Things Are Quietly Changing at Bitwarden, and People Are Worried

For a lot of people, Bitwarden became the go-to password manager after the LastPass fiasco. Free, open source, and trustworthy, it has gained a reputation by offering a free tier, keeping the code open, and not pulling the rug.

But that comes at a cost; any hit to its image matters a lot when we are talking about software that holds extremely sensitive information.

So when things start looking a little off, people pay attention. And over the past few months, a few things have looked a little off.

Some things changed at the top

The first change worth noting happened in February. Bitwarden's longtime CEO, Michael Crandell, stepped back to an advisory role. The company said nothing about it publicly, and one would have to check his LinkedIn profile to find out.

The new CEO is Michael Sullivan, who was previously CEO of Acquia and, before that, InsightSoftware. What got people worried was his experience of working across "all facets of mergers and acquisitions," with named private equity firms, including Hg, Vista Equity Partners, and TA Associates.

That is a very particular background for someone to be stepping into a head honcho role at a password manager company. Bitwarden's CFO also changed, where Stephen Morrison left in April and Michael Shenkman, who previously ran InVision, came in as his replacement.

None of these major executive changes were officially announced.

Quiet changes

The term "Always free" has been restored (left), but it was missing for quite some time (right).

I referred to the Wayback Machine and found that the term "Always free" had been on Bitwarden Personal's product page for a long time, sitting inside the plan comparison table.

It disappeared sometime in mid-April and was only restored sometime after May 14.

According to a company employee who posted on the r/Bitwarden subreddit, all of that was supposedly due to an oversight by the Bitwarden marketing team.

Then there's the other issue of values being quietly changed. Bitwarden has used the GRIT acronym to describe its company culture for years, standing for Gratitude, Responsibility, Inclusion, and Transparency.

I again checked the Wayback Machine, and the values were still intact as of March 14, 2026. At some point after that, they were quietly changed. GRIT now stands for Gratitude, Responsibility, Innovation, and Trust.

The 2022 blog post Crandell wrote laying out the original GRIT values was edited to reflect the new ones. Except the editing stopped halfway. The explanatory paragraph further down in the same post still describes Inclusion and Transparency as the values.

📋

Props to ByteHaven for spotting this.

Bitwarden's stance

Sullivan published a blog recently, laying out his first 100 days at Bitwarden and also hashing some things out.

The free tier is not going anywhere. He ruled out a trial model or bait-and-switch and said that the open source foundation and the ability to audit the code, self-host, and verify are what make Bitwarden different from everything else in the space.

He also acknowledged that changes are coming, but those would be explained properly.

Should you be worried?

The post referenced above is the most direct on-record statement Bitwarden has about the free tier. But a pattern of ambiguity has already been established.

For such a sensitive piece of software, unannounced leadership changes and a values rewrite are the kind of thing that should make you nervous. But unless Bitwarden does something drastic like axing the free tier or pulling a Cal.com, there is not much to act on just yet.

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Suggested Read 📖: Bitwarden vs. Proton Pass

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Wow! Microsoft Now Has a Fedora-based Linux Distro

At the Open Source Summit this week, Microsoft announced a range of open source-focused updates, ranging from new Linux distro releases to agentic AI tooling.

Brendan Burns, co-founder of Kubernetes and Corporate VP for Azure OSS and Cloud Native at Microsoft, delivered a keynote on their technological shift from cloud native to what the company is calling the "AI native era."

The announcement covered quite a bit of ground, so here's a breakdown.

What was announced?

The Linux part of the announcement has two updates. Azure Linux 4.0 is coming to Azure Virtual Machines as a public preview, though it is still in active development and no downloads are available yet. Microsoft has a sign-up form open for early access.

Azure Container Linux is now generally available, with a full rollout planned during Microsoft Build on June 2. It is an immutable, container-optimized OS, which by design means no package manager and a read-only system image.

This is aimed at teams handling regulated or security-sensitive deployments, with the intent to keep the attack surface relatively limited while Microsoft maintains the supply chain end to end.

For agentic AI, Microsoft is pushing several building blocks for what it calls an open agentic stack. The Microsoft Agent Framework is an open source SDK and runtime for multi-agent systems, consolidating earlier work from Semantic Kernel and AutoGen into one foundation.

Alongside that is the Agent Governance Toolkit, which covers identity, policy, and audit controls for AI agent deployments and A2A (agent-to-agent) protocols for cross-vendor, cross-framework agent communication.

We saw this coming

The announcement doesn't mention Fedora once, but the Azure Linux 4.0 branch on the project's GitHub paints a different picture.

The README file for 4.0 explicitly describes Fedora as an "upstream base" for Azure Linux, describing the distro as a set of TOML configuration files and targeted overlays applied on top of Fedora.

Likewise, packages come straight from Fedora's upstream repositories, with any deviations from that kept minimal and clearly documented.

Last month, we reported on discussions from a Fedora ELN SIG meeting where it became clear Microsoft was backing a proposal to build x86-64-v3 packages for Fedora 45.

Kyle Gospodnetich, a Linux engineer at Microsoft, was co-authoring the change proposal, with the motivation tied directly to Azure Linux's need for x86-64-v3 performance gains.

There was also talk of Microsoft forking the distribution entirely at one point, but they were guided toward working within the Fedora ecosystem instead. We called it "a big if" at the time.

Now, the 4.0 branch confirms it. 🤓

As for why Microsoft stayed quiet about the Fedora connection in its announcement blog post. Fedora is effectively Red Hat's upstream, and Red Hat is both an Azure partner and a competitor in the enterprise Linux space. I presume that it would make for an awkward read in that context.

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Suggested Read 📖: Fedora Hummingbird Debuts As a Hardened Linux Distro

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The Famous Linux System Cleaner BleachBit Now Has a TUI (And I Tried It Out)

It is a matter of preference to use system cleanup utilities on a computer or smartphone. On Linux, we have many such tools that handle everything from clearing browser caches and old package archives to shredding files and wiping free space.

They range from quick CLI scripts to full-blown graphical applications. Some focus on browser data; others go deeper into system logs, package caches, and temporary files.

One of the more popular offerings among those is BleachBit, which is a free and open source system cleaner for Linux and Windows that handles all that. It's developers have now given everyone an early look into how its text-based user interface (TUI) is shaping up.

BleachBit TUI works well

The TUI is simple to navigate. The space bar toggles cleaning options on or off, and Enter expands a category to show the file list underneath.

For previewing what would be cleaned, there are two options: lowercase p runs a full preview across all selected items, while uppercase P previews just the focused component.

📋

You can use either Shift or Caps Lock for switching to uppercase.

The two preview options (full, focused) on the alpha TUI of BleachBit.

Once done, d handles deletion for everything selected, and D deletes the focused component specifically. On my first attempt, the deletion failed because I had not launched the TUI with elevated privileges.

Re-launching with sudo python3 bleachbit_tui.py fixed that. Once initiated, I had to press Y to confirm the action, and when it completed, a dialog appeared in the bottom-right showing the files deleted and space recovered.

Using sudo fixed the errors I was getting.

There is also a palette menu, accessible via Ctrl+P. From there, you can search commands, maximize a selected component, quit BleachBit, save a screenshot, and bring up the keys/help side panel.

Since the TUI shares its backend with the regular BleachBit GUI, it picks up all the same settings automatically. That covers your selected cleaning options, keep list, custom cleaning list, and cookie keep list.

It also supports changing display themes and some mouse interaction alongside keyboard navigation, including the scroll wheel. On Windows, the TUI ships as both an installer and a portable package, compiled as a native 64-bit binary, unlike the 32-bit stable GUI and CLI builds.

If you want to try it out on Linux, the official announcement has quick-start instructions for running the TUI on Ubuntu, and if that doesn't suit you, then you could build from source.

🚧

This is still being developed. If you go ahead with testing it, expect things to break.

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LibrePlan 1.6.0 Released With Better Collaboration Tools and 15 New Languages

If you have not heard of LibrePlan before, then you wouldn't be alone. When they sent us a press release, I was wondering what this project was for. Then I read up on it, and it turns out to be an open source, self-hosted, web-based project management tool that has been around since 2009.

It can handle project planning, resource allocation, time tracking, and progress reporting, and its target customers are organizations that want full control over their own infrastructure and data.

Now, they have introduced a new release that adds some useful features around collaboration, project tracking, and a pretty notable expansion of language support.

What's new?

The demo of LibrePlan as a placeholder.

The 1.6.0 release arrives with email support for major user groups, per-project document repositories, and configurable email templates with notification support.

Project managers also get a few new visibility tools. There is now an issue and risk log, a pipeline overview, project margin tracking, and traffic light-style status indicators in the project list view.

The last addition in particular should be handy, letting you spot which projects need attention at a glance without you needing to click through each one.

Moving on to the highlight of this release, we have the expanded language support, which takes the earlier four languages supported number all the way to 19.

These include Czech, Chinese, German, Persian/Farsi, Russian, Italian, Norwegian Bokmål, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Simplified Chinese.

None of these new additions have been through manual review, though. They were put together using AI tooling, and the project is counting on the community to spot mistakes and tighten things up.

Get LibrePlan

LibrePlan 1.6.0 is available now, with Docker images for the Community Edition available on Docker Hub, and a live demo environment is accessible on the official website.

There's also a separate enterprise-focused version called LibrePlan Enterprise for organizations looking to deploy this release, and the source code for the Community Edition lives on GitHub.

You can learn more about this release in the announcement blog.

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Suggested Read 📖: Fedora's AI Move Hits a Roadblock

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Someone Vibe-Coded Lightroom CC onto Linux, and I am Not Touching It

Someone has managed to make Adobe Lightroom CC run on Linux via Wine. Don't get it confused with the other Adobe offerings though; this is the cloud-syncing desktop version of Lightroom.

Sander Hilven, a developer, has put together a working recipe that works on Wine 11.8 staging with Lightroom CC 9.3.1. Interestingly, they have not done any of the actual work themselves.

The dev just told Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.7 what the goal was and left it to figure out the rest, while providing an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription for the AI to work with.

The AI dug through crash logs and Wine compatibility issues autonomously, figuring out what needed fixing. It verified its own work by screenshotting the running Lightroom instance and clicking through the interface to confirm whether each fix held up.

Though, several fixes were needed to get things going. Some Windows APIs that Wine doesn't implement were bringing down the entire Creative Cloud process on launch, some DLLs Lightroom depends on simply did not exist in Wine, and there were naming mismatches between how Lightroom looks for its files and how Adobe actually ships them.

The Remove/Heal tool was the trickiest fix. It kept crashing mid-use, and the AI traced it back to a dependency that Wine ships in the wrong place.

Currently, browsing, editing, exporting, and the Remove/Heal tool all work. Not everything is perfect though; tutorial videos don't play, some GPU-accelerated effects may not render correctly, and there's a bug with double-clicking thumbnails.

I won't touch it

The sole human developer's GitHub has no bio to speak of, and outside this repo, there is nothing that tells you much about who they are.

The entire project, including the patched DLLs and the assurance that they work, was produced by an AI agent. No human has looked at those binaries independently.

That is a lot of trust to put in AI-generated Windows DLL patches running inside your Linux computer.

I won't be testing this due to all that and because I don't have an Adobe subscription. But if you have one and have a spare machine lying around, why not give it a try and post your findings on our forum?

Yeah, that is a not-so-subtle nudge to visit it and interact with the other FOSSers. 😉

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I Gave Desktop Email Clients Another Shot and This New App Delivered

If you are someone who has to tackle many emails throughout the day, an email client is most likely part of your workflow. For the uninitiated, these desktop applications let you manage one or more email accounts from a single place without having to open a browser tab for each one.

Think of them as a local home for your inbox that comes equipped with the necessary tools for composing, organizing, and syncing your content. 📥

I had one of my earliest experiences with these through Thunderbird, which I used at a previous workplace. It did the job well enough at the time, and I have no real complaints about it from back then.

Eventually I drifted toward just using the web apps of whatever email service I was on. So, when I came across Aerion, I thought to myself, why not give email clients another shot?

Aerion: A Home For Your E-Mails

This is an open source, lightweight desktop email client maintained by a team of developers that is sponsored by 3DF, which covers the infrastructure and human resource-related costs.

The project takes inspiration from GNOME's email client Geary, with a focus on being resource efficient and offering a clean interface without the baggage that tends to weigh down the older solutions on Linux.

Before you blurt out "Electron!," know that Aerion uses Wails and Svelte under the hood. It also comes with a CASA Tier 2 certification, which was assessed by TAC Security, a Google authorized assessor under the App Defense Alliance.

This means that the app's codebase has been scanned and verified against the OWASP ASVS standards by an independent third party. For a small indie project that handles your email credentials and account access, that is a big reassurance.

Feature-wise, it covers the essentials like support for multiple accounts, conversation threading, a WYSIWYG composer powered by TipTap, contact sync (via CardDAV, Google, and Microsoft), multiple color themes, and keyboard navigation with vim-style shortcuts.

For email providers, Aerion works with Gmail, Microsoft 365/Outlook, Proton Mail (via paywalled Proton Bridge), iCloud Mail, GMX Mail, and generic IMAP/SMTP setups.

Yahoo, Fastmail, Zoho Mail, AOL Mail, and Mail.com are listed as well, though these were marked as untested at the time of writing.

📋

Keep in mind that Aerion is still pre-release software, so things may not always go smoothly.

I Used It

Getting started meant adding my Gmail account, and that process was smoother than I expected. Aerion hands you off to the browser for the OAuth flow, where you go through Google's usual permissions and disclaimers routine, at the end of which you land back in Aerion, authenticated and ready to go.

Adding a new Gmail account to Aerion.

There's a nasty catch here, though. If you accidentally click somewhere outside the "Add Email Account" window while it is open, the whole thing closes and discards whatever progress you made. You won't get any warning or confirmation popup; it will just f*ck right off.

Mails being fetched on the left, a filled inbox on the right.

When Aerion finishes fetching your emails, you will notice that remote image loading is blocked by default. You can manually allow loading per email or add specific domains to an allowlist to avoid having to do it every time.

With Gmail connected, I spent some time sending and receiving mail, and the basics work as you would want them to. The composer has all the tools you need to put together a well-written email, and new messages are delivered with proper sync happening with the Gmail servers.

Below is a quick example of me sending a test mail from Aerion to my Proton Mail account. It landed without issue, showing up in Gmail's sent folder and in the Proton Mail inbox.

Checking the mail I sent using Aerion on the web apps for Gmail and Proton Mail.

Where things got a bit less clean was with notifications and sync. When I received new mail, I received no notification in Aerion's interface or GNOME's notification dropdown.

I had to manually hit the sync button to get the mail to appear, though Aerion does auto-sync in the background. The catch is that there is no way to configure how often it syncs, at least for Gmail, so if you are used to mail showing up the moment it lands, adjust your expectations accordingly.

And if you like keeping your mailbox clean, Aerion has you covered. You can mass delete emails that land in the "Bin" first, or you can go the extra step and permanently wipe them to free up cloud storage. Either way, the changes reflect on Gmail's servers without issue.

Though there's one more inconvenience that some of you might not like. Before you can start using Aerion, you are asked to agree to its Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

The terms are fairly standard. It is pre-release software, so bugs and shifting features are part of the deal, there are no warranties, and the whole thing is provided under the Apache 2.0 license.

On the privacy side, things are more reassuring. Aerion does not collect or transmit any of your data to external servers, so no telemetry, no analytics, and no ads to worry about. When it connects to Google or Microsoft APIs, that access is limited strictly to the email functionality you configured.

Install it Now

People running Linux-powered distributions can get Aerion from Flathub. Those on platforms like ARM64, Windows, and macOS will have to visit the releases page to get the relevant packages.

If neither of the options are your thing, then you could always build from source.

Aerion (Flathub)

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Heavy Community Backlash Blocks Fedora's AI Developer Desktop Initiative

What looked like a done deal for Fedora is now very much on hold.

The Fedora AI Developer Desktop Initiative, a proposal to build an official platform for AI and machine learning workloads on Fedora, has been blocked after two Fedora Council members retracted their earlier approval votes.

The initiative was proposed by Red Hat engineer Gordon Messmer, aiming to deliver an Atomic Desktop with accelerated AI workload support, covering developer tools, hardware enablement, and building a community around AI on Fedora.

Why the withdrawal?

As you already know, at the May 6 council meeting, the members unanimously voted to approve this new initiative. After which a short, lazy consensus window was left open until May 8 to accommodate absent members, after which the decision was to be ratified.

But that last bit never happened, as council member Justin Wheeler (Jflory7) was the first person to change their vote to -1. He pointed to the LTS kernel component of the proposal as a "massive structural shift" that had not been cleared with the relevant legal and engineering parties.

He also noted that feedback from Fedora kernel subject-matter experts had not been properly incorporated into the plan and that new developments, particularly the Nova driver work (for NVIDIA GPUs), would introduce technical and legal complexities that need proper vetting.

Following that, fellow council member Miro Hrončok (churchyard) put in his -1, saying that he had originally assumed the proposal was purely additive and therefore uncontroversial.

But seeing the community's response, he realized that he was mistaken about that. As an elected representative, he felt the need to reflect on this major proposal before signing it off.

A community divided

Over 180 replies have piled up in the proposal's discussion thread, with many well-known Fedora contributors pushing back on things like kernel policy, proprietary software, and project identity.

Hans de Goede from the packaging team called out the proposal's emphasis on CUDA support as going against Fedora's foundational commitment to free software, arguing that open alternatives like AMD's ROCm and Intel's oneAPI should be the focus instead.

Another Fedora contributor, Tim Flink, questioned whether the initiative amounted to little more than a mechanism to get CUDA onto a Fedora-adjacent system.

Neal Gompa raised similar concerns, saying Fedora has historically leveraged its stance on proprietary software to push vendors toward open solutions and that this proposal would undercut that effort.

What happens next?

Part of what made this blow up the way it did was a communications gap. Fabio Valentini of the FESCo noted that he only became aware the proposal was being voted on after stumbling across the council meeting on Matrix accidentally.

The initiative is now listed as blocked in the council ticket, with a new escalation deadline of May 22. Gordon (the proposal submitter) has said a revised draft is coming, telling the thread he plans to have a few people look it over before posting it.

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