Built around servers people can host, TeamSpeak has been around since 2001, serving as a reliable communication tool that has gained a reputation for running light and reliably over inconsistent networks.
It has gone through many iterations that have seen it grow from a simple client-server voice tool into something that has a modern interface, built-in screen sharing, and the option to buy hosted servers.
TeamSpeak 6, currently in beta, is the most significant overhaul the platform has ever pushed, having entered testing in January 2025 and progressed through several builds to today's 6.0.0-beta4.1.
If you assume that the platform only focuses on mainstream OSes, then you would be wrong. The client and server software have supported Linux alongside Windows and macOS since the early versions.
Non-FOSS Warning! TeamSpeak is not open source software. But it has been available on Linux for years, and many Linux users use it, just the way Discord is used.
Direct calls will be possible
1-1 Direct Calls are coming to TeamSpeak
Your friends will be one call away. No Server required.
TeamSpeak is adding the ability to make 1-1 direct calls, letting two people call each other without setting up or joining a server first. It's not live yet since the devs are still testing it, but they say it's coming soon.
That's not the only thing direct calls are coming with. Screensharing is built right in, letting you share your screen, a game, or your camera straight from the call at up to 4K or full source quality.
Presets facilitate a quick setup, or you can select the resolution, bitrate, FPS, and audio if you'd rather configure it yourself. There's also a privacy setting so you can choose whether the stream is public, limited to contacts, or private, plus a toggle for capturing system audio alongside it.
Sourced from the X thread linked above.
Picture-in-picture comes with it too. Using the Shift key, you can drag up to four screenshares or cameras into a corner of another feed while sharing, arranging them according to your preference.
When asked about the possibility of making group calls, SYOX, the Community Manager at TeamSpeak, said that:
This feature focuses on 1-1 direct calls between two users in a private chat. It remains to be seen whether and to what extent we will introduce Group Calls. We are definitely keeping an eye on group calls as a feature addition, but the scope has not yet been discussed, as it was not the focus of this release/implementation.
Can I finally move away from Discord?
This change has me wanting to try TeamSpeak again. Direct calls without needing a server is precisely the thing that made my last test of it so brief, since spinning up a server just to talk to a person never felt worth the effort.
If the feature works as well as it looks in these previews, I might end up ditching Discord sooner than later. And if they can figure out group calls in the coming months, then I won't even need to host a server to talk to my friends, so that's a win too!
The GNOME Extensions ecosystem is packed with tools that let you customize almost every part of the desktop. Whether it's changing the appearance of the top panel, replacing the app launcher, adding visual effects, or making the interface behave exactly the way you want.
If there is one customization extension that deserves to be installed first on a fresh GNOME setup, it's Just Perfection.
As the name suggests, the extension lets you tweak countless parts of the GNOME Shell. From small visual adjustments to larger interface changes, it gives you an impressive amount of control without requiring you to edit configuration files.
In fact, the number of available tweaks is so extensive that it deserves an article of its own, which we already have and you can read it here.
The screenshot below contains effects of another GNOME Extension called User Accent Color which we will see in a later section.
Just Perfection
Some of the highlights include:
Change the position of the panel, clock, and notification indicators.
Adjust the size and corner radius of the Activities Overview.
Show or hide individual panel items.
And that's just a glimpse. I recommend checking the project's official README to explore its exhaustive list of features.
2. User Themes
Installing a GTK theme changes the appearance of your applications, but it doesn't affect the GNOME Shell itself.
That's because the Shell uses its own theme, separate from GTK. If you want to customize the top panel, Activities Overview, Quick Settings, and other Shell components, you'll need the User Themes extension.
Once installed, you can apply any compatible gnome-shell theme stored in your ~/.themes directory using the GNOME Tweaks application.
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Shell Theme applied to Tokyo Night
It's a small extension, but an essential one if you're interested in desktop theming.
3. Wallpaper Slideshow
If you like refreshing your desktop without manually changing wallpapers every few days, Wallpaper Slideshow is an excellent extension to have.
It automatically cycles through images from a folder of your choice at configurable intervals, turning your wallpaper collection into a dynamic slideshow. The extension also supports downloading Bing's Wallpaper of the Day if you prefer fresh backgrounds without maintaining your own collection.
Wallpaper Slideshow
Better yet, it automatically detects changes to your wallpaper folder, so newly added images become part of the rotation without any extra setup.
You can control the slideshow from the Quick Settings menu or the desktop context menu, and the extension even remembers its queue across reboots, allowing the slideshow to resume where it left off.
It's a simple way to keep your GNOME desktop feeling fresh with minimal effort.
4. User Accent Colors
One of the nicest visual touches in modern desktop environments is having the system's accent color automatically match your wallpaper. If you've wanted the same experience on GNOME, User Accent Colors is worth a look.
The extension extracts the dominant accent color from your current wallpaper and applies it across the desktop, including GNOME Shell, Adwaita applications, and adw-gtk3 themed GTK3 applications.
It can also generate matching tinted themes and even recolor supported icon packs, giving the entire desktop a much more cohesive appearance.
The result is a desktop that automatically adapts whenever you change your wallpaper, without manually tweaking themes or accent colors. If you're building a visually consistent GNOME setup, this extension is an excellent finishing touch.
5. Dash to Dock
By default, GNOME only displays the Dash while you're in the Activities Overview.
Many users, however, prefer having a dock that's always visible and keeps their favorite applications within easy reach.
Dash to Dock transforms the built-in GNOME Dash into a fully customizable dock that can be positioned on any edge of your screen. You can tweak its size, behavior, transparency, auto-hide options, and much more.
The only thing I personally miss is a ripple-style hover animation. Fortunately, the next extension offers a different take on desktop navigation.
6. Dash to Panel
While Dash to Dock focuses on creating a dock, Dash to Panel takes things a step further.
It merges the GNOME top bar and Dash into a single panel, giving the desktop a layout that feels much closer to Windows.
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Dash to Panel in GNOME
If you're switching from Windows 10 or Windows 11, this extension makes GNOME feel instantly familiar.
Beyond changing the layout, Dash to Panel offers a surprising amount of customization. You can:
Change the panel's color, opacity, and appearance.
Show or hide individual panel items.
Keep the original GNOME top panel while using only the dock functionality.
Customize various behaviors to suit your workflow.
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Dash to Panel as a dock
It's one of the most feature-rich panel extensions available for GNOME.
7. Dhruva Dock
Dhruva Dock is the newer addition to the GNOME extensions ecosystem, and it has quickly gained attention thanks to its polished appearance and smooth animations.
The dock supports true magnification effects, includes an integrated clock, and offers several preset themes alongside color customization options.
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Dhruva Dock
Unlike many dock extensions, Dhruva Dock isn't limited to the screen edges. You can position it almost anywhere on your desktop, giving you much more flexibility when designing your workspace.
Its fluid animations are easily one of its strongest selling points.
8. Blur My Shell
Few visual tweaks change the look of GNOME as much as adding blur effects, and Blur My Shell has become the go-to extension for that purpose.
What started as a simple blur utility has gradually evolved into a comprehensive customization tool. Besides adding blur to the Activities Overview and various Shell components, recent versions even allow blur effects to be applied to application windows.
Blur My Shell
The extension also lets you configure different blur pipelines, giving you fine-grained control over which parts of the desktop should be blurred and by how much.
While it doesn't offer the level of control found in Wayland compositors like Hyprland, and older hardware may struggle with the added effects, it's still one of the best visual customization extensions available for GNOME.
9. Dynamic Music Pill
If you frequently listen to music while working, Dynamic Music Pill is an extension worth checking out.
Instead of displaying a simple scrolling track title in the panel, it presents your currently playing music inside an elegant pill-shaped widget with playback controls.
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Dynamic Music Pill
You can place it either on the top panel or alongside the Dash, depending on your preferred layout.
Beyond its attractive design, the extension also includes several useful features:
Adaptive colors based on the album artwork.
Multiple visualizer modes.
Playback controls with configurable click actions.
Synchronized lyrics.
Transparency and appearance settings.
It's a great combination of functionality and visual polish.
10. Top Bar Organizer
If you've ever wished you could rearrange the items on GNOME's top panel, Top Bar Organizer makes that incredibly easy.
Unlike many customization extensions, it doesn't overwhelm you with dozens of configuration options. The interface is refreshingly simple.
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Top Bar Organizer
You simply drag and drop panel items between the three available sections:
Left Top Bar Box
Center Top Bar Box
Right Top Bar Box
That's all there is to it.
Whether you want the clock on the left, system indicators in the center, or a completely custom layout, this extension makes it possible in just a few clicks.
11. Arc Menu
GNOME's built-in search is one of its strongest features. It lets you quickly launch applications, find files, perform calculations, and much more, all from a single interface.
That said, many users still prefer having a traditional application launcher that's always available.
Arc Menu is much more than a simple Start Menu replacement. It offers an impressive collection of menu layouts inspired by different desktop environments and operating systems.
Arc Menu Layputs
Want a Windows 11-style Start Menu? That's available. Prefer a macOS-inspired launcher? You can switch to that with just a few clicks.
Beyond the layouts, Arc Menu provides extensive customization options. You can change icons, tweak the appearance, reposition the menu, customize categories, and fine-tune almost every aspect of the launcher.
If you enjoy experimenting with different desktop layouts, Arc Menu is one of the most versatile extensions you can install.
12. Burn My Windows
Even the developers describe Burn My Windows as a "useless" extension.
I couldn't disagree more.
If you enjoy desktop animations, this extension is pure fun. Instead of the standard open, close, and minimize animations, it lets you replace them with dozens of eye-catching effects.
Burn My Windows
Some of my favorites include Apparition, Broken Glass, Incinerate, and Matrix, though there are plenty more to experiment with.
It won't make you more productive, but it definitely adds some personality to your desktop.
13. Customize Clock on Lock Screen
The GNOME lock screen doesn't offer much room for customization out of the box.
This extension changes that by letting you customize the appearance of the lock screen clock.
Customized Clock on Lockscreen
One particularly interesting feature is the ability to display the output of shell commands. That opens up several possibilities, such as showing inspirational quotes, system information, weather updates, or any other text generated by a script.
For example, I used the command below to print the system details as shown in the screenshot above:
Whenever you move or resize a window, it behaves like a flexible sheet rather than a rigid rectangle, recreating one of the most iconic desktop effects from the early days of Linux desktop customization.
It certainly makes interacting with windows a lot more enjoyable.
15. Compiz Magic Lamp Effect
Continuing the nostalgia, Compiz Magic Lamp Effect recreates another classic animation from the Compiz days.
Instead of windows simply disappearing when minimized, they smoothly stretch and collapse into the dock using the familiar Magic Lamp animation.
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Magic Lamp Effect
The effect looks particularly good when paired with dock extensions like Dash to Dock, making window animations feel much more polished than the default GNOME behavior.
If you're already using one of those docks, this extension is a perfect companion.
16. Background Logo
Sometimes the smallest tweaks can make your desktop feel a little more personal.
Background Logo lets you place a logo or image directly on top of your desktop wallpaper without modifying the wallpaper itself. Whether you want to display your favorite Linux distribution's logo, your organization's branding, or a custom SVG, the extension makes it easy.
Background Logo settings
It may not be an essential customization, but it's a nice option for users who enjoy putting their own stamp on every part of their desktop.
17. Modern Clock
If you like the clean desktop widgets found in KDE Plasma, Modern Clock brings a similar experience to GNOME.
Instead of placing the time in the top panel, this extension adds a modern-looking desktop clock widget inspired by KDE's Modern Clock. It sits directly on your desktop and blends nicely with minimalist wallpapers, making it a subtle yet attractive addition to your workspace.
Modern Clock
Unlike the standard GNOME clock, this one is meant to be part of your desktop rather than the shell interface. If you're building a customized desktop with widgets and visual enhancements, Modern Clock fits right in.
Wrapping Up
One of GNOME's greatest strengths is the flexibility offered by its extension ecosystem. While the desktop intentionally keeps its default experience clean and minimal, these extensions allow you to shape it into almost anything you want.
Whether you're looking for a Windows-like taskbar, a macOS-inspired launcher, beautiful blur effects, playful window animations, or simply more control over the interface, there's an extension here that can help.
Of course, you don't have to install all of them. In fact, I'd recommend starting with a few that solve problems in your daily workflow and then gradually adding more as needed.
Did I miss one of your favorite customization extensions? Let me know in the comments. I'd love to check it out.
Let me tell you that this is a rare event. Not because Torvalds is using AI. Last Christmas holidays, Torvalds used AI for the first time for a personal, hobby project. He was averted to AI at first but made his peace with it, even for AI-assisted code contributions in the kernel project.
The event we are talking about is rare because Torvalds doesn't code on Linux kernel anymore. He is in the maintainer mode. He just reviews code and merges pull requests from various contributors to the kernel code.
So this is a rare occasion in recent time when he made a kernel patch himself. And he did that with the assistance of AI.
Fixing a one-liner bug with AI
Don't scoff at "one-line" code change. Speak to any software developer and they will telly you that often the bugs are easy, few line code changes. It's the process of finding the root cause that takes time, effort, and skills.
The bug Torvalds dealt with was in the Intel Xe graphics driver for Battlemage G21 cards. It caused GDM, the display manager, to restart endlessly.
Tracking it down with AI required 24 debug patches (did he just use "printfs?) and 18 kernel boots. Ultimately, the culprit turned out to be a single line where round_up() should have been round_down().
And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work.
The AI "did the grunt work" for Torvalds by adding debug instrumentation, running analysis, and even writing the final commit message. I can feel the commit message part, it's a boring but necessary task.
But this debugging session was not all smooth sailing. Torvalds didn't just add "don't make mistakes" to his prompts. On the contrary, the AI told Linus multiple times that the problem was "impossible and unsolvable." Torvalds refused.
I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am.
AI is a tool, use it effectively
Torvalds shared his views a few months back. Lot has changed since then
This is what many people in the software industry understand. AI is just a tool and it is essentially useful when there is a capable human driving the process.
Look at the example here with Torvalds. A vibe coder with no knowledge of what's going on with the code, would have left it to AI to make decisions, and AI would have called the bug unfixable and walked away.
But Linus Torvalds has experience. He could understand what the AI was doing right or wrong. He persisted and fixed the bug.
The patch will be in Linux 7.3 and has been marked to be backported to stable kernel branches.
The creator of Linux needed 18 boots to find a one-line fix. The AI helped him get there. Although, I think he would have gotten there all by himself as well, even if it would have taken a bit longer.
There is no information available on what model or tool he used. In his personal project, where he used AI for the first time, he had used Gemini from Google. I guess he is not into local AI for now. I hope he finds enough interest and gives us a new gift after Linux kernel and Git. Wishful thinking, I know.
Proton Mail (partner link), the service people turn to for escaping Big Tech, has rolled out "Categories" as a new inbox view that automatically sorts incoming email into six groups: Primary, Social, Promotions, Newsletters, Transactions, and Updates.
When you receive a new mail, it gets sorted automatically into one of six categories based on metadata, without Proton reading the contents of the message. This is what Gmail already introduced years ago and it does work for most parts.
How does it work?
By default, Primary houses personal and work-related messages along with any important updates; Social covers social media updates and activity notifications; Promotions covers discounts and sales offers; and Newsletters carries news content you signed up for.
The other two categories can be enabled via the Settings if you require them.
Of course, we are not claiming that this is something revolutionary. Gmail and Outlook have offered inbox tabs for years, but they achieved that by scanning the contents of emails that are hosted on their servers.
Proton's approach here is different, sorting mail by metadata instead of reading what's inside each message, since its zero-access encryption keeps that content unreadable even to itself.
Anant Vijay Singh, the Product Lead for Proton Mail, goes even further to note that:
Proton’s business model aligns our incentives with yours because we’re 100% funded by our community, not by advertisers. Enabling Categories doesn’t change any of this.
Your inbox remains protected by zero-access encryption, and emails you send with other Proton users (or using password protection) are end-to-end encrypted.
It's already live
If you haven't logged into your Proton Mail (partner link) account recently, then keep an eye out for a dialog titled "Your inbox, automatically organized." It will show you two options; go with "Yes, organize it" if you want to upgrade to the new category-focused inbox experience.
If you'd rather stay on the legacy, unified inbox system, then choose "Keep inbox as before."
Once enabled, you will see the categories all lined up at the top of your emails, with a useful blue dot appearing on the ones with unread messages.
Moving an email to a different category takes a right-click followed by "Move to category..." or a drag and drop. Going forward, Proton Mail sorts similar emails into that category automatically.
If the default category selection or the feature itself doesn't suit your preferences, then you can manage it from the Settings menu (gear button), where you could either disable it by clicking on the button near "Email categories."
Or, you could go into the "Email categories" settings page to enable or disable individual categories and toggle notifications for each one. I was content with the default selections, so I didn't bother changing anything.
You can see how Proton Mail categorized my mail. 👇
From left to right: Social, Promotions, and Newsletters.
Keep in mind that you cannot disable the "Primary" category as that one always stays on, catching anything that needs your attention along with emails from any category you've turned off.
And that's not all. Proton is also bringing full-content search to Proton Mail on mobile in the coming weeks. It'll let users search the actual contents of their emails, not just subjects and senders.
Proton says that the search will run entirely on the user's device rather than touch its own servers.
The PhD is aiming to build an all-encompassing platform that can take a C repository running into hundreds of thousands of lines and translate it into Rust that's "safe, behaviourally correct and maintainable Rust."
Getting from C to Rust automatically means solving a few separate problems, and the system tackles them in sequence. First, it has to break a massive codebase into pieces small enough to work with without losing track of how those pieces depend on each other elsewhere in the code.
Only then does the actual translation happen, handled by language models that have already been trained on real C-to-Rust conversions, with the goal of writing code that looks like something a Rust developer chose to write rather than C dressed up in Rust syntax.
That's the easier half. The harder task is proving the translated code actually behaves like the original, which is where fuzzing and formal equivalence checks come in.
When something doesn't line up, a separate repair step tries to track down exactly where the translation went wrong and patch it using symbolic program-repair techniques instead of starting the whole chunk over.
Jon points out that the language model handles only one part of the job. Whatever it generates still has to clear validation before anyone can trust that it kept the original behavior intact.
The targeted test case
Both AppArmor and snap-confine already run in production on real Ubuntu systems, handling access control and sandboxing that most users never see but rely on constantly.
That's why they were picked, not because they are simple, but because Canonical wants industrial-grade test cases that offer a much better look at how the approach holds up under real production conditions.
Testing a live component carries with it everything that's built up around it through years of real use, which makes it a far harder thing to translate without breaking something, and that's the point.
Jon also flagged an important caveat, noting that nothing generated by this project is going into either tool anytime soon. The point, he said, is that Canonical has "a vested interest in the software and are keen to see the results," not that a rewrite is coming.
Why should you care?
If the approach survives this test, Canonical will have a real answer to whether automated translation can be trusted with code that protects the system, not just the code that was easy to test on.
As a result, Ubuntu users, from regular desktop installs to enterprise deployments, could eventually see security-critical components with fewer bugs without Canonical having to gamble on a time-consuming manual rewrite of sensitive code.
LightDM 1.33.0 is out after a four-year gap, now under community maintainership rather than Canonical's. Two new maintainers, one behind Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix and the other a long-time Fedora and openSUSE contributor, have stepped up.
Nitrux has given a name to what it's been building since dropping Plasma for Hyprland last year. The Workspace Environment brings four in-house QML components together, a workspace bar, a dock, a settings app, and a lock screen.
A busy point release for Linux has just landed. AMD Radeon picks up HDMI 2.1 support, Apple M3 MacBooks can boot Linux for the first time, and Btrfs large folio support is on by default.
The Xen Project recently launched a Safety Committee to build the shared documentation, test evidence, and certification artifacts that companies deploying Xen in automotive, avionics, and industrial automation keep having to produce independently.
PINE64 is halting the production of its Linux-based tablets. Reason? The soaring RAM prices have made it impossible to keep the pricing reasonable for such hobbyist devices. And the RAM prices are increasing due to AI boom. Big Tech has already put their hands on the supply with bulk orders for their data centers and now the consumers are struggling as prices for disks and RAMs have gone up multiple folds.
🧠 What We’re Thinking About
Don't remember if I shared it in the newsletter or not. A few days ago, it was found that some AI companies are buying rare books to train their LLMs. And in the process, they were also cutting (read destroying) the books because it is easier to scan the books page by page that way.
404 Media (paywalled content) has tracked one such shipment to the Amazon AI training facility. So at least we have one culprit identified.
🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings
Most people look no further than Tmux and Screen. But what if I told you there were terminal multiplexers that shared sessions over SSH, restored your workspace exactly as you left it, or brought tiling WM concepts straight into your terminal?
A detailed guide on apt that covers updating the package database, installing and removing packages, searching, showing package info, listing upgradable software, and cleaning up leftover dependencies.
Want your GNOME desktop to look like those Catppuccin or Nord riced screenshots without spending an afternoon in config files? Rewaita is a Flatpak app that applies color palettes to GTK and Libadwaita apps through CSS overrides.
Desktop Linux is mostly neglected by the industry but loved by the community. For the past 14 years, It's FOSS has been helping people use Linux on their personal computers. And we are now facing the existential threat from AI models stealing our content.
If you like what we do and would love to support our work, please become It's FOSS Plus member. It costs $49 a year (less than the cost of a McDonald's burger a month), and you get an ad-free reading experience with the satisfaction of helping the desktop Linux community. And there are also free Linux ebooks.
On GNOME inside the Nautilus file manager (aka Files), press CTRL+F to start a search in the current directory and CTRL+SHIFT+F to search everywhere. You can also select the result and use CTRL+ALT+O to open that location in file manager.
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🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse
If you went through the apt guide earlier, why not test your knowledge with a quick quiz?
The beginning is always simple. 😆
🗓️ Tech Trivia: On August 22, 1955, representatives from seventeen companies that had bought IBM's new 704 mainframe met at RAND Corp in Santa Monica and formed SHARE, the first computer user group, so members could trade code and documentation instead of duplicating each other's work.
🧑🤝🧑 From the Community: A long-time FOSSer has returned, kicking off a thread on how Windows enabled bitlocker without asking him, resulting in considerable wear on the attached storage disks.
The open hardware manufacturer recently posted an update on its Mastodon account, and it's not great news if you were hoping to grab new Linux-powered PINE64 hardware.
The disruptions in DRAM and eMMC supply are to blame, as PINE64 says its Linux hardware production pipeline is empty for now, with nothing new planned while component costs stay high.
Whether that changes depends on component pricing after mid-2027, and they aren't promising anything before then. They expect stocks for the PineNote and PineTab2 to run out in three months.
Once that happens, there's no more new launches or restocks to cover the outgoing stock.
Not everything is affected though. PINE64's microcontroller lineup, the PineTime, PineVoice, and Pinecil, will keep shipping as usual since they don't rely on the same memory chips.
Concluding their announcement, they gave everyone a status update on the upcoming PineTime Pro:
As for the PineTime Pro, currently the demo firmware has basic drivers for the display, touch, motion, GPS, buttons, heat rate sensor (chip id only), battery charger, motor, microphone and the speaker. Though some issues do need to be ironed out first before a pilot batch begins production.
That's it for this post, all in all it's a bit bleak for the Linux devices, but in the meantime PineStore still have a great lineup of MCU powered devices which will continue to expand with more exciting devices.
The unnamed culprit
PINE64 never actually says the word "AI" in their post, choosing to keep the announcement focused on the DRAM/eMMC shortage. But you have to look further to see where that shortage is actually originating from.
Memory prices have been climbing for months, and DDR5 has taken the hardest hit of all. Companies running AI data centers have been locking up global memory supply well into next year, leaving everyone else fighting over what's left.
Executives across the memory industry aren't optimistic either. SK Hynix's CEO recently said that the worst is still ahead, with supply expected to lag behind demand for years to come.
Not the only ones
PINE64 isn't the only Linux-focused hardware provider caught in this price surge.
The Orange Pi Neo, a Linux-first handheld built with Manjaro, has been sitting on ice since earlier this year for the same reason. The project has been in development for two years and still has no launch date, all because DDR5 and SSD prices refuse to come back down.
I am sure these aren't the only projects affected; smaller ones still in the crowdfunding or conceptualization phase must be facing the same problem.
What worries me is that the AI bubble will eventually burst, but small Linux-focused projects are the ones getting choked out right now. If these component prices stay this absurd, we are going to lose the few independent hardware choices we actually have left.
