An open source, speech-to-text tool for Linux called Vocalinux has just introduced its 0.14 beta release, bringing about a mix of refinements that touch keyboard shortcuts, remote transcription, and Wayland reliability.
We kick things off with the most important usability addition. Earlier, users were stuck with the default toggle or push-to-talk bindings for recording audio during transcriptions.
Now, it is possible to set keyboard shortcuts via the Settings menu, allowing you to create a diverse range of keybind combinations using the Ctrl, Alt, Shift, and Super keys paired with any letter or number key.
Likewise, on GNOME's Wayland session, text injection is possible again when a bare XKB engine is configured, and whisper.cpp no longer defaults to using every CPU core on hybrid Intel and AMD laptops.
Remote API users get something too, where the Remote API engine now supports FunASR and SenseVoice models through OpenAI-compatible endpoints.
What is Vocalinux?
The about dialog and settings menu of Vocalinux.
I talked about the new Vocalinux release, but I never fully explained what it was.
It is a free and open source voice dictation app for Linux, released under the GPL-3.0 license. It lives in your system tray and lets you dictate into almost any text field on your desktop, terminals, browsers, IDEs, office apps, wherever your cursor happens to be.
And everything runs locally, so your voice data stays on your machine the whole time.
The choice of speech recognition engine isn't locked either, as you get whisper.cpp as the default choice, followed by Whisper for PyTorch and NVIDIA configs, VOSK for lightweight setups, and Remote API for offloading to a network server.
I tried testing this beta release to see what it offered. I tried running it on two separate distros, Fedora Workstation and Ubuntu; the result for both runs was an app refusing to launch via the app launcher or the terminal.
It eventually did launch on Ubuntu after I followed some troubleshooting steps, but the app was unresponsive and had to be terminated. Even so, I am not too bummed out by this, as such are the risks associated with pre-release software.
Get started
You can get a quick start by trying out the demo on the Vocalinux website, which runs SpeechRecognition on your web browser. Naturally, that's for testing purposes only.
If you want to locally run speech-to-text on your Linux computer, then you can install Vocalinux by running this script:
🚧
Always verify such scripts before running them on your computer.
After the installation finishes, either run vocalinux or find the app icon in the application launcher. If you get caught up choosing between the engines, there's a comparo that should make your decision easier.
If you were looking for it, the source code for Vocalinux lives on GitHub.
Also, running the installer on a non-Debian-based distro like Fedora, will make it throw a warning or two about needing to install dependencies manually, take a note of that before proceeding.
My thanks to Phoronix for bringing this tool to my attention. 😄
Linux Mint has taken the slow road to Wayland while everyone else rushed ahead, and it looks like that paid off. Cinnamon's Wayland session is dropping the experimental label with Mint 23 this Christmas, shipping alongside X11 as a fully supported option.
Most microcontroller boards support Lua as an afterthought. The ELM11-Feather from BrisbaneSilicon builds around it. A GOWIN FPGA runs the whole show with no separate CPU, giving you Lua at the application layer, C for drivers, and VHDL/SystemVerilog for the hardware itself.
Joey Castillo's Open Book started as a DIY soldering project back in 2020. Six years later it's back as Open Book Touch, a proper ready-to-use e-reader with a 4.26-inch touchscreen, ESP32-S3, microSD, user-replaceable battery, and no DRM.
One developer, a few months of work, and Chatto is now open source under AGPL-3.0. It's a self-hosted team chat built to be light and simple enough to run by just launching an executable.
GNOME is working on an app called Test Center that would make trying experimental features less of a gamble.
📚 Linux Learning Offers
There are a few offers I came across that will help you improve your Linux skills, personally or professionally.
First is Linux Foundation offering upto 40% off on its training courses and certification exams. For people looking to make a career in the field of Linux and IT, a certification on Linux, Kubernetes and other related technologies can be of help.
Even if you don't want to go for certifications, you should always thrive for learning more. Humble Bundle O'Reilly collection is packed with Linux and Unix books, covering everything from shell scripting to system administration and kernel internals. This should be of interest to most Linux users, professional or not.
And part of the money gets donated to Code for America.
Third and last, my friend has created an "AI Engineer Bootcamp" course because AI is now a useful tool, even Linus Torvalds thinks so. If this is something that interest you, you can get it an additional discount with custom link.
🧠 What We’re Thinking About
Like a zombie back from the grave, the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit, one of the longest-running legal sagas in open source history, isn't dead yet.
Cursor has an unpatched zero-day on Windows where dropping a file named git.exe at the root of any repository causes it to execute automatically when the project opens. This was known to them for months and has not been patched yet.
🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings
I have been using Trello since 2013, watching it slowly turn into something else after new ownership stepped in. I set out to find what Trello used to be, across seven open source tools.
Seven Gentoo-based distros for people who want what Portage offers without starting completely from scratch. We have covered desktop use, penetration testing, security hardening, and audio production.
The compose key has been in Linux desktops for years, and most people have never touched it. Once you assign a key in GNOME settings, short two-character sequences let you type accented letters, copyright symbols, degree signs, and more.
The ORICO 8848U4 is a 4-bay USB4 NVMe enclosure that connects over Thunderbolt and shows up as native NVMe devices on Linux without requiring any driver installation.
The indie Linux handheld space is getting interesting, with many tinkerers and small companies trying their hand at crowdfunding to fund their creations.
Why should you opt for It's FOSS Plus membership:
✅ Ad-free reading experience ✅ Badges in the comment section and forum ✅ Supporting creation of educational Linux materials ✅ Free Linux eBook
🗓️ Tech Trivia: On July 15, 1928, the ENIGMA cipher machine entered service with the German Army, encrypting messages via rotor wheels and swappable patch cables. Polish cryptographers first cracked it in 1932, sharing their methods with Britain in 1939, which let Bletchley Park read German traffic throughout WWII.
🧑🤝🧑 From the Community: Pro FOSSer Ernest has kicked off a rather interesting thread, asking other FOSSers what they understand of AI.
I recently bought an external Dell keyboard that came with a dedicated Copilot key. Since I don't use Microsoft's Copilot, the key was doing nothing useful.
My new Dell Keyboard comes with a CoPilot key
So, I decided to map it to the YouTube Music web app. There is no such app, but I created it as a PWA using Vivaldi.
In theory, it seems like a trivial thing, but making the Copilot key launch that web app came up as a decent challenge. And hence this tutorial.
My first attempt was using KDE's System Settings → Keyboard → Shortcuts. I created a shortcut for the YouTube Music PWA and tried assigning the Copilot key to it.
Unfortunately, KDE only detected the key as Meta+Shift and completely ignored the function key that was part of the key combination.
After a bit of searching, I came across a Reddit post that suggested using the keyd utility to remap the key at a lower level. That turned out to be exactly what I needed.
Instead of trying to use the original key combination, I remapped the Copilot key to Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F12. It is a key combination that is rarely used, making shortcut conflicts highly unlikely.
Why KDE Can't Detect the Copilot Key
On my keyboard, pressing the Copilot key actually sends Meta+Shift+F23.
The problem is that KDE's shortcut recorder only captures the Meta+Shift modifiers and ignores the F23 key entirely. As a result, it is impossible to assign the Copilot key directly through the graphical settings.
The solution is to intercept the key before KDE receives it and translate it into another shortcut that KDE can recognize normally. This is exactly what keyd does.
It is also available in the official repositories of Ubuntu 26.04 and above.
Enable and start the service:
sudo systemctl enable --now keyd
Verify that it is running:
sudo systemctl status keyd
Identify Your Keyboard
First, identify the vendor and product ID of your external keyboard.
Run:
sudo keyd monitor
Locate your external keyboard in the output and note its vid:pid value. Make sure you choose the external keyboard instead of your laptop's built-in keyboard.
device added: aaaa:bbbb:cccccccc Dell KB216 Wired Keyboard Consumer Control (/dev/input/event9)
device added: aaaa:bbbb:cccccccc Dell KB216 Wired Keyboard System Control (/dev/input/event8)
device added: aaaa:bbbb:cccccccc Dell KB216 Wired Keyboard (/dev/input/event7)
device added: dddd:eeee:ffffffff Keychron Keychron K8 Pro Keyboard (/dev/input/event6)
Verify the Copilot Key
To see what the Copilot key actually sends, run:
sudo keyd monitor
Now press the Copilot key.
You should see output similar to:
leftmeta down
leftshift down
f23 down
f23 up
leftshift up
leftmeta up
This confirms that the key sends the combination:
Meta + Shift + F23
Create the keyd Configuration
Create a configuration file for your external keyboard.
Before I end this this tutorial, let me share a few things that you should know about using this method.
Hot plugging: keyd automatically detects when the keyboard is connected or disconnected through udev. You don't need to restart the service after plugging in the keyboard.
Mouse remapping: keyd only handles keyboard input. If you need to remap mouse buttons, consider tools such as input-remapper or xremap.
Disable the remapping: If you want to temporarily restore the original keyboard behavior, simply stop the service:
sudo systemctl stop keyd
With that, you should be able to make some good use of CoPilot key on Linux.
The idea that Wayland has worse input lag than X11 has been floating around Linux gaming circles for years. Some numbers backing the claim did come up back in 2025, when a developer measured GNOME's Wayland session against X11 and reported some considerable extra latency.
More recently, Marco Nett decided to test the same question (along with a few others) on his gaming rig, and instead of using a mobile phone camera to calculate latency, he cooked up a DIY device to measure it himself.
What do the numbers say?
0:00
/0:03
Source: Marco Nett
Called the Click2photon, it is a DIY device that straps a light sensor to the monitor and fires simulated mouse clicks over USB. It measures the time between a click and the resulting change on screen, giving out real end-to-end latency numbers.
As a side note, the hardware, firmware, and analysis code for the testing device are freely available on GitHub.
He ran the tests on Diabotical, a CPU-bound DirectX 11 game, through Proton on CachyOS with an RTX 4070 SUPER and a 500 Hz OLED monitor. He went looking for answers in varying scenarios.
Testing X11 against native Wayland, VRR on against off, and a DXVK low-latency fork on against off. He also ran a bonus set of tests comparing native Wayland to XWayland, with every configuration standardized at 300 clicks.
The results undercut a lot of what gets discussed online. The eight main test cases land within 0.72 ms of each other, with medians ranging from 4.21 ms to 4.93 ms.
Source: Marco Nett
X11 beats Wayland by just 0.14 to 0.22 ms, nowhere near enough to explain Wayland's reputation for feeling laggy. Enabling VRR cuts latency by 0.26 to 0.45 ms and tightens the spread of results, more than any other factor tested.
Up to 0.84 ms gets saved in uncapped scenarios once the dxvk-low-latency fork is turned on. The real culprit is XWayland, which adds 3.13 ms on top of native Wayland, more than every other factor combined.
Stacking every optimization together (X11, VRR, and the low-latency fork) only moved the median down by 0.72 ms compared to a plain Wayland setup.
What does this mean for Linux gamers?
For the average Linux gamer, the lesson isn't to abandon Wayland for X11. It's to turn on VRR if your display supports it, get the dxvk-low-latency fork installed if your setup allows it, and make sure games run through native Wayland instead of XWayland.
What I have covered here is a distilled summary of the testing done by Marco, I highly suggest you give the original blog a read. He has taken a lot of variables into account, and listing them individually would've made you click away from this article. 😅
Mindgard just disclosed an unpatched 0-day in Cursor yesterday, where a poisoned repository could trigger arbitrary code on Windows systems without the developer needing to do anything on their end.
The bug lives in how Cursor resolves Git binaries when a project loads. Cursor checks several locations for git, and one of them is the workspace itself.
Plant a file called git.exe at the root of a repository, and Cursor runs it the moment that project opens. This happens because the execution is integrated into the normal startup routine, something you'd probably never notice unless you went looking for it.
Mindgard proved this by renaming the Windows Calculator app to git.exe and placing it in a test repo. Opening that repo in Cursor launched it instantly, with the flaw repeatedly spawning new instances of the app.
Here you can see many instances of the Calculator app being launched by Cursor repeatedly.
This is not something Cursor didn't know about. Mindgard's Aaron Portnoy first reported the bug on December 15, 2025, then followed up repeatedly in the months after.
Getting anyone to respond took a public LinkedIn post asking for a security contact. Cursor's CISO eventually replied privately, blaming a broken automation for the missed HackerOne invite.
The stonewalling didn't stop there, as the bug report on HackerOne was closed prematurely, being termed "informative and out of scope." Mindgard pushed back, HackerOne reopened it, and confirmed the details had reached Cursor.
Days passed, and the silence from Cursor was more apparent. Requests for updates in February, March, and April were left unanswered, all while they were busy shipping new releases.
Five months of cat and mouse, and Mindgard finally decided to go public.
There's a response
Just a placeholder image of Cursor's Linux build.
Albeit a very vague one. Speaking to Dark Reading, an unnamed spokesperson for Cursor informed them that:
I can confirm we are addressing this and will get back to Mindgard accordingly.
That statement isn't very confidence-instilling for an issue that feels magnitudes higher.
But what do I know about handling sensitive cybersecurity issues in a big AI firm? Maybe they had good reason to ignore the issue and were working on some shiny new AI feature. 🤷
Testing experimental software is a hassle right now. You either wait for a stable release, or you dive into the pit of nightly builds hoping the whole thing doesn't fall on your head.
That gets worse on image-based systems like GNOME OS, where the base image is read-only and you can't just swap out a package and move on.
GNOME wants to fix that with a new app it's prototyping, tentatively called Test Center.
Something new to tackle testing
It is meant to act as a one-stop solution for installing, running, and removing anything experimental, whether that's an app or a piece of the system itself.
For apps, you skip the usual grind of hunting down CI artifacts or building your own Flatpak bundle by hand. A developer hands you a link, you tap it, and the build shows up tagged as experimental, set to expire on its own.
System components run on sysext images instead of Flatpaks, though the idea plays out the same way. Take something like parental controls, still early in development, you'd grab the sysext tied to that merge request through Test Center, and it lands on your system as an overlay rather than a replacement.
Remove it, and you restore your system to the same state before the experimental change was applied.
Plus, there's a good reason system-level testing has been such a mess up to now.
According to Modal Collective, the closest thing on a regular package-based distro is packaging your changes into an unofficial repo like a COPR or PPA and asking testers to install from there themselves.
Once they do, the experimental packages don't sit next to the stable ones, they replace them outright. Break something, and it's on you to fix it. You won't get proper updates again until you do.
What's next?
All this effort is part of the GNOME OS Developer Tool Suite, a project that's been in funding through Germany's Prototype Fund since June 2026. Tobias Bernard, Jonas Dreßler, and a few others are working on this under the Modal Collective umbrella.
In a related plan, an easier way to distribute command-line developer tools on image-based systems is also part of the same project, though the team says more details on that are coming in a separate post.
If you're developing for GNOME OS and have opinions on what's currently annoying about testing and development workflows, the team wants to hear from you on Matrix, in the #gnome-os room, or in person at the GNOME OS BoF during GUADEC.
I started using Trello around 2013-14 to work on a team project. Trello was new and rising at the time for its simplicity of providing a collaborative Kanban board.
After its acquisition and recent AI surge, Trello has changed a lot. But I still miss its simplicity in Kanban style tools I have tried so far.
As I lean more towards, open source and self-hosting, I have collected a bunch of projects that can be considered in the same league as Trello.
My search for open source Trello alternatives were based on mainly finding simple kanban boards with team collaboration and public boards option. Integration to external services, mobile apps and the ability to import Trello projects are also worth considering. Since we are in AI era, automation and AI agent access can also be not ignored.
So, let's begin to see what open source tool can replace Trello for you.
Kan.bn
Kan is a sleek, modern looking Kanban task board. Built with Typescript, Kan provides a modern user interface and experience. It comes with all of the classic Trello features so you get boards and workpaces, labels and filtering. You also have the ability to comment and check activity logs on the tasks.
There is no automation or AI feature at the time of writing this article. Which is not entirely a bad thing because sometimes simplicity itself is a feature.
One thing that does bother me is the lack of smartphone apps. I like to keep a track on tasks while on the move.
That doesn't mean Kan doesn't provide ways for efficient work. They are already working on implementing templates so that you can easily create same type of tasks. Integrations with external tools is also a work in progress.
The biggest feature for people moving away from Trello is that you can import your Trello boards directly in Kan. That makes it a true open source alternative to Trello.
Use it if you want to move your existing Trello tasks to a self-hosted tool with modern look and feel.
Planka
If you want to use something that looks and feels like Trello, look no further than Planka. Look at the screenshots, and you'll feel like you are looking at Trello itself.
You get all the usual Trello and kanban board features. You have lists with tasks and those tasks can have deadline and time tracking. Kanban, grid and list views are available. You should also be able to import your Trello tasks here.
REST API with 50+ webhook events helps you integrate task management with external tools in your workflow.
Organizations can have single sign on along with Google, Azure AD and more.
There are no official mobile apps for now. If you must use one, there is a community app in progress. I would suggest waiting for the official mobile apps, instead.
Licensing and pricing are issues here. There are two versions: community and pro. Both versions are available in hosted and self-hosted formats. The pro version has additional features like user roles, recurring cards, UI customization for organization branding etc. You can self-host the community edition for free. Everything else has a price tag, including self-hosting the pro version.
Licensing is 'fair use' and it is not clear that they use a clear, open source solution. I would keep them in 'source open' category.
💡
Use it if you want a Trello style Kanban task board for your organization and you are okay using a source open software with no public boards.
Vikunja
Vikunja is primarily and open source, self-hostable Kanban board that you can use on your own and with your team. You can add labels, create relation between tasks, add deadlines and priorities.
Tasks and boards and can be shared with public, too. This makes it is easy to collaborate with external people and they don't even have to create an account.
Apart from Kanban, you also get list, tabular and Gantt chart views. Recurring tasks, sub tasks, due date notification, you get them all.
I like the idea of the "quick add magic". It's a helpful featuere specially if you work with AI to create task description. In the description, use keywords like mention a date and it adds that as a due date. This saves you the trouble of manually assigning labels, due dates, priorities etc.
Vikunja doesn't have smartphone apps but it does let you import your Trello projects.
Written in Go, Vikunja claims to be speedy. How to verify the claim? Well, there is a demo board you can test, no lon in required.
It is AGPL licensed and you can self host it on your own or opt for managed hosting from Vikunja itself.
💡
Use it if you want a true open source, self-hostable tool to manage tasks individually or for an organization.
Wekan
Wekan is one of the OG open source Trello alternatives. You can self host it on your servers. It feels more enterprise and organization oriented than individuals and lean team. The interface is a bit dated for my liking but still good enough for managing tasks without eye candy.
The promise is simple. You get boards, lists and tasks. It is collaborative and since its enterprise oriented, there is option to purchase commercial support.
There are mobile apps listed on their website but I didn't find anything on the Trello import. No AI integration as far as I can see.
💡
Use it if you want a true open source, self-hostable tool for an enterprise.
Tududi
Funny sounding name aside, Tududi is somewhat of a Clickup alternative. You have boards, areas (work, life, personal) and the ability to create notes. Which is a great way to share common docs with the team.
There are plenty of features to like here. Recurring tasks, subtasks, priorities, labeling, deadlines. All the usual stuff is already here with a few smart features. Progress can be tracked with completion stats and productivity patterns.
No smartphone apps but responsive design makes it easy to follow tasks on web browser on your mobile devices. Don't see automation or AI features here, either. Not sure about public board, too.
It can be self-hosted via Docker or you can use the hosted service from the developer.
💡
Use it if you want an open source Kanban tool with the ability to add docs.
Leantime
While not exactly a Trello clone, Leantime is a project management tool created specifically with ADHD and neurodivergence in mind. So you get more color codings, emoji-based priority features.
There is a "personal view" that shows all your tasks in one place irrespective of which board they belong to. This is something I have seen in ClickUp.
You can also take notes that won't be saved in the main tasks and would only be used in personal view.
You can track productivity with built in reports and see how the project is coming together.
Another thing that I feel is helpful is the ability to create a blueprint for a project. So instead of creating the main project board immediately, this can be used for the (pre) planning phase.
Leantime also has builtin whiteboard for creating mind maps and wireframes to visually represent your thoughts.
💡
Use Leantime if you have people with ADHD in your team and you are not looking for an exact Trello replacement.
Fizzy
From the makers of Basecamp, Fizzy is a relatively new tool and claims to make "Kanban as it was supposed to be". Which means it is keeping things simple by giving you boards with only the most essential features.
We have been using Fizzy for the past several months for managing our tasks here at It's FOSS.
Auto close is the feature that you won't easily find in other project management tools. Once you add a task, it gets added to Maybe list by default. And if the task sees no activity (edits, comments, moving to other lists), it gets moved to a "Not now" list that is hidden from the main view.
Another thing here is that no matter how many lists (columns) you add, you can only view two of them at a time. Helps with focus, apparently.
Fizzy has smartphone apps that makes it easier to manage tasks without sitting in front of a computer.
My biggest gripe with Fizzy is that it doesn't have a deadline feature. Everything is either Maybe, Intermediate lists or Done. And then removing tasks from Done list is done one by one manually, no multi-select here. So if your board has hundreds of finished tasks and you didn't delete them immediately, you have to delete them one by one. Or you just let them stay in the Done section which kind of looks odd when the number increases.
Public boards are available in Fizzy so you can use it for sharing project roadmaps. Webhooks let you integrate to external tools.
Fizzy also has CLI version and thus allowing you to use an AI agent for accessing and managing the board, if that's your thing.
There is no direct way for importing Trello projects in Fizzy. So that's something worth noting. Also, Fizzy is source available, not open source.
You can self-host it or use the hosted service which is free anyways.
💡
If deadlines is not something you need and you are okay with source available, Fizzy is a good choice as it is free even in hosted version.
Bonus: Schedule
Now this one is completely different than the rest of the Trello alternatives mentioned here. Schedule is a simple, kanban style todo list of your Linux desktop. It doesn't have collaboration features, cannot be self hosted or accessed via web browsers.
It's a desktop application. You install it, you create your boards, add tasks and work on them. Sometimes you need that. Either you don't work with a team or external collaborators or you just want a separate place for your personal projects.
Use this for personal task management on your desktop only.
Which tool should you use to replace Trello?
I have deliberately not included these in my list here:
Nextcloud Deck: Kanban feature is good but it's just one part of a different type of software suite.
Plane, Mattermost and OpenProject: Full-fledged project management suite. Overkill for just Kanban feature.
Kanboard, Restyboard, Taskboard: No longer actively developed.
Nocobase, Baserow: More of no code CRM oriented tools than just Kanban boards.
And to answer the question...it all depends on your requirements.
If you want a simple Kanban tool that looks modern, go with Kan. You can use it for free or self host it or opt for the paid hosted version. Fizzy is also a good choice if you don't need deadline features. Vikunja is also rising in popularity and worth a dekko.
I would suggest checking each tool and its features and see if they will be your ideal open source Trello alternatives.
Your turn now. Which Kanban tool do you use? Did you find something worth trying in this list? Share it in the comments,
