When OpenClaw hype was at its peak in the beginning of 2026, a lot of people bought Mac Mini just to keep an agent running around the clock.
I never understood why people would spend $500 on a device to run OpenClaw like agents that are merely inferences to a commercial LLM like Claude and ChatGPT.
But these 'claws' are here to stay, and people are utilizing them to run their agent on dedicated hardware. And that's why we have dedicated hardware built around these agents.
Autonomous is a company known for standing desks and ergonomic chairs, although they did start as Robotbase, making personal robots.
Seems like they are back to their roots, sort of. They have a few "AI hardware" projects in their offering and that includes a thinking desk and a paper pet companion.
But the device I am going to feature today is a desk companion that runs AI agents and you can use it as an office assistant or an intern (no offense to interns).
The device is called Intern 2 because it's a follow-up to Intern, which was released six months ago. Let's learn more about it.
Intern 2 Specifications
Board: Orange Pi 4 Pro, 8-core Allwinner A733 (2x Cortex-A76 + 6x Cortex-A55, up to 2.0GHz)
Memory: 6GB LPDDR5
Storage: 64GB onboard + up to 256GB expansion
Connectivity: Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4
New in Intern 2: voice interaction (dual mic, pickup up to 3m; 5W speaker) and browser control, on top of the existing Telegram/Slack/Discord channels
Warranty: 1-year warranty, 30-day free returns
Intern 2 starts at $249 for the OpenClaw or Hermes editions, and $299 for the Developer edition.
So basically, the device ships with an agent framework already running. You pick OpenClaw or Hermes at checkout, plug the box into Wi-Fi, add it to a Telegram, Slack, or Discord group (WhatsApp gets added later through a separate QR pairing step), and it starts triaging your inbox, watching GitHub issues, and running whatever multi-step task you hand it, all without you touching a terminal.
I am guessing you will have to do some configuration to connect it to your mail and suff but that should not be too difficult if your main LLM is already connected to various services you use.
The board underneath is an Orange Pi 4 Pro: an 8-core Allwinner A733 chip, two beefier Cortex-A76 cores paired with six efficiency Cortex-A55 cores, and a 3 TOPS NPU. It's the kind of board you can buy separately, so Intern 2 isn't offering or hiding anything exotic. It is just packaging familiar SBC hardware into something that doesn't look like a dev board.
What does it look like? It looks like a pyramid with a glowing top. I kind of like the look.
The voice interaction is the main selling point here. Why type when you can just speak to it? Is that not what Tony Stark did as Iron Man?
Intern 2 adds dual far-field mics rated to pick up speech from up to 3 meters away, plus a 5W speaker, so you can just talk to the thing sitting on your desk the way you'd talk to a coworker (or an intern). Browser control is also there, letting the agent act on websites on your behalf instead of only working through chat integrations and APIs.
There are three editions to choose from:
OpenClaw ($249): the default, framework preloaded, no setup beyond Wi-Fi and a chat app.
Hermes ($249): identical hardware, running the Hermes agent out of the box instead.
Developer ($299): ships with the shell open. You SSH in, and Claude Code comes preloaded, with room to swap in Codex or OpenCode if you'd rather run your own agent stack.
Open-source Autonomous OS
Intern 2 runs on Autonomous OS, an open-source operating system created by Autonomous for physical AI agents.
It handles sensing, memory, skills, and updates, while the actual "brain" is swappable between OpenClaw, Hermes, PicoClaw, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, or any other agent framework you want to wire in.
Intern is the second reference device built on it, after a desk lamp called Autonomous Lamp. Since Autonomous is working on more AI-powered hardware, it makes sense to have a custom operating system.
Open sourcing is also the wise decision. These devices are more for tech enthusiasts, and some of them may tweak the OS to our liking and needs. So good job, Autonomous.
As mentioned previously, it starts at $249 for the OpenClaw or Hermes editions and $299 for the Developer edition, with free shipping. Every unit ships hand-assembled and tested, backed by a 1-year warranty and 30-day free returns (I like that). Developer documentation is available here.
Should you buy Intern 2 is a question only you can answer. If you have interacted with Nanoclaw, Hermes Agent, etc. and like the idea of interacting with them via voice, this device should interest you.
Sure, this can be built from scratch, especially when the operating system is also open source. But not everyone has the time and skills to do that. People spend money on 'out of the box' experiences after all. I would not mind splurging on it, as I am sucker for such gadgets.
So, would you spend some money and get yourself an "AI Intern"?
The MPEG-4 Visual Patent Portfolio License has been in effect since January 1, 2000, covering essential patents behind the MPEG-4 Part 2 Visual standard from more than 30 licensors, including Canon, LG, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony, and Toshiba.
As of July 19, 2026, every one of those patents has expired. The very last one standing belonged to Siemens AG, active only in Brazil. VIA Licensing Alliance, the body that administers the portfolio, has already taken down the webpage for it, which was around until July 18, a day before the expiry.
The patent in question is BR PI0109962-0, titled "process for storing and processing image information from successive images over time."
How we got here
Siemens had filed the same patent across several jurisdictions, and most of those expired years ago.
The European version, EP 1,279,291, expired on April 9, 2021, across Germany, France, and the UK. Two other Siemens US patents in the broader portfolio, US 6,636,637 and US 7,068,721, expired in January 2018 and March 2022, respectively.
The rest of the portfolio wound down on a similar timeline. Koninklijke Philips N.V.'s US 6,959,046, expired on December 7, 2022; Dolby Laboratories Licensing Corporation's US 7,395,211, expired on November 14, 2023, making it the last US patent in the pool to expire.
That left Brazil's BR PI0109962-0 as the final one.
What does this mean?
With the last patent gone, this specific license no longer has any patents behind it. VIA Licensing Alliance's per-unit royalties on decoders and encoders, along with its separate participation fees for subscription and title-by-title video services, have nothing left to enforce.
That doesn't mean every possible MPEG-4 Visual patent anywhere is gone, just the ones in this specific pool. Other essential patents could exist outside it. But for the 30-plus companies that did join, the licensing obligation is now over.
A quick look at MPEG-4 Visual
MPEG-4 Visual is formally Part 2 of the MPEG-4 suite of standards, the same family that gave us the MP4 container format as Part 14.
The container and the codec are separate things. MP4 files can hold audio and video encoded in several different codecs, including MPEG-4 Part 2, H.264/AVC, HEVC, and AV1.
The standard itself was developed by MPEG, the Moving Picture Experts Group, a working group under ISO/IEC responsible for compression standards spanning video, audio, and 3D graphics.
MPEG doesn't administer the patents behind its own standards, though. That job fell to VIA Licensing Alliance, formerly MPEG LA, which pooled patents from Canon, LG, Microsoft, Panasonic, Siemens, Sony, Toshiba, and more than 30 other licensors into a single license.
Over the years, companies large and small took out licenses to use MPEG-4 Visual in their products. Canonical, Apple, Sony, Raspberry Pi, and The Walt Disney Company all appear on VIA Licensing Alliance's list of licensees in good standing, alongside hundreds of others spanning security cameras, media players, and broadcast equipment.
Electronic Engineering Times has a detailed writeup on the history of MPEG licensing if you are looking for a longer read.
Then I stumbled across MangoWM, and I couldn't leave it alone because it offers a similar scrolling mode as compared to Niri, plus more, while still being simple to build from source code.
MangoWM is a Wayland compositor built on top of wlroots and heavily inspired by dwl (which itself draws from dwm).
On paper, it sounds like yet another minimal tiling compositor. But when I actually sat with it for a few days, something clicked. This is a guide to what I tried, what I discovered, and what made me stop going back to Niri.
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Niche window managers like Niri, MangoWM, Hyprland often require configuring elements with dot files. I would consider these more of an expert level domain for Linux users. If these things are new to you and you still want to try, use dot files from the developer or trusted repos and try them in a VM or a spare test machine.
What is MangoWM, anyway?
Before I get into the setup, let me introduce MangoWM.
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A short video of Mango WM on Arch Linux
MangoWM (sometimes referred to as "mango") is a Wayland compositor, meaning it replaces not just your window manager but the entire display server layer above the kernel. It handles input, rendering, compositing, and window management all in one relatively small binary.
It was created by a developer named DreamMaoMao, and it takes the "as lightweight as dwl, built in seconds" philosophy seriously, while tacking on a surprisingly complete feature set: smooth animations, multiple layout modes, per-tag window rules, blur and shadow effects via scenefx, scratchpads, hot-reload config, and excellent XWayland compatibility for the legacy apps you can't avoid.
The tag system (borrowed from dwm) is worth understanding upfront. Instead of numbered workspaces that you switch between sequentially, tags are labels you assign to windows. A window can carry multiple tags at once, and you can view any combination of tags simultaneously. It's a different mental model, and once it clicks, going back to linear workspaces feels oddly constraining.
Installing MangoWM on your system
MangoWM comes as a pre-built package on Arch Linux, Fedora, and NixOS. If you're just trying Mango for the first time, I highly suggest running it on Arch Linux. It eases the overall installation with just a single command.
On Arch Linux (which includes Kali, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS users), the cleanest route is through the AUR. You need an AUR helper like yay or paru:
yay -Syu scenefx0.4
yay -Syu mangowm-git
This pulls the latest git build.
If you get classic Arch Linux error messaging saying, "a manual intervention is required," then it's likely you're missing -yu flag with AUR helper.
If you're using a display manager like SDDM or GDM, MangoWM registers a desktop session entry during install, so it should appear as a session option at the login screen.
When you open Mango WM for the very first time, all you get is a blank screen. When you hit Alt+Enter(Return), foot,(the default terminal emulator) opens, and you can start configuring the window manager from there.
Mango WM screen after opening up two terminal instance
Getting a working config to start from
MangoWM reads the config from ~/.config/mango/config.conf. On a fresh install, the system-wide default lives at /etc/mango/config.conf. The first thing I did was copy it over:
If you want a more complete starting point with Waybar, Rofi, wallpaper setup, and all, the developer maintains an example config repo.
I tried the developer-provided config, but didn't find the shortcut intuitive to use. So I went ahead and wrote my own config file from scratch. Mango WM documentation really helped me to copy configuration snippets that I wanted to achieve, a keybinding similar to Sway and i3 setup.
I found this genuinely useful as a reference, even though I ended up rewriting most of it from scratch within a few sessions. Reading through someone else's complete config taught me what was possible much faster than the docs alone would have.
Here's my complete config in one file. The default configuration uses Alt+arrow keys instead of a Sway-like configuration of utilizing hjkl Vim-like workflow.
Learning the tag system
This is where MangoWM diverges most sharply from compositors like Sway, Hyprland, or Niri, all of which use the workspace model I'd been on for years.
In MangoWM, every window is assigned one or more tags (numbered 1–9 by default). You view tags rather than switch to workspaces. The keybindings to know:
Keybind
Action
Ctrl + 1-9
View a tag
Alt + 1-9
Move the focused window to a tag
The thing that surprised me: you can view multiple tags simultaneously by pressing Ctrl multiple numbers. Two related projects on different tags? Hold Ctrl and press both numbers. They merge into a single view.
I resisted this for about a day. Then I stopped resisting. There's something genuinely freeing about being able to pull in exactly the windows you want without reorganizing anything.
Switching between layouts
One of MangoWM's most practical features is per-tag layout switching. You're not locked into master-stack globally. For each tag, you can cycle through:
Master-Stack: the standard big window on the left, stack on the right
Scroller: windows scroll horizontally, similar to Niri's model (this one made me feel at home)
Monocle: one maximised window at a time, others hidden
Grid: even tiling across available space
Deck: stacked cards, only the top one visible
The default keybind to cycle layouts is Super + N. I ended up assigning specific layouts to specific tags because my work context maps cleanly to them: a Monocle tag for focused writing, a Scroller tag for reference browsing, and a Master-Stack tag for terminal work.
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Switching layout in Mango WM with Super + N
I have bind Alt + s to get a similar scrollable model like Niri. Similarly, to switch to normal tiling, I have bind Alt + t. To cycle windows, I have bound Super + Shift +hjkl and Super + Shift + arrow keys.
This kind of per-context layout was something I kept wishing Niri had. Niri's scrollable workspace model is clever, but it's one model. MangoWM gives you a toolkit.
Setting up your bar, launcher, and wallpaper
MangoWM doesn't bundle these, so you have to bring your own. The recommended options from the official quick-start docs are:
Status bar: Waybar, eww, AGS, Quickshell. I use Waybar all the way.
Launcher: rofi, fuzzel, bemenu, wmenu. I prefer Fuzzel as an application launcher on Wayland.
Wallpaper: You have these options: swww (awww) and swaybg. Btw, I use azote for setting up wallpaper. It offers the ability to set different wallpapers for different monitors and presents a nice gallery of wallpapers to choose from.
Notifications: swaync, mako, dunst. I prefer fnott as my notification daemon on Wayland.
I was already running Waybar with a Tokyo Night theme on Niri, and I carried the whole config over with minimal changes. The IPC support in MangoWM means you can expose workspace (tag) state to Waybar properly. The example config in the developer's repo shows exactly how.
To autostart these tools, MangoWM's config has an exec-once directive (similar to Hyprland):
Within about an hour, I had a working bar and wallpaper. The whole setup felt familiar to anyone who's configured a wlroots-based compositor before.
Tuning the visual effects
This is where I spent more time than I expected. MangoWM ships with window effects powered by scenefx: blur, drop shadows, corner radius, and per-window opacity. These live in the [effects] section of the config:
The hot-reload support means you can adjust values and see changes without restarting anything. Just save the file. I found myself iterating on corner radius and shadow softness for an embarrassing amount of time.
Coming from Niri, which keeps visual effects minimal, this felt almost indulgent. But it also never felt slow. The scenefx rendering layer is efficient enough that I didn't notice a GPU performance difference on my i5 with integrated graphics.
Window rules and per-app behaviour
MangoWM supports window rules that let you control how specific applications open: which tag they land on, what layout they use, whether they float, and their starting dimensions.
The pin option keeps a floating window visible across all tags, useful for PiP video, a music player, or a floating terminal you want everywhere.
I set up rules for Firefox (always tag 2, master-stack), my terminal (tag 1, no floating), and a scratchpad terminal (floating, pinned). This level of control over window placement is something I missed badly whenever I used a compositor without it.
Should you try MangoWM?
If you're already on a tiling Wayland compositor and you're happy with it, the answer depends on what's missing.
MangoWM is worth trying if you want more layout flexibility than a single-model compositor gives you, if you like the dwm tag philosophy but want modern Wayland features alongside it, or if you want smooth animations and window effects without moving to a heavier compositor like Hyprland.
It's probably not the right choice if you want a point-and-click GUI configuration tool, if you're new to tiling window managers in general, or if your distro doesn't package it and you're not comfortable building from source.
For me, the combination of fast compilation, hot-reload config, per-tag layouts, and genuinely good XWayland support hit a set of itches I didn't fully know I had. I came in expecting to write a quick "I tried it" post and came out with a compositor I'm going to stay on.
No doubt, Niri is a good window manager. But I'm sticking with MangoWM for my daily use.
Michael Catanzaro is stepping away from managing GNOME's security issue tracking, a role he has held largely by himself since November 2020, with support from Red Hat. He calls the work mostly administrative, following each report from the moment it lands to whenever it gets fixed or the clock runs out, and requesting a CVE once that happens.
Come November 1, 2026, Michael will stop tracking newly reported security issues, only focusing on issues that were already in the pipeline before that date. By December 1, he anticipates that every disclosure deadline tied to that remaining batch will have passed, and his part in handling issues will be done.
Alongside that, he is also changing how GNOME handles vulnerability reports overall. Pointing to the rise of AI-generated security submissions, he says that for issues reported on or after August 1, 2026, the disclosure deadline is now just 30 days, a 60-day drop from 90.
And projects that ban AI-generated contributions have to take note. Any security issues submitted to GNOME Security won't be forwarded to such projects, given how much of what comes in today carries AI involvement. Michael will instead close the report in GNOME Security's own tracker and reach out to the project's maintainers directly to flag that it exists.
Someone needs to step up
Michael is currently looking for someone to take the role over, but not just anyone. He wants an experienced member of the GNOME community, someone who already knows their way around the project, to step in.
He's offered to help whoever takes it on get started, but is clear that this isn't a good task for newcomers.
Whoever takes over would inherit the workflow that runs through a form on security.gnome.org, which funnels submissions to a security team that aims to acknowledge new reports within two business days.
Whatever gets submitted through that form is used to open a confidential issue on GitLab, which is then assigned to the relevant project maintainer as the primary handler.
They would also need to take over the archaic way of keeping track of all the security issues for GNOME, which is a basic wiki page on GNOME's GitLab instance. It has to be updated manually, with every new report, fix, and disclosure going into separate tables split by year and project.
Other Linux projects already run something closer to that. Ubuntu publishes searchable, filterable security notices tied to CVE IDs. Fedora and Red Hat route tracking through Bugzilla instead, where a parent bug logs the underlying flaw, with separate tracking bugs filed against each affected package.
You can go through Michael's announcement for more information.
It's been nearly five years since Alacritty made its debut and became a favorite of many power terminal users.
By power users, I mean people who configure Vi mode everywhere, even in graphical IDE.
Personally, I prefer Kitty and I have written some tutorials on Kitty. But whenever we share our Kitty articles, someone would mention Alacritty. And that kind of forced me to try Alacritty.
But this article is not about comparing Kitty and Alacritty. It's merely me sharing my experience and exploration of Alacritty.
What is Alacritty?
Alacritty is a modern terminal emulator designed with a strong focus on performance. It is a GPU-accelerated terminal that uses OpenGL technology to offload rendering tasks entirely to your graphics processor rather than relying heavily on the CPU. Out of the box, Alacritty comes with a decent set of defaults. Which seems to be true as you really don't need to do much to make this terminal work right away.
Exploring Alacritty
Alacritty comes with several 'cool features' that will elevate your terminal workflow. These are Vi mode, scrollback buffer search, regex hints and multi-window approach.
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The Alacritty interface you see in the videos and screenshots here are slightly modified by me. I have shared my tweaking and configuration changes in the later section of this article.
Scrollback navigation with keyboard
Alacritty features a built-in Vi mode, which you can easily access using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + Space.
Vi Mode in Alacritty
Once you are in this mode, you can move around your scrollback buffer using standard Vi navigation keys. This means you don't need to reach for your mouse at all just to scroll through your text, keeping your hands exactly where they belong on the keyboard.
Text selection
The Vi mode can do several types of selection and copy text entirely with keyboard shortcuts.
When you are in Vi mode, pressing Alt + v enables semantic selection, which is the one I use most often. Semantic selection is a smart feature that lets you select distinct words or semantic blocks of text based on specific characters acting as boundaries.
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Semantic Select
If you want to perform a standard manual selection, simply press v to start selecting from the cursor, then move the cursor in any direction to select your text.
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Normal Select
Now, instead of lowercase v, if you press Shift + v, a line selection mode is enabled, allowing you to quickly select entire lines of text at once.
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Line Select
Searching inside terminal
When you have a lot of output in your terminal scrollback and need to track something down, Alacritty has built-in search functions. You can press Ctrl + Shift + F to start a forward search.
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Forward Search
Or Ctrl + Shift + B to initiate a backward search.
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Backward Search
Once you type your query, you can press Enter to jump between the matches sequentially.
Alternatively, if you are already inside the Vi mode, you can simply press / and type your search term directly.
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Search inside Vi Mode
I personally use the Vi mode search because it gives me extra flexibility. It allows me to semantic-select/line-select the entire matched term even when only a partial match is found.
☠️
Don't judge me for using light themed terminal 😸
Moving between brackets
A feature I love while reading configuration files is bracket matching. I usually print the file to the terminal and jump straight into Vi mode.
Once there, you can place your cursor on top of any bracket and press %. This will instantly jump your cursor to the matching opening or closing bracket.
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Matching brackets
At times, this is much more handy than opening the file up in a separate text editor. Especially when I am using it with the Zellij terminal multiplexer.
Configuring Alacritty
Alacritty does not need any user configuration to work properly and access its important features, as it comes right out of the box with some highly sensible defaults.
Still, there are plenty of areas that we can customize to tweak it to perfection. Here, I will take you through some of the options that I personally changed in my Alacritty setup.
Creating a single configuration file for all your features seems easy at first. However, if a tool supports multiple configuration files and imports, it is always a better practice to divide the config into relevant, modular parts.
Doing this will give you a much easier editing experience later when you need to tweak specific behaviors.
For Alacritty, all configuration files should be located in the ~/.config/alacritty/ directory. The directory structure in my system looks like this:
You can see that I have split the configuration files into separate items for:
Main config: alacritty.toml
Keybindings: keybindings/keybindings.toml
Themes: themes <name>.toml
Now, once you have all your configuration files split up, you need to import the other configs into your main file alacritty.toml so that Alacritty can actually read them.
Open up your alacritty.toml file in a text editor and add the import lines to the top of your file using the import array under the [general] section:
To change font in Alacritty, in the config file, add the following lines:
[font]
size = 12
[font.normal]
family = "JetBrains Mono"
style = "Regular"
[font.bold]
family = "JetBrains Mono"
style = "Bold"
[font.italic]
family = "JetBrains Mono"
style = "Italic"
[font.bold_italic]
family = "JetBrains Mono"
style = "Bold Italic"
The above configuration is self-explanatory. Of course, any font you want to appear in your terminal must actually be installed on your system first.
To find the exact name of the font you want to use, you can either open up a font-manager GUI application, or query your system via the command line using fc-list and filtering for your desired font family:
fc-list | grep "jetbrains"
List fonts in the system
Set scrollback history
We have already seen some great features relating to scrollback navigation, selection, and searching. To make these features truly efficient, you need a comparatively large scrollback buffer so you don't lose your terminal history too quickly.
In your main Alacritty configuration file, you can set this by adding the following lines:
[scrolling]
history = 10000
I would suggest caution when increasing this value much beyond 10000. Because this scrollback history is stored directly in your RAM, a massive scrollback buffer can negatively affect your system performance.
Especially when you accidentally dump a massive log file or print exceptionally long files directly to the terminal.
Change the shell
Most Linux distributions come with Bash as the default shell, and sometimes you may want to use an alternative shell like Zsh.
You don't actually need to change your entire system-wide default shell just for this. You can simply change the shell executed inside Alacritty itself.
To do this, add the following lines to your main alacritty.toml file:
[terminal]
shell = "/usr/bin/zsh"
To know the shell location, use:
which zsh
Opacity and blur
Alacritty allows you to change the terminal window opacity across all desktop environments, and it even lets you add a native blur effect if you are running a KDE Plasma Wayland session.
To configure this, add the following lines under the [window] section of your configuration:
opacity = 1.0
blur = true # enable this for KDE Plasma to get blur
Keybindings
The best way to manage custom shortcuts is by adding them via a separate keybindings.toml file and importing it into your main configuration, as we looked at earlier.
In this file, you can define keybindings using the following syntax:
Here, [[keyboard.bindings]] defines the section. For every new keybinding you want to map, a separate [[keyboard.bindings]] section must be used.
Inside this section, you have a few core parameters to customize:
key: The main key used to perform the action (e.g., A, B, 2, 3, |, /).
mods: The modifier keys required for the shortcut. You can use keys like Control, Shift, Alt, or Super. To combine multiple modifiers, separate them with a pipe symbol (|)—for example, Control|Shift triggers on a Ctrl + Shift action.
mode: Defines a specific terminal state (such as Vi mode) that must actively be running for this shortcut to take effect.
action: The actual command or event you want to perform. You can find a complete action reference list directly in the official documentation.
Just like keyboard configurations, the [[mouse.bindings]] headers must be separate sections for each distinct mouse shortcut. Inside each section, you define:
mouse: The specific mouse button you want to map. Options include Right, Left, Middle, Forward, Back, WheelUp, and WheelDown.
action: The command you want to perform. This uses the exact same action references as the keyboard bindings.
For instance, I have an 8-button mouse, so I added the Forward button to quickly toggle into Vi mode, and the Back button to instantaneously open a fresh Alacritty window.
Color schemes
Alacritty allows you to completely alter the appearance of your terminal using custom color configurations.
Out of the box, it expects you to modify the hex color values for various display elements manually. If you don't want to build a palette from scratch, you can visit our GitHub repository to grab several preset color schemes for Alacritty.
Alacritty color schemes
Once you find a theme you like, you can drop it into your ~/.config/alacritty/themes/ directory, import it into your main config, or tweak the individual color blocks within that file to customize the look entirely to your liking.
Alacritty is available in the default repositories of most popular distributions. If you are using Ubuntu, install it using the apt package manager:
sudo apt install alacritty
Fedora users can install it using the DNF package manager:
sudo dnf install alacritty
For Arch Linux users, install Alacritty from the extra repository using the command:
sudo pacman -S alacritty
Wrapping Up
One thing to note is that, as far as I know, Alacritty does not support viewing images natively from the terminal, though there is some Sixel image support development floating around.
Personally, I don't care much about image support because I am not working on images from the terminal anyway. But if that is an absolute requirement for your workflow, you may feel a bit disappointed.
There are exciting new terminal emulators like Ghostty and Ptyxis these days, and I have given them a try for a while. Now, I have been using Alacritty for the past couple of months as my main terminal, paired with Zellij multiplexer. I like this setup. It may make me forget Kitty, who knows.
What's your take on Alacritty? Do you use it as your main terminal emulator? If not, which one is your favorite? Do mention it in the comments below!
Our brains are not meant to be locked in for eight straight hours during a work/school day. That's not how these little pink sponges work, no matter what hack productivity gurus on YouTube might try to sell you.
What works is cutting the friction around your workflow, and staying on top of the mental nerfs you already carry, plus the ones that pile up over the day. There's a whole ecosystem built around fixing that, ranging from break reminder apps, Kanban boards, to Pomodoro timers and phone-to-desktop bridges.
On GNOME, you don't need to leave your desktop to get most of this. The extension ecosystem already covers timers, notes, clipboard history, and phone syncing, without asking you to juggle five different subscriptions.
Here are eight extensions worth having, plus a native GNOME feature that handles some of this for free.
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This is a productivity-focused list. If you want a quick overview of extensions that add to your experience, we have a separate list for that.
1. GSConnect
Every time your phone buzzes, and you have to pick it up just to check what it was, that's a small amount of time taken away from whatever you were doing. GSConnect gets rid of that by putting your phone's notifications right on your desktop, so you can glance, decide it's not urgent, and stay exactly where you were.
Of course, this could also go the other way, making you waste more of your time, but that's on you. ☠️
It's a full implementation of KDE Connect built specifically for GNOME Shell. Beyond notifications, you get SMS from your keyboard, a synced clipboard between your phone and your Linux machine, and file sharing that goes both directions.
2. Caffeine
Caffeine does one thing. It stops your screen from dimming, locking, or suspending while it's switched on. Click the coffee cup icon in the top bar, and GNOME leaves your screen alone until you turn it back off.
It sounds minor until you're three slides into a presentation and the screen goes black, or you're deep into a long article and the lock screen interrupts you mid paragraph. You can also scroll on the panel icon to toggle it, and there's command line support if you'd rather script it.
Alternatively, you could fully disable system suspend via the Settings menu under the Power page (inside Power Saving), but that's not a good idea if you are running a laptop that needs to be functional during long sessions without AC power.
3. ddterm
Hit a keyboard shortcut, and a terminal slides down from the top of the screen. Hit it again, and it slides back up. With ddterm, you don't need to switch through workspaces or hunt for a terminal window buried under everything else.
Restart your session and every tab comes right back, and resizing is just a matter of dragging on the outer edge. The preferences panel covers the rest if you go looking for it.
It also runs natively on Wayland, which isn't something every drop-down terminal extension can claim, and its development has stayed consistent for years now, with a steady flow of releases rather than long stretches of silence between updates.
4. Clipboard Indicator
Clipboard Indicator keeps a searchable history of everything you copy, text and images both, so you're not relying on memory or copying the same thing twice.
The feature list goes further than most clipboard managers bother with. Pin entries to keep them at the top, tag them to stay organized, search with regex if you need precision, and edit an entry directly from the menu instead of copying it out, fixing it, and copying it back in.
For anyone handling sensitive information, a private mode pauses history tracking on demand, and specific apps like password managers can be excluded from tracking entirely.
5. Advanced Alt-Tab Window Switcher
GNOME's default Alt+Tab is fine until you have a dozen windows open and no way to tell them apart at a glance.
Advanced Alt-Tab Window Switcher or AATWS replaces all three of GNOME's built-in switchers with one that actually helps you find what you're looking for. This includes filtering, sorting, and a type-to-search mode that matches by title, app name, or even the executable behind it.
It's not limited to switching either. Close windows, move them between workspaces or monitors, pin one always on top, or launch a new instance of an app, all without leaving the switcher.
For anyone whose workflow is spread across multiple monitors with a lot of windows open at once, this cuts out most of the clicking and squinting that the stock switcher makes you do.
6. Tiling Shell
Tiling Shell brings proper tiling window management to GNOME, going well past the basic two column split GNOME ships with by default. Drag a window and a snap assistant shows you where it'll land, with a built in editor for building your own layouts from scratch.
Layouts aren't rigid either. Span a window across multiple tiles, resize adjacent tiled windows together, and set a different layout for each workspace on each monitor.
Keyboard shortcuts handle the tiling too, so dragging windows around with the mouse is optional rather than being a neccessity.
7. Cronomix
Most productivity extensions do one job. Cronomix does several. Timer, stopwatch, Pomodoro tool, alarm, to-do list, time tracker, and even flashcards, all bundled into a single dropdown instead of five separate tools competing for your attention.
The Pomodoro and timer functions cover the classic work-then-break rhythm, while the to-do list and time tracker give you somewhere to actually log what you did with the time instead of making guesses at the end of the day.
It follows a very different approach compared to the single-purpose extensions elsewhere on this list.
8. Notes With History
A lot of the sticky note extensions on GNOME haven't been touched in years, and installing one on a modern system usually means finding out the hard way. Notes With History puts a menu of notes in your panel instead of scattering note windows across your screen.
Click the icon, pick a note, and it's all there. 📝
Notes can be reordered to keep the most relevant ones near the top, and the panel icon itself is customizable so it's easy to spot at a glance.
9. Freon
A sluggish system without an obvious cause can be very annoying, especially when you are in the middle of a time-sensitive task with your manager breathing down your neck.
Freon puts important system stats like CPU, disk, and GPU temperature, alongside fan RPM and voltage info, right in the top bar for you to quickly figure out if there's a system-wide slowdown or an app that's misbehaving.
You can pick which sensors to show, switch between Celsius and Fahrenheit, and set the refresh rate for the metrics display. Though you will need your GPU manufacturer's driver installed to get GPU readings.
Bonus Tip ✨
If you don't want to install anything at all, GNOME has a few tricks up its sleeve, tucked inside Settings. Since GNOME 48, there's a Digital Wellbeing section that handles screen time and break reminders natively.
It tracks how much time you spend on screen each day and compares it against previous days and weeks.
You can set a daily screen time limit that triggers a notification once you hit it, with an option to turn the screen grayscale afterward as a nudge to step away. There are also built-in eyesight and movement break reminders.
It's not as configurable as something like Cronomix or a dedicated break reminder extension, but if you're already on GNOME 48 or later, the most basic productivity features are sitting right there waiting to be turned on.
