Okay, killed by Ubuntu is an exaggeration, as Ubuntu is not the only Linux distro doing this.
Still, the big news is that Linux Mint is bringing hibernation back.
In a recent blog post, the Mint team previewed a new Sleep Modes page in the System Administration tool. It's meant to make enabling hibernation and setting it up correctly easy, without you editing config files by hand. The feature is planned for the upcoming Mint 27 release coming in December.
Mint hasn't magically fixed the problems that made Ubuntu drop hibernation. What it does is give you the choice, along with two hybrid modes that sit between suspend and hibernation.
Hibernation vs suspend: What's the difference?
Both features are about saving your session, which simply means everything you have open like your apps, windows and documents.
When you suspend (also called sleep), your computer keeps your session in RAM and powers down almost everything else. Waking up takes a couple of seconds. The catch is that RAM needs power to hold that data, so a suspended laptop keeps draining its battery.
If the battery dies while suspended, your session is lost, along with any unsaved work.
Hibernation copies your session from RAM to your disk and then powers off the machine completely. It uses no power at all. When you turn the computer back on, the session loads back from disk and your apps and windows are exactly where you left them.
In short, suspend is fast but needs power. Hibernation is slow but survives a dead battery.
Why Ubuntu and other distros dropped hibernation
Ubuntu disabled hibernation by default back in Ubuntu 12.04, I think. The reason was that it was unreliable slow, and that having two suspend modes confused people.
Speed is indeed a problem. Writing gigabytes of RAM to disk and reading it back can take longer than a full reboot, especially on older hard drives.
Hibernation also needs a lot of swap. Your swap space has to be at least as large as the RAM in use so the whole session fits. Ubuntu ships a small swap file by default, and Fedora uses zram, which lives in RAM and is useless for hibernation.
Then there's Secure Boot. With Secure Boot enabled, the Linux kernel runs in lockdown mode, and lockdown blocks hibernation because the saved image on disk isn't signed and could be tampered with.
Since most new computers ship with Secure Boot on, hibernation simply doesn't work for a large chunk of users. This is one of the main reasons Fedora Workstation doesn't offer hibernation out of the box either.
The three sleep modes in Linux Mint
The new Sleep Modes page gives you three options. You pick the one that suits how you use your computer. You can enable all of them and choose which one to use from the power menu (at least that's what it looks to me).
Hibernation
This is the classic mode. Your session is saved to disk and the computer shuts down completely, using no power. It's slower than suspend and can take longer than a reboot to hibernate and resume.
Hybrid Sleep
Hybrid Sleep suspends your computer and saves the session to disk at the same time. Most of the time, you get the quick wake-up of suspend. If the battery runs out, you'll need to plug in the charger, but your session is still there to resume from disk.
Suspend-then-Hibernate
This one suspends first and switches to hibernation only when the battery level gets critical. I think this is the most practical option for laptop users. You get fast resume in normal use and a safety net when the battery is about to die.
What Mint's new sleep mode doesn't fix
None of this removes the old limitations. You still need plenty of swap, and the tool flags a lack of swap as a problem. If Secure Boot is enabled, the tool lists it under Detected Problems. The good thing is that the tool writes its settings to its own systemd file, so you can turn these modes on and off without messing up your system.
I like how Mint takes a subtle approaches to "new features". Not every new feature needs to have AI in it. This is not a shiny new change but it's one of those changes that everyday Linux users are likely to use. Am I right?
The way this law is written, it doesn't stop at Big Tech. Even VLC, a free and open source media player maintained by a non-profit, could end up paying this new tax.
What the new French internet tax says
The measure is amendment I-1358 to France's 2027 finance bill, tabled by Laurent Lhardit. It creates a tax on "producers of digital data" at €0.055 (5.5 euro cents) for every gigabyte delivered to subscribers of French internet providers.
The amount is capped at 15% of the company's revenue in France or 2% of its total revenue, as per the amendment. Note that it's 15% of French revenue, not of total network traffic. And the text joins the two caps with an "or" without saying which one applies when they differ.
How much money are we talking about?
The amendment cites an Arcep estimate of 200 billion GB a year flowing to French internet subscribers. It expects the tax to bring in €10 billion a year. It also names Google, Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Amazon, Netflix and Akamai (cloud server provider) as the senders of about half of that traffic.
You'd think the money goes to the telecom operators who build and maintain the networks. That's the "fair share" argument European telcos have pushed for years.
But that's not the case. The revenue goes straight into the state budget, and the amendment's own justification talks about tax fairness between local businesses and digital multinationals, plus the ecological benefit of compressing data.
Why VLC is angry
A gigabyte of open source software counts the same as a gigabyte of Netflix. VideoLAN, the French non-profit behind VLC, posted on X that the tax would cost it over €1 million a year.
So, the French socialists, and Parliament members just voted a tax, that they don’t understand, which would cost VideoLAN more than 1 million euro per year.
They are probably the most clueless politician on Earth? And they claim they want technological sovereignty…… https://t.co/JX7tW6iJrP
Lhardit replied that the cap would protect VideoLAN. He also said he didn't see how the tax could be passed on to users of Facebook, Instagram or TikTok since those services are free.
VideoLAN didn't take that well:
You have no idea what you are talking about.
What you said about Facebook and Insta and other social networks are not targeted because they are free, means you don’t understand the basics of economy. You don’t understand the difference between Revenue and Profit. Nor what is a… https://t.co/09TSNbto5y
You have no idea what you are talking about. What you said about Facebook and Insta and other social networks are not targeted because they are free, means you don't understand the basics of economy. You don't understand the difference between Revenue and Profit.
The cap may limit what a low-revenue non-profit owes. But there is no explicit exemption for associations, free software or free content anywhere in the text. VideoLAN's €1 million is the possible figure before the cap, and right now nobody can tell the exact figure for certain because of all the ambiguity.
See, a "war on Big Tech" sounds great in a headline, and European governments are fond of laws that squeeze extra money out of American tech companies. But I don't buy the idea that Netflix will pay them out of their pocket.
Netflix will do what it always does and raise subscription prices. And Facebook is "free" only because advertisers pay for it, which is exactly the revenue versus profit point VideoLAN was making.
So the government gets extra money, Big Tech protects its margins, and you end up paying. Meanwhile, non-profit projects like VLC, which never had a price to raise in the first place, are left wondering how big their bill will be.
Let's just hope that this doesn't take the form of law. Because this will set a precedence. I wouldn't be surprised to see other European countries try their own version. No government will say no to extra tax revenue.
Like GDPR, this has all the ingredients of another mess. If a law is going to tax "internet companies", it needs to say in black and white which ones. Right now, it doesn't.
What do you think? A fair way to make Big Tech pay, or a blunt instrument that hits everyone else? Let me know in the comments.
Remember Wubi from the 2000s? For people who were afraid of going into BIOS and booting from CD/DVD/USB, Wubi provided an easy way to install Ubuntu Linux straight from Windows.
This concept has made a comeback in the form of Libertix although the core idea remains the same: install Linux in dual boot from inside the Windows.
Libertix is a Windows application. You use the .exe to install the tool and run it. The tool analyzes your system and if the test passes, it lets you resize the disk to install Linux Mint or Zorin on your system. Those are the two distros supported at the moment.
It configures a dual-boot menu for both BIOS/MBR and UEFI/GPT machines. This way, you do not need to create a live USB.
Libertix: Install Linux from Windows
Libertix is an open source software developed by Ekimia, a French company. From the looks of it, they sell Linux preinstalled computers in France. They launched a €3,000 campaign in June 2026 to pay a full-time contributor over the summer to work on this project.
Here's how it works.
Before touching anything, Libertix runs a compatibility test. It looks at your firmware type (BIOS or UEFI), your disk layout, BitLocker status and how much space can be taken from the Windows partition. If something doesn't fit, it won't proceed.
If everything checks out, it lets you shrink the Windows partition and then it downloads the chosen distro ISO. Checksum is verified before downloading the ISO.
Libertix then stages the files on disk and tells your computer to boot into its own live environment just once. On UEFI systems, that's done through the BootNext firmware variable. On older BIOS systems, it uses GRUB4DOS and a temporary Windows boot entry.
After the reboot, the Libertix live system checks the plan and hardware again, creates an ext4 partition and installs Linux on it.
The final setup gives you a customized, beautiful-looking GRUB menu with entries for Linux, Windows, shutdown and advanced options.
If you enabled file sharing, your Windows folders show up in Linux. Your Linux files are also accessible from Windows, but in read-only mode, which makes sense as it avoids filesystem corruption.
I like that there's a recovery path built in. Libertix tracks every stage it completes. If something fails or you cancel midway, it undoes only the steps that were done and restores the Windows boot.
🚧
Libertix is in the early stage of development and since partitioning is involved, I suggest taking a full backup of your important data on an external disk before you experiment with Libertix.
Worth a try?
I wanted to give Libertix a try and show the installer in action. But for that, I would need a functional Windows system. And I don't have one right now. I'll see if I can arrange one and showcase this tool's functioning to you.
Till then, if you feel like, you can give it a try on a spare system because this is in early stages of development. If you are not comfortable with partitions and stuff, don't get over excited and mess up your system.
Still, overall, this is a nice tool to exist and I hope it supports more distros in the future. For many Linux beginners, creating the live USB and dual booting from it seems intimidating. If this tool helps lower that barrier, I am rooting for it.
If you want to explore the project, look at its architecture and technical documentation; head over to its GitHub repo.
"If you are not paying for the product, you are the product."
That's often true, and it's doubly true for VPNs. A VPN service could see all your traffic, so a shady free VPN is worse than no VPN at all.
But you may still find yourself in a situation where you need one. And let's be honest, if it's casual use, paying for a VPN doesn't make a lot of sense, because VPN prices are only reasonable on yearly or longer plans. You don't want to pay for two years upfront just to open one blocked website.
The good news is that a few well-known privacy companies offer usable free plans. They make money from their paid users, not from your data (most of them have independent audits) and the free plan is often a way to generate lead.
You can take advantage of that and use it for your occasional VPN requirements.
In this article, I'll list free VPNs that you can use on Linux. I have split them into two groups: VPNs built into web browsers, and VPN services with a proper Linux client that protects your entire system.
I have stuck to reputable services only, and I'm not including random "free VPN" browser extensions, because most of them are spammy at best.
When and why do you need a free VPN?
The most common reason is geo-restriction. Some website owners block visitors from certain countries, and a VPN lets you appear to be somewhere else. This is perhaps the most common such screen I have seen with sites that geo-block its visitors.
Sometimes it's not the website but your government that blocks a site, or even a specific X/Twitter account.
In more "restrictive regions", a VPN may be the only way to get around censorship and reach parts of the open web. It's also handy when you're traveling and need a work or university portal that only works from your home region.
Then there's the case of public Wi-Fi. At a hotel, airport or café, a VPN adds an extra layer of protection between you and whoever else is on that network. At least it gives me peace of mind.
Free VPNs come with limitations. That's expected. What matters is whether those limitations matter to you.
First, check whether you need an account. Most free VPNs ask for one, some only want an email, and a few need nothing at all.
Next, check whether it's browser-only or system-wide. A browser VPN only protects traffic from that browser, while a system-wide VPN covers every application on your Linux system. For system-wide VPNs, also check whether there's a native Linux client and whether it has a GUI or is CLI only.
Then look at the limits. Some (rare) free plans have unlimited data, others give you anywhere from 2 GB to 50 GB a month. Free plans also restrict you to a handful of server locations, and some don't even let you pick one.
If you care about encryption, look for WireGuard or OpenVPN support. If your goal is watching content from another country, check streaming support first, because most free plans don't offer it.
Finally, check the no-logs policy. Every VPN claims one, at least on paper. A no-logs claim backed by an independent audit is better than one without.
With that out of the way, let's see the options of free VPNs for Linux users.
Browser-based free VPNs
These are VPNs built right into the web browser. You don't install anything extra. Click a button and your browsing goes through the VPN.
They are good enough for opening geo-blocked websites or browsing on public Wi-Fi. Just remember that they only cover the browser. Your terminal, package manager, torrent client (if you use it) and every other app still use your normal connection.
Strictly speaking, some of these work more like an encrypted proxy than a full VPN. For casual browsing, the difference won't matter much.
Vivaldi (with Proton VPN)
Vivaldi partnered with Proton in 2025 and integrated the free tier of Proton VPN directly into its web browser. It's available on Linux, Windows and macOS.
What makes it stand out is that it's free with no data limits. You get the same thing Proton gives its free users: no ads, a strict no-logs policy and medium speeds. Your server options are limited to Proton's free locations.
You need to sign in with a Vivaldi account or a Proton account. Vivaldi says the account requirement is there to prevent abuse of the free service.
If you are already a Vivaldi user, this is the easiest option on the list. If you are not, it's a decent reason to give Vivaldi a try.
Mozilla has had a paid VPN for years. With Firefox 149, it added a free built-in VPN to the browser itself.
You get 50 GB of VPN browsing per month, which is generous for a browser VPN. Once you hit the limit, the VPN pauses until the next month. You can also pick the location you want to browse from, and you need a Mozilla account to use it.
The problem is availability. As of Mozilla's July 2026 update, it covers 29 countries, including Canada, Japan, Mexico, Australia and much of Europe. If you don't see the VPN button in Firefox, it hasn't reached your region yet.
If you want Mozilla's protection for your entire system, there's the paid Mozilla VPN. It costs $9.99 per month, or $4.99 per month on the yearly plan, and covers up to 5 devices with 500 servers in 30+ countries.
Opera was the first major browser to bake in a free VPN, way back in 2016. It's still there in the desktop version, Linux included.
It is unlimited and doesn't need an account. Just enable it in the settings and you're done. That's the lowest-friction option on this list.
The limitation is location choice. You can't pick a country, only a region: Americas, Europe or Asia (or let Opera pick the "optimal" location). That's fine for public Wi-Fi but hit or miss for geo-blocked websites, and technically it's a browser proxy rather than a full VPN.
Also, many people would be weary of the fact that Opera was sold to a Chinese consortium earlier. Personally, I prefer privacy services from Europe. That's not a guarantee but just a perception that European companies have better privacy laws.
These are proper VPN services with native Linux apps. Once connected, everything on your system goes through the VPN: browsers, terminal, apps, updates all of it.
Proton VPN
Proton VPN free Linux
Proton VPN comes from Proton, the Swiss company behind Proton Mail. Its free plan is the best one I know of, and it's my default recommendation for anyone who asks.
The free plan has no data limit and no ads. Its no-logs policy has been independently audited, and Proton's apps are open source too.
You can use it on 1 device at a time, with servers in up to 10 countries: the Netherlands, Japan, Romania, Poland, Norway, Switzerland, Singapore, Mexico, Canada and the US. Speeds are medium, since paid users get priority.
The free tier limitation is that you can't pick a country. Proton assigns you a free server, and you can reconnect to get a different one. Streaming and P2P/torrenting are not supported on the free plan either.
On Linux, Proton has both official CLI and GUI app, which is rare among VPN providers.
The paid VPN Plus plan unlocks 20,000+ servers in 140+ countries, up to 10 devices, faster speeds, streaming support, P2P with port forwarding, the NetShield ad-blocker and Secure Core multi-hop servers.
Windscribe is a Canadian VPN company with one of the more generous capped free plans.
You get 10 GB of data per month if you confirm your email address. Without an email, you get 2 GB, which is good enough for emergency use. Free users get servers in 10 countries, and unlike Proton, you choose the location yourself.
There's also no limit on the number of devices, even on the free plan. Windscribe's desktop apps are open source, and on Linux you get both a GUI app and a CLI.
Most features, including the firewall (their name for the kill switch) and split tunneling, are available to free users too. Its no-logs claim has been audited, and has also held up in court.
If 10 GB isn't enough but you don't want a full subscription, Windscribe has an interesting "Build-A-Plan" option. You pay $1 per month per location you need (minimum $3), and each location adds 10 GB to your monthly allowance. Unlimited data is a $1 add-on, while the full Pro plan costs $9 per month or $69 per year.
hide.me is a Malaysia-based VPN with a free plan that doesn't require a sign-up or payment details.
The free plan used to cap you at 10 GB a month. Now there's no data limit at all, but speeds are throttled. Tom's Guide measured free speeds at around 1 Mbps, which is enough for reading but painful for anything else.
You get 1 simultaneous connection, and hide.me advertises 8 free locations, mostly in Europe plus the US. Streaming isn't supported on the free plan.
For Linux, hide.me has an official command-line client. It's built on WireGuard, written in Go and open source under GPLv2, and it works with the free plan. You can also set it up manually through NetworkManager.
The paid plan unlocks 91 locations, 10 simultaneous connections, full speed, a fixed IP address option, dynamic port forwarding and streaming support.
You probably know AdGuard for its ad blocker and AdGuard DNS. The company has been building privacy tools for well over a decade, and AdGuard VPN is part of that family.
On Linux, AdGuard VPN comes as an official command-line client for Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and RPM-based distributions. There's no GUI here.
You need an AdGuard account, which you can create from the terminal itself. The free plan gives you 3 GB of traffic per month at speeds capped to 20 Mbps, and 2 devices at a time.
The paid plan removes the data cap and the speed limit, opens up 75+ locations and lets you connect up to 10 devices at the same time.
Riseup is a volunteer-run collective that has been providing secure communication tools to activists and privacy-minded people since 1999. Its email, chat and other services are built around anonymity and resisting surveillance, and RiseupVPN is one of those services.
RiseupVPN is different from everything else on this list because there is no paid plan. Everything is free. There's no account to create, no configuration, and Riseup says it doesn't log your IP address.
The whole thing runs on donations. Riseup estimates the VPN costs about $60 per person per year to run and asks regular users to donate at least that much if they can.
On Linux, it's available as a snap and as a package for Debian and Ubuntu. Arch users can find it in the AUR.
Note that this is a donation-funded service with a handful of gateways in North America and Europe. Riseup doesn't publish a list, but users report locations like Seattle, Montreal, New York, Paris and Amsterdam.
Don't expect commercial VPN speeds, because it's built for privacy and getting around censorship, not for unblocking streaming catalogs.
Lantern started as a censorship circumvention tool, and that's still its focus. It's developed by Brave New Software, a US nonprofit with no relation to Brave Browser. The code is open source, and it has been around since 2013.
The free version doesn't need an account or payment details. Just download and connect. The limit is data, of course. Free users get about 250 MB per day, resetting every 24 hours. Which is fine for reading blocked news sites or checking a social media account, but not much else.
Lantern doesn't disconnect you when you hit the cap. Instead, downloads slow to about 128 Kbps until the next reset, which is mostly useless these days. Free users in Iran, Russia and Belarus get unlimited data, which tells you who the service is really built for.
If you want more, Lantern Pro gives you unlimited data, up to 5 devices, server location selection, premium servers, built-in ad blocking and the option to host your own private Lantern server.
If you want a VPN to watch Netflix or Prime Video from another country, or to watch your home country's catalog or live sport event while living abroad, a free plan won't work well. Most free plans either don't support streaming or have data caps that run out after a few hours of HD video.
A paid plan is better for this. Even then, streaming services are smart. They actively block VPN IP addresses, so expect things to break from time to time. Proton is a reliable VPN or you can go for Unlocator Smart DNS.
Comparing the free VPN options
VPN
Type
Account needed
Free data
Location choice
Linux support
Vivaldi + Proton
Browser
Yes
Unlimited
Limited to Proton free servers
Yes (built into browser)
Firefox built-in VPN
Browser
Yes (Mozilla)
50 GB/month
Yes
Yes (built into browser)
Opera
Browser
No
Unlimited
Regions only
Yes
Proton VPN
System-wide
Yes
Unlimited
No (auto-assigned)
GUI + CLI
Windscribe
System-wide
Optional (2 GB without email, 10 GB with)
2 to 10 GB/month
Yes, 10 countries
GUI + CLI
hide.me
System-wide
No
Unlimited (throttled)
Yes, 8 locations
CLI
AdGuard VPN
System-wide
Yes
3 GB/month
Yes, limited locations
CLI
RiseupVPN
System-wide
No
Unlimited (donation-funded)
Yes, a few gateways
GUI (tray app)
Lantern
System-wide
No
About 244 MB/day
No (Pro only)
DEB/RPM
Which one should you use?
If you just want to open a blocked website or feel safer on hotel Wi-Fi, a browser VPN is enough.
If you want the whole system protected, Proton VPN's free plan is the one I'd start with, and Windscribe is a good backup when you need to pick a specific country.
If you're dealing with real censorship, keep RiseupVPN or Lantern installed as a fallback. Although I would suggest going for a more robust, paid VPN like Mullvad.
And if all you care about is encrypting traffic on public Wi-Fi, there's also Cloudflare WARP. It's free with no data cap, needs no account, and has an official Linux client (warp-cli). But you can't choose a location, so it won't help with geo-restrictions at all.
I hope this list helps you select a free VPN service. If you have questions or suggestions, please leave a comment.
Collabora has published its own account of the Danish ministry pilot that earlier coverage, including ours, had described as Denmark moving off Microsoft's office software.
The ministry's own launch release had described it as a test by a group of employees in one department. Back then, the minister handling this, Caroline Stage Olsen, had said the tech giants were not being tossed out the door overnight.
A volunteer test, not a switch
The pilot began in June 2025, when volunteers in the Danish digitalization ministry's own department started writing documents in Collabora instead of Microsoft's Word, Excel, and PowerPoint editors.
cBrain, the Danish company behind the ministry's F2 case and document management system, was tasked with integrating Collabora into it.
The ministry presented it as a test from the beginning and said that a wider rollout in the department depended on the results. Days later, it told Version2 (in Danish) that no decision to phase out Microsoft had been made and that the plan was not to replace Windows with Linux.
Ingeniøren reported in December (also in Danish) that testers had complained about documents from other government agencies that opened blank, track changes that were difficult to accept, and line spacing that appeared odd.
Its story was based on ministry and cBrain correspondence obtained through a records request, and it covers the months up to an evaluation workshop in October, where testers were to say whether they wanted to keep using Collabora.
Later that day, a second story had Frejdie Søndergaard-Gudmandsen, cBrain's head of product management, calling the bugs normal for a pilot. It was also reported that the ministry had decided to continue into 2026.
Two versions of why it stopped
The ministry's press officer told Ingeniøren in October that the election call interrupted the project, that it was not evaluated as planned, and that staff don't use Collabora today and have no plans to.
Collabora's statement gives a different cause. It says the June reorganization ended the digitalization ministry as a separate ministry and left the pilot without a home before the evaluation was done, and that this shouldn't be characterized as a finding against the suite.
The election was called in February, and the new government that took office in June merged the digitalization ministry into the research and education ministry.
Collabora adds that the first phase worked, that its engineers resolved the tickets testers raised, and that it paid for that work itself. It also says the experience is carrying into work with other Danish authorities and cBrain, and that formal assessment was never finalized.
On October 27, the research, education, and digitalization minister Christina Egelund said on DR's P1 Morning show that she knows little about why the project ended without a proper evaluation and pointed out that the decision was made under the previous minister.
Where our earlier coverage ran ahead
Our June 2025 article said, citing Politiken's report, that the ministry was moving from Office 365 to LibreOffice, with full adoption expected by autumn. The ministry later said no decision to phase out Microsoft had been made and described a smaller volunteer pilot.
Politiken soon corrected its own article, and we fixed the Linux claim at the time, but our headline and the autumn timeline stayed as they were.
openEuler has two fresh releases out. 24.03 LTS SP4 arrived in July 2026, and the short-term 26.09 innovation release followed on October 1.
We covered openEuler 24.03 LTS when it came out in 2024. Two years later, that LTS version is still getting new features, and SP4 is the latest round.
The releases have plenty of features of all kinds. Some target SuperPoD infrastructure and specialized AI accelerators, you know, enterprise features. So this article focuses on the features you and I can explore on a regular PC or virtual machine.
I am going to check on the AI tools, the desktop bits and the under-the-hood changes. I installed them in GNOME Boxes to see what actually works on a regular machine.
LTS, service packs and innovation releases
openEuler has two release tracks: long-term support (LTS) and innovation releases. The community is continuing to develop the 24.03 LTS series through service packs, with the next major LTS release currently expected in 2028.
Instead of new version numbers, an LTS gets feature updates through service packs (SP1, SP2 and so on). Unlike Windows service packs (if you remember it), these are proper feature releases, not just a bundle of patches.
Similar to Ubuntu's six monthly releases, these "Innovation releases" introduce newer technologies on a shorter support cycle. openEuler 26.09 is scheduled to receive support until March 2027.
What's new in openEuler 24.03 LTS SP4
SP4 stays on Linux kernel 6.6, but openEuler keeps backporting newer upstream features into it.
AI-assisted diagnosis and tuning
The AI addition most relevant to regular users is intelligent diagnosis and tuning. An Intelligent Diagnosis Agent works with a Known Issue Analysis Agent to find a problem, work out the root cause and suggest a fix.
The tuning side collects system metrics, finds performance bottlenecks and gives you optimization suggestions. In theory, that saves you hours of staring at top and perf output.
The AI features are delivered through openEuler's Witty framework, which can be installed from the distribution repositories using the package witty. Once installed, you launch the interface with witty or opencode and interact with the diagnosis and tuning agents through natural language prompts.
Unlike the first-generation EulerCopilot experience, which was closely tied to openEuler's own cloud AI services, Witty supports both local models and a range of OpenAI-compatible APIs, making deployment significantly more flexible for users outside China.
There's also a lightweight Agent sandbox for running code and tool calls from AI agents in isolation. Considering how many people now give AI agents shell access, that's a sensible addition.
Kernel changes worth knowing
Under the hood changes that you won't see.
The biggest addition is sched_ext, the eBPF-based scheduler framework that landed upstream in Linux 6.12. You can load custom CPU schedulers at runtime without recompiling the kernel. If one misbehaves, the kernel quietly falls back to the default scheduler.
FUSE file systems can now talk to the kernel over io_uring. That should help performance for FUSE-based tools like sshfs.
There's also a programmable page cache that lets applications set their own file caching policy. It's meant to speed up loading large AI models, which is usually limited by disk I/O.
ARM users can now choose a 64K page-size kernel at install time. The 4K kernel stays the default, so nothing changes unless you opt in.
The enterprise stuff
The rest of SP4 is aimed at enterprises and data centers. There's NPU compute slicing, faster recovery for AI inference containers, networking and reliability features for SuperPoD, and confidential computing improvements for Arm CCA, TaiShan and Hygon systems. openEuler's own compiler builds (LLVM, Go and BiSheng JDK) also got updates.
What's new in openEuler 26.09
26.09 ships with two kernels: Linux 6.6 for servers and Linux 6.18 for DevStation, openEuler's developer desktop edition.
OpenEuler 26.09 server edition
DevStation is where most of the desktop-relevant changes are and that's what I tried in the VM.
A new installer and a user-space package manager
DevStation uses a new installer called "heolleo". I almost read that as "Hello Leo" 😄
It uses a SquashFS-based image, can install from a local ISO and works fully offline.
Heolleo Installer
The more interesting addition is epkg, a user-space package manager. It installs software in your home directory without touching system packages, and you can keep separate environments for different projects. It supports multiple package sources too, which makes it sound a bit like Conda or Nix.
PolyMind: a self-hosted AI agent platform
DevStation also bundles PolyMind, a self-hosted platform for AI chat, agent workflows and managing multiple models. It connects to MCP services and AI agents through its agentd service.
OpenEuler Polymind
SkillHub and keeping agents in check
openEuler also launched SkillHub, a place to find, install and share AI agent skills. Each skill gets an automated security assessment. openEuler is upfront that this helps you judge risk but doesn't guarantee a skill is safe, which is a fair warning.
OpenEuler SkillHub
AgentCensor is the one I find most interesting and useful going by its description. It sits between an AI agent and your system, logs tool calls, file changes and system calls, and can allow, block or ask for your approval before the agent runs something.
SCCS tackles token bloat in long-running agents. It replaces large tool outputs in the context window with short references and fetches the full content only when needed. The rest (ram-a-kv, MemFabric and ModelFS) are for optimizing inference servers.
ModelFS is a model startup acceleration feature that uses a programmable page-cache framework underneath, allowing caching behaviour to be tuned for AI workloads while remaining compatible with existing applications.
Getting openEuler
You can get both from the official download page. There are several choices, from servers to embed devices. For normal usage, go for the DevStation. That's the desktop version and that's the one that comes with all the above mentioned AI tools.
Things have certainly improved in the past two years since we last covered openEuler first. The focus is on providing AI and that's not surprising. We are in 2026 and AI is everywhere. An operating system focused on developers has to provide AI at its core.
Have you tried openEuler ever? What's your experience with it like? Share in the comments please.
Canonical has restarted development of Ubuntu Core Desktop, an immutable, snap-based take on Ubuntu that sat dormant after a developer preview in 2023. Jon Seager, Canonical's VP Engineering for Ubuntu, says a dedicated team is now working on it.
The objective is for it to grow into the default Ubuntu desktop experience as the project matures. What you know of Ubuntu Desktop is not changing, and Jon says that the various Ubuntu flavors are under no pressure to build Core versions of their own.
Separately, Juerg Haefliger, a Canonical engineer, has proposed a firmware package for Ubuntu LTS releases that would shield older kernels from firmware written for newer ones.
Both are early in development and things could still change.
What's Ubuntu Core Desktop?
Ubuntu Core is Canonical's operating system for IoT and embedded devices, and work on it started in 2014. It is immutable and strictly confined, with the kernel, OS image, and apps being kept separate and updated independently of each other.
On Core Desktop, everything is a Snap, from the bootloader and kernel to the desktop environment and your apps. That makes the system harder to break and easier to recover.
The 2023 desktop preview fell short of expectations because it packed much of the desktop, including GNOME and its login screen, into one bulky Snap package. The new approach is to get those pieces separated.
A newly-assigned team of developers has already made good progress moving the old preview onto the newer Core 26 base. Infrastructure for daily image builds is expected to be ready within the coming weeks, and the work is set to run through the 27.04 cycle.
Apps are a big hurdle since Core Desktop only runs strictly confined Snaps, and classic ones like VS Code can't run on it directly. Jon's preferred idea is to host them in a Workshop, Canonical's sandboxed development environment, and show their windows on the main desktop.
Permissions prompting is another piece he considers key to Core's success. Under this, the system would ask users before a confined app touches things like the camera, microphone, or home directory.
What's the firmware proposal about?
Ubuntu LTS releases launch with one kernel, known as GA, and the hardware enablement (HWE) stack later rolls out newer kernels for that same release. Ubuntu 24.04 launched on kernel 6.8, and its current HWE kernel is 7.0.
Desktop installs of 24.04 follow HWE by default, while servers stay on GA unless you opt in. Both kernels share one firmware package today, so firmware backported for the newer kernel also lands on GA systems, and Juerg notes that vendors rarely test an old kernel with new firmware.
He points to a couple of AMD regressions on GA systems after recent 24.04 backports. His solution to the problem is a linux-firmware-hwe package that HWE kernels would depend on.
It would carry the complete firmware set from the Ubuntu release the HWE kernel comes from, in place of a handful of hand-picked files backported to the LTS.
GA systems would stay on the regular firmware, and the two sets can't be installed together. A machine with both kernels would load the HWE firmware even when booting GA, and the bug report for this change has left the workaround as something that might be considered.
As for when this might land, the report is still quite new, with no assignee mentioned and a test case section that only says TBD. Though it is being tracked against Ubuntu 27.04, which is set for an April release next year, codenamed "Tenacious T-Rex."
Neither change affects a regular Ubuntu user yet, and once the daily Core Desktop images start showing up, we shall see how far the project can go in its quest for immutability.
