I Spent Time With GeForce NOW to See If It's Gameable on Linux

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.

🚧

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.

GeForce Now

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.

Next, you will have to agree to NVIDIA's Privacy Policy and GeForce NOW's Terms of Use. Be sure to go through them, as they contain many clauses.

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.

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/FryVRW4
via IFTTT

The Simplest Method to Extract All Images from a Document in LibreOffice

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

🚧

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 😄

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/Jy0oKqj
via IFTTT

Ubuntu's Rustification Has a New Milestone! Coreutils Migration is Complete

Ubuntu has managed to do away with GNU Core Utilities in its default stack. The last three holdouts, cp, mv and rm, have moved to uutils' coreutils; the Rust reimplementation Canonical has been feeding into the distro since 2025.

They had been held back from 26.04 LTS over flaws in the uutils versions. Everything else, from ls and cat to chmod and du, made that jump in earlier releases.

This change, while big, sits hidden away in an obscure mention in Canonical's work-in-progress release notes for Ubuntu 26.10.

It's been a long road

Canonical started oxidising Ubuntu last year, and Ubuntu 25.10 became the first release to ship coreutils as the default. That release also made sudo-rs the default privilege tool, replacing a command that had been in place for decades.

26.04 was the release where the plan did slow down quite a bit, as Canonical kept cp, mv, and rm on their GNU versions due to a bunch of TOCTOU issues that were blocking the full implementation.

These were caught during an audit, when Canonical commissioned Zellic for two rounds between December 2025 and March 2026, focusing on the most security-sensitive utilities first.

Across both rounds, Zellic raised 113 issues, and 44 of them were assigned CVEs. Canonical says the vast majority have been resolved.

Getting here has had its ups and downs, and the last stretch was not clean. In July, uutils cp went back into the archive and came straight out again after it broke live image builds.

The fix was quick; as the developers marked it "Critical," the fix went upstream, and the migration landed in time for 26.10.

What changes for you?

When typing commands, nothing changes for you on the surface. uutils coreutils is designed to be a drop-in replacement for essential GNU tools, and the project treats any divergence from GNU as a bug, further pointing out that some options may still be missing or behave differently.

So if you prefer staying on the GNU version, you have the option to install the coreutils-from-gnu package that houses all the required components.

The next stage

Coreutils is one piece of a broader campaign. Earlier this year, Canonical became a Gold Sponsor of the Trifecta Tech Foundation, pitching in €40,000 a year to fund memory-safe system software.

Under this, their current target is ntpd-rs, a Rust rewrite of the tools Ubuntu uses to keep its clock in sync. While work is still ongoing, it has already arrived for testing.

Its transition to being default is targeted for Ubuntu 27.04.

What Canonical is gradually building up towards is the completion of their oxidation vision for Ubuntu, and it's not about blindly including new components. Rather, it looks like a measured approach that's being worked out a few steps at a time.

---

Suggested Read 📖: Linux is getting ready to purge old 32-bit Arm platform code.

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/DswzSur
via IFTTT

Rune Goes Open Source, Looks to Share Revenue With Contributors

Rune has left behind its proprietary old self for a new open source identity under the GPLv3, letting you clone, read, or build off it from GitHub. The relicensing came via a string of moves, one of which was the commit that marked the project's license transition.

The developers have also decided to keep commit history mostly intact, which runs back to 2017, with some gaps here and there. I point that out because projects that go open often squash the history first, so old secrets and sensitive commits never land in the public repo.

To give you some context, Rune is an IDE for Linux and macOS that can be used for writing and debugging code, running your terminals and CLI tools in the same window, and letting a coding agent take on parts of your tasks.

It is based on Go, and the team defends its use by showcasing vtebench runs that show the Go terminal keeping pace with Alacritty, Ghostty, and Kitty on a set of terminal workloads.

Do keep in mind that these were not language benchmarks; these only show how far the IDE has come.

The Rune team is further looking to expand language support beyond Go and Python, with Rust and Zig already in beta on main and an open call for developers to steward their own language.

While the IDE itself is free to use, people can opt for paid plans to get access to the P2P Rune Network, premium support, and a separate tailored plan for enterprises with extra bells and whistles.

Going the open source route

The license, GPLV3, allows contributors to keep the copyright in what they submit, and the company (Unstable Build LLC) takes no special right to relicense their work. Earlier, the project asked contributors to sign a CLA; that's not the case anymore.

Rune's creator, Ernest Romero Climent, is not happy with what has happened elsewhere in open source, where companies build in the open, lean on the community for years, then change the license once the project is worth something.

Instead, they are looking to pay contributors via an opt-in credits program, where accepted work earns credits and a slice of eligible service revenue funds a pool, which is then split by the credits each contributor holds.

All awarded credits will be tracked in a public ledger, showing the revenue behind the pool, any deductions, the credits awarded, and how each payout is worked out.

As I said, all of that is optional. You can still send patches without joining the program.

---

Suggested Read 📖: openEuler and the race to build Asia's AI infrastructure.

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/6X7VIu3
via IFTTT

openEuler and the Race to Build Asia's AI Infrastructure

When it comes to open source and AI, we almost always look West. While a lot happens in the United States and some in Europe, the East is not lagging either.

In the recently concluded LEAP East conference, several startups and enterprises came together to showcase their innovations and share what they were building.

Out of them, openEuler caught our attention for its focus on Open Source AI.

The SuperPoD

At LEAP East 2026, openEuler showcased its SuperPoD OS, which extends operating-system support for UnifiedBus-based SuperPoD computing systems.

Think of a SuperPoD as a cluster of several powerful computers that need to act like one giant machine. Running AI workloads takes computing power and doing it across hundreds of such machines is messy as they need to share memory, pass data around quickly, and not conflict with each other.

UB Service Core is the open-source software layer, part of the openEuler ecosystem, that makes coordination across those machines actually work. It provides five cluster-level system services for UnifiedBus-based SuperPoDs: Engine, Memory, Communication, I/O, and Virtualization.

The Engine pools memory and DPU resources across the cluster and schedules them dynamically. It also handles automatic failover so the system keeps running if a node goes down.

The Memory component lets machines within a UnifiedBus-based SuperPoD share and pool memory using unified-memory programming, meaning software can treat distributed memory as a single addressable space.

The Communication piece provides high-performance networking over UnifiedBus while staying compatible with standard Socket and Verbs interfaces, so existing applications don't need to be rewritten to benefit from it.

The I/O service handles global data read/write caching at a high level, which matters for workloads like AI inference that repeatedly access large shared datasets.

The Virt component covers virtualization pooling, decides live-migration policy (when and how to move a running VM to another machine), supports disaster recovery, and improves communication efficiency between VMs and containers.

Together, these five services give a SuperPoD cluster the coordination it needs to perform like a single well-organized system, with a claimed 30-50% performance gain over conventional architectures.

According to openEuler, UB Service Core can improve application performance by 30–50% by taking advantage of the peer-to-peer UnifiedBus interconnect architecture.

This SuperPod or UB Service Core is fully open source under the openEuler umbrella.

Agentic AI in the OS

openEuler is evolving toward an AgentOS model. In openEuler 24.03 LTS SP4, DevStation (desktop variant of openEuler) includes openEuler Intelligence, a desktop AI assistant that uses an agent runtime and MCP-based tools to support development and system operations.

Pre-built agent harnessing in the operating system is not uncommon these days. openEuler 24.03's built-in AI agent can be used to control the Linux system.

So, instead of doing things manually, by mouse clicks, you could just ask the agent to dim the brightness, lower the volume, or change the wallpaper. The built-in AI agent has custom skills to control the system settings in openEuler's UKUI desktop environment.

This is a work in progress. But the direction is clear. AI agent should soon be able to let you control the system instead of doing things manually.

Expanding into a community-based ecosystem

openEuler has launched openEuler Hong Kong User Group to bring together developers, researchers, and organizations in Hong Kong to connect, share experiences, and explore open-source innovation together.

openEuler is an open-source project incubated and operated by the OpenAtom Foundation. The community is expanding international collaboration through local user groups, industry partnerships, and participation in global open-source events. The Hong Kong User Group represents another step in openEuler’s efforts to encourage local participation and international collaboration.

Explore openEuler Community

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/zqyrSpU
via IFTTT

Paperweight: An Open Source App to Clean Up Your Inbox and Digital Footprint

E-mail is one of those things that get really unruly before you realize they have. You sign up everywhere with your e-mail, get lots of spam from services that you almost forget you have even heard of, and all the important things, consequently, get lost in the noise.

This is the problem Paperweight aims to solve. It is an open source application that helps you see what accounts or newsletters you subscribed to so that you can take a decision on them.

Paperweight helps you reduce your digital footprint locally

You probably already know that a digital footprint is the trail of information you leave behind when you use the internet. While it is not easy (nearly impossible) to erase the entire digital footprint, we sure can reduce it.

There are premium services like Incogni from Surfshark that does this job for a fee. They look into all the data broker databases and also send the data deletion requests on behalf of you.

Paperwight aims to help you do some of those tasks. The idea is this. You plugin your email into Paperweight. It scans all the emails and gives you:

• Accounts you signed up for or made a purchase
• Email lists (newsletters) you are on
• Personal data (like phone number, payment details) in the messages

While you can bulk unsubscribe, rest of the action needs manual action. You will have to approach the respective websites by sending them emails individually.

And here's the thing. All this processing happens locally on your system. The inbox is scanned on the system, there is no server in between, so no data collection. The source code is available so you can verify these claims.

Let's see paperweight features in detail.

Bulk Unsubscribe

All the services that send you e-mails are listed under "Mailing lists" right on the main window, and you can go in and check what e-mails you've been sent, how many, and the dates of the recent ones.

Here's the exciting part: you can select multiple services at once and unsubscribe from their e-mails without having to individually open every single service's e-mail and going through the unsubscription process, which usually takes you through a few browser hoops.

After selecting the services you wish to unsubscribe from, it becomes a simple matter of clicking the dumpster icon and confirming:

📋

Sometimes, some services require more intervention, so even if you select all the ones you wish to unsubscribe from, you might have to do a few individually. Also, some services simply cannot be unsubscribed from, such as YouTube's on Gmail. The selection box itself is grayed out for them.

Note that many email services, including the privacy-focused ProtonMail has this feature built-in.

Account Inventory

An entire "Accounts" section shows you exactly all the places where your e-mail is being used to log into other services. All the services where you did "login with Google" will also show up here if you're using a Gmail account.

There, you can see the kind of access it has to your data, including financial, identity or health information, and gives you an unsubscribe as well as a "delete all e-mails" button.

Again, the automated unsubscribe request may not always be respected by the service at the other end.

Breach Alerts

Under the banner of the same accounts inventory, Paperweight also makes an exclusive list of services on that roster that have been known to be at risk or breached. It gets the security risk data from publicly available Have I Been Pwned, and gives you the options to delete/request your data, and to delete their e-mails on your account.

GDPR Deletion Template

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) gives users the "right to be forgotten". As such, mostly companies have to comply with the rule and relinquish any and all data they might have regarding an individual if the individual requests so.

How does Paperweight come in? Well, they give you a template to request your data from any service you are subscribed to. Just click on the "Data requests" option down below in actions, and you'll see an almost fully written e-mail to get the company rid of your data.

It is still not fully automatic but it is still better than doing it all from scratch.

Interface

The user interface is pretty sleek and pretty simple. On the dashboard, three big blocks show the number of e-mails analyzed, mailing list subscriptions, and accounts where your e-mail is used.

On the left, there are small buttons to access pretty much the same things. There are a few "at a glance" type lines showing recent activity and highlights of the analysis of the account.

Finally, a frequency graph shows the number of e-mails you've received in the past few months.

The interface for further options are shown in the screenshots above and pretty much show you all available options right on the face. You don't have to look too far for anything at all.

Data Traffic

Just out of curiosity, I tracked the network traffic going through Paperweight and to my relief, it only seems to be talking to the e-mail service providers' servers or the servers of the services that you're trying to modify. For example, there will be traffic to and from Canva's servers if you're trying to unsubscribe from their mailing list.

Free vs Lifetime

Paperweight might be open source, but it is a freemium sort of application. There's a free version that lets you use Paperweight with one email account and 90 days of email history.

And then there is a lifetime license that costs a one-time payment of $69 and gives you the option to add multiple accounts and scans through your entire past e-mail history.

Here's the thing. The source code is available on GitHub, under the MIT license and if you want, you can fork the repo, modify the code to remove the restrictions, and use all the features. There is no constant validation for the license. However, that would be a breach of honor.

Although I feel that $69 is a bit too much, probably because I am a student. Price parity and pay-what-you-want model would have been better. But that's just my opinion.

Getting Paperweight

Paperweight is available for all of the big three operating systems Linux, MacOS and Windows.

On Linux, they provide an AppImage and a .deb package.

Get Paperweight

Conclusion

For a lot of users, Paperweight probably provides a service that you had no idea you needed. But now that you are, you can use it periodically to maintain a clean and healthy inbox. Once a month, on a weekend should be good enough.

The free version does feel limited, though, especially the 90-day history cap. I would have preferred a Melia like solution that allows full access for a single email account and lifetime license for multiple accounts.

If you give Paperweight a try, do share your experience in the comments.

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/ai5gl2A
via IFTTT

MAKERphone 2.0 Lets You Build a 4G Phone and Vibe-Code Its Apps

Most of us carry a phone every day, but very few of us could say what's actually going on inside one. That gap is exactly what CircuitMess is trying to fill or should I say, has been trying to fill.

The Croatian company CircuitMess, founded by Albert Gajšak, ran its first MAKERphone campaign back in 2018, a build-it-yourself phone kit that raised over $324,000 and eventually shipped to more than 6,000 people as "Ringo."

Now there's a sequel. MAKERphone 2.0 is live on Kickstarter (partner link) and it has already sailed past its goal with weeks left to go.

The pitch is the same as before: you assemble a working mobile phone yourself, then learn to code on it. The major difference this time is that you don't need a soldering iron to do it. That's a big relief, for me at least, as I am terrible at soldering.

📋

The article contains partner affiliate links. Please read our affiliate policy.

📝 Key Specifications of MAKERphone 2.0

As you can see, the MAKERphone looks like the normal keypad cellphones. Here are the main details:

• Processor: ESP32-S3, dual-core, 4 MB flash, 4 MB PSRAM
• Cellular: 4G LTE Cat-1 with 2G fallback, Nano SIM
• Display: 1.77-inch color, 160×128
• Input: 12-key numpad, nav joystick, 4 function keys, volume keys
• Audio: DAC, speaker, I²S mic, 3.5 mm headphone jack
• Battery: 1000 mAh, USB-C charging
• Storage: microSD slot
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB
• Expansion: UMAX modular connector
• Assembly: no soldering required this time
• Coding: MicroPython, Arduino C++, VibeBoy (AI-assisted)
• Price: starts at $119 for early backers, $169 otherwise

The kit starts at $119 for super early backers and climbs from there and goes for a retail price of $169.

This is a DIY gadget, the phone that arrives as a box of parts and a build guide, and you put it together into something that makes real calls and sends real texts over 4G LTE. Pop in a SIM and it behaves like an actual phone.

Now 4G seems like a step down from the usual 5G but the device is not supposed to replace your smartphone. If you are not going to use all those internet connected social media and apps, you don't really need 5G. I explain the concept later.

At the core, there is ESP32-S3, the same family of low-power microcontroller you'll find in countless hobbyist boards. So no, this is not going to compare or compete with Snapdragon or Apple Bionic chip and they don't even pretend to do so.

The original MAKERphone asked you to solder the whole board together. Version 2.0 drops that requirement, which lowers the barrier a lot if you've never touched an soldering iron. CircuitMess says it's built to be assembled by kids from around 11 up, so a functional adult should manage fine.

From the official assembly video, it seems like just putting the pieces together.

There's a 1.77-inch color display, a headphone jack (yes, in 2026), and a modular design that lets you bolt on extra hardware. More on that below.

Modules, coding, and a smart band

The part that makes this more than a nostalgia kit is the module system. MAKERphone 2.0 takes add-on modules that change what the phone can do. Several of these modules come in the box.

There's an infrared module for controlling an old TV, a camera module, a 2W speaker, an LED module, and a temperature and humidity sensor. There's also a perfboard so you can wire in your own sensors.

Once it's built, you code it. You can write for it in MicroPython or Arduino C++. CircuitMess is also pushing an AI-assisted coding tool it calls VibeBoy, so the "vibe coding" fad has officially reached the DIY phone aisle.

And that's not a bad thing entirely. Not everyone can code or make a custom app in MicroPython. But LLMs have removed that barrier. You have the hardware; you use a LLM and let it generate the kind of software you want. That's the reason that Seeed Studio and many other hobbyist hardware makers are promoting their own AI-assisted platforms. It makes hardware more enjoyable for bigger group of people.

CircuitMess is selling a companion too: a programmable smart band that pairs with the phone over Bluetooth. Think of it as a semi-smartwatch as it can show you time, let you play games and use timer and stopwatch functionality. There are no sensors here to track your health and activities, as far as I can see.

It's a separate accessory rather than part of the base kit, so treat it as an add-on if the idea appeals.

The idea behind this DIY phone

A 4G phone seems like an outdated device in 2026. After all, 5G is everywhere and even the most basic smartphones support 5G these days. But the premise of MAKERphone is entirely different. It's not a smartphone by choice.

We have seen such devices in the 'maker space' in the past. There is Flipper Zero that has an entire different purpose, then there are handheld retro gaming devices, pocket computers, etc.

This is a similar idea where kids in STEM or hobbyist adults can build the device as per the liking, by adding the desired modules.

To give it more functionality, there is the scope of a 4G sim card. This gives you the ability to make calls and text messages.

With that, it becomes a bar phone that you assemble and design new games and apps for your own self.

And the device is still useful as a phone. If you want kids to stay connected with you, not the social media, it works. The same goes for adults who deliberately want to stay away from the internet (except when using a proper computer).

📋

Think of it as the basic keypad phone but one you can customize on your own with new apps and additional hardware modules. If you have teenage kids interested in STEM in your family, add it to your Christmas shopping list for 2027.

🛒 Pricing and Availability

MAKERphone 2.0 is live on Kickstarter now and has already hit roughly 790% of its funding goal, with about 27 days left on the campaign as of writing.

Back MAKERphone 2.0 on Kickstarter

Pricing starts at $199 for the early bird tier, with higher tiers as the discounts sell out. There are way too many tiers to fit in all here.

US, EU, UK and Canada residents do not need to pay any import fee. VAT is likely to be extera depending upon your location. Shipping cost are not clear to me but the device should start shipping in July-August 2027.

🚧

As with any crowdfunding campaign, treat the timeline as an estimate. Back it because you want to support the project, not because you're counting on the ship date.

If you just want an inexpensive (smart)phone, this isn't the device for you. If you want to understand phones, or hand a kid something that turns screen time into build time, and the budget and wait time is okay for you, you can make a purchase.

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/Kz2uk8V
via IFTTT