Before we dive into the matter, you first have to understand what DisplayLink is. It is a proprietary graphics transport technology that lets computers connect to one or more external displays over USB, using docks or adapters built around DisplayLink chips.
It works by compressing display data on the host computer and sending it to a chip in the connected device. The chip then decodes it for output to monitors through interfaces such as HDMI or DisplayPort.
On Linux, this support can rub some people the wrong way due to its closed-source nature. That is where Mike Lothian's (FireBurn) Vino comes in as an open alternative.
Unfortunately, Synaptics owns DisplayLink and has sent Mike cease-and-desist letters alleging that he infringed its DisplayLink patents with his project.
What's Vino?
Vino is a driver that lets the Linux kernel talk to DisplayLink docks directly. It is meant to replace DisplayLink's closed-source software and the open source EVDI kernel module that sits beside it.
Mike wrote it with help from Claude Code, and the first version reached the kernel mailing list in June, unfinished. He had faced a communication issue between the dock and the driver and asked other developers for help.
In early July (courtesy of LWN.net), he emailed a Synaptics employee for guidance and mentioned his Rust rewrite of EVDI. About two weeks later, a different employee replied.
That reply said his Rust rewrite of EVDI was not a thing of concern. Rather, the concern was the DisplayLink protocol and codec, which Synaptics believes are covered by its patents.
Lawyers get involved
A cease-and-desist letter followed on August 17. It told Mike to stop development and withdraw anything he had submitted to maintainers and hosting sites, with a signed confirmation due by August 28.
An appendix listed over 125 patents without saying which applied. Mike posted a working version 3 of Vino on August 26 and asked Synaptics the next day which claims they had in mind.
The answer came in October as claim charts. They map one claim from each of two patents, GB2484736 and GB2485613, to his source code.
The October 5 letter said Synaptics would seek $25,000 for the cost of preparing those charts if Mike missed an October 11 deadline, with the figure rising by at least $25,000 each week.
Mike replied on October 6 (message 8) with an offer to pause public work on the encoding code the charts point to if Synaptics paused the deadline and the weekly charge. He also asked about licensing that code for non-commercial use.
On October 7, Synaptics said it would grant no patent license or promise not to sue and set October 18 as a final deadline.
💭
What I can see so far is a very aggressive patent infringement witch hunt against a lone open source developer who was quite open to communication.
Synaptics took about three weeks to answer his request for specifics, then followed with a potentially life-ruining $25,000 demand that compounds weekly.
Clean room design quirks
Mike describes Vino as a clean-room driver and says he reverse engineered it from captured USB traffic and vendor programs.
If you didn't know, in a clean-room recreation, one party studies the original implementation, then writes a description, and a separate party builds the new code from that description alone.
It is meant to act as a defense against copyright claims because it shows nothing was copied. Synaptics’ July reply argues that clean-room or independently written code can still infringe a patent. 🤷
The timing
Vino also lands in a busy stretch for AI-assisted reverse engineering, from smart TV cleanups to office suite clones. Legal pressure has reached other AI-built projects too.
Mike has already taken down the Vino repository in response to the demands, and Synaptics has not made a public statement so far.
Only time will tell what happens to the work, and I hope someone forked it before it went offline, as that would give others a good starting point to build on.
Claude Code users are hitting "safety checks" in the middle of decompiling things. Some Codex users got warnings and account restrictions for poking at their own smart TVs. 404 Media calls it a crackdown on the coolest thing people were doing with AI and I agree with them.
This is precisely the reason why local AI and open source/weight models are going to be the next big thing for people who want control over their data and computer.
So this edition is about who gets to say 'no' on your machine.
🐧 AI at the core of new Linux distro
Remember Playtron, the Linux gaming OS from Cyanogen co-founder Kirt McMaster? It rebranded as Kora in July 2025 and has now unveiled Kora OS, a Linux desktop pitched at people who primarily use AI.
Here's the catch. Kora OS will be free when it ships in 2027, but the money comes from subscriptions that bundle AI models and agent services. Cortex and the desktop interface are proprietary. So it's Linux-based, not open, and only "local when possible".
Kora won't be the only one. Omarchy is already there and so do openKylin and openEuler. There will be more distros offering AI-first opearting systems.
🔐 Agent security
You know that "Yes, and don't ask again" option in Claude Code? It saves an allow rule in .claude/settings.local.json inside your project. Sometimes that rule is the exact command you approved, password or token included, in plain text.
The bug report about this goes back to August 2025. A bot closed it as "not planned" after 60 days of no activity. So the same tool that won't help you decompile your own TV firmware will happily remember your production database password.
🔍 Discover AI tools
Memory Poisoning Lab is an MIT-licensed teaching lab for memory poisoning attacks on AI agents. You replay six scenarios, try defenses and see what repair actually restores. It uses a scripted agent and synthetic data, so it runs offline with no API keys. There's a browser demo too.
TurboDiffusion is a video generation acceleration framework that can speed up end-to-end diffusion generation upto 100 times on a single RTX 5090.
Ram-Altman relates to last week's edition. Since Sam Altman was unhappy with consumers not fully utilizing their RAMS, someone created a bash script you run from cron. Any day your Linux box has more than 10% of its RAM available, it mails Sam Altman a note. It's silly but awesome 😄
🗂 AI jargon: Abliteration
In AI, Abliteration is a way to remove the refusal behaviour from an open-weight model without retraining it. Researchers have found that refusals are typically tied to a single "direction" inside the model's activations. Find that direction, subtract it from the weights, and the model mostly stops saying no.
That's why you see "abliterated" versions of popular models on Hugging Face. You see, with open weights LLMS, the guardrails are yours to keep or remove. With a cloud model, they're someone else's call.
😂 Meme
In case you didn't know already, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is accused of dating a Chinese spy.
Kirt McMaster founded Playtron in 2022, and the company went on to build GameOS, a Linux-based operating system for gaming PCs. It now goes by KORA Systems Inc. and is launching a new AI-focused desktop operating system.
The OS shares the KORA name, with GameOS living inside it as GameFrame, a dedicated mode for turning the system into a game console. We received a press release regarding this weeks before the launch, so this write-up might be missing some updates.
🚧
A major component of this OS is not open source.
KORA, explained
KORA is a desktop OS developed on a Linux base, with AI models and agents built right into the system. Don't think that it is an app or a layer over another one; it's a standalone offering.
The company says AI workloads on macOS and Windows stay boxed into a single app or tab, with those having no view of the hardware underneath. KORA is built on the idea that AI belongs inside the OS.
The desktop is organized around neural workspaces, where each one keeps a project or client apart from the rest, and the AI only sees the workspace that is open. Files in it also keep their own version history.
Each workspace doubles as a sandbox too. The user sets what files, devices, AI tools, and online services every app and agent can access, while AppArmor enforces it all.
Search in the neural file system works on meaning, so a person or an agent can find a file by what it contains.
Its memory system builds context from the email, contacts, calendar, and cloud files the user connects. Local models run that analysis on the device, and data goes to the cloud only with the user's approval.
How open is it?
Cortex is the engine behind the models, and it spreads AI work over the CPU, GPU, and NPU, then passes some of it to other computers on the network.
Local models run by default, and cloud ones only join when a task needs them. KORA speculates that local models will handle roughly seven in ten of the calls it manages in 2027.
They also say that models from any outside lab can be integrated, and a chat can move from its own agent to Codex or Claude Code with its context intact. A planned SDK would also let third-party apps and agents tap into projects, memory, search, and email.
Sadly, Cortex is not open source. :(
Still, the wider ecosystem is open, and developers will get the same building blocks KORA's own apps use, such as workspaces, file versioning, and collaboration.
You mentioned Qualcomm?
Yes! Qualcomm engineers worked alongside KORA for nearly a year to bring a Linux desktop to the Snapdragon X2 Elite platform.
Though Qualcomm's wider Linux effort for X2 laptops is still early. Its own developer preview targets kernel developers and not end users, and the drivers meant to open the NPU to local AI are still being pushed upstream.
Even so, KORA says the PCs can run a language model with 26 billion parameters locally, with HUMAIN, the Saudi AI company, working with KORA on an enterprise version.
That version is called HUMAIN OS, with the first OEM PCs expected to arrive preloaded with it in 2027, while KORA itself follows later that year.
So, yes, for now, there is no ISO to download in case you got too excited.
Some thoughts
If you look closely, they are going at it differently than Omarchy, which began in June 2025 as a ready-made setup of Arch Linux and Hyprland that has since landed millions in backing for its foundation.
Omarchy's Quattro release lets users pick from several third-party agents, while KORA builds its own agent into the system and lets others plug in their models. They are basically taking different routes to chase the same bet.
Both seem convinced that AI agents are where the desktop market is headed.
Mozilla has been experimenting a lot with Firefox lately, and a good chunk of that effort has gone into AI. The sidebar can house a chatbot of your choice, and Smart Window has an assistant that lets you pick the AI model.
Luckily, they have stopped tunnel-visioning into AI, and the UX side of the browser has seen some big upgrades.
Containers keep work, shopping, and personal browsing separate; Split View shows two pages side by side in one window; and Vertical Tabs move your tab list into the sidebar.
I believe that these upgrades have made Firefox a much more compelling option when compared to other popular web browsers.
Of course they are not stopping there. Mini Window is the latest addition to that list, which builds on the work done in Picture-in-Picture, the floating video player.
🚧
This feature is still being developed. Don't rely on it for any important browsing sessions.
Firefox Mini Window
Using Mini Window on Linux with Firefox 160 feels like a beta from the start. It needs a regular browser window with a tab open to work because a standalone mini window is not possible yet.
It comes in two modes.Move full tab sends the whole page into a small window that floats above your other windows, and Move selection lets you draw a box around the part of a page you want and sends only that.
Either way, the moved tab is not available in the main window until you send it back.
A full tab mini window looks like a tiny browser window. The top bar has the page address along with reload, back, forward, send back, and close buttons. Pages adapt to the smaller size as well.
During testing, websites like ours, Wikipedia, and Associated Press were successfully switching to their compact layout.
A selection mini window is more compact and shows just the chosen area under the page address, with a reload button and the same close and send back buttons.
Both kinds can be dragged around and resized. Selection mini windows have some rough edges because they can appear too small and refuse to resize well.
They are still handy for research sessions where you need to check small bits of information without opening more tabs and cluttering the desktop.
Try it Out
Before you get started using Mini Window, you first have to ensure that you are on Firefox 160 or later. To do that, go into the hamburger menu and open "Help and Report." Here, click on "About Firefox" and take note of the version shown in the dialog that opens up.
Next, you just have to start a normal browsing session with multiple tabs and follow any one of these three approaches to get started:
Add the Mini Window icon to the toolbar.
Right-click a tab and go into "Move Tab."
Right-click the page content and choose Move Section to "Mini Window."
For the toolbar method, right-click the toolbar and open "Customize Toolbar." Find the Mini Window icon in the list and drag it onto the toolbar, then hit "Done." After that, the feature is just one click away on any page.
If you have followed desktop Linux this year, you could not have missed Omarchy. And if you have followed Omarchy, you could not have missed DHH.
David Heinemeier Hansson, better known as DHH, created Ruby on Rails and co-owns 37signals, the company behind Basecamp and HEY. In 2025, he released Omarchy, an opinionated Arch Linux setup built around the Hyprland tiling window manager. It looked great and had a keen following. But it was still one more Arch-based setup.
Then AI moved into its core. With Omarchy Quattro, agents became a first-class part of the desktop, and Omarchy took off. It drew in people who had never touched Linux before. Its plugin marketplace crossed 500 plugins in its first week and now has thousands, and the Omacom Foundation has more than 20 million in pledges, including AI tokens from Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta.
That rise has not been quiet. Many long-time Linux users distrust AI-generated code, and the flood of vibe coded plugins has definitely raised real security worries.
Asahi Linux, the project that makes Linux run on Apple Silicon Macs, has a no-AI contributions policy and has just moved from MIT to GPL, citing AI-assisted code laundering. And DHH, never shy of a fight on Twitter, is a polarising figure in his own right.
So I sent him questions over email about all of it: the AI bet, the Asahi licence change, plugin security, the foundation money, his critics and what comes next. Here are his answers, lightly edited for typos.
Omarchy was a nice-looking tiling setup on Arch until AI was added to its core, and then it got extremely popular, even among non-Linux users. Why do you think that happened? What did Omarchy do differently that hundreds of other distros didn't?
The age of agents is changing everything. We clearly saw its potential with Omarchy Quattro, and it's no surprise to me that anyone who's interested in agents is therefore also interested in Omarchy. We've simply made the best of a wonderful opportunity that's been offered to Linux. Meanwhile, lots of other open source projects in this ecosystem have decided to take a very anti-AI stance, and their results are as you would expect.
"Lots of other open source projects in this ecosystem have decided to take a very anti-AI stance, and their results are as you would expect."
Ubuntu is carefully adding AI to its desktop. We have a couple of examples from China in the form of openKylin and openEuler. Other than those, I don't see any other major distros doing that. Why has no other major distro gone as far as you?
Ubuntu is built on top of GNOME, which is extremely hostile to the idea of agent development. So it's not a surprise to me that they're having a hard time integrating the best of AI into their distribution. The same goes for many other distributions that are deeply entwined with open source projects that are hostile to AI. It's difficult to fully embrace the age of agents when you're steeped in such thinking.
Omarchy chose Superwhisper for voice input. Ubuntu has an open source solution for the same. Sometimes it seems that your focus is less on open source and more on Linux.
I don't have the repulsion to commercial software that many in the old Linux world have. I love commercial options when they give us the best software. I've worked on commercial software my entire life. I am happy to integrate the best commercial offerings, whether it's Superwhisper or Spotify or Dropbox or anything else, into Omarchy. I'm creating a distribution that includes all the software that I personally want to use, and plenty of that software is commercial.
You've said that you respect Asahi but disagree with its no-AI policy, and you called for an agent-driven effort to finish M3 to M5 support. This month, Asahi moved from MIT to GPL, citing AI-assisted code laundering. Do you read that as a response to Omarchy?
Asahi changing their license may be a response to Omarchy, but it also doesn't matter. The Linux kernel is already licensed under the GPL, and we are in full compliance with those terms. We have a bunch of patches to the kernel that are available as open source. If Asahi is licensed in the same way, we will continue as we have all along and build on top of the best open source software. Isn't that the point of open source? That any project is free to incorporate open software as long as they abide by the license? That certainly is how we approach it within Omarchy. I don't see how anything changes at all.
Isn't that the point of open source? That any project is free to incorporate open software as long as they abide by the license?
Many Omarchy supporters seem angry with Asahi. But does the licence change affect Omarchy at all? Omarchy can continue its Mac support work with the MIT-licensed Asahi code it already has.
I don't think there's any reason to be angry with Asahi, but it's fair to be disappointed that our advances can't be upstreamed such that we could get a single body of work that enables Linux to run well on Macs. But personally, I can't get too excited about it either, because whatever they choose to do, it doesn't really have any bearing on our mission. We will simply build on top of the best open source solutions that are already out there and then fill in the gaps.
If Asahi didn't have a "no AI contributions" policy, would Omarchy have contributed back the work it has done to bring Omarchy to Apple M hardware?
Of course.
Omarchy's plugin market passed 500 plugins in its first week, and it now has thousands. Many of these are vibe coded by hobbyists, unlike AI-assisted development by experienced programmers, and this worries a lot of people. What stands between a malicious plugin and an Omarchy user today? And what do you say to people who think Omarchy is unsafe because it's "vibe coded" and not properly tested for security issues?
The plugin marketplace is agentically reviewed. There is surely more we can do to lock things down, but it's already far more secure than, say, something like the AUR. I would say that it's a feature, not a bug, that the majority of these plugins have been created by AI, as AI is incredibly good at sticking to established conventions. And it's also very good at reviewing incoming code for security vulnerabilities.
It's a feature, not a bug, that the majority of these plugins have been created by AI.
The Omacom Foundation has about $18.5 million in pledges, including AI tokens from Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta, to spend over three years. How do you plan to spend it? If the donations run out, is there a plan to make money in some way? How would you keep Omarchy going?
We have already hired four full-time employees. We have started the AIR project to sponsor artists. We are paying for infrastructure, and we are supporting community members with hardware and tokens to pursue integration projects like Omarchy M and Omarchy Dragon. There will be a lot more to come, including contests and other forms of community engagement. We will find a way to spend all the money. And when it's gone, we will either have succeeded so well that it'll be easy to raise more, or the world has changed to such an extent that Omarchy is no longer necessary. Both of these outcomes are just fine with me.
DHH interacting with people during Omarchy event in China
Much of the opposition to Omarchy is about two things: AI, and you. What would you tell a Linux user who likes Omarchy but not its creator?
I'm not here to persuade any haters. I'm simply offering the gift of Omarchy to anyone who wants it. And if someone can't accept it because they have a problem with me, their loss. Thankfully that's a tiny but vocal minority in the existing Linux community. The ambition for Omarchy is much, much larger than just converting people over from other Linux distributions. In fact, I don't really spend much if any time thinking about that. The way to make Linux win is by converting Windows and macOS users.
The way to make Linux win is by converting Windows and macOS users.
Fragmentation is often blamed for holding desktop Linux back, and you've added another distribution, even if it does things differently. What do you make of the "there are way too many distros already" argument?
There are very few Linux distributions that matter in any grand scheme of things. I don't think fragmentation is a problem at all. What's a problem is having such a tiny user base as Linux on the desktop has had for decades. Omarchy is on a mission to make a major dent in that by converting large numbers of Windows and macOS users to a distribution that is not only materially different from what they already have, but is the right answer for the age of agents. That turns out to be a pretty unique proposition in the world of Linux at the moment.
We all know how vocal and passionate you are about Omarchy on Twitter. Do you still develop new features of Omarchy, or is it completely handled by the team you have formed? What role do you play on the development side?
Designing features and defining the user experience of Omarchy is the main thing I spend my time on. We have a wonderful community helping with a thousand different aspects of what it takes to run a successful distribution, but defining that key experience is still the main work that I do.
Elon Musk says AI will soon skip code and generate binaries directly. You built Rails around programmer happiness. Do high-level languages matter when the programmer is an AI?
They clearly don't matter in the same way they did when we were writing everything by hand. I think the future of programming is still up in the air, though. But I also think it is very worth listening to what someone who has been as correct as Elon Musk has been on a wide variety of topics thinks about this future. I am certainly spending a lot more of my time developing in lower-level languages I would never have engaged with prior to the age of agents.
Servers, phones, hardware or something else entirely: what's one plan for Omarchy that nobody outside the core team knows about yet?
First, we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.
What would you like to tell It's FOSS readers, many of whom are long-time Linux users wary of AI?
Take another look with fresh eyes and an open mind. AI is the most amazing thing we've made computers do. Don't miss out because of your priors, because of politics, because of what the technology looked like a year ago.
Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution equipped with its own desktop environment and a set of XApp tools that make it a truly unique package that caters to both beginners and power users alike.
For years it followed a familiar rhythm of new releases roughly every six months, with girls' names being used in alphabetical order from Ada in 2006 to Zena in 22.3 for naming individual releases.
That flow has since shifted as the developers settle on a longer development cycle, which sees them move to one major release per year with no point releases in between.
Version numbering and naming also change with this, as the number now points to the year ahead, taking users from 27 to 28 to 29, and boys' names take over from the girls' names.
Linux Mint 27 "Adrien" is the first release under this new strategy. It is planned for Christmas, builds on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and comes with a five-year support period.
So, with this feature rundown, we are following the monthly news posts since January and are sticking to changes that are new in Linux Mint 27.
🚧
Everything below is a preview of the anticipated changes. These can still shift before the stable release.
1. Wayland is Here
Cinnamon's Wayland session is no longer experimental. Both X11 and Wayland are fully supported in the next Cinnamon release, with Wayland nearly level with X11. This makes the flagship experience of Linux Mint Wayland-ready, bringing it up to the level of other mainstream distros like Fedora and Ubuntu.
Much of the groundwork revolves around everyday interactions. Windows and menus map properly, focus stealing is prevented, and crashes across Cinnamon, Muffin, cinnamon-session, and Xwayland are fixed.
Multi-monitor setups and KVM switches are covered too. 🔥
Graphics get attention as well. Hardware acceleration is supported, including GBM over EGL for NVIDIA cards, while HiDPI scaling reaches cursors and Chromium-based apps such as Slack and VS Code.
The final gap in ensuring Wayland support was the screensaver.
The new one is rendered by the compositor and handled by Cinnamon itself in place of a separate cinnamon-screensaver process, and it works on both Wayland and X11. The old screensaver stays as a fallback for one release before it goes away.
2. Desktop Upgrades
Nemo Changes
The default file manager, Nemo, gets a preview pane that can be opened with F7 or from the status bar. It handles audio files, pictures, and videos and can show metadata details such as the capture date and the camera used.
Similarly, Interactive Search, the feature that kicks in when you open a folder and start typing, becomes a filtered view that narrows the list as you type, in place of jumping to the first match and leaving you to navigate through the rest.
Screenshot Tool
A dedicated screenshot tool arrives for Cinnamon. It can capture a window with or without its shadow, and it can capture all monitors or just one.
You can also crop a shot before copying or saving it, and the tool deals with shadows differently for windows that draw their own titlebars and windows that rely on the system's.
Library Redesign
The Library is how the XApp app Thingy appears on the desktop, and it gets a redesign that groups recent documents by type instead of by the application that opened them.
A sidebar holds predefined groups that you can show, hide, and reorder. You can also add custom groups based on file type and limit them to a single directory if you like. Single items can be removed, and the whole recent documents list can be cleared at once.
3. System and Installer Changes
A Common Installer
Linux Mint switches to the live installer that Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) already uses, replacing Ubiquity. The new installer handles OEM installs, BIOS and EFI systems, Secure Boot, and LVM and LUKS setups.
Hibernation Returns
After Ubuntu dropped it, hibernation has made a comeback in Linux Mint 27 through a new "Sleep Modes" page in the System Administration tool that makes it easy to set up again.
That page also adds two more options. Hybrid Sleep suspends the machine while also writing the session to disk, and Suspend-then-Hibernate starts out as a normal suspend before it hibernates once the battery reaches a critical level.
Kernel Management
This has moved out of the Update Manager and into the System Administration tool on both Mint and LMDE, and it is built around kernel series.
You track a series, choose how many older kernels to keep, and let a weekly cleanup remove the rest, or run a manual cleanup whenever you like, while a History page keeps a record of what happened.
Custom, OEM, and Real-Time are some of the kernel series' that can be marked as tracked, while untracked series are removed at the next cleanup round unless their kernels are exempted.
User Settings
Account settings also move into the System Administration tool, with it taking over the handling of users and their account details. That includes home directory encryption at account creation, webcam selfies with a mirror option, and HiDPI avatars.
4. Core App Additions
Superlight
Superlight is the new system monitor. Its graphs track CPU load, memory and swap use, GPU, network traffic, disk activity, temperatures, and fan speed, while a dedicated "Battery" page shows status and charge history.
An app page and a process list sit alongside them. Columns are configurable and sortable, and the choices are carried across sessions. The "Storage" page shows a usage breakdown and gives quick access to options like emptying the trash, clearing the cache, and accessing the file system.
Velocitty
The new default terminal for Linux Mint, called Velocitty, offers a tab overview in the style of Ghostty and Ptyxis, color palettes, and tabs that can be reordered, moved, and detached.
Paths can be shortened, and tab colors can flag root sessions, remote sessions, and running processes. Custom tabs can also be assigned a name, color, or command.
Xepub
If you prefer reading EPUB books, then you will love this one. Linux Mint 27 offers a dedicated app called Xepub that supports chapter navigation, search, bookmarks, and zoom.
You also get a choice of fonts, and it remembers where you stopped reading.
Selecting a word opens a menu that can be used to search the dictionary, Wikipedia, or a translator, and the search engine to be used is configurable.
Calendar and Clocks
Calendar is a new app from the Clockenstein project, and it connects to local calendars, Google Calendar, and CalDAV servers like Nextcloud. You can use it to create and edit events, and any sync errors on remote calendars are shown, with unreachable ones turning read-only.
Reminders can be dismissed or snoozed, and a separate daemon and notification agent deliver them while the app is not running, with the Cinnamon clock applet being compatible with those to keep events visible in the panel.
Clocks is the part that was still under development when we last heard about it. The September update previews it as an Android-inspired alarm app from the same project, with recurring alarms and custom sounds.
Unfold
Handling archives gets simpler with Unfold, a very portable archive manager that lets you view, create, and extract archives while using 7zip and 7zip-RAR to do the actual work behind the scenes.
Encrypted and password-protected archives are supported as well, and the app is released under GPLv3+.
5. Misc Changes
Before we wrap up, here are a few smaller changes that could be of interest to you:
WPA3 and OWE support in Cinnamon.
Fingerprint login in Slick Greeter without needing to press Enter.
A new "Sensors" page in System Reports with fan speeds and temperatures that refresh automatically.
A Mint-Y refresh with better dark colors and contrast, plus rounded frames, scrolled areas, treeviews, and listviews.
Can't Wait to Get Started?
Well, you will have to wait, oops. Linux Mint 27 is supposed to drop sometime around December 24 on Christmas Eve and will be offered in three officially supported variants:
Cinnamon (the flagship ⭐)
MATE
Xfce
Seeing that this article has gone live before the release is available, the download portal linked above only features the earlier releases of Linux Mint. Though, if you have the skills, you could build the release from source.
Asahi Linux is the reason you can run Linux on an Apple Silicon Mac today. For years, the project put most of its own code under the MIT license so that anyone, including the BSDs, could reuse it as needed.
That is changing because Asahi Linux is tired of code laundering. They have announced that Asahi is moving all of its repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward, all Asahi Linux code will be under strong copyleft licenses only.
This is because people were taking in-development code straight out of their personal forks, publishing it without credit, or rewriting it with AI to hide its origin for "replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon."
What is code laundering?
Code laundering (also called license laundering) is the practice of taking someone else's code and passing it through a process that hides where it came from, so you can use it without honoring the original license or crediting the author.
Before AI, this usually meant manually rewriting code line by line, renaming variables and stuff, and shuffling functions around until it no longer looked like the original.
LLMs made it much more easy and cheaper of course.
📋
The MIT license only asks you to keep the original copyright notice. It doesn't require you to share your changes or keep your version open. That's what makes it popular, and it's also what made things problematic for Asahi here.
Learning from history
The move has come after the Asahi team was made aware "some time ago" of multiple attempts to exploit its permissive licensing to hijack its work.
In the most extreme cases, feature code that was still under development was lifted from developers' personal forks before it was even publicly released. The report points out that the MIT license "explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors."
Asahi didn't name anyone in the report. It also didn't spell out how existing contributions will be relicensed or whether every past contributor agreed to it.
Asahi draws parallels with WINE's situation two decades ago. WINE, the compatibility layer that lets you run Windows apps on Linux, was originally MIT-licensed too. But in the late 90s and early 2000s, companies took the code, built proprietary forks on top of it, and sold them commercially. So, in 2002, the WINE team relicensed to the LGPL to discourage proprietary forks and push companies to contribute upstream.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it
Asahi has been upset lately
Asahi didn't name anyone so we are left with guesswork on who they are targeting with this license move.
The first is Aurora Silicon and its Vulkan driver, Borealis. Borealis is a fork of Asahi's HoneyKrisp, the Vulkan driver for Apple GPUs. Aurora Silicon submitted a pull request to register its own Vulkan driver ID with Khronos (VK_DRIVER_ID_AURORA_BOREALIS), says the driver runs on M1 to M5 and the A18 Pro, and keeps it in its own Mesa fork rather than upstream.
The second is Gravity Linux, a Fedora-based distro for Apple Silicon. It was forked from Asahi over the disagreement about LLM use.
To be fair to Gravity, it is open source, it isn't selling anything, and it credits its AI use openly. It even says it plans to sunset the distro once its driver work lands upstream.
It isn't the kind of bad actor the progress report describes. But it does represent the "permissive fork that embraces AI" approach that Asahi has consistently pushed back against.
📋
For clarification, Asahi's progress report does not mention Aurora Silicon or Gravity Linux by name. I have provided their conflict with Asahi as context.
Why this license change matters
As far as I can tell, this is the first time a major open source project has moved to copyleft specifically because of AI-assisted code laundering. Projects have relicensed before, but usually to stop cloud providers from reselling their work as a service. This one is specifically about AI.
I wouldn't be surprised if more hardware enablement and reverse-engineering projects follow. Making the first changes takes a lot of time and effort but they are easier to "rewrite" once someone has done the hard part.
Will the GPL actually help?
If the problem is people who already ignore the MIT license, why would they respect the GPL? After all, GPL cannot stop a determined bad actor. Nothing does, actually.
Stripping attribution from MIT code already breaks the MIT license, since keeping the copyright notice is its one real condition.
What the GPL changes is the commercial benefit. Under MIT, someone can take Asahi's code, close it up, and sell a product, and that's perfectly legal as long as the notice stays in.
Under the GPL, anyone who distributes a modified version has to release the source under the same license. You can't legally build a closed, paid Apple Silicon distro on top of GPL code. And if a product's source has to be public, the copying is easier to spot.
Not everyone is happy
The move has drawn criticism, particularly from the BSD side, which was one of the main reasons Asahi chose MIT in the first place. OpenBSD's Apple Silicon support relies on Asahi's m1n1 bootloader.
"Sad to see Asahi out there burning bridges for no reason.. relicensing m1n1 and drivers under GPL2-or-later, seemingly without the consent of all prior contributors, under the guise of "defending against AI bad actors", seems entirely disingenuous and misguided."
Sad to see Asahi out there burning bridges for no reason.. relicensing m1n1 and drivers under GPL2-or-later, seemingly without the consent of all prior contributors, under the guise of "defending against AI bad actors", seems entirely disingenuous and misguided.
