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Speaking of AI, Asahi Linux, the project behind Linux on Apple Silicon Macs, is moving every repository from MIT to GPL v2 or later. The team says people were lifting unreleased code and rewriting it with AI to hide its origin. That hints at Omarchy but DHH told us in an interview that he really doesn't care about this license move.
Firefox 160 can send a full tab, or just a box you draw around part of a page, into a Mini Window. We tested it and shared this new feature.
Closing a kitty session no longer means losing your layout. The 0.50 release can save every window, tab, and scrollback at logout and restore them at the next launch, once you enable the setting.
Hate Chromium? Domicile is a Rust-based Wayland compositor that draws your entire desktop as a web page using a patched Chromium build ☠️. It only runs on x86_64 machines for now.
Nautilus, or Files, GNOME's file manager, may soon get a neater way to browse long folders. Developers are testing optional section headers that sort files into groups, though this is an early build, so things could change.
Synaptics has sent a cease-and-desist to developer Mike Lothian over Vino, his open source DisplayLink driver. The letters claim patent infringement, and Mike has had to pull the repository from public view.
The company behind GameOS, Playtron, is now KORA Systems. Its new desktop OS, also called KORA, puts AI models and agents right into a Linux base, with a launch planned for later in 2027.
This edition of FOSS Weekly is supported by LabEx.
LabEx offers interactive, hands-on learning experience on Linux, devops and cybersecurity. There are labs and challenges to practice your learnings straight into the 'playground' offered by LabEx.
Not sure which backup tool to pick? Déjà Dup suits GNOME desktops with almost no setup, while Kopia and Restic handle cloud storage for those who want more control. UrBackup covers fleets of machines.
📆 Trivia Bit: Firefox 1.0 arrived on November 9, 2004, as Mozilla’s open source alternative to Internet Explorer. It came with tabbed browsing, a built-in pop-up blocker, and phishing protection, and was released for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Agent Name Service (ANS) now has a home at the Linux Foundation. The launch happened at KubeCon North America in Salt Lake City, and you might remember that the foundation first announced its plans for the project way back in June.
GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Salesforce, and DigiCert are among the organizations now involved with ANS, bringing the total number up to eleven.
One of the early deployments of ANS has been in AGNTCY, another project under the foundation, where its directory of AI agents can now check an agent’s ANS identity.
Announcing the move, Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation, had this to share:
Autonomous AI agents are transacting and operating across global systems, but they can't succeed without verifiable identity.
Under the neutral governance of the Linux Foundation, ANS provides a common foundation for trust that the entire industry can adopt, implement and improve together.
An explainer
Platforms identify AI agents in their own ways, and a service that receives a request from one has no standardized way to confirm who the agent represents.
ANS tackles this by linking each agent to a domain name its operator owns, the same way a website is tied to its domain. Each version of an agent gets its own name, such as ans://v1.4.2.travel.example.com.
To register an agent, the operator first has to prove it controls that domain. Certificates are then issued for the agent, and every registration goes into a public log that anyone can read.
ANS also publishes details about each agent in DNS, the internet's address book, and other systems can then look them up with tools they already use.
The main DNS records use a format from a separate project called DNS-AID. ANS adds one record of its own that points to the agent's entry in the public log.
When an agent sends a request, the receiving system can check that its registration exists, that it has not been revoked, and that the agent really holds the key tied to it.
ANS only covers who the agent is. Deciding what it can do is left to the receiving system, and platforms have to add the check themselves.
The setup behind ANS
A technical steering committee now oversees the project. It starts with five seats, held by three people from GoDaddy, Ken Huang of DistributedApps.ai, and Michael Kantor of Hashgraph Online (HOL).
That lineup is only a starting point. The first election has to be held within 12 months, and after it, the charter prevents any one company from holding half or more of the seats (to ensure vendor neutrality, I assume).
The charter also mentions that meetings are meant to be open to the public and that discussions and decisions should be visible to everyone.
As for all the code in the project, the Go, Rust, and Java libraries currently use the MIT license, but new code contributed from now on has to use the Apache 2.0 license.
Some lore info
ANS began in 2025 as a draft sent to the IETF, the internet standards body, and a follow-up came in October. Drafts like these have no formal standing at the IETF and are not endorsed by it.
At present, the Linux Foundation calls the specification formalized. The reference code and a local demo are on the project's GitHub page, and the specifications are on ansinfo.ai.
Before we dive into the matter, you first have to understand what DisplayLink is. It is a proprietary graphics transport technology that lets computers connect to one or more external displays over USB, using docks or adapters built around DisplayLink chips.
It works by compressing display data on the host computer and sending it to a chip in the connected device. The chip then decodes it for output to monitors through interfaces such as HDMI or DisplayPort.
On Linux, this support can rub some people the wrong way due to its closed-source nature. That is where Mike Lothian's (FireBurn) Vino comes in as an open alternative.
Unfortunately, Synaptics owns DisplayLink and has sent Mike cease-and-desist letters alleging that he infringed its DisplayLink patents with his project.
What's Vino?
Vino is a driver that lets the Linux kernel talk to DisplayLink docks directly. It is meant to replace DisplayLink's closed-source software and the open source EVDI kernel module that sits beside it.
Mike wrote it with help from Claude Code, and the first version reached the kernel mailing list in June, unfinished. He had faced a communication issue between the dock and the driver and asked other developers for help.
In early July (courtesy of LWN.net), he emailed a Synaptics employee for guidance and mentioned his Rust rewrite of EVDI. About two weeks later, a different employee replied.
That reply said his Rust rewrite of EVDI was not a thing of concern. Rather, the concern was the DisplayLink protocol and codec, which Synaptics believes are covered by its patents.
Lawyers get involved
A cease-and-desist letter followed on August 17. It told Mike to stop development and withdraw anything he had submitted to maintainers and hosting sites, with a signed confirmation due by August 28.
An appendix listed over 125 patents without saying which applied. Mike posted a working version 3 of Vino on August 26 and asked Synaptics the next day which claims they had in mind.
The answer came in October as claim charts. They map one claim from each of two patents, GB2484736 and GB2485613, to his source code.
The October 5 letter said Synaptics would seek $25,000 for the cost of preparing those charts if Mike missed an October 11 deadline, with the figure rising by at least $25,000 each week.
Mike replied on October 6 (message 8) with an offer to pause public work on the encoding code the charts point to if Synaptics paused the deadline and the weekly charge. He also asked about licensing that code for non-commercial use.
On October 7, Synaptics said it would grant no patent license or promise not to sue and set October 18 as a final deadline.
💭
What I can see so far is a very aggressive patent infringement witch hunt against a lone open source developer who was quite open to communication.
Synaptics took about three weeks to answer his request for specifics, then followed with a potentially life-ruining $25,000 demand that compounds weekly.
Clean room design quirks
Mike describes Vino as a clean-room driver and says he reverse engineered it from captured USB traffic and vendor programs.
If you didn't know, in a clean-room recreation, one party studies the original implementation, then writes a description, and a separate party builds the new code from that description alone.
It is meant to act as a defense against copyright claims because it shows nothing was copied. Synaptics’ July reply argues that clean-room or independently written code can still infringe a patent. 🤷
The timing
Vino also lands in a busy stretch for AI-assisted reverse engineering, from smart TV cleanups to office suite clones. Legal pressure has reached other AI-built projects too.
Mike has already taken down the Vino repository in response to the demands, and Synaptics has not made a public statement so far.
Only time will tell what happens to the work, and I hope someone forked it before it went offline, as that would give others a good starting point to build on.
Claude Code users are hitting "safety checks" in the middle of decompiling things. Some Codex users got warnings and account restrictions for poking at their own smart TVs. 404 Media calls it a crackdown on the coolest thing people were doing with AI and I agree with them.
This is precisely the reason why local AI and open source/weight models are going to be the next big thing for people who want control over their data and computer.
So this edition is about who gets to say 'no' on your machine.
🐧 AI at the core of new Linux distro
Remember Playtron, the Linux gaming OS from Cyanogen co-founder Kirt McMaster? It rebranded as Kora in July 2025 and has now unveiled Kora OS, a Linux desktop pitched at people who primarily use AI.
Here's the catch. Kora OS will be free when it ships in 2027, but the money comes from subscriptions that bundle AI models and agent services. Cortex and the desktop interface are proprietary. So it's Linux-based, not open, and only "local when possible".
Kora won't be the only one. Omarchy is already there and so do openKylin and openEuler. There will be more distros offering AI-first opearting systems.
🔐 Agent security
You know that "Yes, and don't ask again" option in Claude Code? It saves an allow rule in .claude/settings.local.json inside your project. Sometimes that rule is the exact command you approved, password or token included, in plain text.
The bug report about this goes back to August 2025. A bot closed it as "not planned" after 60 days of no activity. So the same tool that won't help you decompile your own TV firmware will happily remember your production database password.
🔍 Discover AI tools
Memory Poisoning Lab is an MIT-licensed teaching lab for memory poisoning attacks on AI agents. You replay six scenarios, try defenses and see what repair actually restores. It uses a scripted agent and synthetic data, so it runs offline with no API keys. There's a browser demo too.
TurboDiffusion is a video generation acceleration framework that can speed up end-to-end diffusion generation upto 100 times on a single RTX 5090.
Ram-Altman relates to last week's edition. Since Sam Altman was unhappy with consumers not fully utilizing their RAMS, someone created a bash script you run from cron. Any day your Linux box has more than 10% of its RAM available, it mails Sam Altman a note. It's silly but awesome 😄
🗂 AI jargon: Abliteration
In AI, Abliteration is a way to remove the refusal behaviour from an open-weight model without retraining it. Researchers have found that refusals are typically tied to a single "direction" inside the model's activations. Find that direction, subtract it from the weights, and the model mostly stops saying no.
That's why you see "abliterated" versions of popular models on Hugging Face. You see, with open weights LLMS, the guardrails are yours to keep or remove. With a cloud model, they're someone else's call.
😂 Meme
In case you didn't know already, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is accused of dating a Chinese spy.
Kirt McMaster founded Playtron in 2022, and the company went on to build GameOS, a Linux-based operating system for gaming PCs. It now goes by KORA Systems Inc. and is launching a new AI-focused desktop operating system.
The OS shares the KORA name, with GameOS living inside it as GameFrame, a dedicated mode for turning the system into a game console. We received a press release regarding this weeks before the launch, so this write-up might be missing some updates.
🚧
A major component of this OS is not open source.
KORA, explained
KORA is a desktop OS developed on a Linux base, with AI models and agents built right into the system. Don't think that it is an app or a layer over another one; it's a standalone offering.
The company says AI workloads on macOS and Windows stay boxed into a single app or tab, with those having no view of the hardware underneath. KORA is built on the idea that AI belongs inside the OS.
The desktop is organized around neural workspaces, where each one keeps a project or client apart from the rest, and the AI only sees the workspace that is open. Files in it also keep their own version history.
Each workspace doubles as a sandbox too. The user sets what files, devices, AI tools, and online services every app and agent can access, while AppArmor enforces it all.
Search in the neural file system works on meaning, so a person or an agent can find a file by what it contains.
Its memory system builds context from the email, contacts, calendar, and cloud files the user connects. Local models run that analysis on the device, and data goes to the cloud only with the user's approval.
How open is it?
Cortex is the engine behind the models, and it spreads AI work over the CPU, GPU, and NPU, then passes some of it to other computers on the network.
Local models run by default, and cloud ones only join when a task needs them. KORA speculates that local models will handle roughly seven in ten of the calls it manages in 2027.
They also say that models from any outside lab can be integrated, and a chat can move from its own agent to Codex or Claude Code with its context intact. A planned SDK would also let third-party apps and agents tap into projects, memory, search, and email.
Sadly, Cortex is not open source. :(
Still, the wider ecosystem is open, and developers will get the same building blocks KORA's own apps use, such as workspaces, file versioning, and collaboration.
You mentioned Qualcomm?
Yes! Qualcomm engineers worked alongside KORA for nearly a year to bring a Linux desktop to the Snapdragon X2 Elite platform.
Though Qualcomm's wider Linux effort for X2 laptops is still early. Its own developer preview targets kernel developers and not end users, and the drivers meant to open the NPU to local AI are still being pushed upstream.
Even so, KORA says the PCs can run a language model with 26 billion parameters locally, with HUMAIN, the Saudi AI company, working with KORA on an enterprise version.
That version is called HUMAIN OS, with the first OEM PCs expected to arrive preloaded with it in 2027, while KORA itself follows later that year.
So, yes, for now, there is no ISO to download in case you got too excited.
Some thoughts
If you look closely, they are going at it differently than Omarchy, which began in June 2025 as a ready-made setup of Arch Linux and Hyprland that has since landed millions in backing for its foundation.
Omarchy's Quattro release lets users pick from several third-party agents, while KORA builds its own agent into the system and lets others plug in their models. They are basically taking different routes to chase the same bet.
Both seem convinced that AI agents are where the desktop market is headed.
Mozilla has been experimenting a lot with Firefox lately, and a good chunk of that effort has gone into AI. The sidebar can house a chatbot of your choice, and Smart Window has an assistant that lets you pick the AI model.
Luckily, they have stopped tunnel-visioning into AI, and the UX side of the browser has seen some big upgrades.
Containers keep work, shopping, and personal browsing separate; Split View shows two pages side by side in one window; and Vertical Tabs move your tab list into the sidebar.
I believe that these upgrades have made Firefox a much more compelling option when compared to other popular web browsers.
Of course they are not stopping there. Mini Window is the latest addition to that list, which builds on the work done in Picture-in-Picture, the floating video player.
🚧
This feature is still being developed. Don't rely on it for any important browsing sessions.
Firefox Mini Window
Using Mini Window on Linux with Firefox 160 feels like a beta from the start. It needs a regular browser window with a tab open to work because a standalone mini window is not possible yet.
It comes in two modes.Move full tab sends the whole page into a small window that floats above your other windows, and Move selection lets you draw a box around the part of a page you want and sends only that.
Either way, the moved tab is not available in the main window until you send it back.
A full tab mini window looks like a tiny browser window. The top bar has the page address along with reload, back, forward, send back, and close buttons. Pages adapt to the smaller size as well.
During testing, websites like ours, Wikipedia, and Associated Press were successfully switching to their compact layout.
A selection mini window is more compact and shows just the chosen area under the page address, with a reload button and the same close and send back buttons.
Both kinds can be dragged around and resized. Selection mini windows have some rough edges because they can appear too small and refuse to resize well.
They are still handy for research sessions where you need to check small bits of information without opening more tabs and cluttering the desktop.
Try it Out
Before you get started using Mini Window, you first have to ensure that you are on Firefox 160 or later. To do that, go into the hamburger menu and open "Help and Report." Here, click on "About Firefox" and take note of the version shown in the dialog that opens up.
Next, you just have to start a normal browsing session with multiple tabs and follow any one of these three approaches to get started:
Add the Mini Window icon to the toolbar.
Right-click a tab and go into "Move Tab."
Right-click the page content and choose Move Section to "Mini Window."
For the toolbar method, right-click the toolbar and open "Customize Toolbar." Find the Mini Window icon in the list and drag it onto the toolbar, then hit "Done." After that, the feature is just one click away on any page.
If you have followed desktop Linux this year, you could not have missed Omarchy. And if you have followed Omarchy, you could not have missed DHH.
David Heinemeier Hansson, better known as DHH, created Ruby on Rails and co-owns 37signals, the company behind Basecamp and HEY. In 2025, he released Omarchy, an opinionated Arch Linux setup built around the Hyprland tiling window manager. It looked great and had a keen following. But it was still one more Arch-based setup.
Then AI moved into its core. With Omarchy Quattro, agents became a first-class part of the desktop, and Omarchy took off. It drew in people who had never touched Linux before. Its plugin marketplace crossed 500 plugins in its first week and now has thousands, and the Omacom Foundation has more than 20 million in pledges, including AI tokens from Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta.
That rise has not been quiet. Many long-time Linux users distrust AI-generated code, and the flood of vibe coded plugins has definitely raised real security worries.
Asahi Linux, the project that makes Linux run on Apple Silicon Macs, has a no-AI contributions policy and has just moved from MIT to GPL, citing AI-assisted code laundering. And DHH, never shy of a fight on Twitter, is a polarising figure in his own right.
So I sent him questions over email about all of it: the AI bet, the Asahi licence change, plugin security, the foundation money, his critics and what comes next. Here are his answers, lightly edited for typos.
Omarchy was a nice-looking tiling setup on Arch until AI was added to its core, and then it got extremely popular, even among non-Linux users. Why do you think that happened? What did Omarchy do differently that hundreds of other distros didn't?
The age of agents is changing everything. We clearly saw its potential with Omarchy Quattro, and it's no surprise to me that anyone who's interested in agents is therefore also interested in Omarchy. We've simply made the best of a wonderful opportunity that's been offered to Linux. Meanwhile, lots of other open source projects in this ecosystem have decided to take a very anti-AI stance, and their results are as you would expect.
"Lots of other open source projects in this ecosystem have decided to take a very anti-AI stance, and their results are as you would expect."
Ubuntu is carefully adding AI to its desktop. We have a couple of examples from China in the form of openKylin and openEuler. Other than those, I don't see any other major distros doing that. Why has no other major distro gone as far as you?
Ubuntu is built on top of GNOME, which is extremely hostile to the idea of agent development. So it's not a surprise to me that they're having a hard time integrating the best of AI into their distribution. The same goes for many other distributions that are deeply entwined with open source projects that are hostile to AI. It's difficult to fully embrace the age of agents when you're steeped in such thinking.
Omarchy chose Superwhisper for voice input. Ubuntu has an open source solution for the same. Sometimes it seems that your focus is less on open source and more on Linux.
I don't have the repulsion to commercial software that many in the old Linux world have. I love commercial options when they give us the best software. I've worked on commercial software my entire life. I am happy to integrate the best commercial offerings, whether it's Superwhisper or Spotify or Dropbox or anything else, into Omarchy. I'm creating a distribution that includes all the software that I personally want to use, and plenty of that software is commercial.
You've said that you respect Asahi but disagree with its no-AI policy, and you called for an agent-driven effort to finish M3 to M5 support. This month, Asahi moved from MIT to GPL, citing AI-assisted code laundering. Do you read that as a response to Omarchy?
Asahi changing their license may be a response to Omarchy, but it also doesn't matter. The Linux kernel is already licensed under the GPL, and we are in full compliance with those terms. We have a bunch of patches to the kernel that are available as open source. If Asahi is licensed in the same way, we will continue as we have all along and build on top of the best open source software. Isn't that the point of open source? That any project is free to incorporate open software as long as they abide by the license? That certainly is how we approach it within Omarchy. I don't see how anything changes at all.
Isn't that the point of open source? That any project is free to incorporate open software as long as they abide by the license?
Many Omarchy supporters seem angry with Asahi. But does the licence change affect Omarchy at all? Omarchy can continue its Mac support work with the MIT-licensed Asahi code it already has.
I don't think there's any reason to be angry with Asahi, but it's fair to be disappointed that our advances can't be upstreamed such that we could get a single body of work that enables Linux to run well on Macs. But personally, I can't get too excited about it either, because whatever they choose to do, it doesn't really have any bearing on our mission. We will simply build on top of the best open source solutions that are already out there and then fill in the gaps.
If Asahi didn't have a "no AI contributions" policy, would Omarchy have contributed back the work it has done to bring Omarchy to Apple M hardware?
Of course.
Omarchy's plugin market passed 500 plugins in its first week, and it now has thousands. Many of these are vibe coded by hobbyists, unlike AI-assisted development by experienced programmers, and this worries a lot of people. What stands between a malicious plugin and an Omarchy user today? And what do you say to people who think Omarchy is unsafe because it's "vibe coded" and not properly tested for security issues?
The plugin marketplace is agentically reviewed. There is surely more we can do to lock things down, but it's already far more secure than, say, something like the AUR. I would say that it's a feature, not a bug, that the majority of these plugins have been created by AI, as AI is incredibly good at sticking to established conventions. And it's also very good at reviewing incoming code for security vulnerabilities.
It's a feature, not a bug, that the majority of these plugins have been created by AI.
The Omacom Foundation has about $18.5 million in pledges, including AI tokens from Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta, to spend over three years. How do you plan to spend it? If the donations run out, is there a plan to make money in some way? How would you keep Omarchy going?
We have already hired four full-time employees. We have started the AIR project to sponsor artists. We are paying for infrastructure, and we are supporting community members with hardware and tokens to pursue integration projects like Omarchy M and Omarchy Dragon. There will be a lot more to come, including contests and other forms of community engagement. We will find a way to spend all the money. And when it's gone, we will either have succeeded so well that it'll be easy to raise more, or the world has changed to such an extent that Omarchy is no longer necessary. Both of these outcomes are just fine with me.
DHH interacting with people during Omarchy event in China
Much of the opposition to Omarchy is about two things: AI, and you. What would you tell a Linux user who likes Omarchy but not its creator?
I'm not here to persuade any haters. I'm simply offering the gift of Omarchy to anyone who wants it. And if someone can't accept it because they have a problem with me, their loss. Thankfully that's a tiny but vocal minority in the existing Linux community. The ambition for Omarchy is much, much larger than just converting people over from other Linux distributions. In fact, I don't really spend much if any time thinking about that. The way to make Linux win is by converting Windows and macOS users.
The way to make Linux win is by converting Windows and macOS users.
Fragmentation is often blamed for holding desktop Linux back, and you've added another distribution, even if it does things differently. What do you make of the "there are way too many distros already" argument?
There are very few Linux distributions that matter in any grand scheme of things. I don't think fragmentation is a problem at all. What's a problem is having such a tiny user base as Linux on the desktop has had for decades. Omarchy is on a mission to make a major dent in that by converting large numbers of Windows and macOS users to a distribution that is not only materially different from what they already have, but is the right answer for the age of agents. That turns out to be a pretty unique proposition in the world of Linux at the moment.
We all know how vocal and passionate you are about Omarchy on Twitter. Do you still develop new features of Omarchy, or is it completely handled by the team you have formed? What role do you play on the development side?
Designing features and defining the user experience of Omarchy is the main thing I spend my time on. We have a wonderful community helping with a thousand different aspects of what it takes to run a successful distribution, but defining that key experience is still the main work that I do.
Elon Musk says AI will soon skip code and generate binaries directly. You built Rails around programmer happiness. Do high-level languages matter when the programmer is an AI?
They clearly don't matter in the same way they did when we were writing everything by hand. I think the future of programming is still up in the air, though. But I also think it is very worth listening to what someone who has been as correct as Elon Musk has been on a wide variety of topics thinks about this future. I am certainly spending a lot more of my time developing in lower-level languages I would never have engaged with prior to the age of agents.
Servers, phones, hardware or something else entirely: what's one plan for Omarchy that nobody outside the core team knows about yet?
First, we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.
What would you like to tell It's FOSS readers, many of whom are long-time Linux users wary of AI?
Take another look with fresh eyes and an open mind. AI is the most amazing thing we've made computers do. Don't miss out because of your priors, because of politics, because of what the technology looked like a year ago.
