Back in April, Jon Seager, Canonical's VP of Engineering, spoke with The Pragmatic Engineer (paywalled), telling them that Ubuntu inside Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is growing faster than native Ubuntu desktop installs. He expects WSL to pull ahead within months.
Jon was speaking on the topic of how AI is reshaping Ubuntu when the topic of WSL came up, where he pointed out that:
In a year, the growth in our WSL numbers is significantly higher than the growth in Desktop usage numbers. WSL enables Windows users to “install” Ubuntu for use within their Windows environment.
Once installed, users interact with Ubuntu through the Terminal app, and what you’re running literally is Ubuntu. Your home directory is mounted with Ubuntu and you can pull windows out of this terminal to your desktop; as in actual windows as on-screen windows.
I expect to see more Ubuntu WSL users than “native” Ubuntu users over the coming months. This is especially true for anyone doing ML or AI work. We’re already hearing from lots of devs who have no choice but to get a Windows machine from their employer, but then find themselves needing to do AI or ML work. With WSL, this is a lot simpler.
Canonical doesn't seem bothered
Ubuntu Pro, Canonical's paid security and support subscription, already covers WSL instances the same way it covers native installs. Subscribers get to take advantage of up to 15 years of CVE patching, toolchain coverage for Python, Go, and Rust, and fleet management.
Simply speaking, a WSL user on Ubuntu Pro and a data center running Ubuntu Server are the same kind of customer to Canonical; the company gets paid either way.
And, as you saw earlier, Jon also points to why demand keeps climbing. Plenty of developers don't get a say in their work laptop, and once AI or ML work lands on their plate, WSL becomes the easiest way to get a working Linux environment without a fight over IT policy.
Craig Loewen, WSL's product manager at Microsoft, called the Ubuntu Pro arrangement a "fantastic partnership" when it launched, further stating that:
This work will benefit enterprise developers who use WSL to build production Linux solutions.
What does it mean for native Linux?
This is where it gets tricky if you are rooting for the Linux desktop specifically. If WSL quietly satisfies the demand that would otherwise push developers toward dual-booting or switching entirely, does that take pressure off IT departments and hardware vendors to ever approve native Linux at all?
Canonical isn't asking that question, but its own VP describing the shift like a win makes the case for native Linux adoption weaker. Running Ubuntu on bare metal will still be better than WSL for anyone who wants full hardware control, maximum performance, and a Linux-first setup.
But if the fastest-growing way to use Ubuntu is inside a Big Tech operating system, then that's something worth thinking about.
Whether you're a developer, system administrator, or simply someone who spends a lot of time in the terminal, juggling multiple terminal sessions can be messy and frustrating.
A terminal multiplexer helps you keep everything organized, letting you manage several sessions from a single interface while making your workflow much more efficient.
While tmux and GNU Screen are the names most Linux users are familiar with, there are many more similar terminal multiplexer tools available. As someone who like to explore new tools, I spent some time and came up with this list for you.
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Many terminal emulators let you split your screen into panes, but splitting a screen isn't the same as multiplexing it. For this list, I am focusing on tools that offer real session value beyond arranging windows.
Zellij
Zellij describes itself as a terminal workspace rather than just a multiplexer, with an emphasis on delivering a polished experience from the moment you launch it.
It aims to provide sensible defaults while still leaving plenty of room for customization.
Zellij
One of the things that sets Zellij apart is its focus on usability. Built-in layouts, a plugin system, and collaborative sessions are all part of the experience, but the project's philosophy is that you shouldn't have to trade simplicity for advanced functionality.
This makes it approachable for newcomers while still offering enough flexibility for users who want to tailor their workspace.
While this is not a ranking list, Zellij is the first one on this list because I have used it on a daily basis for the past several months.
TUIOS
While most terminal multiplexers focus on helping you manage terminal sessions, TUIOS takes that idea a step further by presenting itself as a terminal window manager.
TUIOS tries to bring concepts you'd expect from a tiling window manager, such as workspaces, automatic tiling, and window management, into your existing terminal.
TUIOS
The workflow is centered around a modal interface inspired by Vim, letting you switch between managing windows and interacting with terminal applications.
Alongside features like a command palette and workspace organization, TUIOS also supports automation through tape files, making it suitable for users who want to build repeatable terminal workflows instead of just juggling multiple shells.
Wezterm
You probably know WezTerm as a feature-rich terminal emulator. But there's more to it than meets the eye.
WezTerm includes a built-in multiplexer, allowing you to create and manage persistent sessions without relying on a separate tool.
Wezterm as a Terminal Multiplexer
It integrates multiplexing directly into the terminal and supports local domains. While it lets you connect to remote domains over SSH and other tmux like features, this requires you to spend some time configuring.
Kitty + Abduco
If you're already using Kitty as your terminal emulator, you don't necessarily have to switch to a traditional multiplexer. Pairing it with abduco gives you a lightweight way to keep terminal sessions running in the background while letting Kitty handle everything on the frontend.
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Kitty with Abduco
It's a simple combination that sticks to the Unix philosophy of using small tools that do one job well.
The primary job of abduco is to detach and reattach terminal sessions, leaving the rest to your terminal emulator.
Kitty complements this nicely with features like tabs, splits, and a polished interface, giving you a workflow that feels familiar while still providing session persistence.
tmate
Rather than reinventing the multiplexer experience, tmate builds on tmux and adds secure session sharing, making it easy to collaborate, troubleshoot problems, or provide remote assistance without asking someone to install extra software.
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Tmate
The biggest addition is the ability to generate a connection string that others can use to join your session.
By default, these shared sessions are relayed through tmate's public servers, although you can host your own relay if you prefer to keep everything under your control. If you never need to share your terminal, however, plain tmux is likely the better fit.
Boo
At first glance, boo might look like just another GNU Screen alternative. In reality, it's a fairly different take on terminal multiplexing.
Built on Ghostty's terminal emulation library, boo keeps track of the actual terminal state, allowing it to recreate a session exactly as you left it, even after you've detached and reattached.
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Boo
The project also leans into automation. Besides keeping sessions alive, it includes commands that let scripts and AI agents inspect or interact with detached sessions without needing a live terminal connection.
Okena
Okena combines terminals, tabs, panes, and projects into a single interface, with a strong focus on helping you pick up exactly where you left off.
Close the application, reopen it later, and your workspace is restored much like you never left.
Okena
That persistence model is what makes Okena different. Unlike tmux or GNU Screen, it doesn't keep sessions running in the background after the application closes, nor is it designed for detached SSH workflows or remote session management.
Instead, the emphasis is on restoring your local workspace, making it feel more like a modern development environment than a server-backed multiplexer.
Seance
Seance, built with GTK4 and libadwaita, takes a desktop-first approach to terminal session management. It feel more like a modern Linux application than a traditional keyboard-driven multiplexer.
It offers a clean interface with configurable key bindings, workspace management, and session persistence across restarts, so you can reopen the application and continue where you left off.
However, it isn't designed around detached server sessions or remote SSH workflows. Instead, it focuses on providing a polished experience for managing terminal workspaces on your local Linux desktop.
Wrapping Up
As you can see, there's no shortage of ways to organize your terminal workflow. Some of these tools have been around for decades, while others are reimagining what a terminal workspace can look like. The thing is that there's no single "right" choice. It all comes down to how you work.
Whichever you choose, learning to use a terminal multiplexer is one of those skills that pays off over time. Once it becomes part of your workflow, your muscle memory, there is no going back to normal terminal sessions.
The newest point release for Linux is here a few months after the last one, and the time in-between was not spent idly. Scheduler work that took over a year finally came together, several pieces of hardware got proper support, and a series of 2023 MacBooks can finally boot Linux.
During all this, Linus Torvalds' transition from treating AI as noise for years to slowly warming up to it has been something of a wildcard entry.
Anyhow, let's see what this point release has to offer.
What's new in this release?
AMD's platform driver changes lean heavily on Zen 6 prep. The Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI) driver adds v3 ranking table support for dynamic core rankings, and the power management controller driver adds support for Family 1Ah Model 80H SoCs (a Zen 6-focused change, basically).
What Ubuntu's OEM kernel had been carrying out of tree is now in. The long-awaited AMD ISP4 driver completes webcam support for the HP ZBook Ultra G1a and other upcoming Ryzen laptops.
For Intel, most of this round's EDAC work targets next-gen Xeon Diamond Rapids chips, adding sub-memory channel awareness and Rank Retry Logic to preserve data integrity during memory errors. Nova Lake H and Panther Lake H gain in-band ECC error reporting through the IGEN6 driver.
Linux 7.2 also continues clearing out old i486 chunks that started disappearing in 7.1 and makes TSC and CX8 support unconditional on x86. TDX modules can now update at runtime, similar to CPU microcode, so security fixes no longer force a full reboot on TDX-enabled systems.
Another highlight of this kernel release has been Cache Aware Scheduling, which was merged after more than a year of work, landing behind the CONFIG_SCHED_CACHE option.
Without cache awareness, the scheduler can end up scattering related tasks across zones on chips with multiple last-level caches (LLCs). This feature groups those tasks onto cores within the same LLC instead.
Laptop support also sees some improvements that include new ASUS ROG Strix G16 2025, Zephyrus G14 2023/2025, and TUF Gaming F16 support. Lenovo laptops gain more configurable attributes along with WMI battery charge limiting, and Microsoft's Surface Pro 12-inch gets platform driver support.
A few smaller changes round things out:
Nouveau adds support for the NVIDIA GA100 compute accelerator via GSP.
Btrfs large folio support left experimental status and is now on by default, and huge folios up to 2M arrive as a new experimental option.
Networking brings more Wi-Fi Aware and WiFi 8/UHR groundwork, plus 10Gbit and EEE support in the Realtek R8152 driver.
Apple M3 MacBooks can boot the mainline kernel for the first time, though only to a serial console so far. The Asahi Linux devs worked hard to deliver this.
A new USB4STREAM protocol that lets two machines move data directly over a USB4 or Thunderbolt cable.
Well, this last week of the release was - once again - bigger than I would have wished for, but hey, with the whole "new normal" thing, if I delayed releases for that reason we'd probably never have a release at all.
There are a number of fairly late reverts - the drm scheduling reverts stand out, but there's a few other ones in here too. It may not be pretty, but it's the correct way to deal with "oh, that code wasn't ready and caused problems". People will be trying that again later.
Is it for you?
It's good to get excited about a new kernel release, but compiling the kernel or installing a new one is usually considered for intermediate to expert levels of skill. If this release fills some gap you faced with earlier kernels, then you should definitely go for it.
Proton has launched AI Paper Trail, a free tool that shows people what their AI chatbot conversations reveal about them. It runs on Lumo (partner link), the company's privacy-focused AI assistant, and works by digging through exported ChatGPT or Claude conversation history.
Once you upload your content, the tool starts building a personal report around four categories. There's a "Privacy Type," a personality label based on how someone approaches their own data. Then comes an "AI Exposure Score," a number built from how many personal data points got pulled out of the conversations and how revealing they are.
The report also breaks down what the AI actually knows about you, covering identity, habits, relationships, and interests. On top of that, it puts a monetary figure on what this information could be worth to an AI provider.
And none of the uploaded data sticks around on Proton's server; the company says that it gets deleted right after analysis, and the resulting report stays visible only to the person who generated it.
The reasoning behind AI Paper Trail comes down to how casually people treat individual AI prompts. A single question about travel plans or a work email draft might seem harmless on its own.
But stack up months or years of conversations covering someone's job, relationships, health concerns, and finances, and a surprisingly complete picture starts to form.
Eamonn Maguire, Director of Engineering at Proton, notes that:
People understand that AI collects data, but most don't realize how revealing their conversation history becomes over time. AI Paper Trail makes that invisible profile visible.
We want people to understand what they're sharing with AI systems so they can make informed decisions about the tools they use.
What they have done here is hit two targets with one shot, offering people a privacy-focused tool that pushes them toward more conscious decisions when interacting with AI chatbots, while steering them straight into Lumo in the process.
This is a superb way to market a chatbot that focuses on privacy instead of mining every inch of your soul, erm, personal data.
It works well
I wanted to see for myself how the tool worked, so I first ChatGPT some information about how I approach certain subjects, saved it into memory, and then got back into Proton's AI Paper Trail to see what it could make of it.
The tool first told me to export my data from ChatGPT via the "Data controls" section in the Settings menu. I had to re-verify my ChatGPT session by giving it a one-time password and got the export started, but the files never showed up on time for me to use.
Instead, I asked it to generate me a dummy one taking in data from memory. 😆
When that was done, I uploaded the dummy export, and Lumo got to work behind the scenes all while promising not to store any of it on its servers.
A minute or so later, my report was ready. It gave me a personality-style rundown, labeling me a "Technical tester exploring AI profiling and ethics," complete with a fake handle and a summary pegging me as someone running structured experiments on AI behavior, focused on data extraction limits and ethics.
My AI Exposure Score came out to 21 out of 100, along with a "Hard to read" privacy type. Interests ended up being my biggest giveaway on the breakdown, while everything else landed at medium to minimal.
The part that actually got me was the "Most revealing" note (first picture above, right-hand side). It noticed I'd asked for a structured personality profile, tried to get it to infer my identity from barely anything, and even caught me trying to force it to remember something via a direct command.
Since I'd gotten ChatGPT to build that dummy file straight from its own memory of me rather than pulling random filler, the report had real clues to chew on, and it still managed to call out the testing motif buried in there.
Scrolling further down, there's a "What we identified" section that splits everything into categories like technical proficiency, ethical and philosophical inquiry, and privacy awareness, each with its own reasoning attached.
At the end, it dropped a few privacy tips and nudged me toward trying Lumo (partner link, hehe). There's also a shareable card option if you want to showcase your exposure score for some validation or gloating.
The project now has a name for what it has been creating, the "Workspace Environment." It ties together four new in-house developed components as pieces of a five-layer architecture, presenting a very different desktop experience for Nitrux than we are used to.
Uri Herrera, Nitrux's founder, describes it as filling a gap, where a window manager gives you almost nothing beyond window placement and a full desktop environment like GNOME or Plasma bundles everything into one tightly coupled process tree.
The Workspace Environment sits in between as a cohesive shell built from independent, single-purpose components that don't share a process lifecycle with the compositor or with each other.
The four components
Valenz and Marina.
Valenz is the new workspace bar, handling media controls, tray, notifications, and indicators for network, Bluetooth, battery, and power profile, plus weather, a calendar view, and system resource widgets.
Whereas Marina is the new dock that tracks and groups open windows across workspaces on Hyprland while handling pinning, auto-hide, and horizontal scrolling. It also adds unread message badges for pinned apps that expose a launcher count.
Workspace Settings and Desklock.
Workspace Settings replaces KDE System Settings entirely, covering user accounts, locale, networking, and MauiKit configuration without any Plasma dependency.
Desklock completes the set as a native QML lock screen built on the QMLGreet codebase, with PAM authentication, per-output lock surfaces, and CPU, memory, and network monitors alongside MPRIS playback controls.
All four are QML-based and built with MauiKit, though only Valenz and Marina share LayerShell-Qt, so the stack still ends up with one visual language instead of stitched together toolkits.
Does it make sense?
The switches aren't just cosmetic, and alternatives were considered.
Uri writes that Waybar and SwayNC leaned on GTK and CSS styling, which clashed with the QML-first approach he had already committed to with QMLGreet.
Crystal Dock had a similar limitation, built on legacy Qt Widgets instead of QML, and its broad feature set worked against Nitrux's preference for narrowly focused tools. Hyprlock got replaced too, over a visual mismatch with MauiKit and a bug that left it in a bad state after suspend or hibernation.
The pattern across all three swaps is consistency. Uri picked first-party QML tools over external options like Quickshell specifically to avoid depending on a construction framework he doesn't control.
There's a maintenance aspect associated with the lock screen choice too. In Uri's words:
Because Desklock derives directly from the QMLGreet codebase, the two components share the same secure lifecycle and visual identity. This shared foundation minimizes maintenance overhead while strictly enforcing our unified architectural philosophy.
It provides a native QML session locker that executes its single responsibility perfectly, completing the visual and functional ecosystem of the Workspace Environment.
You'll have to wait
Nitrux Workspace Environment marks the end of Maui Shell, the project's old convergent shell concept. Nitrux has already archived its GitHub repository and is looking forward to their next developmental milestone.
One catch worth knowing before you go looking for these tools is that Valenz and Marina both list Nitrux 7.0.0 as a requirement, and the current stable release is still 6.1.0. So you will have to wait.
Whether the wait is worth it will depend on how these components hold up once regular users actually get their hands on them.
There's something satisfying about watching a Linux project everyone assumed had quietly died come back with a fresh commit. It happens more often than people expect, and it's usually worth celebrating when it does.
One of those revivals has been the return of LightDM, the display manager Canonical built more than a decade ago.
LightDM is alive
Released last week is LightDM 1.33.0, which rolls out a bunch of improvements as well as introduces the two new maintainers who are taking over. The last release, 1.32.0, came out way back in July 2022, marking a four-year gap in which the project barely went anywhere.
You see, LightDM's original maintainer, Robert Ancell, had already called the project "essentially unmaintained," and questions about its future eventually popped up on various forums over the years.
Luckily, two people willing to keep the project going stepped up, making it a community-maintained affair rather than a Canonical-maintained one.
Joshua Peisach and Neal Gompa are both known for their work across a string of open source projects. Joshua leads Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix, and Neal doesn't really need an introduction; he has spent years contributing to Fedora, openSUSE, and CentOS.
As for what 1.33.0 actually delivers, the maintainers say its purpose is mainly to tag the fixes that piled up since 1.32.0 and clear out pull requests that had been sitting for years.
There are no breaking changes and no dependency changes, so existing LightDM setups should upgrade without any surprises. The biggest addition worth flagging is Qt6 support for the client library, though that doesn't mean Qt5 is going anywhere. Greeters built on the older toolkit will keep working just fine.
There's a long list of smaller fixes too. VNC server handling has been patched, the flood of log errors from missing PAM modules is gone, and a batch of multiseat and FreeBSD-specific bugs got cleared out.
Help is needed
If you didn't know, LightDM is a lightweight, cross-desktop display manager. It's the software behind your login screen, the one that authenticates you and hands things off to your desktop session once you're in.
Canonical built LightDM to replace GDM, and it debuted back in Ubuntu 11.10 as the login screen behind Unity. Ubuntu itself moved back to GDM in 2017 when it dropped Unity for GNOME Shell, but LightDM never really went away.
Linux Mint adopted it that same year and pairs it with its own slick-greeter, and elementary OS runs it through Pantheon Greeter. Several Ubuntu flavors and Fedora spins still depend on it as well.
If you think you can help LightDM evolve into something more, then know that Joshua and Neal are looking for new contributors to join in. You can reach them directly over Matrix.
They also point out that signing the Canonical CLA is no longer required.
Though I have something more to add here.
Don't unleash your army of clankers (I believe the formal term is 'AI agents') on this project; it's already happening to many open source projects lately, and this one has just been revived. It doesn't need to be inundated with hallucinations and pointless fixes.
The maintainers also request that anyone opening a pull request for a bug fix show a way to reproduce the problem first.
Linux Mint is getting automatic old kernel cleanup in the next release, a feature Fedora has handled through DNF's installonly_limit for years. And I did not even know that Mint doesn't do it.
The Document Foundation has put up a write-up (part 1 for now) of how the Austrian Military migrated 16,000 PCs from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. The part worth noting is that ~8,000 users installed it on their own before it was mandated. Now that's a pleasant surprise.
CachyOS released their August update, and the two things that stand out are Shelly v3 and the Server Edition groundwork. Running a cutting edge distro on a server? Old school sysadmins will shiver at that thought.
Proxmox VE now officially runs on ARM64, with the same codebase, release cycle, and support window as the x86-64 build. NVIDIA Grace and Vera systems are fully validated, and other UEFI-based ARMv9-A hardware gets best-effort support.
An open source project called Xodus is working through the hardest parts of bringing Xbox Game Pass to Linux. They have already figured out Xbox authentication and game downloads.
KGamma is getting a Wayland replacement that works with Night Color, supports independent per-monitor values, and applies settings on the first frame.
Illinois signed the Children's Online Social Media Safety Act, which requires device makers and OS providers to collect a child's age bracket at setup and expose it via an API for apps to query.
There are a few more AI-related stories that we covered this week. But I am not going to include all of them here. They get covered in the Local AI Weekly newsletter, and you can also read them if you follow the feed. I'll try to keep the AI buzz to the necessary minimum in FOSS Weekly.
Rebooting after a kernel update is frustrating and results in downtime. Critical infrastructure should not suffer from reboots. TuxCare allows you to patch Linux kernels live. Works with more than 60 distros.
I had a good chat with Bianca Lewis, OpenSearch's executive director, talking about how OpenSearch has spent the past few years trying to shed the "Elasticsearch fork" label.
🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings
A beginner's guide to installing software from source on Linux. It covers clone, configure, make, where to install things so cleanup isn't painful, and how to fix the missing compiler errors you'll almost definitely hit the first time.
Six backup tools for different kinds of Linux users. The highlights include Déjà Dup for GNOME desktop with zero setup, Kopia if you want an open source GUI, Restic and BorgBackup for terminal-native control.
If you regularly deal with PDF, try a tool like PDF Arranger that allows you to split, merge, rearrange PDF docs.
This corner may still have some local AI stuff for now. A practical setup guide for running Hermes agent on a Raspberry Pi as an always-on backend while controlling it from a laptop using Hermes Desktop's remote gateway feature.
🎓 Linux Foundation certification offer
Linux is turning 35 this month. The Linux Foundation, the official organization behind the Linux kernel project, has a catalog of industry-oriented training and certifications.
And they are offering 35% off on all of it, including the instructor-led classes that contain very technical topics like performance tuning. Popular certifications like LFCS and CKDA
Desktop Linux is mostly neglected by the industry but loved by the community. For the past 14 years, It's FOSS has been helping people use Linux on their personal computers. And we are now facing the existential threat from AI models stealing our content.
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 an ad-free reading experience with the satisfaction of helping the desktop Linux community. And there are also free Linux ebooks.
Ubuntu's Tiling Assistant has an experimental layout editor, which allows you to create tiles and assign windows to those tiles. First open the Extensions app and go into the settings for "Tiling Assistant."
Here, click on the "i" button and go into "Advanced..." and enable "Advanced/Experimental Settings." Now, inside the new "Layouts" page, you will find multiple layout entries without keybinds assigned.
Click on the "Disabled" box and enter a keybind, and use the downward arrow nearby to fine-tune the layout.
Once these are set, whenever you press any one of those shortcuts, any open windows can be opened in that layout for you. You can read how it works in the official documentation.
Those pesky clankers sure do know how to trick us. 🤖
🗓️ Tech Trivia: On August 5, 1858, Cyrus West Field succeeded on his fifth try at laying a telegraph cable across the Atlantic. Queen Victoria and President Buchanan traded congratulatory messages soon after. Though the celebration was short-lived, as the cable died within a month.
🧑🤝🧑 From the Community: Pro FOSSer Xander is asking other FOSSers what they like about Linux; do you have anything to add?
