Getting More Out of KDE Plasma System Monitor

One of the biggest strengths of KDE Plasma is its customization, and the System Monitor is no exception.

I have shown this with KDE Konsole tweaks earlier and now I am here to do the same with KDE System Monitor.

Like most other parts of the Plasma desktop, the System Monitor offers plenty of customization options that are easy to overlook.

Let me show you how to transform the default KDE Plasma System Monitor into a clean and powerful system monitoring dashboard.

Understanding the System Monitor Layout

Before we start customizing the System Monitor, let's first understand how KDE Plasma System Monitor arranges sensors on the page.

Take a look at the sample layout diagram below.

KDE Plasma System Monitor Layout

This gives you a general idea of how different elements are organized inside the System Monitor.

At the top is the window layer, where everything is arranged in rows. Inside each row is a column layer, where items are arranged into columns.

Within each column, you'll find sections. These sections hold the individual widgets that display system information.

When you enter the System Monitor's edit mode, which we'll cover in the next section, you can hover over the layout to identify these different layers.

As you add or modify widgets, clicking on a particular layer only shows the options available for that layer.

For example, clicking the column layer lets you add more columns, but not sections.

Likewise, clicking the section layer lets you add additional sections, but not columns.

Keeping this layout in mind will make it much easier to customize the System Monitor without any confusion.

As mentioned earlier, KDE Plasma's default System Monitor includes a few pre-built pages that display essential system information.

If you look closely, you'll notice that each item on these pages is essentially a widget, similar to the widgets you can place on the Plasma desktop.

In other words, the System Monitor app works like a canvas where you can add widgets and configure them however you like.

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KDE System Monitor has the concept of "pages" and they are configured to display specific system information. If you look closely, you'll notice that each item on these pages is essentially a widget, similar to the widgets you can place on the Plasma desktop. In other words, the System Monitor app works like a canvas where you can add widgets and configure them however you like. This is what we are going to do.

Add a New Page

By default, the Plasma System Monitor includes four pages:

• Overview: A dashboard that displays multiple system statistics.
• Applications: A list of running applications and their resource usage.
• History: Live graphs for CPU, GPU, memory, and network activity.
• Processes: A list of running processes and their resource usage.

For this guide, we'll create a new page instead of modifying the existing ones.

Click the menu button in the top-left corner and select Add New Page.

Add a new page

In the dialog that appears, enter a name for the page and choose an icon.

Next, set Load this page to During application startup.

Finally, click Add.

Add page details

The new page will now appear in the sidebar. Select it to open it.

You'll be greeted with an empty page. This is where we'll build our custom system monitoring dashboard.

Edit the Page

Now that the new page is ready, it's time to customize its contents.

Open the new page and click the Edit Page button in the top-right corner.

Since the page currently contains only one system monitor widget, click on it. This opens a sidebar where you can configure the selected widget.

Let's turn it into a horizontal bar chart that displays the load on each CPU core.

In the sidebar, change the following settings:

• Title: CPU Load Graph (or any name you prefer)
• Display Style: Horizontal Bars
• Sensors: Select the usage percentage for all CPU cores, as shown in the clip below.

Editing the first KDE Plasma System Monitor widget.

Selecting Sensors

Choosing the right sensors is the most important part of building your dashboard. Most System Monitor widgets work similarly to Plasma desktop widgets and let you display different types of system information.

Depending on the widget, you'll usually find two sensor fields:

• Sensors: Displays the selected sensors as charts, graphs, or other visual elements. You can select multiple sensors.
• Text-only Sensors: Displays the selected sensors as plain text instead of charts or graphs.

Clicking either field opens a categorized list of available sensors.

For example, CPU-related sensors, such as usage percentage, per-core statistics, and CPU temperature, are available under the CPU category.

Likewise, RAM-related sensors are grouped under Memory → Physical Memory.

Here are some of the main sensor categories you'll come across:

• CPUs: CPU usage, per-core statistics, temperature, and related metrics.
• Disks: Disk usage, free space, read/write activity, and other storage information.
• GPU: GPU usage, temperature, video memory, and related statistics.
• Memory: RAM and swap usage.
• Network Devices: IP address, download and upload speed, and other network statistics.
• Operating System: Kernel version, hostname, uptime, and other system details.

The exact sensors available will depend on your hardware and system configuration.

Adding a New Row

Now that we've added the first widget, let's create a new row to add another one.

While still in edit mode, click Add Row. A new empty system monitor widget will appear below the existing one.

Add a row

This time, we'll configure it as a pie chart to display used and free physical memory (RAM).

If you'd like to see the complete process, check out the short clip below.

Otherwise, configure the widget with these settings:

• Title: RAM Usage
• Display Style: Pie Chart
• Sensors: Used Physical Memory Percentage and Free Physical Memory Percentage

Adding a RAM usage pie chart to the dashboard.

You can also customize the chart colors if you like, but we'll leave them at their default values for this guide.

Add a Column

If the first section looks a bit too wide, you can split the available space by adding another column.

While in edit mode, click the topmost layer of the widget. This opens the menu for that layer.

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Check the layout diagram to know the arrangements.

From there, select Add → Add Column. The process is shown in the clip below.

Adding a new column using the top layer menu.

A new system monitor widget will appear to the right of the existing one. At the same time, the original widget will automatically resize to make room for the new column.

Using the same editing process as before, I configured this new widget with the Color Grid display style to show additional system information.

Creating a Color Grid widget to display system information.

Change the Position of a Widget

After setting up the dashboard, I felt that the Color Grid would look better before the CPU Load graph.

To move it, I clicked the topmost part of the widget to open that layer's menu.

From there, I clicked on Move and simply dragged the widget to the left of the CPU Load graph.

Moving the column item.

That's all there is to it.

Organize Widgets with Sections

So far, we've added rows and columns and rearranged widgets.

There is one more organizational feature in the System Monitor called Sections.

Sections let you group related widgets together. For example, you can keep all hardware-related sensors in one section and system information in another.

Let's see how it works. I'll demonstrate this on a new page. By now, you should already know how to create one.

In edit mode, click the top part of the section layer, located just above the widget title.

From the layer menu, select Add → Add Section. A new widget will be added to the right of the existing one.

Both widgets now belong to the same section and share a single section header.

To separate them visually, click the section header and select Add → Add Separator.

Add items in sections.

Save Your Changes

Once you're happy with the layout, click the Save Changes button in the top bar.

Save Changes

This saves all your modifications and exits edit mode.

Your newly created pages and customized widgets will now be available whenever you open the System Monitor.

Start with Your Custom Page

After creating your custom dashboard, you may want the System Monitor to open with that page by default. Fortunately, that's easy to set up.

Click the menu button in the top-left corner and select Edit or Remove Pages.

In the Start with drop-down menu, select the page you created.

Click OK to save the changes.

Start with Custom Page

From now on, the System Monitor will open directly to your custom page every time you launch it.

Remove a Page

If you no longer need a page, you can remove it at any time.

Click the menu button in the top-left corner and select Edit or Remove Pages.

A dialog listing all available pages will appear. Click the Delete button next to the page you want to remove.

Remove a custom page from the System Monitor

Once you're done, click OK to save the changes.

If you don't want to delete a page completely, simply uncheck it in the list. This hides the page without removing it.

Download Community Pages

You don't have to build every dashboard from scratch. The KDE community has created many custom System Monitor pages that you can download and use.

As with any third-party content, install these pages with caution. They are community-created and may not have been tested by the KDE developers for security or stability.

To browse available pages, click the menu button in the top-left corner and select Get New Pages.

Browse available community created pages

This opens the online catalog, where you can click the Install button next to any page to download and add it to your System Monitor.

Export or Import Pages

If you frequently switch between systems, exporting and importing pages can save you from recreating your custom dashboards every time.

To export a page, first open the page you want to save. Then click Menu → Export Current Page. Choose a file name and click Save.

The page will be saved with the .page extension in your chosen location.

Export a page in KDE System Monitor

To use it on another system, open the System Monitor and select Menu → Import Page. Then choose the exported .page file to add it to your System Monitor.

Wrapping Up

KDE Plasma's System Monitor is much more than a tool for checking CPU and memory usage. It offers a level of customization that many graphical system monitors simply don't provide.

Despite being a GUI application, it gives you plenty of flexibility to build dashboards that suit your workflow.

Have you customized the KDE Plasma System Monitor before, or do you prefer a different system monitoring tool?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

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Terramaster F4-425 Pro: An Hardware Upgrade for an Already Solid NAS

Terramaster F4-425 Plus was the first NAS I ever used in my hoemlab setup. It's a solid device for a NAS. Not too expensive, silent and has a decent operating system. The hybrid HDD+SSD model along with TRAID and built-in backup tools makes it a good NAS choice.

Now Terramaster has refreshed their F4-425 series with a Pro model. The main thing that changes here is the CPU. There is also a revamped operating system in the form of TOS 7 but that should be available on previous F4-425 models, too.

20% off launch offer

The new F4-425 is still a solid device, hardware wise. Operating system has rough edges and hopefully it will improve in the future updates if Terramaster is serious on this product. They usually are.

I have used the device for a few days as it's a new device and I have been travelling to other cities for most of the past few weeks. So what I am sharing here are more of first impressions. A more thorough review with extended daily use will follow.

Still, there is enough here to give you a useful picture of where the F4-425 Pro stands right now.

📋

Just so that you know, Terramaster sent me the F4-425 Plus NAS. The views shared are my own, coming from my experience of using this device.

The hardware

Visually, the F4-425 Pro is identical to the Plus. Same aluminum chassis, same front layout with four HDD bays and a single USB-A port, same rear port arrangement. There is no design refresh here. You cannot distinguish between the two by just looking at them from the outside.

Find differences between the two models of F4-425

What changed is the processor primarily. The Plus had an Intel N150 with 4 cores. The Pro moves to the Intel Core 3 N350 with 8 cores and a 7W TDP. The integrated GPU gains 32 execution units versus 16 to 24 on the Plus, which matters for hardware-accelerated transcoding. My unit is the top configuration with the N350 and 16GB DDR5.

Component	F4-425 Pro (this unit)	F4-425 Plus
CPU	Intel Core 3 N350, 8-core (7W)	Intel N150, 4-core
RAM	16GB DDR5 (single SODIMM slot)	16GB DDR5
GPU (iGPU)	32 execution units	16–24 execution units
HDD Bays	4× SATA hot-swap	4× SATA hot-swap
M.2 Slots	3× NVMe (PCIe Gen3 x1)	3× NVMe (PCIe Gen3 x1)
Max Storage	152TB (32TB×4 HDD + 8TB×3 NVMe)	144TB
LAN	Dual 5GbE	Dual 5GbE
USB	3× USB-A + 1× USB-C (all 10Gbps)	3× USB-A + 1× USB-C (10Gbps)
OS	TOS 7	TOS 6 (upgradeable to TOS 7)
Price	$799.99	$599.99

The 8-core upgrade is meaningful for a NAS running multiple Docker containers, simultaneous services, and media transcoding. There is also a cheaper N305 variant at $699.99 with 8GB less RAM, but given how much a NAS tends to do in parallel, I would lean toward this configuration.

One constraint worth noting is that there is only one SODIMM slot. If you want to upgrade beyond 16GB later, you will need a single module of single-rank DDR5.

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I like the fact that Terramaster includes bunch of M2 screws and stickers to label the hard disks. It's a minor thing but worth appreciation.

First, a discovery that changed how I think about TerraMaster migration

Before the hardware rundown, I want to share something I stumbled into during setup that I did not know before and found genuinely useful.

Terrmaster's operating system, TOS, does not live on the NAS device itself. There is no onboard eMMC storage. The operating system is installed directly on one of the user-inserted disks.

When I moved some of my existing drives from the Plus into the Pro, it booted straight into TOS 6 with my old user credentials already present. The Pro just picked up where the Plus left off because the OS was on the drives, not the device.

If that was amusing, the story gets better.

I then inserted those same drives into my ZimaCube Pro as I wanted to format them. And the strangest thing happened. The ZimaCube started presenting itself as a TerraMaster NAS running TOS. The TOS installation on disk was only about 280 MB but that was enough to 'hijack' the boot process.

I formatted the SSDs by putting them in my Terramaster D1 SSD enclosure and connecting it to my Ubuntu laptop. I formatted the drives using GParted via my TerraMaster USB DAS, reinserted them in the Pro, and it initialized fresh with TOS 7.

💡

The upside of this design is that NAS migration is much simpler than you might expect. If the NAS unit dies, your OS, configuration, and data all survive on the drives. Move them to a new TerraMaster device and you pick up right where you left off.

The OS installation experience

No, I am not talking about installing an open source NAS OS on the Terramaster F4-425 Pro. I am talking about TOS itself.

Since the device doesn't come with on-board storage, the OS is installed when you boot (with fresh hard disks).

I used two SSDs to test the NAS. Only SSDs, no HDDs (don't judge me). I think in total, I have 8 SSDs of various size. I started buying them 2 years back when I started exploring homelab setup. My collection of disks would have grown as my interest and devices grew in my homelab but the increased price have put a stop on them for now. From what I see, the SSDs that I bought 2 years ago, cost 2 to 3 times more these days. I'll wait for the prices to come down.

Enough of my sob story. So, I used two disks and they were combined into one with TRAID.

The TOS 7 was downloaded and installed in 25 minutes or so.

Once it is installed, you get the option to create a "super user" locally:

And then you get the option to add an email account. You have to provide an email address and you may provide a fake or temporary one and skip verification, I think. However, this email address is used to send notification about certain events like NAS being rebooted, shutdown and more. You can also configure custom notification for when disks are full or they encounter issues.

Here's a video of the TNAS OS installation and initilization. It's a raw, unedited video of about 35 minutes. Mostly the first and last few minutes are of interest.

You'll notice some errors when I first log in to the TOS. Those errors went away after the reboot.

Using TOS 7: Improvement on TOS 6, but the "AI-native" label is not justified (yet)

TOS 7 is surely an improvement over the previous TOS 6. The interface is cleaner, navigation is more intuitive, and the storage management tools feel more coherent. The addition of system monitor in the sidebar is a good move and overall, the TOS seems to have a good user interface at first look.

The redesign is evident, sepecially if you have used TOS 6 in the past.

That said, TerraMaster is marketing TOS 7 as "the world's first AI-native NAS OS" and I think that's more of marketing than actual AI features.

The "Ai-native" tag needs a lot more work

The main AI feature is the inclusion of OpenClaw, which lets you interact with the NAS using natural language. Sounds compelling. But OpenClaw is an orchestration layer, not an AI model itself. It acts as a middleman between you and whatever LLM you connect it to, which could be a cloud service or a local model running on current or another device. The NAS itself is not doing any AI inference. So "AI-native" means "designed to connect to AI", which is a different thing.

The idea Terramaster showcased in their TOS7 video was that OpenClaw could be used to manage the NAS more easily by asking the AI to configure a few things instead of doing it all by yourself.

If that was the idea, it would have made more sense to include some open source model pretrained data on Terramaster docs or at least have some custom skills added to it (for the lack of good enough GPU for local AI). There is no scope for adding a GPU for more local AI capabilities.

Nanoclaw needs to be conncted to an LLM first

I tried pointing OpenClaw at Ollama running on my ZimaCube Pro. The configuration is not straightforward. There are networking details to sort out and Ollama's API endpoint format matters. It is doable (and I'll revisit this scenario later), but it is not the one-click experience the marketing implies.

Of course, OpenClaw can be connected with Claude and other cloud LLMs but then it won't be native, local AI. I also don't have Claude Max plan to connect it to OpenClaw.

Personally, I would not trust AI automation with my private data, especially when I plan to use this as my primary local data backup. That said, the idea of including AI assistance is not entirely bad. People are increasingly using AI and they want it built into the tools they already use, rather than switching to a browser tab or a terminal.

The other AI feature is in the Photos app. It scans your library to recognize faces, places, and scenes. This is useful but nothing new or revolutionary, it was already there in TOS version 6. Tools like Immich and PhotoPrism already do this, and they are both open source options you can install on the NAS itself. What would actually differentiate this is something like OCR on scanned documents, which neither Photos nor most self-hosted tools handle well. That opportunity is sitting right there.

Official Terramaster Photos apps has some AI features (that were in TOS 6 too)

The AI recognition in Photos is also not enabled by default. You have to go into settings and turn it on manually. Once enabled, it takes a while to process a large library.

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To give credit where it is due: TRAID for combining disks of different sizes works well and remains one of TOS' highlights. And Jellyfin had Intel QuickSync hardware transcoding enabled out of the box without any manual configuration on my part, which I appreciated.

There is a Linux terminal, too

TOS 7 provides terminal access to a Linux environment running underneath. I guess this is good for people who do not want to rely on the provided graphical user interface and want to take matters into their own hands by using the command line.

Now, the Linux environment is Ubuntu. Ubuntu 22.04 specifically. That version reaches end of life in April 2027, almost a year from now. For a device just launched in mid-2026 and expected to run for years, shipping with a near-EOL Ubuntu base is not a good move. I would have expected 24.04 at minimum.

Another thing is that I could see pending updates in the terminal but it threw a warning when I tried to run apt upgrade.

I don't know why the screenshot is blurry. Still, you can see the upgrade results in warning

Which makes sense to some extent. Terramaster doesn't want you to upgrade the system on your own. Rather, they will provide OTA updates. If you install a package on your own, you can upgrade it with "apt install package_name" way. And of course, the terminal is at your disposal to configure docker, development tools etc from the command line because a few things are rather easy in the terminal than fiddling around in the GUI menu.

Easy remote access through

Terramaster also has this new feature (I think) calles TNAS.online remote access. So, if you register an account with Terramaster, you can enable remote acces to your NAS device. This makes it easier for you to access data when you are not on your home network.

Rough edges worth knowing about

These are not dealbreakers but they add up and are worth calling out early. I hope Terramaster team reads this and provides software updates to address these issues.

Global search has a scope problem. TOS 7 has a distinction between your personal space (home directory) and the shared public space. A global search only returns results from your home directory. Files stored elsewhere on the device did not appear. Even files I copied into the home directory did not show up in search results immediately, possibly due to indexing time. But the lack of clear guidance on what the two spaces mean, and which one search actually covers, will confuse new users.

Jellyfin cannot browse subdirectories inside the home directory. I set up a Movies folder inside my home directory but Jellyfin would not display subdirectories when I tried to add it as a media library. It wanted to use /Volume1/jellyfin by default, which means media gets tied to the application path. If Jellyfin gets uninstalled, the data location becomes a concern.

No keyboard navigation in Photos. Browsing photos requires mouse clicks throughout. You cannot use arrow keys to move between images in the viewer. The app search bar launched from the top bar also does not dismiss with Escape. These are minor but they signal a UI that was not fully tested for keyboard users.

Would make more sense to navigate through keys rather than mouse clicks

The absurd need to enable apps after each reboot. Unless Terramaster really want to discourage shutting down the NAS device, I see no reason why an installed application needs to be enabled again after rebooting the device. I noticed it with OpenClaw, Jellyfin and even Terramaster's Photos application. It makes no sense to me.

Still excellent hardware wise

I liked the previous F4-425 Plus device. This one is not much different other than a (needed) CPU upgrade. It's the same aluminium chasis, same small form factor and the same silent device.

Yes, F4-425 Pro is also a 'silent machine'. You'll probably won't notice it running even if it is sitting on your disk and its fan is running.

The hybrid model to include 4 HDDs and 3 SSDs is good. It's just that you need to pull out the outer casing to access the SSD compartment. HDDs can be easily accessed from the front.

It seems that TOS's software is capable of handling the hot swap. I could not test it for the lack of disks.

It measures 181 mm wide, 219 mm deep, and 150 mm tall. Basically a small form factor device that doesn't take much desk space.

The USB-C port is still at the back. I said this in my F4-425 Plus review, too. The single USB-C port is on the rear of the device. For quick external SSD connections, this is inconvenient for a lazy person like me.

I added around 125 GB of pictures and watched the resource consumption. It remained under 20% CPU and RAM load.

Similarly, I streamed a 4K movie in mkv format. The load remained under 10%. So the processor is quite capable here as a NAS and a casual media hub.

Resource utilization during 4k media streaming

I am not a professional and don't really run benchmark tests. Just sharing what I observed as a novice homelabber.

Verdict: promising hardware, software still maturing

Based on a few days of use, the F4-425 Pro is a capable device with a hardware upgrade that makes sense. The 8-core processor and improved iGPU are relevant improvements for anyone running multiple services. The TOS-on-disk design makes migration genuinely easier than it has any right to be.

TOS 7 is a better version of TOS 6 by a clear margin. But the AI features are far from a finished product. OpenClaw requires external configuration to work so the native AI part is not there yet.

I will be putting the Pro through more extensive use as a daily driver and sharing a full review a few month later perhaps. There is more to test, including sustained performance under load, RAID behavior with multiple disks (if I can afford them), mobile apps and whether Ollama installed directly on the device makes OpenClaw actually useful. Stay tuned for that.

The NAS itself is $799.99 for this configuration. That is the entry point, not the total cost. If you do not already have drives, HDDs and SSDs have increased substantially in price over the past year. Building a usable NAS with populated bays is a meaningfully larger investment than the device price alone suggests. Factor that in before buying.

💡

The device is priced at $799.99 but due to Prime Day sale, it is available for just $639.99. That saves $160 for you. Official website link here.

If you already have the previous F4-425 model, I don't think you should upgrade just because there is a new model. If you are buying a NAS for the first time or upgrading your NAS for several years, F4-425 Pro is an option worth considering. Sure, the provided operating system may not be to everyone's liking but you can always install a different operating system. The hardware is solid.

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Linux Users Get This For Free! Brave Origin Costs $59.99 For Everyone Else

Origin is Brave's stripped-down browser, built for people who never touch most of what the company packages with Brave Browser. It drops the AI assistant, the rewards program, the crypto wallet, and the VPN, leaving the ad and tracker blocking in place.

Don't let that fool you into thinking that this is some half-baked browser; you still get regular security upgrades, Chromium-specific patches, and general browser updates.

Though, for most users, Brave Origin costs $59.99 for a one-time license purchase for use across Windows, Android, macOS, and iOS. However, people running a Linux distro on their computer do not have to pay a dime or sign up for an account.

Announcing Origin earlier this month, Brave explained that they:

Built Brave Origin in response to requests from users who wanted to support Brave’s industry-leading work on Web privacy and open-source adblocking, without having to manage or remove features they weren’t interested in using.

I wanted to see for myself what Brave Origin was about while also comparing it to their flagship offering. So, would you like to come along as I explore it? 🤓

This is what's on offer

The first thing Origin showed me was a choice built right into onboarding; pay for a license to support Brave, or proceed for free since I was on Linux. I went with free, and right after came the usual first-time setup screens.

First came the prompt to set it as my default browser.

Next came the request to import settings from other browsers, offering to pull bookmarks, extensions, and saved passwords over from whatever browser Brave found on the system (Firefox in my case).

After that came the reporting of crashes or freezes (aka Stability) dialog; basically some telemetry that would be sent over to Brave when Origin behaved erratically during use.

Good to see that it was disabled by default. 😄

Those were the only things asked of me during onboarding, and I started browsing right away. Brave Search is the default here, same as any other Brave install, though it can be swapped out for something else if you prefer something like DuckDuckGo or Ecosia.

I left it as is during testing, and it held up well. Searching for "YouTube" even pulled in recent coverage from high domain authority sites like the BBC and Google's own blog under the news results.

Brave Shields performed quite well too! It did its job without me needing to configure anything. While playing a video on YouTube, it caught 16 trackers and ads on that one page alone, with fingerprinting protection switched on by default.

Nothing about the page felt broken or stripped down because of it either.

A lean Brave Origin install's Speedometer score on a VM (left), next to a customized Vivaldi install's score on bare metal (right).

I also ran a Speedometer test on BrowserBench, running Origin inside my test setup of an Ubuntu 26.04 LTS virtual machine, and it scored a 23.3 without any extensions or themes installed.

For a comparison, I ran the same test on my daily driver Vivaldi installation on Fedora Workstation 44 (non-VM setup), and the score came in at 23.2, close enough to call a tie.

While it's tempting to say this proves Origin is incredibly lightweight, Speedometer mostly measures responsiveness of Web applications, where modern virtual machines actually perform nearly as fast as real hardware.

Because the two tests ran on entirely different operating systems, the near-tie mostly shows that both browsers handle web code at the same fundamental speed. To truly prove Origin is lighter, I'd need to test them side-by-side on the exact same setup.

I didn't have the chance to do that while working on this piece. 😅

Why not Brave Browser?

Brave Browser (left) and Brave Origin (right).

Well, the regular Brave Browser already does almost everything Origin does, plus a lot more. Out of the box, it bundles in features like:

Column 1	Column 2
Leo AI	Tor
News	VPN
Rewards (which also brings along Brave Ads)	Wallet (plus Web3 domain support)
Speedreader	Wayback Machine
Talk	Web Discovery Project

It also has an opt-out telemetry system, which, if skipped, will quietly send back a daily usage ping, crash logs, and P3A analytics in the background.

If you use even a couple of those extras, like asking Leo a quick question, the VPN, or the rewards program, stick with regular Brave, since it already does this for free on all platforms.

Brave Origin, on the other hand, removes every item on that list, either compiling them out of the build entirely or switching them off by default, depending on how it's installed.

Simply speaking, Origin is for people who never touched most of those features and want them gone rather than just tucked away in a menu. It's also for the ones who skipped Brave Browser altogether because of all that extra stuff (or bloat).

Running both side by side isn't a problem either. I ran the standalone Origin install alongside a Brave Browser install during testing, and neither one interfered with the other at any point.

Installing Brave Origin on Linux

There are two ways to get Brave Origin running on your Linux computer.

The first is installing the standalone app (we talk about this in detail a bit later), where a dedicated application is downloaded into your system, and you just launch it to use it.

The second method is to upgrade your existing Brave Browser installation by going into Settings > System and scrolling down to the "Brave Origin" entry.

Here, you only need to click the "Proceed with Origin for free on Linux" button, and the browser switches over to the Origin experience, with the option to manually re-enable any of the disabled features.

Switching back to the normal browser doesn't need a reinstallation either. You can do that by disabling the Brave Origin flag at brave://flags.

Ubuntu

If you already have Brave Browser installed via apt, then you can skip the last step in this section.

If not, then you can follow these steps to get Brave Origin. First, you have to ensure that you have cURL installed via the following command:

curl --version

If it shows an error, run:

sudo apt install curl

Next, you have to add the GPG keyring for Brave's APT repository to your system:

sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg

Then, you have to add Brave's APT repository to your system's sources list:

sudo curl -fsSLo /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brave-browser-release.sources https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/brave-browser.sources

And refresh apt's package index:

sudo apt update

Now, it is just a matter of installing the browser using:

sudo apt install brave-origin

Fedora

On Fedora 41 or later machines with DNF5+ (non-atomic), you can run the following commands to get Brave Origin:

sudo dnf install dnf-plugins-core

sudo dnf config-manager addrepo --from-repofile=https://brave-browser-rpm-release.s3.brave.com/brave-browser.repo

sudo dnf install brave-origin

Arch Linux

For Arch Linux and derivatives, the way to get Brave Origin is via an AUR helper like yay or paru. The official instructions mention how to get it using yay:

yay -Sy brave-origin-bin

There's also a cURL command that handles installation on most Linux distros that goes like:

curl -fsS https://dl.brave.com/install.sh | FLAVOR=origin sh

You won't find the source code for Origin in a separate repository on Brave's GitHub, and that's because there isn't one. Origin is just a stripped-down build of brave-core, and doesn't have its own codebase.

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PINE64's Smart Speaker is a Home Assistant Powered Alternative to Amazon Echo

PINE64 has been building budget-friendly ARM and RISC-V hardware since 2015, when the original PINE A64 single-board computer launched on Kickstarter. The community-driven outfit has since put out devices like the PinePhone, the ROCK series of SBCs, and the Ox64 RISC-V board.

And now with the PineVoice, they are stepping into the smart speaker space, going the Home Assistant way instead of bundling Alexa or Google Assistant.

🚧

PINE64 points out that this device is still in the early stages of development and might have some snafus.

What does it pack?

Built specifically as a voice satellite (basically a relay) for Home Assistant and not a general-purpose smart speaker, the PineVoice's horsepower comes from the Bouffalo Lab BL606P.

Which is a RISC-V SoC that pairs a 480 MHz 64-bit T-Head C906, a 320 MHz 32-bit T-Head E907, and a 150 MHz 32-bit T-Head E902 core.

For the memory, PINE64 includes 32 MiB of pSRAM and 788KB of SRAM, along with 16 MiB of XSPI NOR flash for storage, and wireless connectivity is handled via 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 5.2 (BT+BLE).

Wake word detection runs locally through MicroWakeWord, currently using the "Hey Jarvis" model from ESPHome instead of routing audio through a cloud server. The firmware speaks the Wyoming Protocol, which is how Home Assistant's voice interface talks to satellite devices like PineVoice.

A dual microphone array handles audio capture, a built-in speaker outputs audio with physical buttons for volume, and a hardware switch handles mic mutes. A center LED ring shows what PineVoice is doing at any given moment, and these light patterns are said to replace spoken responses from the speaker for most actions and states.

The whole thing measures 65 mm x 65 mm x 66 mm and connects over a single USB-C port that handles both power and data.

Get one

PineVoice is in stock now for $49.99 at the Pine Store's community price, with a $59.99 retail price for those buying elsewhere. It ships with a USB-A to USB-C cable in the box (as shown above), and PINE64 backs the device with a 30-day warranty.

Additionally, the source code for PineVoice's firmware can be found on Codeberg and the specification sheet on the documentation portal.

PineVoice

---

Suggested Read 📖: ArmSoM Sige6 is The First Sige Board to Ditch Rockchip

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No More Reboots During Kernel Patching for ARM64 Systems on Ubuntu

Canonical's Livepatch can now patch the Linux kernel on ARM64 systems without forcing a reboot. This has been possible on AMD64 machines for years, but ARM64 users had no equivalent option until now.

It is available for users on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Ubuntu Core 26, and if this sounds familiar, that's because Canonical has already talked about this before. The first time was when the Ubuntu 26.04 release was out, back in April, and the second instance was when Ubuntu Core 26 arrived.

We are covering this now because they have put out a dedicated writeup explaining the effort that went behind getting this ready.

Work started back in 2023, where the company ran a gap analysis (a study of what's missing) on what ARM64 needed to support live kernel patching, and the results weren't very encouraging.

The issue was that the upstream ARM64 kernel lacked a stable implementation of reliable stacktraces, a feature livepatching depends on to know when it's safe to swap code in a running kernel.

The compiler toolchain wasn't ready either, with GCC, objdump, and Kpatch all missing stable ARM64 support at the time. Work picked up through 2024 and into this year as Arm processors became more common in cloud and edge deployments.

Upstream kernel maintainers, hardware vendors, and Canonical's own engineers had to step up for closing those gaps. By late February, the ARM64 Livepatch client was already applying patches in Canonical's test environments for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Ubuntu Core 26.

Why should you Livepatch?

Some bug was preventing me from enabling Livepatch on a VM.

Livepatch comes as part of Ubuntu Pro, Canonical's subscription that bundles security patching, support, and compliance tools all while also covering the kernel by patching critical and high-severity vulnerabilities.

You don't need to pay for any of this if you just want to try it out, since Canonical offers Livepatch free for personal use on up to five machines. That should cover most home setups and small server fleets without forking over payment details.

The real advantage shows up once you are managing more than a handful of machines, because instead of scheduling downtime to patch a kernel vulnerability, Livepatch applies the fix in-memory and lets administrators decide when each machine gets the update.

It isn't a complete replacement for patching, though, since Livepatch only touches the kernel. Canonical still recommends rebooting every so often regardless, because long uptimes pile up memory leaks and other state issues that a livepatch can't clear.

None of this really matters if you are a desktop user who restarts their machine fairly regularly, since Livepatch is built for systems where a reboot means real downtime and risk of cost overruns.

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I Finally Tried Niri, The New Way Of Tiling Linux Users Are Going Crazy About

When I first heard about Niri, a Rust-powered, scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor with a supposedly different take on window management, I was both skeptical and intrigued.

But after a few weeks of daily driving it and pairing it with the excellent Dank Linux desktop suite, I have a lot to say.

What Exactly Is Niri?

Niri is not your typical tiling window manager. It describes itself as a "scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor," and that one word, scrollable changes everything.

Traditional tiling WMs like i3 or Sway divide your screen into a fixed grid. Every time you open a new window, all the existing ones get reshuffled and resized. If you have ever lost track of your editor because Firefox decided to squish it into a 200-pixel-wide column, you know exactly how jarring that can be.

Niri works differently. Windows are arranged in columns on an infinite horizontal strip that extends to the right. Opening a new window never causes existing windows to resize. You simply scroll sideways to bring other windows into view, much like flipping through pages on a tablet.

Scrollable tiling example in Niri (screenshot from their GitHub repo)

The project is inspired by PaperWM, a GNOME Shell extension that brings scrollable tiling to GNOME. The motivation behind writing a standalone compositor, rather than another GNOME extension, was to isolate workspaces per monitor properly. With Niri, each display has its own discrete set of workspaces that never bleed into one another.

And crucially, it is written entirely in Rust. Which could be a deciding point for some.

Installing Niri

Niri's availability varies across distributions. I found it packaged on Fedora, Arch Linux, and Ubuntu.

💡

I'm using Ubuntu 26.04 VM to test the full Niri window manager experience. For virtualization, I'm using QEMU/KVM along with virt-manager GUI.

If you are on Ubuntu, you will need to install it from a custom PPA or build it from source.

On Ubuntu 25.10 and above, there is a PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:avengemedia/danklinux
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:avengemedia/dms
sudo apt install niri dms

On Fedora, installation is as simple as:

sudo dnf install niri

On Arch:

sudo pacman -Syu niri alacritty dms-shell-niri
systemctl --user add-wants niri.service dms

Once installed, you can get a first impression of Niri by simply running a command niri while staying in the current Gnome or XFCE session. Later, you can launch Niri from your display manager (login screen).

At first boot, you are greeted by a hotkey overlay, a quick cheat sheet of default keybindings that I found genuinely useful. If you prefer to skip it on subsequent launches, a single config line handles that.

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A glimpse of using Niri Window Manager in Ubuntu 26.04

To get a feel, you can start pressing Alt+T a couple of times. This will open multiple instances of your default terminal emulator, allowing you to navigate different windows by pressing Alt + arrow keys, the Alt+hl Vim binding, or using the mouse scroll button.

The Scrollable Tiling Experience

I discovered the real appeal of Niri only after I stopped trying to use it like a traditional tiling WM. This mental model shift is important.

Rather than dividing my screen into regions, I started thinking in terms of a horizontal timeline of work. On the left, my text editor. Scroll right a bit in the terminal. Further right, browser, documentation, another terminal. Each workspace is its own infinite strip, and each monitor has its own independent set of workspaces. It felt a lot like having a very wide desk that you can slide across.

In traditional tiling setups, every time I opened a new window, I would mentally recalculate where things had moved. In Niri, nothing moved. What was on the left stayed on the left. New things appeared to the right.

Window resizing is still possible. You can adjust column widths and toggle preset sizes with keybindings. Niri also supports floating windows, which can be toggled per window via a keybinding or set as default through window rules. I used floating windows for things like file manager dialogs and calculator apps that feel awkward in a tiled layout.

The workspaces are dynamic and arranged vertically (similar to GNOME's workspace model), while windows scroll horizontally within each workspace. It is a two-axis system, and I experienced it as surprisingly intuitive once the initial learning curve passed.

Configuration

Niri uses a KDL-based configuration file, typically located at ~/.config/niri/config.kdl. KDL is a document language similar in spirit to JSON or TOML but with a different syntax. I found it clean and readable, though it is not something every user will be familiar with right away.

The configuration is comprehensive. You can define:

• Keybindings for almost every action
• Window rules to set default sizes, floating state, or opacity per application
• Animations for window open/close, workspace switching, and scrolling
• Input settings for keyboard, touchpad, and mouse
• Output configuration for multi-monitor setups, including scale, mode, and position

💡

When you're exploring Niri, you don't need to define any new configuration. The default configuration options are good to go for most users.

There is dedicated documentation on configuration. It walks through the config format with clear examples. Hot-reloading the config works via niri msg action reload-config, which makes tweaking much less painful than the "restart and hope" workflow of some other WMs.

One area I noted needs third-party tools: bars, notification daemons, and app launchers are not included. Niri is strictly the compositor. You bring your own Waybar, your own mako or dunst, your own wofi or rofi-wayland.

For experienced users, that modularity is a feature. For newcomers, it can feel like a lot to wire up.

That is precisely where Dank Linux comes in.

Enter Dank Linux: Turning Niri Into a Complete Desktop

Setting up a full Niri desktop from scratch, including bar, launcher, notifications, and theming, can take hours of configuration. I discovered Dank Linux as a project that elegantly solves this problem.

Dank Linux is not a distribution. It is a modern desktop suite built primarily around Niri (with also support Hyprland, Sway, MangoWC, labwc, and Miracle WM). At its heart is DankMaterialShell (DMS), a complete desktop shell featuring dynamic theming, smooth animations, a spotlight-style launcher, a control center, a system monitor, and beautiful widgets.

Getting started is almost embarrassingly easy:

curl -fsSL https://install.danklinux.com | sh

That single command brings up an interactive installer that handles dependencies, sets up DMS, configures your chosen compositor (I selected Niri), and even lets you pick your preferred terminal from the list: Ghostty, Kitty, or Alacritty.

Step 1

At first glance, the Dank Linux installer will ask you to choose your favorite window manager. Currently, it provides you with two options, i.e., Niri and Hyprland. Of course, I'll go with Niri this time.

Step 2

Next, choose your default terminal emulator from the list.

Step 3

It will provide you with a dependency check if any additional necessary needs need to be installed. You can toggle your selection for installation with the Space key.

Step 4

Dank Linux installer will prompt for privilege escalation. I'll go with the sudo option.

Dank Linux asking for privilege escalation

Step 5

The installer will also prompt you to replace the existing Niri config.kdl file.

Step 6

Finally, after the setup is complete, you'll get to see the message saying "Your system is ready" and be provided with a couple of commands to view its logs.

Now, it's time to log out and log back into our new Dank Linux environment. You can even first test the whole setup while staying on the Gnome desktop environment.

I tried booting directly into Niri and got stuck on the black screen issue for a couple of days. The issue was that I had been testing it in a VM, and I first needed to enable 3D acceleration in the VM.

💡

Here's a quick troubleshooting tip. Ensure you have 3D acceleration configured on your machine either a physical or a VM. Check niri logs for any message related to /dev/dri.

Make sure to set Listen type to None and tick the checkbox next to OpenGL in Display Spice options to enable 3D acceleration if you're using QEMU/KVM.

To enable 3D acceleration, enable Listen type to None and enable OpenGL in Virt Manager

Also, you need to make changes to Video Virtio.

What DankMaterialShell Brings

After the installer finished, I experienced one of those rare moments where a Linux desktop setup just looks good out of the box. Here is what DMS provides:

Dynamic Material You Theming

Powered by matugenDMS extracts a colour palette directly from your wallpaper and applies Material Design 3 colour schemes across the entire desktop, including system applications. Switch your wallpaper, and the whole UI recolors itself. It supports automatic light/dark mode switching too, and I found the color transitions genuinely elegant.

Dank Dash

A sidebar dashboard that surfaces media controls, weather, a calendar, and system information at a glance. It is the kind of widget panel that looks like it belongs on a premium Chromebook, not a tiling WM.

Spotlight Launcher

An application launcher that supports filesystem search and is extensible through plugins. I discovered it launches apps noticeably faster than rofi on the same hardware.

Settings

Quick toggles for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, night light, and other system settings. It mirrors the kind of control center you see in macOS or GNOME.

System Monitor (Dank GOP)

System Monitor on Niri and Dank Linux Environment

Real-time monitoring of CPU, memory, GPU, disk, and network is presented in a clean overlay that does not require opening a separate terminal window.

Dank Search (dsearch)

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Dank search (dsearch) in Dank Linux lets you search filesystems from the launcher

Though you need to install it manually, it's a blazingly fast filesystem search tool, available both from the launcher and as a standalone CLI. When using from the launcher, you can use / to begin file search.

Dank Greeter

A polished login screen (greetd greeter) that matches the rest of the DMS aesthetic, so the visual consistency starts from the moment you boot.

In case you're still getting the default gdm3 login screen or failed to install Greeted at the installation prompt, you can do so with the following command:

dms greeter install
sudo systemctl start greetd

The DMS documentation is well organized and covers compositor-specific setup, keybind configuration through IPC, theming, plugin development, and CLI usage. Running dms setup After installation, it generates starter configs for both Niri and your chosen terminal, and dms doctor runs a diagnostic if something goes wrong.

For Niri specifically, DMS integrates tightly, including IPC-based keybind hooks and compositor blur support. The Niri community maintains a Discord server, and DankMaterialShell has its own subsection there, which I found active and helpful.

🚧

Niri is Wayland-only. If you rely on X11-only applications, you will need XWayland. Niri supports XWayland, but you might face issues with older apps.

In The End...

Niri's scrollable tiling approach solves real friction in the traditional tiling workflow. It gives you a compositor that is both memory-safe (It's Rust afterall) and impressively stable.

Paired with Dank Linux's DankMaterialShell, it becomes a complete, visually coherent desktop that can genuinely compete with mainstream desktop environments on aesthetics while leaving them far behind on efficiency.

Is it for everyone? Nah! If you are new to Linux desktops, the setup complexity (even with Dank Linux's one-liner) assumes some familiarity. But if you are a tiling WM user who has ever been frustrated by windows jumping around when you open something new, Niri is worth your afternoon or night, depending on whether you are a day or night person.

If you liked horizontal scrolling but don't want to go with Niri window manager and Dank Linux together, you can consider two actively maintained projects like Scroll (a fork of Sway enabling horizontal scrolling) and PaperWM, the GNOME Shell extension I mentioned in the beginning.

Enjoy the variety in the Linux desktop offering 😸

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