
• M.2 expansion module

Now finally onto the hardware on board:

• A main Rockchip RK3576 chip
• A secondary low-powered Raspberry Pi RP2350B MCU
• 8 GB RAM
• 64 GB internal storage
• 7000 mAh battery (tentatively)

As an ARM based device, the processing is comparable to the power offered by a Raspberry Pi 5, handling basic operations rather well.

Software

Here's where things get really interesting. The Flipper team intends Flipper One to be able to support the mainline Linux kernel, and has gone to the massive undertaking of having absolutely no proprietary binary blobs in any of their software. This includes the operating systems as well as the firmware. They're building FlipperOS, a layer on top of Debian, which you can do anything to.

There's also FlipperCTL, which has been created as a response to full-fledged Linux operating systems being awkward and uncomfortable on small screens. It is, therefore, a UI designed for a screen as small as that, controlled by a D-pad and a few buttons. The idea then, is to wrap utilities like ping, nmap and traceroute into this FlipperCTL interface.

Abilities

Apart from the use cases already mentioned, like as a pentesting tool or a networking agent, it can also be used as a survival desktop or a thin client, using the USB-C port to connect to a monitor. The exact details of the OS haven't been decided yet, but something slick like KDE Plasma with something resourceful like Kali Linux to suit all pentesting needs is the way Flipper is planning to go. It is also being planned as a hacker's TV media box, to be used as a media platform using Kodi or something similar. This would turn any HDMI input taking monitor into your personal media box, a luxury that is quite underrated in situations like a strange hotel room.

Not to forget, the presence of both a CPU and an MCU is by design, as the intention is to have the device functioning at low power, with the LCD and buttons, even without the main CPU running. Even when Linux is off, the device can run simple programs off of the MCU.

So what can you do?

But where do you come in? Well, the entire device is still under development and needs contributions from anyone who can provide it to be completed. Flipper has made a Developer Portal for Flipper One, where the entire development process is to be made open. That means half-baked task tracking, documentation, internal discussions, debates and everything.

You don't need to be a software developer, strictly, you could be a designer, just work on documentation, 3D models, so on and so forth. So, what all can you contribute to?

• Hardware: PCBs, antennae, chips, processors, connectors and everything in between (literally).
• Mechanics: Designing, enclosure, plastic/metal parts, mounting parts and so on.
• Linux: Firmware for the RP2350 microcontroller, relating to practically every component that the software will interact with.
• Interface: UI/UX design, visuals and graphics.
• Docs: Documentation, wikis, guides, progress made on the portal itself.
• Testing: This one you can find out for yourself.

Conclusion

Flipper's team has taken up a humongous task, trying to make this entire project totally open, the hardware design plans, the software blobs barring no small proprietary bits, and has shown courage admitting the need for help finishing the project. The Developer Portal is a great approach, inviting all the people from across the globe to contribute in any way that they possibly can. And with a beautiful passion project such as this? I'm expecting they absolutely will want to. I urge the readers to do that as well, if you have some skill and time to contribute.

Read the whole story from Flipper

This kind of project instills hope in user-level innovation after long bouts of polished, corporate products and we're all here for it. Let us know what you think of the device in the comments. Cheers!

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KDE is Going Wayland Only So This New Project Gives You KDE With X11

When KDE announced that Plasma 6.8 would be dropping the X11 session entirely, not everyone was happy about it. Wayland has been the default on most major distributions for a while now, but there's still a significant chunk of users with reasons to stay on X11.

One such case is of a group of developers who took the code that KDE itself is walking away from and started building an X11-first desktop around it. That project is SonicDE.

Their goal is to maintain and actively develop the parts of KDE Plasma's X11 stack that are being left behind, while cutting out Wayland dependencies and pushing X11 support forward rather than just holding the line.

The work can be traced back to a KWin/X11 patchset called kwin-x11-improved, which was later merged with the full KWin/X11 source by Joseph Crowell in September 2025 under the name "KDE-Lite," and rebranded as SonicDE by December.

SonicDE: X11 Plasma Restored

Image sourced from Joseph Crowell, one of the contributing developers of SonicDE.

It is a collection of KDE Plasma and KDE Frameworks component forks, each rebuilt with X11 as the focus. The project now spans 40 repositories on GitHub, with the team working through the KDE stack and stripping out what's not needed.

The most prominent of those is sonic-win, a fork of KWin/X11 that handles window management and compositing. It's the most active repository in the project and the one where most of the foundational work is happening.

Alongside it are sonic-workspace, derived from plasma-workspace, and sonic-desktop-interface, forked from plasma-desktop. The former provides the core environment components, while the latter handles the desktop shell. Together with sonic-win, these three form the backbone of what SonicDE actually is as a desktop.

The project covers a lot of ground beyond the core trio of components.

For networking, sonic-network-manager is there; sonic-audio-applet-pulse covers PulseAudio volume management; sonic-screenlocker takes care of screen locking; sonic-screen manages display configuration; and login sessions are handled by sonic-login-manager.

From left to right we have SonicDE on EndeavourOS, Artix Linux, and Vendefoul Wolf.

SonicDE also ships a Silver theme, forked from the Klassy theming utility for Plasma, alongside a matching silver-sddm login screen. Together, they give the desktop a consistent look rather than just resembling a stripped-down Plasma install.

What users actually get is an X11 desktop that behaves the way longtime KDE users expect, while still inheriting improvements from the upstream Plasma components it forks from.

And since SonicDE is being built to be init system agnostic from the start, it isn't locked to systemd. BSD support is one of the stated goals too, so the project is thinking well beyond Linux users.

Availability of this?

It is already packaged for Arch Linux-based distributions, with additional builds available for Debian, Devuan, Artix Linux, and Vendefoul Wolf. The official website has the links for the packages for those distros.

SonicDE

Also good to know is that the developers are already packaging SonicDE for Gentoo, NixOS, OpenMandriva, and FreeBSD, so keep an eye out on their socials and GitHub page for updates.

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Linux Kernel 7.1 is a Feature Release That Could Be Useful For You

Following Linux 7.0 in April and the stable point releases since, Linux 7.1 is now available as a major feature release in the 7.x series.

You get a bunch of upgrades with this, ranging from a new NTFS driver that landed after four years of development all the way to a bugfix for a long-standing audio issue on the Steam Deck OLED.

And, if you remember our reporting from a few months ago, then this release also formally drops i486 CPU support from the kernel build system.

What's new in this release?

Intel's Flexible Return and Event Delivery (FRED) is now enabled by default in Linux, having previously required a manual fred=on boot flag. The switch was held back until publicly available hardware could be properly evaluated, and the code has since been tested thoroughly enough to flip from opt-in to opt-out.

Phoronix reports that people running Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" should see real gains here, particularly on I/O-heavy workloads like databases, networking applications, and audio processing.

The crypto subsystem picks up some Intel QAT additions too. For QAT Gen4 and Gen5 hardware, basic Zstd compression offload is now available. The Gen6 version, intended for the Diamond Rapids platform, gets a native Zstd implementation covering both compression and decompression.

The amd-pstate driver gains CPPC Performance Priority, Dynamic EPP (Energy Performance Preference), and Raw EPP with this release for more granular control over power and performance on modern AMD Ryzen and EPYC hardware.

Similarly, the AMDgpu driver sees several changes this cycle, including SMU 15.0.8 IP support, DCN 4.2 display updates, a new DebugFS interface for monitoring 64-bit PCIe registers, and a fix for a GPU page fault triggering on non-4K page size kernel builds.

And, after four years of work, a new NTFS driver has landed in the mainline kernel. We covered its development last December, when it was still working its way toward integration.

Linus Torvalds called the merge the "ntfs resurrection," though he briefly un-pulled the code over a Git structure issue before accepting a revised pull request. The new driver is available via the⁣ NTFS_FS Kconfig switch, and NTFS3 is still around for now.

Finally, we have the newly introduced support for 12 new SoCs, including Qualcomm's Glymur, Mahua, Eliza, and IPQ5210, Axis ARTPEC-9, Microchip's LAN9691 and PIC64GX, Renesas RZ/G3L, NXP S32N79, Rockchip's RV1103B, and ARM's Zena and Corstone-1000-A320.

Should you install this?

📋

It is to get excited about a new kernel release, But compiling a new kernel or installing a new one is usually considered intermediate to expert zone. For a regular Linux user, it is better to wait for the distro to provide it, unless you have a compelling reason to get the new kernel early.

It depends. If something in this release addresses a gap you had with earlier kernels, it's worth the upgrade. You can download the tarball from the official website and get started installing it on something like Ubuntu.

Linux Kernel 7.1

For the rest of us, it depends on the distribution one is using. Not every distro will be providing this release upgrade. Rolling releases like Arch Linux and more frequently updated distros like Fedora and its derivatives will be picking this up soon.

Others on distros like Debian or Linux Mint likely won't see it on their computers.

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Suggested Read 📖: Proton Drive Now Has a CLI

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