Overshared to an AI? Proton's Tool Will Give You a Reality Check

Proton has launched AI Paper Trail, a free tool that shows people what their AI chatbot conversations reveal about them. It runs on Lumo (partner link), the company's privacy-focused AI assistant, and works by digging through exported ChatGPT or Claude conversation history.

Once you upload your content, the tool starts building a personal report around four categories. There's a "Privacy Type," a personality label based on how someone approaches their own data. Then comes an "AI Exposure Score," a number built from how many personal data points got pulled out of the conversations and how revealing they are.

The report also breaks down what the AI actually knows about you, covering identity, habits, relationships, and interests. On top of that, it puts a monetary figure on what this information could be worth to an AI provider.

And none of the uploaded data sticks around on Proton's server; the company says that it gets deleted right after analysis, and the resulting report stays visible only to the person who generated it.

The reasoning behind AI Paper Trail comes down to how casually people treat individual AI prompts. A single question about travel plans or a work email draft might seem harmless on its own.

But stack up months or years of conversations covering someone's job, relationships, health concerns, and finances, and a surprisingly complete picture starts to form.

Eamonn Maguire, Director of Engineering at Proton, notes that:

People understand that AI collects data, but most don't realize how revealing their conversation history becomes over time. AI Paper Trail makes that invisible profile visible.

We want people to understand what they're sharing with AI systems so they can make informed decisions about the tools they use.

What they have done here is hit two targets with one shot, offering people a privacy-focused tool that pushes them toward more conscious decisions when interacting with AI chatbots, while steering them straight into Lumo in the process.

This is a superb way to market a chatbot that focuses on privacy instead of mining every inch of your soul, erm, personal data.

It works well

I wanted to see for myself how the tool worked, so I first ChatGPT some information about how I approach certain subjects, saved it into memory, and then got back into Proton's AI Paper Trail to see what it could make of it.

The tool first told me to export my data from ChatGPT via the "Data controls" section in the Settings menu. I had to re-verify my ChatGPT session by giving it a one-time password and got the export started, but the files never showed up on time for me to use.

Instead, I asked it to generate me a dummy one taking in data from memory. 😆

When that was done, I uploaded the dummy export, and Lumo got to work behind the scenes all while promising not to store any of it on its servers.

A minute or so later, my report was ready. It gave me a personality-style rundown, labeling me a "Technical tester exploring AI profiling and ethics," complete with a fake handle and a summary pegging me as someone running structured experiments on AI behavior, focused on data extraction limits and ethics.

My AI Exposure Score came out to 21 out of 100, along with a "Hard to read" privacy type. Interests ended up being my biggest giveaway on the breakdown, while everything else landed at medium to minimal.

The part that actually got me was the "Most revealing" note (first picture above, right-hand side). It noticed I'd asked for a structured personality profile, tried to get it to infer my identity from barely anything, and even caught me trying to force it to remember something via a direct command.

Since I'd gotten ChatGPT to build that dummy file straight from its own memory of me rather than pulling random filler, the report had real clues to chew on, and it still managed to call out the testing motif buried in there.

Scrolling further down, there's a "What we identified" section that splits everything into categories like technical proficiency, ethical and philosophical inquiry, and privacy awareness, each with its own reasoning attached.

At the end, it dropped a few privacy tips and nudged me toward trying Lumo (partner link, hehe). There's also a shareable card option if you want to showcase your exposure score for some validation or gloating.

Generate Your Report

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Nitrux Shows Off a New Desktop Approach Other Distros Might Want to Take Note of

Don't think that this move came out of the blue. Nitrux has been busy building this up since last year, when it swapped out KDE Plasma for Hyprland and told everyone that they were headed towards 'a new beginning' that was not for everyone.

The project now has a name for what it has been creating, the "Workspace Environment." It ties together four new in-house developed components as pieces of a five-layer architecture, presenting a very different desktop experience for Nitrux than we are used to.

Uri Herrera, Nitrux's founder, describes it as filling a gap, where a window manager gives you almost nothing beyond window placement and a full desktop environment like GNOME or Plasma bundles everything into one tightly coupled process tree.

The Workspace Environment sits in between as a cohesive shell built from independent, single-purpose components that don't share a process lifecycle with the compositor or with each other.

The four components

Valenz and Marina.

Valenz is the new workspace bar, handling media controls, tray, notifications, and indicators for network, Bluetooth, battery, and power profile, plus weather, a calendar view, and system resource widgets.

Whereas Marina is the new dock that tracks and groups open windows across workspaces on Hyprland while handling pinning, auto-hide, and horizontal scrolling. It also adds unread message badges for pinned apps that expose a launcher count.

Workspace Settings and Desklock.

Workspace Settings replaces KDE System Settings entirely, covering user accounts, locale, networking, and MauiKit configuration without any Plasma dependency.

Desklock completes the set as a native QML lock screen built on the QMLGreet codebase, with PAM authentication, per-output lock surfaces, and CPU, memory, and network monitors alongside MPRIS playback controls.

All four are QML-based and built with MauiKit, though only Valenz and Marina share LayerShell-Qt, so the stack still ends up with one visual language instead of stitched together toolkits.

Does it make sense?

The switches aren't just cosmetic, and alternatives were considered.

Uri writes that Waybar and SwayNC leaned on GTK and CSS styling, which clashed with the QML-first approach he had already committed to with QMLGreet.

Crystal Dock had a similar limitation, built on legacy Qt Widgets instead of QML, and its broad feature set worked against Nitrux's preference for narrowly focused tools. Hyprlock got replaced too, over a visual mismatch with MauiKit and a bug that left it in a bad state after suspend or hibernation.

The pattern across all three swaps is consistency. Uri picked first-party QML tools over external options like Quickshell specifically to avoid depending on a construction framework he doesn't control.

There's a maintenance aspect associated with the lock screen choice too. In Uri's words:

Because Desklock derives directly from the QMLGreet codebase, the two components share the same secure lifecycle and visual identity. This shared foundation minimizes maintenance overhead while strictly enforcing our unified architectural philosophy.

It provides a native QML session locker that executes its single responsibility perfectly, completing the visual and functional ecosystem of the Workspace Environment.

You'll have to wait

Nitrux Workspace Environment marks the end of Maui Shell, the project's old convergent shell concept. Nitrux has already archived its GitHub repository and is looking forward to their next developmental milestone.

One catch worth knowing before you go looking for these tools is that Valenz and Marina both list Nitrux 7.0.0 as a requirement, and the current stable release is still 6.1.0. So you will have to wait.

Whether the wait is worth it will depend on how these components hold up once regular users actually get their hands on them.

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LightDM is Back From The Dead, But Canonical isn't in Charge Anymore

There's something satisfying about watching a Linux project everyone assumed had quietly died come back with a fresh commit. It happens more often than people expect, and it's usually worth celebrating when it does.

One of those revivals has been the return of LightDM, the display manager Canonical built more than a decade ago.

LightDM is alive

Released last week is LightDM 1.33.0, which rolls out a bunch of improvements as well as introduces the two new maintainers who are taking over. The last release, 1.32.0, came out way back in July 2022, marking a four-year gap in which the project barely went anywhere.

You see, LightDM's original maintainer, Robert Ancell, had already called the project "essentially unmaintained," and questions about its future eventually popped up on various forums over the years.

Luckily, two people willing to keep the project going stepped up, making it a community-maintained affair rather than a Canonical-maintained one.

Joshua Peisach and Neal Gompa are both known for their work across a string of open source projects. Joshua leads Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix, and Neal doesn't really need an introduction; he has spent years contributing to Fedora, openSUSE, and CentOS.

As for what 1.33.0 actually delivers, the maintainers say its purpose is mainly to tag the fixes that piled up since 1.32.0 and clear out pull requests that had been sitting for years.

There are no breaking changes and no dependency changes, so existing LightDM setups should upgrade without any surprises. The biggest addition worth flagging is Qt6 support for the client library, though that doesn't mean Qt5 is going anywhere. Greeters built on the older toolkit will keep working just fine.

There's a long list of smaller fixes too. VNC server handling has been patched, the flood of log errors from missing PAM modules is gone, and a batch of multiseat and FreeBSD-specific bugs got cleared out.

Help is needed

If you didn't know, LightDM is a lightweight, cross-desktop display manager. It's the software behind your login screen, the one that authenticates you and hands things off to your desktop session once you're in.

Canonical built LightDM to replace GDM, and it debuted back in Ubuntu 11.10 as the login screen behind Unity. Ubuntu itself moved back to GDM in 2017 when it dropped Unity for GNOME Shell, but LightDM never really went away.

Linux Mint adopted it that same year and pairs it with its own slick-greeter, and elementary OS runs it through Pantheon Greeter. Several Ubuntu flavors and Fedora spins still depend on it as well.

If you think you can help LightDM evolve into something more, then know that Joshua and Neal are looking for new contributors to join in. You can reach them directly over Matrix.

They also point out that signing the Canonical CLA is no longer required.

Though I have something more to add here.

Don't unleash your army of clankers (I believe the formal term is 'AI agents') on this project; it's already happening to many open source projects lately, and this one has just been revived. It doesn't need to be inundated with hallucinations and pointless fixes.

The maintainers also request that anyone opening a pull request for a bug fix show a way to reproduce the problem first.

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FOSS Weekly #26.33: Mint Kernel, PDF Editing, VLC Drama, Omarchy Quattro and More Linux Stuff

Linux Mint is getting automatic old kernel cleanup in the next release, a feature Fedora has handled through DNF's installonly_limit for years. And I did not even know that Mint doesn't do it.

The Document Foundation has put up a write-up (part 1 for now) of how the Austrian Military migrated 16,000 PCs from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. The part worth noting is that ~8,000 users installed it on their own before it was mandated. Now that's a pleasant surprise.

CachyOS released their August update, and the two things that stand out are Shelly v3 and the Server Edition groundwork. Running a cutting edge distro on a server? Old school sysadmins will shiver at that thought.

Apparently, VLC takes around 30 seconds to play an MP3 on Windows. But don't blame VLC when it is Microsoft's fault.

Proxmox VE now officially runs on ARM64, with the same codebase, release cycle, and support window as the x86-64 build. NVIDIA Grace and Vera systems are fully validated, and other UEFI-based ARMv9-A hardware gets best-effort support.

An open source project called Xodus is working through the hardest parts of bringing Xbox Game Pass to Linux. They have already figured out Xbox authentication and game downloads.

KGamma is getting a Wayland replacement that works with Night Color, supports independent per-monitor values, and applies settings on the first frame.

Illinois signed the Children's Online Social Media Safety Act, which requires device makers and OS providers to collect a child's age bracket at setup and expose it via an API for apps to query.

Omarchy Linux is going all in one with AI with its version 4.0 releasing this week.

There are a few more AI-related stories that we covered this week. But I am not going to include all of them here. They get covered in the Local AI Weekly newsletter, and you can also read them if you follow the feed. I'll try to keep the AI buzz to the necessary minimum in FOSS Weekly.

🤝 This edition of FOSS Weekly is supported by TuxCare.

Rebooting after a kernel update is frustrating and results in downtime. Critical infrastructure should not suffer from reboots. TuxCare allows you to patch Linux kernels live. Works with more than 60 distros.

Explore TuxCare

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

I had a good chat with Bianca Lewis, OpenSearch's executive director, talking about how OpenSearch has spent the past few years trying to shed the "Elasticsearch fork" label.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

A beginner's guide to installing software from source on Linux. It covers clone, configure, make, where to install things so cleanup isn't painful, and how to fix the missing compiler errors you'll almost definitely hit the first time.

A decade of hopping through Mint, Ubuntu, Kali, Arch, AntiX, and EndeavourOS, and the conclusion is that it was never really about the distro.

Six backup tools for different kinds of Linux users. The highlights include Déjà Dup for GNOME desktop with zero setup, Kopia if you want an open source GUI, Restic and BorgBackup for terminal-native control.

If you regularly deal with PDF, try a tool like PDF Arranger that allows you to split, merge, rearrange PDF docs.

In the same regards, in the situation where you have to convert multiple images into a PDF, use LibreOffice or gscan2pdf. I do this when I have to upload IDs and documents to a government portal.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

This corner may still have some local AI stuff for now. A practical setup guide for running Hermes agent on a Raspberry Pi as an always-on backend while controlling it from a laptop using Hermes Desktop's remote gateway feature.

🎓 Linux Foundation certification offer

Linux is turning 35 this month. The Linux Foundation, the official organization behind the Linux kernel project, has a catalog of industry-oriented training and certifications.

And they are offering 35% off on all of it, including the instructor-led classes that contain very technical topics like performance tuning. Popular certifications like LFCS and CKDA

Explore Linux Foundation Offer

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

Censor is a PDF document redaction tool. When you want to hide part of information from a PDF, you can use this tool.

📽️ Videos for You

Enjoy customizing GNOME desktops with extensions. Take a look at some of the good ones in action in this video.

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Desktop Linux is mostly neglected by the industry but loved by the community. For the past 14 years, It's FOSS has been helping people use Linux on their personal computers. And we are now facing the existential threat from AI models stealing our content.

If you like what we do and would love to support our work, please become It's FOSS Plus member. It costs $49 a year (less than the cost of a McDonald's burger a month), and you get an ad-free reading experience with the satisfaction of helping the desktop Linux community. And there are also free Linux ebooks.

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💡 Quick Handy Tip

Ubuntu's Tiling Assistant has an experimental layout editor, which allows you to create tiles and assign windows to those tiles. First open the Extensions app and go into the settings for "Tiling Assistant."

Here, click on the "i" button and go into "Advanced..." and enable "Advanced/Experimental Settings." Now, inside the new "Layouts" page, you will find multiple layout entries without keybinds assigned.

Click on the "Disabled" box and enter a keybind, and use the downward arrow nearby to fine-tune the layout.

Once these are set, whenever you press any one of those shortcuts, any open windows can be opened in that layout for you. You can read how it works in the official documentation.

Local AI Weekly will start from first week of August. If you are interested in learning about open source AI, please subscribe to our upcoming Local AI Weekly newsletter.

Subscribe to Local AI Weekly

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Our Scrambled Linux Editors crossword will test your grasp of Linux editors.

Those pesky clankers sure do know how to trick us. 🤖

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On August 5, 1858, Cyrus West Field succeeded on his fifth try at laying a telegraph cable across the Atlantic. Queen Victoria and President Buchanan traded congratulatory messages soon after. Though the celebration was short-lived, as the cable died within a month.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: Pro FOSSer Xander is asking other FOSSers what they like about Linux; do you have anything to add?

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Omarchy Bets Its Future on AI Agents While the Linux World Stays Cautious

The world of open source is split when it comes to AI, while a big project like Linux is seeing its leader warming up to it, telling those who object on the mailing list that Linux "is not one of those anti-AI projects."

Projects like Rust, GCC, and Codeberg are going the other way, banning AI from writing meaningful chunks of their code, though none of them draw that line in quite the same place.

Omarchy doesn't care about any of that. Its upcoming release, Quattro (4.0), is skipping the debate over whether AI should write code and is building AI agents into the desktop itself.

As a refresher, the project calls itself a "Beautiful, Modern & Opinionated Linux," and the opinionated part shows up in how the distro configures itself with minimal input from the user during installation.

Its creator, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), has now decided that AI agents belong in the defaults too, saying that this is how they will "truly democratize Linux," and predicting that Linux adoption among developers is going to explode.

Enter, Quattro

While Omarchy 4.0 is still in the beta stage, DHH is calling it their biggest release yet.

He is teasing all kinds of new agent-facing features, such as a crash watcher that briefs your AI agent the moment something breaks, a dedicated agents usage widget, and nine different agents to pick from.

The crash watcher is the one DHH teased on X first. Let's say a process crashes. Omarchy catches it off the systemd-coredump journal and pops up a toast. Click it, and your default agent gets briefed on the whole thing through a diagnose-crash skill built to make sense of the backtrace.

Don't worry, it still asks you for confirmation before reporting anything upstream, and it checks for duplicates too.

Quattro also lets you pick a default coding agent under Setup > Defaults > Agent, giving you nine options that include the likes of Claude, Codex, Gemini, Grok, and Copilot.

None of them come pre-selected either. During first boot, a notification nudges you to pick your default agent, and if you skip it, the agentic features stay disabled.

I briefly took a Gemini-powered AI agent for a run.

When I configured Gemini using an API key, I asked the agent what it could do for me, and it said that it could help with Linux configuration and window manager setup through Omarchy.

It also brought up crash diagnosis using the same diagnose-crash skill from earlier, on top of the usual code reading, writing, and command execution any coding agent handles.

There's even a model-usage widget that tracks usage against weekly limits, though it is only available for Claude Code, Codex, Pi, Oh My Pi, and OpenCode sessions.

And, if you go looking through the contributors list for the project, you will see that Claude has contributed a fair bit, further cementing where Omarchy as a project is headed.

Not everyone will be happy

It's been really cool to see the development of Omarchy, but unfortunately, I will not be updating to v4

Omarchy allowed me to take the leap of faith from MacOS to Linux and point me in the right direction

But now I've come to the point where I just need a terminal, a browser,… https://t.co/IZRYE5uifP

— IroncladDev (@IroncladDev) August 12, 2026

Depending on where you stand on AI, this is where people start picking sides. One of them, a developer who goes by the name IroncladDev, has decided they won't be updating to 4.0.

He says that Omarchy is what got him off macOS and onto Linux in the first place, but that's not enough to keep him around for Quattro. His issue is that he isn't interested in any of the "AI/Agentic additions." He just wants a terminal, a browser, and working USB ports, nothing more.

That kind of pushback was inevitable. Move a distro this hard, this fast, and you lose the people who signed up for something simpler. Baking agents into the OS is a bigger ask than a new theme, and DHH made that call for everyone whether they wanted it or not.

Closing thoughts

I believe that DHH is making a well-timed call before the rest of the ecosystem catches up. Omarchy went with Hyprland back when tiling window managers were a niche pick. Betting Quattro on AI agents looks like the same instinct that's paid off before.

While many open source projects are left arguing whether using AI and providing AI-focused features is a good call, Omarchy looks to be on track to become something we can call an "AI Linux distro."

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VLC is Wrongly Blamed for Microsoft Defender's Clumsiness

It all started with a tweet by video game designer Jonathan Blow. Blow is the developer behind games like Braid and The Witness.

He mentioned that he had stopped using VLC on Windows because it took about 33 seconds to start playing a simple MP3, and he had switched to Microsoft Media Player instead.

Finally switched *away* from VLC *to* Microsoft Media Player, because VLC now takes 33 seconds to start playing an mp3 after clicking on it.

A large sector of open source software is in a truly embarrassing place now... pic.twitter.com/237aLdx2fG

— Jonathan Blow (@Jonathan_Blow) August 12, 2026

And he also shamed open source software, framing it as a sign that large part of open-source software is in bad shape.

A large sector of open source software is in a truly embarrassing place now...

This quickly turned into a heated discussion, with people joining from both sides.

VLC's official Twitter account clarified that this delay was not a core VLC regression but a side effect of a Windows 11 / Microsoft Defender update that quarantined VLC’s plugin cache. Their suggested solution is reinstalling VLC or regenerating that cache.

Jonathan argued that it is the developer's responsibility to fix. He cited his own experience of fixing an issue caused by AMD in his game Braid.

Linux user jumps in with solid evidence

A Linux user who goes by the X account @VoxelPrismatic jumped in with concrete evidence that it is not a core VLC issue but a Windows issue.

In this tweet, the user shared a recording of what seems like a Linux distro running KDE. Recording clearly showed VLC started playing an MP3 file in 1-2 seconds.

sounds like a windows issue ngl pic.twitter.com/9Icp2Sf58M

— PRIZ ;] (@VoxelPrismatic) August 12, 2026

But some people were still not satisfied because VLC being slow to open MP3 files on Windows is a real issue but they kept on blaming it on VLC.

The solution to the problem

VLC suggests the following fixes

• Regenerate the plugin cache (e.g. launch with vlc --reset-plugins-cache, or clear VLC’s cache under the user profile and relaunch)
• Reinstall VLC from the official build

However, a better suggestion came from a few users who noted that excluding vlc.exe in Microsoft Defender solves this problem. And I like this one better because it seems to address the problem where it originates, Microsoft Defender. And if the cache builds up, VLC may be slowed down again (I think).

The same was vouched by several people. So this sure looks like the workaround worth trying.

Asking the right question

Among all this, someone asked the real question; how come VLC not working for a single person becomes "a large sector of open source software" being an embarrassing place?

Blame Defender, not VLC

I understand the frustration. Waiting half a minute to play an MP3 should not be acceptable on a modern system, even if it is on Windows.

It is also okay to blame it on VLC when you don't know the real backstory and are unaware of the root cause.

But giving it a “open source is broken” narrative is highly far fetched.

I haven't tested it myself. Not going to jump into Windows just for this, but from what I see, the onus of fixing it lies on the Microsoft side. And from what I know about Microsoft, they won't do a thing.

What's your take on this episode? Share it in the comments.

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SimpleX Chat Wants Its 400K+ Users to Become Investors Too

The world is in a messed-up state where surveillance and eroding people's rights are rewarded, and those who oppose are labeled unpatriotic, anti-national, radicals, criminal sympathizers, and what not.

Yet, that doesn't stop people from investing time and money in securing their data by opting for open source mobile operating systems like GrapheneOS and taking steps to improve their privacy in the online world.

One of those steps is to go for a private messaging app that doesn't give out your data to feed some AI or a governmental agency that asks for your data nicely. SimpleX Chat is one such option, a messaging network that doesn't ask for phone numbers, emails, or user accounts.

I tried it out myself back in 2024, and it left a strong impression. The team behind it has kept building since, and now it wants its users to also have a stake in where the project goes next.

Looking for investors

The founder of SimpleX Chat, Evgeny Poberezkin, reached out to us recently, saying that they were looking to give users "the opportunity to get a stake in SimpleX Chat and benefit from its growth."

That stake comes through a SAFE, short for Simple Agreement for Future Equity, live now on Wefunder.

The first $450,000 invested gets an Early Bird SAFE with a $40 million valuation cap. Once that fills up, later investors get a separate SAFE instead, this one at a $45 million cap.

There's a wrinkle though. Your money doesn't go straight into a SAFE with SimpleX Chat itself. It goes into an SPV, which is the entity that actually holds the SAFE, and your signature ends up on the SPV's own Subscription Agreement instead.

So this comes up as one version for early money, another for everyone who invests after.

The campaign's friends-first soft launch closes August 15, and as of August 11, it had already raised 50% of its target offering amount.

The company behind the app isn't quite what it used to be either. SimpleX Chat Ltd, the UK entity that built the app, is now a wholly owned subsidiary of a new US company, SimpleX Chat, Inc.

Keep that in mind if you consider where a firm is based out of before investing in it.

If the campaign only clears its $50,000 minimum target, the money would go toward covering general operating expenses, just enough to keep things running a while longer.

Hitting the full $1,235,000 target would mean they could hire additional team members, build out a browser-based messaging stack, provide tools for publishers, and work on a framework for interactive widgets.

The company also expects server hosting costs to fall as more independent operators take over network infrastructure, while planning to break even using revenue from public names, business services, and what it calls Community Credits.

That is a model for getting large channels to pay for the servers they use.

Before you go ahead and invest, do understand that this comes with the usual risks of backing a company this early.

There's no guarantee of a return, and what you invest isn't something you can sell easily if you change your mind. The company's own filing goes further, stating it doesn't expect to have enough cash to keep running for the next 12 months without more funding.

A similar occurence

We already had an instance of a messaging app asking its community for help earlier this year, where Session nearly shut down after it ran out of funding, needing $1 million to keep going.

By June, the foundation confirmed development had resumed, backed by two to three developers instead of the dozen-plus it once employed.

SimpleX Chat's own filing admits it doesn't have enough cash to keep going for the next 12 months without more funding either. Raising money through equity now, rather than an emergency donation drive, gives it a strong start.

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