Qiusheng Wu has put out the first release of RustGIS, a new open source GIS application with an announcement on X. v0.1.0 is available right now for anyone to use, along with a second release, v0.2.0, that has rolled out close on the heels of the first one.
The tool's ribbon-based interface will be familiar to you if you have used a modern office suite recently, and the tool itself allows you to analyze map data in various ways.
The release notes for v0.1.0 mention that it comes in 15 interface languages, has support for over 1,000 tools from the GeoLibre and Whitebox suites, and the editing tools cover feature templates and snapping, along with domains and attribute rules.
So, let's check out what RustGIS has to offer. 👇
Who is it for?
GIS stands for geographic information system, which is software for working with data tied to places on Earth. A GIS stacks layers such as roads, rivers, and population on top of each other, matched by location.
Working with those layers in RustGIS starts with analysis tools such as buffer and clip, plus SQL-based selection. Guided workflows cover jobs like viewshed analysis and finding the shortest path. The v0.2.0 release added SQL queries through DuckDB Spatial too.
The app opens common files like GeoJSON, Shapefile, GeoPackage, and GeoParquet, while large files are streamed. You can also open GDAL formats such as File Geodatabase, GPX, and DXF if you install ogr2ogr.
There's AI assistance too! 🤖
The AI Assistant is a chat pane that answers questions about the data or runs commands on the map. Undoing a change takes one step, and commands that touch files or the network wait for approval.
The command line can also render maps and chain tools, while an MCP server lets agents such as Claude Code and Cursor run RustGIS commands and generate maps.
Download RustGIS
If you are looking to try it out, RustGIS is suitable for terrain and hydrology work and for anyone who wants to execute repeatable workflows from the command line. Newcomers might also find the assistant's plain-language prompts easier than wading through the menus.
The newest release at the time of writing was v0.2.0. You can visit the downloads portal to grab binaries for Linux, Windows, and macOS. If you prefer a web-based solution, RustGIS is also offered as a WebApp.
The project hosts the source code for this on GitHub, and it also has a comparison table that shows how RustGIS fares compared to other tools like ArcGIS Pro and QGIS.
ONLYOFFICE is rolling out AI tools across every editor in its suite, but the open source versions do not have them built in. The company says the choice came in response to user feedback, making it so that those versions would require separate AI tool installations.
If you didn't know, they have a few main offerings. Docs is the editor suite that you self-host or integrate into other platforms, while the Desktop Editors bring the editors to Linux, Windows, and macOS, and DocSpace facilitates room-based collaboration.
There's also the Workspace bundle of web apps and mobile apps for iOS and Android.
With the ONLYOFFICE Docs 10.0 release, they are introducing a wide range of fixes, as well as modular apps that should help make your workflow easier.
🆕 ONLYOFFICE Docs 10.0: What's New?
ONLYOFFICE Docs now has a home screen with an Discover Apps category that lists four pre-installed free apps: Files, Rooms, Forms, and AI agents. Each of these is an optional modular app that you use when the need arises.
In short, Files handles storing, organizing, and sharing files, Rooms is for collaborating with other people, Forms is for building forms and analyzing responses, and AI agents can be used to deploy agents for automating tasks and answering questions.
That last one supports MCP servers and can be used for extended reasoning, search, and personalized knowledge base use cases.
What about the editors?
Let's begin with the PDF Editor. The Redact tab now has a "Remove hidden information" option that clears metadata before you share a file, and the Comment tab offers a signature option, with automatic table recognition being available for the Edit Text function.
In the Document Editor, a new "Keep with next" feature has been added to the advanced settings for paragraphs that stops a heading from being separated from its content, including in tables and block content.
Inline objects such as graphical formulas behave more reliably in right-to-left documents, and line-based cropping trims content that runs past the line height. Horizontal lines, which was introduced with Docs 9.4, also get its own settings window.
For collaborative sessions, a new "Follow/Stop" option appears in the list of users editing a file. If you click on it, your mouse's cursor will take you to that person's cursor; clicking on "Stop following" ends tracking.
The Spreadsheet Editor features speed-ups, usability tweaks, and formula aids. Large workbooks should feel quicker, as styles and data are now stored separately and fewer cells are processed.
Copy and cut actions now draw a dynamic outline over the selected cells for quick verification glances, sheet backgrounds are kept intact when files are saved and reopened, and function constant hints appear as you type.
Similarly, for the Presentation Editor, you can now export presentations as a GIF or video file, while the View tab gives you access to a bunch of new views that include the Outline View, Reading View, Notes Page, Notes Master, and Handout Master.
The print settings are broader too, with notes, handouts, and outlines all being printable from the File tab.
The AI bits
Each editor has a dedicated AI Tools tab that launches the AI chat, with common actions preloaded as prompts alongside any you save yourself.
Text documents can be summarized, rewritten, translated, and proofread, with a table of contents, title, and formatting added on request. Presentations get outlines, slide titles, speaker notes, and visual ideas.
In a PDF, the AI can summarize in one click, answer questions, draft emails, and redact confidential details. In spreadsheets, it can tidy messy data, write and explain formulas, spot trends, and build forecasts and Pivot Tables.
For one-off jobs such as changing tone, there are tools such as Quick AI actions and AI assistants that keep running while you edit. Though these are only offered in the Document Editor for now.
If you go the cloud way, you will have to top up a wallet to get access to the ONLYOFFICE AI service, which handles model configuration and deployment for you.
For self-hosting, you will be able to use any popular cloud-based AI service or a local one through tools like Ollama.
📥 Download ONLYOFFICE Docs 10.0
The cloud version of ONLYOFFICE Docs 10.0 is available now through DocSpace, and a free account is enough to try the editors on the platform. If you were looking to host it, then you will have to wait a little longer as the update is still rolling out for self-hosted solutions.
On the other hand, if you are an individual user running Linux or a walled garden platform, then you could opt for the Desktop Editors.
Linus Torvalds has a new branch in his own kernel repository named noref-filemap-read-with-llm.
It holds an eight-patch series built on Linux 7.3-rc6 plus fixes, and its commit message gives no kernel release target for merging it.
While the commit message is long and technical, the change itself is easy to describe.
What he changed
When many threads read the same file, the kernel serves them from the page cache, its in-memory copy of recently read data. Today, each read takes a hold of the cached data and releases it afterwards.
Every thread updates the same counter to do so, resulting in the threads tripping over each other. The issue dates to 2024, when Matthew Wilcox flagged it, citing a customer's workload.
Linus' series of patches skips that step. To make that safe, memory that leaves the cache is not handed out for reuse until a short period has passed, so a reader can copy data straight out without holding anything.
The cost is that more memory sits idle for a moment.
The payoff, measured on his own laptop with some security protections switched off, is that eight threads reading one file went from about 10 million reads per second to between 30 and 33 million.
Linus ran the measurements himself, but for the rest, the commit message credits Claude Code, working under his direction. That includes a draft of the message itself, the code and test programs, and the review behind its list of known problems.
This is not the first time he has used AI on kernel work. In August, he used it to help fix a bug in the Intel Xe graphics driver.
What he said in Prague
Linus spoke with his long-time friend, Dirk Hohndel, the head of Ericsson Software Technology, at Open Source Summit Europe in Prague on Friday.
ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols, who was in attendance, quotes Linus, saying, "I actually really like using AI."
He said he used to think AI was not very good but has changed his mind. In his view, it works well as long as it is treated as a tool, and it makes programming more enjoyable for him.
His own example was a guitar pedal project with an interface he had written in C. He wanted a more modern look and tried AI for it, saying, "I use AI to do the things that I'm bad at."
He also defended vibe coding as "a wonderful way to find joy in programming," mainly for newcomers, and says that while AI is improving the code base, the load it puts on maintainers has become a real problem.
This again shows how much Linus’ stance has changed when it comes to AI. In 2024, he called the AI industry "90 percent marketing and 10 percent reality." Now, he is actively using it for kernel work.
A Fixes tag in a kernel patch points to the commit that introduced the bug, but the last commit to touch a buggy line may only have moved the code to a new file.
Sasha Levin, who co-maintains the stable and long-term support kernel trees, wants AI coding assistants to verify which commit introduced a bug before assigning it a Fixes: tag.
His two-patch series went to the workflows and ksummit mailing lists last week, where he has proposed a new agents directory in the kernel tree to hold the skill that does it.
The new directory
The first patch adds an agents/ directory at the top of the kernel source tree for skills, prompts, and other resources meant for coding assistants. It also adds a MAINTAINERS entry covering the directory.
Each skill gets its own folder under agents/skills/, with a SKILL.md file as its entry point, written in the Agent Skills format.
Assistants are told to read a resource directly from its path in the repository, and links inside a skill are relative to that skill's folder. A new section in the kernel's coding assistants document is meant to describe this layout.
The find-fixes skill, which arrives with the second patch, would be the first one in the directory.
Why do Fixes tags go wrong?
Levin says the series traces back to a question from Ted Ts'o about incorrect tags in stable tree work. He pointed to LLM workflows that help find the right commit.
Ted later explained that the request came from a talk with Hannes Reinecke, who estimated that 15 to 20 percent of Fixes tags are wrong.
That matters beyond bookkeeping, since the tag is how stable maintainers and distributions work out which kernels need a given fix. A wrong one can send a fix to the wrong branches or leave a bug unpatched.
The new find-fixes skill reads Git history and returns a proposed tag with its evidence, while leaving the commit itself untouched.
The skill's guide.rst file says no single clue settles which commit a Fixes tag should name, not even an existing tag. The agent explains how the bug fails, traces candidate commits, and compares each against its parent.
It separates the commit that added the code, the one that made it defective, and any later change that only exposed the flaw.
For backported fixes, it checks whether the bug came from the original change or from how that change was adapted for an older kernel. Merges, reverts, and incomplete histories get their own handling.
When it cannot establish the origin, it returns no tag, lists the candidates and what is missing, and the fix stays a draft until someone resolves it.
Still a work in progress
The second patch would add a section to the kernel's coding assistants document saying an assistant must follow the guide before finalizing a bug fix or its commit message and when reviewing an existing tag.
The document's step for committing a fix would ask for a verified tag, where it now asks only for a Fixes tag. Keep in mind that the skill would not write commit messages, apply the tag, or decide whether a fix belongs in stable.
Where the files should live is still open. The introductory patch message says he is unsure whether they belong under Documentation or in a separate agents directory at the root.
Greg Kroah-Hartman asked whether the series would fix tools skipping the kernel's guidance because an AGENTS.md file is missing. Sasha replied that this is a separate issue for the symlink patch.
There are plenty of online PDF tools that let you edit documents without installing anything on your computer. You just open a website, upload your file, make the changes, and download the edited document.
But there is a catch. You are handing your files over to a third-party service, and you may not always know how it handles your data. Some services may have questionable privacy practices, while others are outright malicious.
In fact, the FBI has warned people about fraudulent online file converters that steal sensitive information and spread malware in the past.
These tools scrape uploaded files for personal details, banking information, email addresses, and passwords, making them particularly risky when dealing with confidential work documents that should've never left an organization's secure environment.
BentoPDF is an open source alternative that advertises itself as a privacy-first tool that processes files directly in your browser instead of uploading them to a server, helping avoid some of the aforementioned privacy risks associated with online PDF tools.
BentoPDF: For Your PDF Needs
homepage ss here
Created by Alam, a developer out of India, BentoPDF traces its origins to an internal tool that was being used for merging and splitting PDFs. Soon after its creation, the lead dev decided to share his work with the world via Reddit, and a few weeks later the code was live on GitHub.
BentoPDF uses WebAssembly, which lets heavy programs run right inside your browser. Its OCR tool, for instance, runs on Tesseract.js, a port of the Tesseract OCR engine. That way, the processing happens on your computer, and nothing is uploaded to a server.
🚀
You don't need to sign up for an account, and there's no web tracking either!
The project is dual-licensed, where the code is provided under the AGPL-3.0, making it free to use and open for anyone looking to fork it. A separate commercial license is available for closed-source use and costs $79 as a one-time purchase.
Alam also publishes two other open source projects, Hyper Compress and Kura. The first is a PDF compression engine, while the latter converts PDFs to standards like PDF/A and PDF/UA.
Anyhow, coming back to the PDF editor, I took it for a test run on Vivaldi, a Chromium-based browser, covering a few tools to see how it holds up in everyday use.
Editing PDFs
The Edit PDF Text tool shows each block of text in the document with a dashed outline, and picking one brings up the formatting sidebar, which houses the usual editing controls.
It has buttons for tweaking the font, size, colors, alignment, and character spacing, along with bold, italic, underline, and strikethrough formatting.
I could also make it fetch all the fonts installed on my Linux system using the System fonts button, and the info button at the bottom was useful for glancing over the metadata of a document.
Once done editing, exporting the file is only a matter of clicking the "Export" button.
The PDF Editor is mainly meant for annotation work, with tools for highlighting, strikethrough, ink, text insertion, and comments. You pick the relevant tool and drag your cursor over a piece of text to apply it.
Adding watermarks to documents is also possible via the Add Watermark tool, which should come in handy for protecting your work or marking a document as sensitive. It offers a lot of flexibility, letting you choose between a text or image type watermark, a single or tiled layout, and granular controls for the pages, text, and visibility.
Common keyboard shortcuts like the ones for copy (Ctrl+C), paste (Ctrl+V), undo (Ctrl+Z), and redo (Ctrl+Y) also work well here.
Easy OCRs
Sometimes a PDF is nothing more than a set of page images, like a scanned report or a document full of charts. You cannot search through it or copy anything out of it because there is no text for your PDF viewer to find.
The solution to that problem is to run OCR on it, which converts the pages into machine-readable text.
OCR PDF handles this in BentoPDF by letting you upload a file, select the relevant language(s) found in the document, and start the process. During my test, I used a two-page brochure for a motorcycle I like to window shop for and left the advanced settings untouched.
It took a while to process the pages, but the output was mostly accurate. Only the very small, lossy text at the bottom of the document tripped it up. I could copy everything to the clipboard or export it as a .txt or searchable PDF file.
File Conversions
BentoPDF has a range of file conversion tools available, and I tested out two of them. PDF to JPG converts each page of a PDF into a JPG image, and using it is quite simple. You upload a PDF file, set the image quality with a slider (the pre-set value is 90%), and click "Convert."
Images to PDF does the reverse, and it accepts an array of formats beyond JPG, including PNG, BMP, HEIC, and PSD.
There are plenty more conversion tools on offer, covering formats like ODP, CSV, EPUB, JSON, WebP, and Markdown, among others.
Quick Compressions
Usually, when handling PDF files that need to be sent via email, its file size matters a lot. Popular email services like Gmail, Proton Mail, Outlook.com, and Yahoo Mail cap attachments at around 20 to 25 MB.
To tackle that, the Compress PDF tool offers two algorithms, "Condense", which is the recommended one, and "Photon," that's tailored for photo-heavy PDFs. Alongside them are four compression levels that run from "Light" to "Extreme.".
For checking it out, I stuck with Condense and only changed the compression level, going with Extreme to see how small the file could could get.
It took quite a while to process, but BentoPDF brought my 120.4 MB PDF down to 28.5 MB, a 76.3% reduction. That is still a little over the usual email limits, but for a 214-page document, it's a good result.
The text and images stayed very readable too, and I only noticed the loss in quality when I zoomed into the images.
Start Editing
There's a lot more BentoPDF has to offer than what I have covered above. Just scroll down on the homepage to see its full list of 100+ PDF tools. There are some security-focused ones that I am sure many of you will like.
If you are looking for the source code, then you should visit the project's GitHub repository, which also contains details on the tech stack that powers BentoPDF.
Long-standing open source projects won't receive new DigitalOcean infrastructure credits after the company quietly ended its support program in a disruptive move that has affected many open source projects. Though they did have enough money to fund Omarchy. 🤷
I cannot confirm, but it could be related. Gentoo Linux is seeking new infrastructure sponsors after several long-term backers withdrew support. The project accepts donated machines, colocation space, virtual machines, physical servers, or funds.
Music copyright group IFPI has submitted yt-dlp, a general-purpose command-line downloader, to the EU's piracy watchlist, lumping it with dedicated ripping services. They named four maintainers while claiming the tool fuels copyright harm.
AI-generated spam flooded Google's open source bug bounty program, prompting the company to temporarily pause product vulnerability submissions. Supply chain reports are still welcome, with them teasing a revamped program by Q1 2027.
Siemens silently deleted the OpenRadioss repository, but AGPL licensing has saved it. Rocky Linux co-founder Brian Clemens forked it as OpenCourant within days; it's already shipping binaries for Linux and Windows.
Red Hat's Lightwell flips the security script. Instead of waiting for upstream patches, it backports fixes directly to production Java libraries. Having cleared 400 vulnerabilities, its on track to grow.
Sequoia PGP arrives in Ubuntu 26.10 as a modern Rust-based OpenPGP tool that sits alongside GnuPG. Both implementations coexist for now, but the plan is to eventually phase out the latter.
Tuta Mail now has an app in the Nextcloud App Store, and a separate Nextcloud plugin in Tuta lets users upload email attachments to Nextcloud and embed video conference links in calendar events.
This edition of FOSS Weekly is supported by Karakeep, an open source bookmark manager.
Karakeep is a self-hostable “bookmark-everything” app. Throw links, notes, images, and PDFs at it, and it helps you find them again.
It uses AI to automatically tag bookmarks and generate summaries, with blazingly fast search across everything you save.
Add content from your phone, browser, or RSS feeds, and build collections with friends or coworkers using collaborative lists.
It’s your private, carefully collected corner of the internet. A home for those 50 open browser tabs you're sure you might need later.
Someone has used AI to create clones of Adobe Photoshop and other tools. I would not keep my hopes high. The project is in a very early stage of development, so there are many functions missing and the user experience is not close to the original. It will also be worth seeing if the project gets development a few months down the line. Because AI has made it easier to create software, so many people create something and then forget about maintaining it.
Tuxdle is the Linux terms guessing game that I created two weeks ago. I am delighted to see that this tiny puzzle game gained a niche following of daily active users. After all, this is a fun way to keep your general Linux knoweldge in check.
S-TUI is a Python tool that monitors CPU frequency, temperature, and power use in your terminal. It can stress-test your processor and detect thermal throttling, with customizable display options and mouse support for navigation.
If your gaming needs have been affected by the absurd increase in prices for memory, storage, and GPU, why not give cloud game streaming a try? NVIDIA already offers a native client for GeForce NOW on Ubuntu.
In the Nemo file manager, pressing F3 opens an extra pane to view two folders side-by-side, making it easy to drag, drop, copy, or move files between different directories without switching windows.
If you find the keyboard shortcut inconvenient, you can add a dedicated toggle button to your interface by going to Edit → Preferences and opening the "Toolbar" tab. Here, you can enable/disable the Extra Pane option. When enabled, it adds a split-window icon to your top toolbar, letting you control the view with a single click.
If you like what we do and would love to support our work, please become It's FOSS Plus member. It costs $49 a year (less than the cost of a McDonald's burger a month), and you get free ebooks, an ad-free reading experience with the satisfaction of helping the desktop Linux community.
And here I thought Windows were only useful for ventilating a room. 🤭
🗓️ Tech Trivia: Did you know? On September 30, 1980, Xerox, Intel, and DEC published the "Blue Book" as the first Ethernet specification. Ethernet had already been running at Xerox PARC for years, but this document helped turn a lab experiment into the networking technology we still use today.
🧑🤝🧑 From the Community: You might have heard about the Blanc Browser by now. It's creator has made an appearance in the forum, replying to an inquisitive thread by one of our Pro FOSSers, Bill.
Plenty of open source projects keep going on goodwill alone, with contributors putting in the hours and expecting nothing back. While others lean on outside support like cash, donated hardware, or someone else covering the hosting bill.
This kind of support rarely gets much attention, but these needs are some of the most foundational aspects of any project that's serious about growing.
Gentoo falls in the second group. The source-based Linux distribution, built around the Portage package manager, runs largely on sponsored infrastructure, as it can only manage to maintain a few vital machines.
Sadly, many sponsors that had backed Gentoo all these years have decided to stop making contributions. The project is now looking for replacements and has put out a call for infrastructure sponsors.
Currently, its sponsors page lists names such as Oregon State University's Open Source Lab, CDN77, HP, and Hetzner, but it may not yet reflect the dropouts.
Gentoo's search for sponsors
Some of the listed sponsors of Gentoo.
There are five ways to help, as laid out on the sponsorship page of Gentoo's wiki, with preference being given to supporters who share the project's vision of software that respects choice and stays open to user-driven changes.
The first way is to accept donated machines for the project's hosting locations in the US. They are not asking for much; anything good enough to handle server-focused tasks in today's time is a good offering for them to use.
Next is Colocation, a type of physical hosting. The sponsor would provide rack space, power, and connectivity, while Gentoo finds the hardware to put in it. Capacity outside the US is their most urgent need at the moment, though offers from the US are welcome too.
Third are virtual machines, with a minimum of 2 vCPUs, 4GB of RAM, and 25GB of storage. The project says that it is leaning more on the cloud wherever it can, but many of its services are monolithic, and that Kubernetes would suit them poorly.
The fourth way is full-package hosted physical servers. The wiki gives two examples: a root server like the ones Hetzner offers, or a sponsor's older or unused servers with Gentoo getting full remote access.
In that second case, the sponsor would still own and manage the hardware, whereas Gentoo would take care of the operating system and remote management, only asking for advance notice before any migration events.
The last is plain old money. Any donated funds would go toward paying for colocation and hosting.
A call to act
Gentoo is far from the only project that needs this kind of backing.
Take LVFS, the firmware update service for Linux. It leaned heavily on the Linux Foundation and Red Hat, with Framework and the Open Source Firmware Foundation pitching in $10,000 a year.
Then Lenovo and Dell joined at the Premier tier, at $100,000 a year each, along with HP and NVIDIA, who followed soon after. I would call that a win for LVFS and a sign that sponsors are out there for projects that go looking.
Maybe your organization has spare rack space, or you have money lying around and want it to do some good. Either way, someone has to host the servers behind projects like this, and Gentoo's infrastructure team is available at infra@gentoo.org for any infrastructure sponsorship-related queries.
Suggested Read 📖: Google has shut down part of its Open Source Bounty Program thanks to AI.
