PhoneBuff is a company that built its name by offering lab-tested, standardized reviews for smartphones run by robotic hands. Their YouTube channel showcases a range of assessments that cover speed tests, drop tests, and battery tests.
When viewers started poking them about trying Linux after a recent performance comparison they did between a Dell XPS 13 and MacBook Neo, they responded.
Taking two identical Dell XPS 13s with an Intel Core 5 320 and 8GB of RAM, one on Windows 11 and one on Fedora, the PhoneBuff crew ran the same real-world apps and workflows on each, timed by their robot mouse and keyboard (aka the clanker in question).
By the time testing concluded, Fedora won six of eleven timed tests while four tied, and Windows 11 took home a single win.
Fedora vs. Windows 11 on same hardware
Same settings too! The screens sat at 200 nits, both laptops stood an equal distance from the WiFi point, and the room stayed temperature controlled. Each test was run three to five times, with the median value noted.
Boot from a full shutdown tied at 23 seconds for Windows and 24 seconds for Fedora, too close to call. Restarting did not. Fedora came back in 27 seconds, median; Windows took 61 seconds. Windows' five runs swung 46 to 68 seconds, Fedora's 23 to 34 seconds.
The widest gap was files. Unzipping the same 6GB archive took Fedora's built-in tool 12 seconds. On Windows, using Windows Explorer, it was 57 seconds, and installing 7-Zip only got it down to 17.4 seconds.
Next comes the result that ought to sting Microsoft. Running VS Code, the robot loaded an open source whiteboard project, scanned it for errors, compiled it, and ran close to 1,900 tests. Fedora was done in 2:20.5. Windows 11 needed 3:41.99.
Source: PhoneBuff
The creative apps went the same way. DaVinci Resolve imported two clips, graded one, stabilized the other, and exported in 2:10.9 (Fedora) against 2:49.9 (Windows). A GIMP session on a 4K image, using tools like smudge, heal, and object removal, finished 53.3 seconds against 60.7 seconds.
The everyday apps were mostly a tie. Chrome on a locally hosted page with video, 3D models, maps, and chart math finished in 19.3 seconds on Fedora against 19.8 on Windows.
The same 500-page document opened in ONLYOFFICE in 8.7 seconds against 9.3, while the OCR pass also went to Fedora, 36.6 seconds against 39.8.
Even the Blender render of the same 1080p scene ended even, 44.2 seconds against 43.5.
Idle memory usage was another big gap. Left idle for a minute, Fedora used 32.9% of the 8GB while Windows sat at 85.2%. The video showed 2.27GB being used on Fedora against Windows' 6.47GB.
The lone Windows win was launching Cyberpunk 2077, 54.3 seconds against Fedora's 57.0-second launch. Though remember, that is a launch time number, not a frame rate, and PhoneBuff didn't run any gaming benchmarks.
What do the numbers mean?
Source: PhoneBuff
Do not read too much into it yet. There are no AI workloads here, and as I just said, no gaming benchmarks either.
The presenter for PhoneBuff says at the beginning of the video that Fedora is one of the many Linux distros out there and that "this won't necessarily represent every possible Linux experience."
A different distro running a different desktop environment will definitely move some of the gaps we see here.
The RAM gap comes with an asterisk too. Windows sat at 85.2% with a few Dell utilities, Defender (MsMpEng), and Edge WebView2 running by default, so Windows is not the only thing behind that 6.47GB number. Fedora simply started off with less baggage.
To summarize, the heavy tasks went to Fedora, sometimes by minutes, the everyday ones tied, and idle RAM sat at around a third on Linux against 85% on Windows.
That is all eleven tests can claim, so take them as data points, not a verdict.
Ikey Doherty is out of retirement, and Omarchy's funding is why.
In a video posted on YouTube, the creator of Solus and AerynOS called the money behind DHH's distro absurd and promised to do it better with nothing. His answer is Barney, a Rust-based tool for building Linux distros from source.
Omarchy's Omacom Foundation has already crossed $13 million in pledges since its August launch, when eight tech executives, including Michael Dell, put in a million each.
The run has drawn its share of pushback, most recently when 1Password pledged $300,000 and its own employees objected. Ikey's video arrived a day after the foundation announced $1.95 million in AI tokens from Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Fireworks.
Not a distro, but a stance
Barney is a tool meant to help you build Linux distros; the repo describes it as "yet another feckin' tool to build a Linux distro" and notes that delivering a distro is not the intended goal.
Ikey plans to show how distros get built instead of shipping what he calls a "wallpaper respin" via a series on his YouTube channel.
Everything gets built from source, and the outputs are cached against what produced them. Change a dependency, and anything built on top of it gets rebuilt. Layouts stay stateless, a concept Doherty says he helped pioneer on Intel's Clear Linux team and later pushed in Solus and AerynOS (formerly Serpent OS).
Builds run in containers, and the results are stored by content, so identical files across packages only get stored once. The plan even includes rebuilding the toolchain from scratch.
Everything is written in Rust and released under the MPL-2.0 license. The project's name itself is personal to him, as Barney is his son's name.
Work on it has started already. The first episode of the series is live, titled "Episode 0: Getting Ready." For access to the behind-the-scenes content, Ikey has set up a Ko-fi page where people can directly support him.
An Irish Traveller's reply
Don't assume that this is something Ikey has no business talking about.
Omarchy's creator, David Heinemeier Hansson, better known as DHH, had written a post comparing Denmark's wolf population with Romani people camping in Copenhagen parks.
Naturally, Ikey, being an Irish Traveller, a group that has faced discrimination for generations, was bound to react. On LinkedIn, sharing his video (the one linked at the very beginning), he called DHH's comments "horrific" and said the funding and the views together had dragged him back into the game.
His laptop buying plans have changed too. Michael Dell was among the launch backers, and Ikey has put the company on his avoid list, while also calling out Omarchy:
Gonna be honest I won’t buy another Dell laptop after Michael Dell showing support for DHH. Skipping the point of it being yet another wallpaper-respin distro.. I cannot possibly tolerate the comments made by DHH (on a number of topics)
As an Irish traveller, I strongly condemn his rhetoric surrounding nomadic people.
As a former Linux distro developer, I wouldn’t touch his shit if you paid me.
Will it do well?
Only time will tell. Right now, my read is that the question misses the point. Barney is not here to become the distro everyone installs. Success, by Doherty's own framing, is showing how a real distro gets built while the industry watches.
You already know that he has walked away from big projects before. Solus and AerynOS both carried on without him. Barney could be next, sure.
What stands out to me is the timing of it all. Another Clear Linux member, Auke Kok, is building The Ur Project from scratch, and neither of them is waiting for a foundation to get going.
The optimist inside me says that if the two of them ever collaborated, they could deliver something that shows the Linux ecosystem that pouring absurd amounts of money into a project isn't the only way to build well.
Nitter, the open source front-end for reading X posts without signing up for an account, is not going anywhere yet.
Weeks after X Corp's lawyers showed up demanding a permanent shutdown, the project's GitHub repository has come out of read-only mode with an updated README that says:
UPDATE: Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.
Now, the repository and the homepage carry the same message, with the latter further stating that the flagship instance of Nitter and third-party-hosted ones will be back up soon.
A proper announcement is expected sometime within the next few days.
What X's letter did
On August 24, X Corp sent out cease and desist letters demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the project's repository. The deadline was 5 PM EST on August 25.
Nitter complied, and the repo was archived and marked as read-only. nitter.net's content was replaced by a short notice (which has since been updated), and a popular instance, XCancel, halted its operations.
TechCrunch, which obtained the letter, reports that X accuses Nitter of an "unlawful use and circumvention of X's Application Programming Interface (API) and associated data."
The project found a workaround and returned sometime in 2025.
Nitter's inspiration, Invidious, a privacy-friendly YouTube front-end that has had its own run-in with big tech lawyers, faced a seven-day shutdown demand from YouTube in June 2023.
Fast forward to now. The project has kept going, and nothing came of the demand.
Makes you think such moves exist to strong-arm open source projects into submission rather than enforce rules. To these companies, any project is worth a lawsuit if there is even a shred of justification.
What remains is that Nitter says legal advice cleared it to continue, but not what that advice was or how instances will operate going forward. The announcement is where those answers come to us.
This could escalate
As far as I can see, X tried to choke such projects by closing the access they relied on back in 2024. It didn't work. Now, in 2026, they tried throwing the book by sending lawyers after them.
Seeing that X leadership has been quite disruptive, I have a feeling that they won't back down this easily, and things will escalate. When they do, I hope the open source community stands behind projects like Nitter.
Switzerland's federal government has launched a pilot program to replace Microsoft 365 with open source alternatives across 3,000 workstations. That's about 7% of the federal workforce. The target is to complete the migration by end of 2027.
This move follows a successful proof-of-concept and a new digital sovereignty law. A separate fast-track military migration is also already underway.
The great migration goes into the pilot phase
The Federal Chancellery is investing CHF 9 million in an open-source workplace rollout for 3,000 federal employees.
On September 3, 2026, the Federal Council published results of "PoC BOSS", a feasibility proof-of-concept involving 172 federal employees who tested the openDesk suite, a German open-source collaboration platform.
During the proof-of-concept phase, core office tasks like document processing and email received positive assessments, while large-scale video conferencing still showed technical limitations.
Based on the 'success' of the PoC phase with 172 employees, the pilot is now launched for 3,000 employees.
Do note that during the pilot phase, the new system runs in parallel with Microsoft 365 rather than replacing it outright. That's okay, I think. Migration of such kind should be gradual rather than sudden.
If the pilot is successful, we might expect the migration to continue on all the 54,000 workstations owned by the federal administrations. That's my guess.
Why?
According to Matthias Stürmer, professor at the Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH), Microsoft’s supremacy in public institutions poses three problems that are driving this migration.
First is the risk of foreign access. US cloud legislation could expose Swiss government data to foreign authorities.
Second is the risk to service continuity, as dependency on a single foreign vendor creates operational risk.
The third risk is the escalating costs as proprietary licensing fees are rising with no Swiss leverage.
Swiss Army is already moving faster
Switzerland's military cybersecurity unit, Cyber Command, is not waiting for the civilian pilot. It is already poised to replace Microsoft 365 entirely with openDesk by October 2026.
It is pretty much the same reason. Military doesn't want foreign governments accessing sensitive Swiss data.
Part of a bigger plan
Back in 2024, the EMBAG Law came into effect. It requires all Swiss federal agencies to publish government-developed software as open source by default. The law also aims to promote digital sovereignty and encourage innovation and collaboration within the public sector.
Then in December 2025, the Federal Council designated digital sovereignty as a primary focus theme. It defines digital sovereignty as "the federal government being able to fulfil its essential mission without depending on an external supplier or country."
Which is essentially moving away from big tech companies from the USA.
Neighboring France and Germany have also been trying similar moves. Let's hope that the great Swiss migration succeeds and sets an example for other countries who may speed up their own plan of moving away from Microsoft.
By the way, Microsoft has deep pockets, so they are also investing over CHF 325 million to expand AI and cloud infrastructure in Switzerland, partly to reduce the sovereignty argument.
Let's see how things move from here, but so far, it is looking positive for us open source supporters.
Most Linux users benefit from GNU Readline without realizing it. It is the library responsible for Bash's interactive command-line editing, providing familiar features like cursor movement, command history, and basic tab completion.
I came across a new tool called Flyline that takes Bash command completion to an entirely different level. No special configuration is required.
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For anyone who has control over their shell environment, Flyline could become a must-have terminal tool.
Flyline takes a different approach entirely. Instead of layering on top of Readline, it replaces it outright. It is built in Rust and ratatui to render richer, more interactive terminal interfaces than Readline.
Exploring Flyline features
When I installed Flyline for the first time and started using it, the difference was immediately noticeable. Command suggestions appeared as I typed, making it quicker to complete commands and move through my workflow. It makes working in the terminal noticeably faster.
IntelliSense style autosuggestion
As soon as you start typing, Flyline displays a completion popup right next to the cursor with matching suggestions. This keeps the suggestions close to where you're working, making it easy to complete commands without breaking your typing flow.
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Flyline IntelliSense Suggestion
You can cycle through the available suggestions by pressing the Tab key, with the selected entry being updated on the command line in real time. If you prefer, the Up and Down arrow keys work just as well, and the completion list can also be navigated using the mouse.
For longer lists, Flyline includes a functional scrollbar that lets you quickly jump through the available suggestions. Personally, I found it faster to keep typing and narrow down the results rather than reaching for the mouse, but it's nice to have the option.
Once you've found the suggestion you want, press Enter to insert it into the command line and close the completion popup.
Fuzzy search and path completion
Traditional command completion usually expects you to type characters in the correct order. For example, typing pamc won't normally suggest pacman, since the entered characters don't match the expected sequence.
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Fuzzy Search
Flyline addresses this with fuzzy search support. Instead of requiring an exact character order, it tolerates minor typos and partial matches, making it much easier to find the command you're looking for. This means you can type a bit more naturally without worrying about getting every character in the right place.
The same fuzzy matching also works for file and directory paths. As you type, Flyline presents matching paths based on your input, allowing you to navigate deep directory structures with fewer keystrokes. I found this particularly useful when working with long or nested paths, where a small typo would normally require me to backtrack and start over.
Automatic completion synthesis (a lifesaver)
Not every command line tool ships with a completion script. Install a new CLI tool and you keep on pressing tab, and nothing happens. No suggestions appear.
When that's the case, Flyline can generate one automatically by parsing the command's --help output and available man pages.
I noticed this while trying ffmpeg, which didn't have a completion script on my system. When I typed:
ffmpeg --<Tab>
Flyline prompted me to generate a completion script for the command. After confirming, it analyzed the available documentation and created a completion definition on the fly. From that point onward, option completion for ffmpeg worked as expected.
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Synthesize Suggestions
This is also useful for commands with dozens, or even hundreds, of available options. Instead of repeatedly opening the man page or running --help to look up an argument, I could simply rely on the generated completions and discover the available options as I typed.
It makes working with feature-rich command-line tools much more convenient.
Customize the cursor (for vanity)
This isn't exactly a productivity feature, but it does make the terminal feel a bit more lively.
If you've used the Kitty terminal emulator, you might be familiar with its cursor animations. Flyline brings similar effects to virtually any terminal emulator, letting you customize how the cursor looks and behaves.
To explore the available cursor options, run:
flyline set-cursor --help
This displays the various settings you can tweak, including cursor style and animation effects.
For example, the following command adds a cursor trail that closely resembles Kitty's animated cursor, even if your terminal emulator doesn't support it natively.
Flyline also gives Bash's reverse history search a much nicer interface. Instead of the traditional incremental search prompt, it presents your command history in a dedicated view where you can see each command in full, search through previous entries, and even check when a command was executed.
Refined History
Just like command completion, history search also supports fuzzy matching. This makes it easier to find an older typed command, even if you don't remember the exact sequence of characters.
What impressed me the most, though, was the Canceled Commands feature. The first time I pressed Alt+R, the list was empty. However, every command I subsequently interrupted with Ctrl+C, was automatically added there.
Cancelled Commands
Remember, it is the commands that are interrupted without executing are added to the cancelled list, and not those commands that are executed and then pressed CTRL+C.
This list is kept separate from your regular shell history, so searching your normal command history with Ctrl+R remains unaffected, while cancelled commands are available through Alt+R. The only limitation is that the list is maintained per terminal session, so it is cleared once you close or reset the terminal.
Working with AI agents
Flyline can also work with your favorite AI assistant to turn plain English into executable Bash commands. Once you've configured an AI agent, you can simply describe what you want to do in natural language, and Flyline will ask the agent to generate the corresponding command.
For example, you could type something like:
ai: list files older than three days
Pressing Alt+Enter, or simply Enter if you've configured a trigger prefix such as ai:, sends the prompt to the configured AI agent. Flyline then displays the generated command with syntax highlighting before you decide whether to run it. If the agent returns additional information in Markdown, Flyline renders that as well.
I didn't test this feature personally. I will let you try and comment your experience with it.
Prompt customization
Flyline doesn't just enhance command editing, it also offers extensive prompt customization. You can build rich prompts with dynamic widgets, animations, left and right prompts, transient prompts, live time displays, and even your own custom widgets that run shell commands in the background.
The project's documentation goes into great detail, complete with examples and screenshots for the various customization options. Rather than covering each one here, I've put together a sample configuration that combines several of these features, including a subtle animation. Simply append the following to your ~/.bashrc to give it a try.
The easiest way to install Flyline is by using the official installation script. Open a terminal and run:
curl -sSfL https://github.com/HalFrgrd/flyline/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sh
The installer downloads the latest release and automatically updates your ~/.bashrc to load Flyline, so there's no need to perform any additional setup manually.
Once the installation is complete, launch the interactive tutorial with:
flyline run-tutorial
I recommend going through the tutorial before you start using Flyline. It walks you through onboarding, making it much easier to get comfortable with the enhanced editing experience.
Is there anything similar for ZSH?
When I started using Flyline, apart from its intellisense style completion, I can't say it felt like a first in a lifetime moment, because I kind of used a similar functionality in ZSH for some time.
Flyline is designed exclusively for Bash, so you can't use it with Zsh.
But, the combination of zsh-syntax-highlighting, zsh-autosuggestions, and zsh-autocomplete covers many of the features you'd expect from an IntelliSense-like command-line interface.
Together, they offer inline suggestions, syntax highlighting, and interactive command completion that make working in the terminal much more comfortable.
ZSH Autosuggestion, Syntax Highlighting and Auto Complete
If you pair these plugins with a prompt framework like Starship or a Powerline-style prompt, you can build a polished and highly productive terminal environment.
Wrapping Up
Flyline is one of the new breed of terminal tools that are built in rust to be faster and provide features that either require too much config effort or not possible in classic GNU tools at all.
From intelligent command completion and fuzzy search to AI-assisted command writing and prompt customization, Flyline adds plenty of quality-of-life improvements without changing the shell you've grown accustomed to.
Give Flyline a try. It's already a capable tool, and with active development, it'll be interesting to see how it evolves in the future.
Omarchy has been on something of a roll now. Funding for its foundation has been climbing fast, from an $8 million launch to $10 million a few weeks later, and now crossing $13 million with the most recent pledge.
What's drawn my attention are the first two Corporate Patrons, 1Password and 37signals, both of whom have decided to pitch $100,000 a year for the next three years. Now, 37signals I get; DHH is heavily involved there, but 1Password was a surprise entry.
Naturally, not everyone's onboard with their pledge.
Signs of disagreement
This has not gone well with employees working at 1Password, with company leadership having to take certain damage control measures to assure their staff.
An internal Slack message has surfaced (courtesy of The Verge), which shows cofounder Roustem Karimov downplaying the criticism, telling team members that:
people have different personal opinions. You believe in your heart that DHH is evil, that you have the moral high ground, and that nothing will change your mind.
However, not everyone believes that. It is not fair to claim a monopoly and ostracize team members who might disagree with you. There are people who are afraid to speak up simply because they will be personally attacked.
CEO David Faugno responded on a different note, telling employees the company doesn't endorse DHH's views, while also noting that Omarchy is the second most used Linux distribution among 1Password's own users.
Why the backlash?
DHH is known to be someone who firmly falls on the "right" side of the political spectrum, someone who doesn't shy away from putting his opinions in public view.
He regularly posts blogs that show where he stands on certain societal issues, and some of his recent writeups are what's fueling this particular backlash.
His recent July post, titled "Wolves, sheep, and gypsies," compares Denmark's wolf population with the Romani people camping in Copenhagen parks, where he argues: "When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them."
Then there's "As I remember London" from September 2025, where he laments about London losing its native Brit majority and a nod of approval for a Tommy Robinson march.
Of course, these aren't the only factors behind his disapproval, but you get the gist of it, right?
Users could jump ship
How 1Password currently pitches its personal plans to new sign-ups.
If you search for the terms "1Password" and "Omarchy" right now, you are bound to run into the many comments made by disgruntled 1Password users on Reddit and Hacker News.
They are calling the choice tone-deaf, given how many smaller open source projects could've benefited from the money. Some are already jumping to alternatives like Bitwarden, while others suggest self-hosting Vaultwarden or going with KeePass and its forks instead.
I see the issue compounding too. Back in February, 1Password raised subscription prices, taking effect at renewals from March 27. Individual plans went up 33 percent from $35.88 to $47.88 a year, and family plans went up 20 percent from $59.88 to $71.88.
Its community forum already has a long thread full of longtime users saying they were leaving over it. If 1Password continues playing with its users' trust like this, who knows what kind of exodus it will see next?
Debian has gotten some good press thanks to Federico Vaga and Nikos Tsipinakis, who presented a talk at MiniDebConf Winterthur this past weekend.
The two CERN engineers laid out why the organization is moving its particle accelerator control computers onto Debian 13, with more than 2,200 industrial computers and embedded systems set to run it by the end of 2026.
Though this doesn't mean that the whole CERN IT infrastructure is being moved. The migration is specific to the accelerator control layer—the front-end computers that talk directly to the equipment running the beam.
Why move?
The multi-tiered infrastructure they are aiming for.
CERN ran a risk analysis in the second quarter of 2023, putting a number on what staying in the Red Hat ecosystem would cost them. The estimate came out to roughly CHF 5.4 million, with around 11 hardware boards needing a full redesign, plus hiring two electronic engineers, two software engineers, and two technicians just to handle it.
Racks would need reorganizing and rewiring, and most systems would be affected during commissioning. Even assuming bug-free replacements, CERN's own estimate put the odds of success at an optimistic 20 percent.
The reason for all that was a compiler flag. When Red Hat builds RHEL, it picks a minimum CPU generation the software will run on. RHEL 9's cutoff already excludes CERN's oldest boards, the kind running chips like Intel's old Core 2 Duo, which comprises about 47 percent of their fleet.
RHEL 10 raises that cutoff again, and this time even newer Ivy Bridge-generation boards, another 17 percent, fall on the wrong side of it.
The release strategy
The Debian LTS and Freexian ELTS release strategy paths.
CERN weighed two paths for keeping Debian aligned with its accelerator schedule. Plan A develops on Bookworm through 2026, deploys Trixie as the long-term support release from 2026 to 2030, then moves to Debian 15 "Duke."
Plan B skips that last jump, staying on Trixie under extended long-term support (ELTS) out to 2033 instead. A third option, running Bookworm itself under extended support the whole way, got ruled out.
Either path depends on Debian's LTS and ELTS programs staying healthy, which is part of why CERN has started sponsoring Freexian, the Debian-focused services company behind those support programs.
How it will be built
The old setup ran on NFS and tftpd, a bootserver model that traces back to around 2005.
The new one decouples the bootloader, kernel, init RAM disk, and userspace into separate pieces, then rebuilds delivery around Kubernetes.
A controller compares the configuration CERN wants against what's actually deployed and redeploys automatically when the two fall out of sync, instead of relying on someone pushing files over NFS by hand.
None of this touches CERN's data centers; this is specifically about the machines that keep the accelerator itself running. By the time the last quarter of 2026 closes out, CERN expects to have completed the migration.
