15 O'Reilly Linux eBooks for Under $30: A Bundle That Goes From Command Line Basics to Kubernetes

Humble Bundle and O'Reilly have put together a pay-what-you-want Linux collection called Linux: All the Things (partner link), and it's built to take you from basic command-line comfort to container orchestration across fifteen eBooks.

O'Reilly doesn't really need an introduction. They are one of the most trusted technical book publishers. This bundle leans on some of their strongest Linux titles, including Learning Git, Linux Pocket Guide, and Practical Linux System Administration, alongside a handful of more specialized picks for security testing and Kubernetes.

Humble Bundle: Linux: All the Things by O'Reilly

All fifteen eBooks come as DRM-free PDF and ePUB files. Which means they're yours to keep forever once you buy them. Whatever amount you pay goes toward the publisher, Humble, and Code for America, a nonprofit working on making government services simpler and more accessible. If you use our link, a tiny fraction will come to us as well (read our affiliate policy). Just wanted to be clear about that.

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Get the bundle

Here's everything in the bundle

Tier 1	Tier 2
Linux Observability with BPF	Learning Kali Linux
Git for Teams	Linux Pocket Guide
Git Pocket Guide	Learning Git
Linux System Programming	Practical Linux System Administration
Understanding the Linux Kernel	Version Control with Git
	Kubernetes: Up and Running
	Network Programmability and Automation
	Learning Modern Linux
	Efficient Linux at the Command Line
	Linux Cookbook

Bundle is divided into two tiers with different pricing and sets of books.

Tier 1: Pay $5.90 or More for 5 Books

The entry tier costs $5.90 and gets you five books, leaning more toward Linux internals than beginner material.

Linux Observability with BPF covers using BPF for performance analysis and network monitoring, the kind of thing you refer to when you're troubleshooting a production system rather than just running one. Linux System Programming and Understanding the Linux Kernel go a level deeper still, covering system calls, process management, and how the kernel itself is put together.

The other two books in this tier are Git references. Git for Teams focuses on building efficient, user-centered Git workflows across a team, and Git Pocket Guide is a quick-reference companion for common git commands.

Tier 2: Pay $29.50 or More for All 15 Books

Paying $29.50 or more unlocks the full fifteen-book set. Do note that the tiers above that, $34.50 up to $49.50, don't add any more books. That extra money just routes to O'Reilly, Humble, and Code for America.

This tier adds two more Git titles to round out what Tier 1 started. Learning Git is a from-scratch introduction for anyone still fuzzy on branches and commits, and Version Control with Git goes deeper into collaborative workflows and tooling.

A cluster of books here cover core Linux skills. Linux Pocket Guide, now in its fourth edition for its 20th anniversary, is a command reference built for the terminal. Learning Modern Linux and Efficient Linux at the Command Line build on that with cloud-native context and practical shell efficiency, while Linux Cookbook and Practical Linux System Administration round things out with recipes and day-to-day sysadmin practice.

Learning Kali Linux covers security testing, penetration testing, and ethical hacking basics, useful if you want to poke at your own systems before someone else does.

The last two books look are more advanced and geared towards DevOps. Kubernetes: Up and Running is a solid on-ramp into container orchestration, and Network Programmability and Automation covers automating network devices instead of clicking through them one by one.

📋

Do checkout for the edition of those books, though. Sometimes, these bundles may include older editions.

🛒 Get the Bundle

All fifteen books are DRM-free PDF and ePUB, so they're yours to keep and move to whatever device you actually read on.

If even a couple of these titles are already on your reading list, $29.50 for all is still a good deal. And part of your payment supports Code for America, which is similar to doing charity yourself.

Get the Linux: All the Things bundle

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X (Formerly Twitter) is Going Open Source

No! It will take quite some time, and you will perish before that happens. Elon Musk has announced that X's entire codebase will go open source once xAI wraps up an internal review for security vulnerabilities. He says they will publish the whole thing without holding anything back.

Further stating that they are inviting third-party reviewers to confirm that what gets published actually matches what's running in production.

Once we have completed our review for security vulnerabilities, we will make the entire codebase of 𝕏 open source, with no exceptions.

Moreover, we will invite third party reviewers to examine the system that is running to confirm that the open source code is what is running.…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 15, 2026

The onboarding of reviewers could be a move to tackle a common complaint against corporate open source releases where the published code is different from what's actually deployed.

Of course, skepticism around the announced move has shown up as expected.

JerryRigEverything, a man known for his knack for taking smartphones to their breaking point, replied to the original tweet (xeet?) saying that:

Don't you say this every few months? That tracks.

And he's not wrong. Elon has made open source promises like this before, for X's codebase and for Grok's models alike, and not all of them have held up.

A pattern to take note of

X's transparency push goes back further than Grok. In March 2023, not long after taking over the platform, Elon had X (called Twitter back then) publish a partial version of its recommendation algorithm on GitHub, the platform's first real step toward opening up its codebase.

Then there's Grok 1. He tweeted back in March 2024 that xAI would open source Grok. Six days later, the company delivered, publishing the base model's weights and architecture under Apache 2.0.

In August 2025, xAI put the weights for Grok 2.5, its 2024 flagship, up on Hugging Face (listed there as "Grok 2"). Elon said at the time that Grok 3 "will be made open source in about 6 months."

That puts it somewhere in February 2026, a window that's now been closed for months with no sign of Grok 3 on Hugging Face.

Following that, in January 2026, the code behind the "For You" feed's ranking algorithm went open source too, landing in a separate repository built on a Grok-based transformer model.

This is the one that actually got the update it was promised, picking up a substantial refresh in May 2026. And more recently, Grok Build followed on July 15, the same day as the X open-sourcing announcement, with xAI publishing the coding agent's Rust source and terminal interface on GitHub under Apache 2.0.

The record, overall, is mixed rather than uniformly bad. The "For You" algorithm got the update it was promised, the 2023 algorithm release didn't (you can check the repo linked above), and Grok 3's six-month window closed back in February 2026 with nothing to show for it.

Let's see what comes of Elon's latest promise.

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Vocalinux Turns Your Speech Into Text Without Giving Away Voice Data

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.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jatinkrmalik/vocalinux/main/install.sh -o /tmp/vl.sh && bash /tmp/vl.sh --interactive

Vocalinux

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. 😄

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FOSS Weekly #26.29: Mint Goes Wayland, OpenBook Reader, Terminal Shortcut Tips, Linux Handheld Computers and More

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.

And Wayland is not really as slow as some people think. That's what a recent benchmark study found out.

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.

Liunyx Foundation Offer

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.

Get the eBooks

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.

On a related note, learn about remapping the CoPilot key on your keyboard to something useful. Yes, some keyboards these days come with a dedicated Microsoft Copilot key.

Since there is so much discussion around keys, let me share my favorite keyboard shortcuts that make me more efficient in the terminal.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

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

Join It's FOSS Plus

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

Space Haven will have you manage a crew of humans on a spaceship trying to survive the cold, dark vastness of space.

📽️ Videos for You

I still stand by this, apt update && apt upgrade needs to go away.

Subscribe to It's FOSS YouTube Channel

💡 Quick Handy Tip

On GNOME, you can resize a window using the Super key on your keyboard. First, run this command:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences resize-with-right-button true

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Now, when pressing the Super key, drag a window while pressing the right-click to resize it.

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If you are interested in learning about open source AI, please subscribe to our upcoming Local AI Weekly newsletter. Expected to start dispatch from this month itself.

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🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

How sharp is your Linux automation knowledge?

What does the cat says?

🗓️ 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.

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Remapping the Useless AI Slop Copilot Key in Linux

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.

Install keyd

On Arch Linux, install keyd using:

sudo pacman -S keyd

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.

sudo mkdir -p /etc/keyd
sudo nano /etc/keyd/externalKeyboard.conf

Replace the keyboard ID with your own vid:pid.

[ids]
aaaa:bbbb:cccccccc
- [main]
leftshift+leftmeta+f23 = C-A-S-f12

Here's what each part does:

The [ids] section limits the remapping to the selected keyboard, leaving your built-in keyboard and other input devices untouched.

• C, A, S, and M represent Ctrl, Alt, Shift, and Meta.
• The left side specifies the key combination received from the keyboard.
• The right side defines the new shortcut that will be sent to the system.

Apply the Configuration

Reload keyd:

sudo keyd reload

Normally, you do not need to log out or reboot.

If this is your first time installing keyd and the remap does not work immediately, a reboot is worth trying.

Verify the Remapping

Run the monitor again:

sudo keyd monitor

Press the Copilot key once more.

This time, you should see the newly assigned shortcut (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F12) instead of the original Meta+Shift+F23.

keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0      leftalt down
keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0      leftshift down
keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0      leftcontrol down
keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0      f12 down
keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0      f12 up
keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0      leftalt up
keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0      leftshift up
keyd virtual keyboard   0fac:0ade:bea394c0      leftcontrol up

Assign the Shortcut in KDE

Now that the Copilot key sends a standard shortcut, KDE can detect it correctly.

Open System Settings → Shortcuts. Here, click on the Add New button on the top-right and select Application.

Add a new Application

From the list of sections, select Vivaldi Apps (or other apps of your choice) and then YouTube Music.

Select the YouTube Music PWA

Locate the application shortcut you want to configure, click the shortcut field, and press the Copilot key or CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+F12.

Add Shortcut for YouTube Music PWA

Since keyd is now emitting Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F12, KDE records the shortcut without any issues.

Check for Shortcut Conflicts

Before deciding on a shortcut, it's worth checking whether KDE or KWin already uses it.

For example, whether Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F12 toggles the KWin compositor in X11 sessions.

You can search for existing shortcuts by running:

grep -i "F12\|F13\|F14" ~/.config/kglobalshortcutsrc

A Few Things to Keep in Mind

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.

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Turns Out Wayland Isn't the Input Lag Disaster Everyone Says it is

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?

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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. 😅

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Cursor AI's Silence on a Critical Flaw Jeopardizes Millions of Users

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. 🤷

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Suggested Read 📖: Did you know a storage bug on Windows 11 could eat up disk space?

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