Zsh has become the default shell for a lot of Linux and macOS users, and for good reason. Between Oh My Zsh, autosuggestions, and smarter tab completion, there's a lot going on under the hood.
But how much do you actually know about it? Take this quiz and find out.
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Few people know that Zsh's roots go back to 1990, when Paul Falstad created it as a student project. That means, Zsh is older than Linux.
I've spent a good amount of time customizing my own zsh setup, and honestly, there's more to it than most users realize. Tab completion itself works very differently (or should I say better) from bash. Then there's spelling correction, smarter globbing, and configuration through .zshrc that can get as simple or as complex as you want.
If you want to learn Zsh, try this resource section on Linux Handbook.
In April this year, we saw Andy Nguyen turning the PS5 into a Linux-powered gaming PC that ran Steam games and emulators, making good use of the hardware on-board.
Sadly, he has now announced that he is walking away from the PS5 hacking scene altogether and is stopping work on porting the project to the PS5 Pro, which would've shipped sometime in 2027.
All due to a single exploit
I am stepping away from the ps5 scene and stopping all my work on ps5 linux. After pouring my heart and months of my life into it, including plans to finish ps5 pro support and release in 2027, it's all down the sink.
You see, running Linux on a PlayStation console is possible because the PS5 Linux project was able to find a way past the hypervisor using exploits Sony had already patched, covering firmware 3.00 through 7.61.
The issue starts with Andy gatekeeping a hypervisor bug that was still open on current firmware, one he says he had found a while earlier. It was prematurely divulged to Sony less than a day after the researchers who found it agreed to wait.
He clarified his position, saying that:
I asked them to at least wait for GTA 6 to come out so that people would have the opportunity to legally purchase the game and also enjoy linux.
Once Sony knows about a bug such as this, it's only a matter of time before it's patched, and that is where PlayStation's bug bounty program on HackerOne comes in.
The ones who found it
To give you an idea of PlayStation's HackerOne program.
While Andy has not named anybody in his post, you will find the reporter after a quick web search. Jordy has put out his side of things, laying out how he handled the bug.
By Jordy's account, the bug was his own discovery, found with what he calls his "trusty ai clanker machine" and no help from anyone else. He had even agreed to Andy's request to not disclose the findings.
Unexpectedly, a third person, still unnamed, found the same bug using AI a few hours later. Anticipating that there would be more people finding the same bug, Jordy decided to post the flaw on HackerOne.
The code is still there
The project's GitHub page and all the related repositories are still there. Nothing has been archived as of today, and if you wanted to, you could start contributing to the PS5 Linux project by taking over any pending work or cooking up new improvements.
You should know that the loader currently supports the original model and the Slim on firmware 3.00 through 7.61, so your test device would need to be on one of those. The PS5 Pro support Andy was building never reached the repository, so you would have to start from scratch.
That's the beauty of open source software. Even if the lead developer and key core maintainers decide to abandon a project, new people can easily take over the work or fork it, and steer it in a direction of their choosing.
While Andy's departure is a blow to the plan for supporting newer PS5 firmware and the PS5 Pro, other contributors have shown that they can deliver work on the loader without him, and I am hopeful more will follow.
In the past, I have shared stories of how real people using Linux in the real world. My favorite is the interview with Stu Keroff, who educates students to make the best use of Linux in school.
When Mišo reached out to me and shared how he helped a local small business move from Windows to Linux, I though of reviving that old series where real people share real stories of how they migrated to Linux and open source.
Mišo Oroz is the founder of Zerolock, an Italian IT company based in Spirano, Bergamo, specialised in migrating small and medium businesses from proprietary systems to Linux and open source.
Here's his story.
I got the call in early 2026. The owner of a small transport and logistics company in Mapello, Bergamo, had five office workstations and a team of drivers who needed to stay in contact throughout the day. He was not looking for a philosophy lesson about open source. He was tired of paying for software that kept causing problems, tired of calling an external technician, and tired of his team losing time to things that had nothing to do with moving goods from one place to another.
What they had before
The office ran on a standard setup that most small Italian businesses would recognise. Five workstations running a proprietary operating system (you know which one), a commercial office suite licensed per user, third-party antivirus renewed annually.
The drivers communicated with the office using WhatsApp on their personal phones, which meant company conversations were happening on a consumer messaging app with no archiving, no administration, and no separation between personal and work messages.
Their data lived partly on local machines and partly on a shared folder. When I asked to see where the most important company documents were stored, it took a few minutes to find the most recent version of a file that should have been immediately accessible.
The owner had paid for eight to ten external IT interventions over two years. Update failures, slowdowns, the occasional scare that turned out to be less serious than it looked but still cost half a day of anxiety and cleanup time.
The assessment
Before touching anything, I spent time understanding what each person actually did on their computers every day. This matters more than any list of installed software, because the real question is not what tools exist but which ones are genuinely in use and how.
The office staff used a word processor, a spreadsheet, email, and a shared filing system. The owner needed occasional remote access when he was out on the road. The drivers needed a reliable way to communicate with the office without using personal phones. No sector-specific proprietary software that would be difficult to replace, which made the project significantly more straightforward than many migrations I have worked on.
The stack
The replacement infrastructure was built entirely on open source components.
Kubuntu 26.04 LTS on all five office workstations. LibreOffice replacing the commercial office suite. Thunderbird for email. Nextcloud deployed on a server hosted in Italy, replacing both the local shared folder and eliminating any dependency on foreign cloud providers. Mattermost for internal communication, installed on the same Italian infrastructure, accessible from both the office workstations and the drivers' phones via the mobile app.
The office used an Epson WorkForce WF-C579R, a networked A4 colour multifunction connected via ethernet. This was the most technically interesting part of the hardware setup.
Kubuntu 26.04 automatically installed a driverless IPP driver, which caused two concrete problems: duplex printing reversed the back page regardless of whether long-side or short-side binding was selected, and print speed was noticeably slower than it had been on the previous system. The driverless path, which works well for many modern printers, does not handle all Epson business devices correctly on 26.04 because the Epson PPA does not yet support the current release.
The solution was to install printer-driver-escpr via apt and force the correct driver using lpadmin. After that, duplex worked correctly and speed returned to normal.
For scanning to a network folder, I set up Samba on each administration workstation, created a Scanner folder in each user's home directory, and configured the scan destination on the Epson web admin panel via IP address using SMB with dedicated credentials set through smbpasswd. This is worth documenting for anyone running Epson business printers on Kubuntu 26.04, because the driverless default will cause the same duplex problem and the fix is not obvious.
pfSense as the network firewall. Encrypted automated backups running nightly. For remote access I deployed RustDesk through my own VPS, which solved a specific challenge with Kubuntu 26: the system runs on Wayland by default, and many remote desktop tools that work reliably on older Linux systems have compatibility issues with Wayland. RustDesk via a self-hosted relay server worked consistently once that configuration was in place, and it has been the standard approach for all my Kubuntu 26 deployments since.
Total recurring licence cost after migration: zero.
The migration
Everything was built and tested on a separate machine before touching any production workstation. I validated every workflow, confirmed that existing documents opened correctly in LibreOffice, tested the Nextcloud connection, and set up Mattermost including the mobile configuration for the drivers.
The actual migration happened over a weekend. Each workstation was rebuilt from scratch with a clean Kubuntu installation. Data was migrated from the existing shared folder to Nextcloud over the local network before the weekend, so that by Monday morning the files were already in the right place on the new system. The drivers received the Mattermost app on their phones with the configuration already set up. From day one they had a dedicated work channel separate from their personal messaging.
Training and the first days on site
The weekend migration was only the beginning. The following Monday I was on site for the first three days of the working week and available by phone for the rest. Each employee received individual training on the tools they actually used, not a generic overview of the new system. I sat next to each person and worked through their specific daily tasks: how to open and save documents in LibreOffice, how to access files on Nextcloud, how to use Mattermost for internal messages.
This part of the project is not glamorous but it is where migrations succeed or fail. The software can be perfect and the migration still falls apart if the people using it feel abandoned on Monday morning. Being on site those first days meant I could answer questions immediately rather than leaving people stuck waiting for an email reply.
What was actually difficult
Two things created friction, as I mentioned earlier. Since this is sort of a case study, I will highlight those two hurdles again.
The first was the printer. The Epson driverless issue was not something I had encountered before on 26.04 and it took a few hours to diagnose and resolve. The duplex problem was intermittent enough that it would have been easy to miss during testing and only surface in daily use. I now test duplex printing explicitly on every Kubuntu 26.04 deployment with a networked Epson.
The second was the Wayland remote access setup. Kubuntu 26 required a different approach to remote desktop than older Linux systems. Testing different configurations took additional time before I arrived at the RustDesk and self-hosted VPS solution that now works reliably. It is a known challenge with Wayland that the ecosystem is actively improving, but at the time it required real problem-solving.
The adjustment period for the office staff was easier than I had anticipated, largely because of the time spent on site. The drivers adapted fastest. For them the change was a new app on their phone that replaced a WhatsApp group, and within a day or two it felt normal.
Six months later
The company has not called me for a single ordinary technical issue since the migration.
The productivity difference showed up in ways that were immediately visible. Before the migration, the workday started with machines that took several minutes to become usable after login, with antivirus scans running in the background competing for resources. Unscheduled updates had a habit of appearing at the worst possible moments, sometimes forcing restarts mid-morning. When something broke, work stopped until the external technician arrived.
After the migration, bootup is fast, background processes do not fight for CPU during working hours, and updates run overnight without touching the working day. The time that had been quietly disappearing into slowdowns, restarts, and waiting is simply not disappearing anymore.
Licence costs for the operating system, office suite, and antivirus are gone. The Nextcloud server costs less per month than their previous storage arrangement. The external technician has not been called.
The drivers now have a proper work communication channel that is administered, archived, and completely separate from their personal phones.
The end result is one hour per day recovered per employee, zero ordinary technical issues after migration, zero recurring licence costs. We have a happy client.
GNOME is still the initial desktop environment for most people who step into the world of Linux, trying their first distribution. I say that because the mainstream picks like Ubuntu and Fedora Workstation both ship it by default, bringing new users directly into the GNOME ecosystem.
While we are seeing a rise in adoption for dynamic tiling window managers like Hyprland, conventional desktop environments like this one are still a daily driver pick for many.
Now, a fresh release, GNOME 51, has arrived, bringing with it many upgrades, such as a better-behaving shell, a new wallpaper that looks chic, and a host of updated pre-installed apps.
Continue reading to get the full details.
A Refined Shell
This is the part of GNOME that you directly interact with without realizing that it even exists. GNOME Shell represents the top bar, the overview, the app grid, notifications, the lock screen, and the way windows move between workspaces.
This release cleans up many of its rough edges, giving you perks like monitor brightness being saved and restored across sessions, and more refined screenshot framing that lets you drag a selection all the way to the edges of your monitor.
Screen reader navigation in the app grid was reworked as well, and two smaller annoyances, a bug with minimized windows on another workspace and broken German date formats, are fixed.
Similarly, the autorun prompt that shows up for connected USB drives was improved.
GDM & Mutter Tweaks
These two are also an important part of the GNOME stack. GDM is the display manager behind your login screen, and it starts a session once you authenticate. Mutter is the compositor that draws the windows, decides where they sit, and handles the input.
GDM picks up a setting for the fallback session. That is the session used when a user has no preferred one or when their preferred one will not start. Administrators can point accounts that have never logged in at a session of their choosing.
The autologin bypass is closed as well. Earlier, a compromised greeter could request autologin for any local account; fortunately, this no longer works.
In Mutter, support for legacy NVIDIA drivers is gone, and on HDR displays, SDR content doesn't look desaturated (discolored) anymore. Window handling gets a few repairs of its own. Edge tiled windows fullscreen properly now, and a maximized window can be moved to another monitor from the keyboard without issues.
It has also stopped reporting several monitors as primary at once, and the mouse cursor hides itself while an input capture session is running—the kind a remote desktop tool opens.
The App Upgrades
GNOME 51 Settings, Software, Files.
The bundled apps see their share of major upgrades. We first start with the Settings app, which has added DNS domain search options to the Network page, gets various translation updates, and handles Wi-Fi sharing through the GNOME QR code widget.
The About page was cleaned up, with the "Windowing System" field removed and the software and hardware info groups expanded to give users quick access to important system details.
Thanks to that, the dedicated "System Details" button is a thing of the past.
Software now warns you before installing an app that has reached end-of-life status, its Flatpak permission list has been expanded, and app ratings use a different measurement approach for showing you the average rating.
Files (Nautilus), the file manager, shows a count badge while you drag several items, and copied files stay selected once a copy operation finishes. Locations opened from another app are displayed in a new tab, while the previewer now supports rename and trash operations.
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Quick tip: You can access the previewer function by selecting a file or folder and pressing the "Space" key. It shows you a preview of the selected item, as well as some key details.
GNOME 51 Calendar, Maps, and Web.
The Calendar app's internals were heavily reworked, and it is now based on GListModel.
The week, month, and agenda views run on that same model, and so do the objects behind its event timelines. Locations now open in Maps through the maps URI, and the "About" dialog shows a status indicator when the app is not running sandboxed inside Flatpak.
Similarly, users of Maps can now download maps for offline use by using the new download tool. To use it, first go to a specific region, then open the hamburger menu on the top-right and go into "Preferences." In the "Downloads" section, click on "Add" to get started.
Then there's Web (Epiphany), the default web browser, which comes with fixes for cases where deleting your default search engine or opening the preferences menu would cause a crash.
Other Changes
I skipped out on mentioning a few changes earlier, but these are still worth knowing:
Roundhex is the new default wallpaper, with three more; Curvaturingster, Glass Stripes, and Tubes being the other additions.
The gnome-desktop component ships with an API for generating QR codes; the Wi-Fi sharing widget we talked about earlier uses it.
GNOME Bluetooth 47.2 adds mnemonics to a few buttons and fixes a couple of memory leaks.
The pre-installed image viewer, Loupe, now shows the creator, copyright, camera lens, and software data stored in a photo's metadata.
Settings gains a new fingerprint manager in the "Users" panel.
For more details, you can give the release notes a read.
Getting Started with GNOME 51
People who are on a rolling release distro like Arch Linux, CachyOS, or EndeavourOS will be the first ones to get this GNOME release as soon as the maintainers push it to the repositories.
If you are on a mainstream distro like Ubuntu or Fedora, then you will also get GNOME 51 via the Ubuntu 26.10 and Fedora 45 (error 404 for now) releases.
Of course there's also GNOME OS, which is the project's testbed for new software. You can install it on a spare machine or virtual machine to see what GNOME 51 has to offer.
Welcome back to Local AI Weekly. I promised a weekly, and then took a month to send the second one. So let's call the first one the pilot episode. From here, the show will run weekly 🤘
This issue leans heavily toward agents, because that's where most of the interesting local AI tooling is landing right now.
Before we see all that, let me thank Atomic Chat, who is supporting this edition of Local AI Weekly.
SPONSORED
Atomic Chat lets you run open-source LLMs privately on your own device, fully offline. It has Turboquant built-in providing faster local inference with longer context windows. Which means you can run bigger models smoothly, right on your device.
I downloaded Unsloth this week. It's an open source framework for fine-tuning and running open models faster and on far less VRAM than the usual setup. It's probably best known for its Dynamic GGUF quants, the ones that let people run 27B-class models in around 17GB of RAM, with 1-bit builds that squeeze onto 8GB.
Yeah...that's the kind of claim I don't want to repeat until I've tested it myself. So consider this a heads-up, not a review or recommendation. I'll try it on my ZimaCube (with Nvidia RTX Ada 2000) and give you the full verdict in a coming issue.
🔍 Discover AI tools
Three of this week's finds are about making your local agents "behave". tehy are smart, but they have to be accountable, too. All of these tools are open source.
The first is agent-inspect, a local-first debugger for TypeScript AI agents. It turns an agent run into a readable execution tree, so you can see every tool call, model call, and the exact point where things went wrong. It can also fail a CI check when the agent takes the wrong path, and bundle up a redacted trace to share with someone else.
Next is AutoMem, a persistent memory layer that plugs into agents over MCP. Most agents start every session from zero. AutoMem stores what matters in a graph for relationships and a vector index for meaning, so recall gives you the answer and the thread it belongs to. You can run the whole thing locally in Docker, offline, with your data staying on your machine.
The third is BrowserSkill from Tencent. It lets an AI agent use your real, already logged-in broswer instead of a fresh sandbox with throwaway accounts. The interesting part is that it runs tasks in a separate, visible Agent Window and only borrows a tab you have open when it explicitly asks, so you can keep working while it does. When it hits a captcha or a login, it hands control back to you and picks up after. Agents can still not tick all the traffic lights, it seems 😉
🖥 Which model can your hardware actually run?
This is the question I get asked the most. You see a model you want to try, but you have no idea if it can run on your system. Downloading and trying all of them is a waste of time and bandwidth.
llmfit helps you there. It's a terminal tool that detects your CPU, RAM, and GPU, then ranks open models by how well they'll actually run on your box, scoring them on size, speed, quality, and context. If you have Ollama running, you can even pull a model straight from its interface. It is open source and written in Rust (if that matters to you).
Just so you know, I work with PikaPods as its growth consultant, so take the mention for what it is. But the point is that self-hosted AI front-ends have moved from hobbyists' Raspberry Pi to something people want running full time without managing a server.
🎙 Voice transcription lands on Linux
Back in issue #1 I said voice AI is shaping up to be the next big thing. LM Studio's Bionic release, v1.1.3 proves my point, as it now brings voice transcription to Linux, including on machines with NVIDIA GPUs.
LM Studio is free but closed source, so keep that in mind. If you are on Linux, you will find that the Bionic AppImage is about 1 GB. That's the biggest AppImage I ever downloaded.
📡 Open Model News
The open model space has kept up the pace since last time. Three releases stand out, and all three are MoE models, which is now clearly the direction the open world is heading.
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next from Alibaba's Qwen team. It's a 125B mixture-of-experts model that only activates 6B parameters per token, and it's an early preview of the architecture behind the upcoming Qwen4 family. Needs serious hardware power, though.
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is here, too. On paper it's a huge 552B MoE, but it activates only 8B parameters on input and 16B on output, with a new architecture built around an aggressively compressed KV cache, roughly 890 bytes per token. Waiting for community quantization on this one.
Those two are heavyweight so the next one is "relatively affordable" by homelabbers. Ornith-1.5 from DeepReinforce comes in three sizes: a 397B MoE flagship, a 35B MoE that activates just 3B per token and runs on a single 24GB card, and a 9B dense model with a quantized build small enough for a phone. It's trained with a self-improvement loop, where the model writes its own tasks and grades its own attempts.
👀 Big Tech Watch
Two things worth your attention.
First, OpenRouter is being acquired by Stripe. OpenRouter is the big model-routing gateway, moving over 10 trillion tokens a day across 400 or so models. It says the product, name, and neutral routing won't change. Worth watching, because a lot of the local and open tooling world leans on that gateway staying neutral.
Second, the industry had a rare moment of agreement. Anthropic's Dario Amodei published an essay called "We Must Pace the Frontier," arguing that AI labs should deliberately slow down how fast they push model capabilities.
Within a couple of days, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis all said they agreed with the core idea. The notable holdouts weren't the labs at all. The US President Trump rejected the idea flatly, saying "whoever wins AI wins."
If the frontier slows and open weights keep improving, that's a good thing for us Local AI enthusiasts.
🗂 AI Jargon: Harness
You'll have noticed the word "harness" turning up everywhere lately. Here's what it means.
Think of the LLM as the brain and the harness as the actual body. A model on its own is just a brain sitting in a jar. It reads text and predicts text. A harness is what turns it into an agent that can do things. The harness runs the loop i.e. it sends your request to the model, reads back the tool calls the model wants to make, actually runs those tools, feeds the results back in, and repeats until the job is done. It also manages memory, context, and what the model is and isn't allowed to touch.
The reason everyone is building their own harness is that the model has become the easy part. The value now sits in the harness you wrap around it: your data, your tools, your workflows, your guardrails.
Using an LLM as a glorified chat tool won't help much. Plugging the LLM into a harness tuned to your work or your company's work will let you achieve the actual AI automation.
⚡ Quick Tip: Keep your Ollama models warm
If you run Ollama and notice the first answer after a break is slow, here's why. By default, Ollama unloads a model from GPU memory after 5 minutes of no requests. I noticed this on my Zima setup. The next request then has to reload the whole model from disk into VRAM, which will delay the next response.
You can change that. Set the OLLAMA_KEEP_ALIVE environment variable on the Ollama service to a longer duration like 30m, or to -1 to keep the model pinned in memory until you restart.
My point is that free GPU memory is only useful if you're going to use it. On a single-user machine where you're the only one using the model, there is little point in freeing up the GPU every five minutes and getting slow responses as a result. However, if you use several large models on one card, the default timeout actually helps.
🎫 Events worth attending
If agents are your thing, there are two conferences coming up, and It's FOSS readers get a discount on both.
AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe is happening on September 17 and 18 in Amsterdam. Use the code ITSFOSS_50 at checkout, which brings registration to $375. It's valid right up to the event date, which is tomorrow.
AGNTCon + MCPCon North America on October 22 to 23 in San Jose, California. Use the code ITSFOSS for 20% or more off current pricing; it should be around $375 again. This offer expires on October 7.
In the end...
I hope it was not too long. Not that I was trying to compensate for the long gap between the two editions...or perhaps I was ;)
As always, some of this will be useful to you and some won't, depending on what you're building or what your interests are. Reply and tell me what you're running locally these days. I read every response.
Linux gamers are used to being treated as second-class citizens, and Ubisoft recently gave everyone a fresh reminder when they pulled Linux and Steam Deck support from For Honor.
They blamed anti-cheat limitations, even though the game's anti-cheat software had supported Linux for years.
Meanwhile, cloud gaming has been slowly building up as an alternative, even for people who can't afford to build a gaming rig thanks to inflated RAM and storage prices. While growth hasn't been anything remarkable, people who can afford a subscription have been signing up for such services.
Geforce NOW is one such name that has managed to carve out its slice of the market, recently moving its native Linux app out of beta and into general availability, officially supporting Ubuntu at launch.
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This app is not FOSS; we covered it because, you guessed it, it's available for a Linux distro; Ubuntu in this case.
Geforce NOW on Linux
Instead of storing games locally, like when using a game launcher like Steam or Heroic, GeForce NOW streams them from NVIDIA's RTX GPUs in the cloud. This way, a laptop or desktop gets GeForce RTX-level rendering without needing to have any of that hardware itself.
Games come from your existing library, not NVIDIA's own store. Link Steam, Epic, GOG, or PC Game Pass, and you can launch anything you already own. All updates and installs are handled on the cloud gaming rig you get access to via the service.
Setting it up
Contrary to what the official system requirements say about using the Xorg session on NVIDIA GPUs, I managed to get the GeForce NOW client running on the Wayland session of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.
My laptop has a GeForce RTX 3050 with 6GB of VRAM, and the system was running with NVIDIA's proprietary drivers rather than the open source Nouveau. Don't worry if you have a less powerful GPU on board, as the app only needs a local GPU to decode the incoming video stream, not render the game itself.
While I kept my testing limited to Ubuntu, I have a feeling this app can run on other Linux distros too.
💬 Why not test it and let us know in the comments below?
Before I could start playing, I ran a network test via the settings menu to see if everything was good to go. The app reported that I could face stuttering or high latency as I was connected to a wireless network, suggesting I connect an Ethernet wire instead.
You will see me facing those issues very soon. 😅
Initially, I tried using the "Free" tier to see what the native app could do on my Ubuntu setup. It was a big fail, as I was stuck in a 300+ waiting queue for access to a machine, and when I eventually did come to the front, I was kicked out because I had left my laptop idle.
I then decided to get in touch with NVIDIA, and thanks to some helpful folks, I was set with a 14-day promotional key for GeForce NOW Ultimate. Next, I had to test some games that could take advantage of a GeForce RTX cloud rig.
The titles I went for were Fortnite, as the multiplayer pick, and Ghostrunner 2, as the singleplayer pick.
Two games in the spotlight
Fortnite
The first game I want to show you is Fortnite, the infamous battle royale game that doesn't seem to be going out of trend anytime soon. Seeing that GeForce NOW supports directly linking one's Epic Games account to the service, I was able to quickly get into the game.
I left the graphical settings untouched, noting that the display name was "NVIDIA VGX," the FPS limit set to "Unlimited," and the rendering mode was "DirectX 12."
Even the matchmaking region was correctly set, and I was getting pings in the 100-120ms range. In the first battle royale match, I noticed that the image quality was not that sharp, and the game stuttered, with GeForce NOW warning of a spotty connection.
That was a given since I was connected to my ISP's weak wireless router. 🫠
Watch until the end to see some top-tier potato aim.
Across sessions, things did improve, and I even managed to win a match. That is when I realized that I could use "Ctrl+G" to launch the GeForce NOW overlay, which gave me access to many options, such as the remaining session time, the ability to enable real-time statistics, and a few others.
Equipped with the expanded metrics, I got to know that I was on a GeForce RTX 4080-powered rig that was pushing the in-game FPS up to 160, as advertised for the Ultimate plan, while the stream was running at ~55 FPS and the server latency was at ~45ms.
I was also losing considerable amounts of frames and packets due to my network setup, which had been quite inconsistent at providing the required bandwidth to drive such a demanding multiplayer game mode that hosts up to 100 players in a single match.
Ghostrunner 2
Next up is the singleplayer pick for this review, Ghostrunner 2, which continues the story of Jack, a clank..., erm, cyborg, rebuilt by a group of human rebels after they found him in a near-destroyed state.
Before I could start playing this, I had to again link my Epic Games account to validate access to the game. This is something NVIDIA needs to work on. If they could give gamers a one-click way of validating all their owned games that are available on GeForce NOW via a specific platform, that would go a long way in ensuring a friction-less experience.
Coming back to the game, the last time I played it was when I tested the demo version in the third-party GeForce Infinity app, where it performed awfully. While there were a bunch of factors that caused those problems, this time around, it was a much better experience.
Like Fortnite earlier, I didn't change the pre-set graphical settings, keeping them at a relatively high preset without enabling any kind of upscaling via AMD FSR or NVIDIA DLSS.
Again, I faced some microstutters, but the game itself looked really good and was very responsive throughout my playthrough. Without the lag, the game felt as good as running on a similarly equipped gaming rig locally.
I fell off the platform right at the end btw.
I can now confidently say that using Geforce NOW on a wired setup or with a very capable wireless router is the way to go. As doing so ensures a consistent flow of bandwidth that is required to stream such amounts of data quickly.
Being located closer to your nearest GeForce NOW server also helps. 😉
During play, I also noticed that my laptop going into Sleep mode would automatically disconnect me from GeForce NOW, with the app notifying me of the occurrence. All the while, the gaming rig itself remains active, and I can quickly jump back in by hitting Play again.
Some closing thoughts
At the end of my testing, I was left thinking that NVIDIA could easily bring the native client to platforms like Arch Linux and Fedora. This would help them cover a large chunk of the Linux gamer base, seeing that there are many derivatives of these distros that are quite popular among gamers.
Coming back to the question I asked in the title of this review: Is GeForce NOW gameable on Linux? On Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, yes, even without the Xorg session NVIDIA recommends. Wayland handled things fine.
While its closed-source nature and paid tiers will be dealbreakers for many of you out there, the thing it offers is convenience. You get easy access to a gaming rig without having to invest in one, and the latter's a far cry (gaming pun hehe) right now thanks to inflated prices.
Game on!
If you are looking for instructions to install GeForce NOW on your Ubuntu PC, then continue reading. First, go to the official website to fetch the .bin file; look for it under the "Linux" category.
Once the file is downloaded, go to it in Files and right-click on it. Now click on "Properties," and enable "Executable as Program."
Launch the executable by either double-clicking on it or clicking "Run" from the right-click context menu. Wait for it to complete the download and installation.
The app will then ask you to sign in with your NVIDIA account, for which the authentication will be carried out via the default browser on your system. And that's about it; just select a plan and start playing.
Ever found yourself in a situation where you have a document with plenty of images and you need to save images from it? Maybe a selected few or all of them?
Now, manually going to each image and then right click might be the no-brainer but an extremely tedious way to achieve this.
Let me tell you the quickest way to extract all the images from a work document.
Access the menu and go to the Save As option. What you have to do here is to save it as HTML. It will create several web files inside the same folder where your document is, but it will also extract all the images. That's what you want, right?
All image files extracted at once from the document
I'll show the details steps for LibreOffice in this quick tutorial.
Extracting all images from a document in LibreOffice
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Create a new folder and move the document you want to extract images from in that folder. By default, the HTML files and images are extracted in the same folder as the document. You would not want tens or hundreds of images to clutter your main document folder.
First thing first, create a new folder and move your desired document file in there. Now open the document in LibreOffice.
Click on the top file menu and then click on the Save As option. The same can be achieved with Ctrl+Shift+S keyboard shortcut.
When it gives you the option to save, make sure to change the file type to HTML like this:
There are actually a number of file format options when you click that. You will have to look for HTML here.
Now that you have ensured that it is saved as HTML, click the Save button.
And then you should see all the images and media files from the document along with a single HTML file in the folder where you saved it. The default location is the same as your original document.
All image files extracted at once from the document
As you can see in the screenshot above, it also saved GIF along with PNG images. There is HTML file and the original doc, too.
This is much better than individually right clicking images and saving them.
And what if you wanted to select only a few images, not all? Well, in that case, you could either manually save the ones you want or extract them all and then only keep the ones you want and remove the rest. It is really up to you.
Another tip, since we are here, if your doc has way too many images and you want to extract a few from the selected chapters only, you can create a new doc and copy paste the chapter in it and save it as an HTML.
Basically, you can utilize this "save as HTML" option in a variety of situations.
Works with other platforms, too
This little trick actually works with most office suites, from MS Office to ONLYOFFICE. It works in Google Docs, too. Consider it a "universal trick" for extracting all images from a document.
I hope you liked this quick little LibreOffice trick. A quick thanks, if you liked it, is always welcome 😄
