These Linux Distros Can Run on Apple Silicon Mac

Personally, I have never owned an Apple device, mostly due to its pricey nature and how the brand loves to lock people in their walled garden. But that's just me ranting there for a bit.

There are many who do like what Apple has to offer and are willing to see what additional value they can get out of that hardware by breaking free from macOS.

This list covers six such options that ought to awaken the tinkerer inside you. 🧑‍🔧

📋

Every install route here boots directly on Apple Silicon hardware instead of a virtual machine, sitting alongside the macOS installation.

1. Fedora Asahi Remix

📋

Good to know: The flagship distro of the Asahi Linux project.

Fedora Asahi Remix is Fedora Linux with the Apple Silicon work from the Asahi Linux project built in. KDE Plasma on Wayland is the default desktop, and GNOME, Minimal, and Server images are there if you want something different.

On M1 and M2 Macs, almost everything works, from the webcam and microphones to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The graphics drivers also pass the OpenGL 4.6 and Vulkan 1.4 conformance tests.

M3 owners can try it too, but support is quite new. Sleep does not work, HDMI on MacBooks is unavailable, and 3D graphics don't run well yet. The M3 Ultra Mac Studio is not supported at all.

Installation begins in macOS. Run the following command in the Terminal app and follow the prompts to continue with the installation of Fedora Asahi Remix on your Mac:

curl -L https://alx.sh/ | sh

M3 owners are recommended to run dnf upgrade --refresh after the install finishes.

Fedora Asahi Remix

2. Ubuntu Asahi

0:00

/0:20

📋

Good to know: Ubuntu's desktop and server images, built on Asahi Linux work.

If Ubuntu is already familiar to you, then this community project has ported it to M1 and M2 Macs by carrying over the Apple Silicon support from Asahi Linux.

The installer comes in four flavors, covering 26.04 and 26.10 for Ubuntu Desktop and Server. The goal is to provide the same feature set as Fedora Asahi Remix, while new hardware support only arrives after the Fedora base ships it.

As a result, you can expect system updates to be behind by a few weeks.

Like earlier, you get the installer as a script and run it in Terminal. It shrinks the existing macOS partition and lets you pick a release and build, leaving your macOS installation intact:

curl -sL https://ubuntuasahi.org/install | sh

Ubuntu Asahi

3. Debian Bananas

📋

Good to know: An unofficial Debian port for M1 and M2 Macs, run by the Bananas Team.

Debian doesn't officially run on Apple Silicon yet, but the Bananas Team is working to change that. It packages the missing pieces and ships them from an unofficial archive of its own.

Official support is stuck on the kernel. The Asahi Linux patches it needs aren't upstream yet. Most other pieces, like the m1n1 bootloader and the audio stack, have been in Debian since Trixie.

The team's installer offers GNOME, KDE, or a console-only setup:

 curl -L https://bananas.debian.net/install | sh

The install page contains the necessary steps.

Debian Bananas

4. NixOS on Apple Silicon

📋

Good to know: NixOS on bare metal, configured through Nix files.

Write the whole system down in a Nix config file, rebuild, and the Mac matches it. That's the NixOS way, and this community port brings it to Apple Silicon. The maintainers keep versions close to Fedora Asahi Remix and turn away changes that stray far from it.

Hardware support follows whatever Asahi Linux supports, and setting it up is quite a hands-on affair. You’ll prep a UEFI environment from macOS with the Asahi Linux installer, boot a NixOS installer from a USB drive, and finish the job from the command line.

NixOS on Apple Silicon

5. Omarchy M

📋

Good to know: Omarchy's Hyprland desktop for Apple Silicon, still in early stages.

Omarchy M is a dedicated team rather than a separate distro that has been put together to handle Omarchy support on Macs. It's bringing the Arch-based, Hyprland desktop to Apple Silicon while also giving some attention to older Macs.

The first release targets M1 and M2 Macs, along with their Pro and Max variants. On the roadmap are a native installer, full GPU support, USB-C external monitors, Touch ID, MLX, and disk encryption.

Support enablement work for newer Macs will take place alongside this too!

The native installer is a community-built app by team member Marcelo Alcantara, and it sets up Omarchy on a Mac machine without needing a USB stick.

Omarchy M

6. Gravity Linux

📋

Good to know: A Fedora remix aimed at M4 and newer Macs, currently an early alpha.

Gravity Linux is built to go away. It's a Fedora remix with KDE Plasma on Wayland, and the plan is to retire it once the drivers land upstream and any mainstream distro can run on supported Mac devices.

It started as a fork of Asahi Linux over a difference in policy on LLM use. Everything it offers comes from clean-room reverse engineering.

The first alpha release runs on the M4 Mac mini and is meant for developers. The display controller and GPU work, but suspend, USB-C display output, Thunderbolt, and USB4 don't; shutdown and reboot behavior is flaky.

You can install it on macOS with the command below, but do plan a full reinstall when the beta lands, as there's no established upgrade path.

curl -fsSL https://install.gravitylinux.org | sh

Gravity Linux

I will be adding more to this list as I come across reliable new projects. Meanwhile, if you know some, please mention it in the comments.

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/mJ3VHG1
via IFTTT

One Open-Source Repo to Replace Adobe, Microsoft, and Salesforce

Adobe charges $60 a month. Microsoft 365 keeps raising its price. Salesforce will take $150 per user without blinking. These are not tools you own. They are subscriptions that expire the moment you stop paying, often taking your files and workflows with them.

The Puter team thinks that is worth fixing. Remember Puter? The folks behind the PuterOS that gives you a workable operating system in a web browser.

Their new project, called everything, is a single GitHub repository with one specific goal and that is to rebuild the world's software from scratch, free and open source.

This is what they are aiming for. Over 50 web-based applications spanning nine categories, including a photo studio, full office suite, CRM, CAD tools, video editor, and circuit design app. Every one of them is open source under the MIT-license. And they can be self-hosted, too.

Basically, it targets all the major Software as a Service (SaaS) companies.

Tapping Into Everything

The applications are all listed on the official GitHub page, they're all in a table, and very helpfully, the cell next to the application name states what popular software it is an alternative to. For example, "Notes" is an alternative to Microsoft OneNote, Evernote, Apple Notes. It is all put in well organized categories.

The apps are all hosted online, and can be opened by pressing the "Try it" link. They're completely usable, however, and in case you have a slow system that can't handle some heavy duty tasks such as video editing, this is genuinely a better option. Nevertheless, you have to remember that you'll be uploading your data to this service, and if that is a privacy concern then you may have to reconsider.

📋

Several features are only available to you if you make a Puter account and sign in. These include several AI features, such as auto-generation of captions in the video editor, but some applications require a sign-in straight away to use them in the first place, such as the Notes app.

Local Hosting

On the other hand, you can also host the applications locally, the instructions for which are given on the GitHub page, again.

For example, here I am running the Video Studio locally:

cd everything/src/video-studio/
npm install
npm run dev

This returns a link you can open up in your browser and use the application.

Storage

📋

Another important issue is that the free tier of the Puter account only gives you 25MB storage on the cloud, making it tough to work on larger projects, especially when it comes to video editing. To resolve this, you can buy a subscription, starting at $10/month for 100GB.

💡

The storage limitation kicks in only when you've logged into a Puter account and using the cloud storage. However, if you are not logged in, meaning you are only using local storage, it works with however large file you want.

Background

HeyPuter launched Puter in 2024 as a self-hostable internet computer: a full desktop environment running in a browser, with cloud storage, apps, and developer tools baked in. It was well received by the community.

With Everything, rather than building one great alternative to one piece of software, the project takes on the entire proprietary stack at once.

The logic is that the vendor lock-in does not come from a single app. It comes from an ecosystem. Adobe keeps you because Lightroom talks to Premiere talks to Acrobat. Microsoft keeps you because Word talks to Excel talks to Teams. Breaking one link does not free you. Everything is trying to break all of them.

The MIT license matters here. Unlike the GPL, MIT places almost no restrictions on use. You can take these apps, modify them, and run them anywhere without obligation. For businesses and developers worried about compliance, that removes the last excuse to keep paying for proprietary software.

Experiencing the Everything apps

I've tested some of the apps to check the quality of the production, and pretty much to see if the job gets done.

🚧

A major observation I made was that progress on projects can only be saved if you've logged in with a Puter account. If not, you have to get it all done in one go. Exporting is fine, either way.

PDF Editor

The PDF editor has great options, adding texts or links, images, stitching PDFs together and so on.

You can even draw diagrams to add to the PDF in the app itself. You can also add sticky notes, highlight text etc. These are quite basic features on a PDF editing menu, but they work seamlessly here, which is great to see.

Since the software is in early stages, there are some bugs. Like when I tried editing the preexisting text in a PDF file, it was not entirely accurate. The text doesn't always get detected in proper blocks, and the formatting gets all over the place as a result of that.

Video Studio

I tried some of the features, such as the AI caption generation, and the film grain effect, with transitions in between clips and it worked quite well.

It also generated captions and allowed me to edit them if a word was incorrect.

The export menu showed options to separately export the audio in a WAV file and captions in an SRT file, which is great.

I had an issue with one of my video clips where it said my browser couldn't decode the video file, but then there was no further information on how to fix it, which essentially rendered the video file uneditable.

Music Studio

Being used to Ableton myself, the interface was different here for me. Don't get me wrong, the app itself is pretty intuitive to navigate through, the major actions are all laid out in a great way.

It has all the effects you might need, such as compression, reverb, delay, parametric EQ, stereo and so on. They work quite well, and the options for each are ample.

Nothing too technical, but just as much as you need.

Interface of the Music Studio

Even the export showed options to export the stems as well as MIDI files separately, which is a great feature to have. Out of all the three that I tested, the music studio worked most to my satisfaction.

Conclusion

There is a new trend in the developer world these days to reverse engineer everything with AI. Puter's new project is part of the same trend.

The apps on The Everything Projects have their ups and downs but on the larger scale, they work incredibly well for the most part, giving features that almost match the professional level. At least for beginning professionals everywhere, who cannot afford expensive software, these apps are a great way to get things done.

It requires an account to access the AI features and to save the progress on projects unless you have an account, where you will probably need a Puter subscription because 25MB is too small a storage to actually get anything done.

That actually is understandable to avoid the service abuse but the 25 MB could have been 250 MB at least. In any case, self-hosting option is always there.

What do you think about this wave of reverse engineering apps and open sourcing them? Let us know in the comments. Cheers!

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/x6OZgob
via IFTTT

Schools in Six German States Can Now Opt For a Nextcloud-Based Open Source Cloud Solution

govdigital eG has awarded IONOS a four-year framework contract under KoDaS, the abbreviation for a collaboration and file storage system. The service delivered under it is built on Nextcloud and sold as Nextcloud Workspace.

It is meant for schools and school authorities in the German states of Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Hesse. Other German states can join later, and schools are not mandated to implement it.

How the deal works

IONOS is the main contractor. It is tasked with delivering and operating the service, running the cloud infrastructure located in German data centers, and building it all on Nextcloud's open source software.

The tender notice for KoDaS sets a maximum value of 67.5 million euros and a maximum term of 48 months from the award. Nextcloud's announcement names the six states and their schools as the main parties who can order, leaving room for other states to be added later.

The announcement does not say what the contract will actually be worth. 📝

The notice calls for procuring software available under an OSI-approved open source license, citing digital sovereignty, lasting availability, and the ability to switch providers.

Among its asks for bidders are ISO 27001 certification, at least 10 million euros in turnover, liability insurance of at least 5 million euros, and a reference project with at least 10,000 active users and fully separated tenants.

For the features, the notice calls for central file hosting and sharing, a browser-based office suite for working on documents together, calendar and contact management, and an integrated email client.

Pricing depends on how many people actively use the service, and it is split into five tiers that start at the up to 50,000 users mark, ending above 500,000. No school authority has to commit to a set volume up front, so each can begin with its current users and grow from there.

Nextcloud's main argument is that public institutions should have alternatives to proprietary platforms so they keep control of their data. The company also believes students who start out using open source tools are less likely to reach for big-vendor products afterward.

We have seen this already

Other German institutions are also reworking their software. Last year, we heard that almost 80% of Schleswig-Holstein's state government workplaces had switched away from Microsoft.

Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is replacing SharePoint with a self-hosted Nextcloud that around 5,000 employees use today, and the state plans to bring that to 50,000 across the public sector.

Then there's the federal Deutschland-Stack, published by the Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernization, which covers all levels of public administration and permits use of only ODF and PDF/UA for documents.

I anticipate more such moves across Europe as governments realize that keeping sensitive data with providers that fall under foreign law can expose it to access they have no say over, irrespective of where the servers are located.

The ongoing US midterms could also shift the conversation depending on who comes out ahead.

---

Suggested Read 📖: France's absurd per-gigabyte tax could cost VLC over €1 million a year.

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/Ieam3XY
via IFTTT

I Came for This New Linux Distro’s Aesthetic Looks and Stayed for its Window Tiling

Yet another new Linux distribution has landed on Arch Linux as its foundation of choice. This one is called Pond, and it is Butterfly Interaction Inc.'s vision of how a desktop should look and behave.

For its desktop interface, it uses Niri, a very popular Wayland compositor that is known for its scrollable tiling, where app windows sit in columns along an endless strip that gradually grows as new items are added.

Pond is labeled an Early Preview, and this First Look piece covers what it offers, my time using it, and the ways you can install it.

Pond: The details ✨

Butterfly says Pond mixes new ideas with desktop habits people already know, and the goal is for a computer to feel more natural to use.

It builds that around four ideas. Windows are arranged spatially and can be rearranged, components come in different sizes to fit the space available, useful information stays in one uniform place, and content only shows up when it is relevant.

They also point out that each component was planned with the whole desktop in mind, from its proportions to where it sits and how it behaves.

As I pointed out earlier, Pond is a rolling-release distro based on Arch Linux with Niri as its compositor. Package duties are handled by a package manager that picks a default source for each app across Pacman, Nix, and Flatpak. More on that later.

Getting it to run

I tested Pond inside a QEMU virtual machine with 4 GB of RAM and a 50 GB disk, making a few tweaks to the machine settings before I could get it to boot.

Right away, the installer caught my eye. It follows a very different approach than what most distros ship with, featuring a simplified one that takes users through the steps quickly.

It asks for your keyboard, language, and timezone first, then the disk, and finally a username, password, and computer name. I really liked how entering passwords in the text field showed me some Pond-themed icons instead of the usual dots or asterisks.

The login screen follows a different approach too, with a cool-looking square and line-shaped password entry box that filled up the empty small squares as I typed my password.

The desktop

Log in, and you will see that the navigation on Pond is keyboard-focused, with an onboarding flow explaining which keybindings are must-knows for getting around Pond's interface and any installed apps.

The desktop itself features a sidebar menu that houses the clock and calendar, the currently running apps inside the minimap (the squarish-looking box), and notifications from the system, web browsers, or the package manager.

A small dock-style menu sits below it, housing quick access to the network and volume controls, as well as the settings page and the hide sidebar button.

Then there's the Vicinae-based launcher, which will feel familiar if you have used launchers on any Hyprland-equipped distro like CachyOS and Omarchy.

Installing apps

Installing new apps is easy. You open the launcher using Super+Space and go into "Install apps" to see a long list of apps that work on Pond. Select one, authenticate the action with your account password, and wait for it to finish installing.

While that happens, a banner shows up in the sidebar under notifications, showing you the progress of installation. To test this out, I installed Firefox, and it ran well. Pond served me the latest build at the time of writing, Firefox 159, and it ran without any hiccups.

Pond's package manager handles those installs, and its GitHub repo shows that most of the catalog is Flatpak apps, with the rest coming from pacman and the AUR.

Those pacman and AUR apps are installed through paru, and updates run paru and Flatpak together. Nix, while present, plays a smaller part, mostly being used to facilitate GPU support.

You also have the option to install package managers like yay and npm.

Tile away!

Window tiling is the best part of Pond. I could move around app windows using Super + Left or Right, switch workspaces using key combinations like Super + Up or Down, and change window sizes using Super + Plus or Minus.

The minimap below the calendar shows each workspace as a row, with the apps inside it as icons. I could even drag and drop app windows inside it to move them across workspaces.

Verdict 📝

The distro follows a very different design language than other Linux distros, relying on colorful shapes and palettes while offering a known, reliable base to work off of.

It is still an early preview, but if development continues and people take a liking to it, I don't see why it couldn't be counted among the top-rated new blood Linux distros alongside the likes of Bazzite, Omarchy, and Nobara.

Trying Pond 📥

Pond lists two installation routes on its install page, and downloading either one means agreeing to Butterfly's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. If you are someone who doesn't like doing so, I suggest going through the fine print before committing to an install.

The first method would have you download an ISO of about 1.5 GB. Then you either flash it onto a USB stick and boot, or plop it into GNOME Boxes or Virtual Machine Manager to run it in a virtual machine.

The second method skips the flashing, letting you run an installer on Windows, where you pick a drive, set aside space for Pond, and set up dual boot.

Butterfly says the installer carries over supported Windows settings and handles common dual-boot problems such as clock mismatches and NTFS drives that block shrinking.

Pond

You will find the source code for Pond's various components on GitHub.

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/K6jZ2uq
via IFTTT

Killed by Ubuntu, Linux Mint is Bringing This Classic Feature Back

Okay, killed by Ubuntu is an exaggeration, as Ubuntu is not the only Linux distro doing this.

Still, the big news is that Linux Mint is bringing hibernation back.

In a recent blog post, the Mint team previewed a new Sleep Modes page in the System Administration tool. It's meant to make enabling hibernation and setting it up correctly easy, without you editing config files by hand. The feature is planned for the upcoming Mint 27 release coming in December.

Mint hasn't magically fixed the problems that made Ubuntu drop hibernation. What it does is give you the choice, along with two hybrid modes that sit between suspend and hibernation.

Hibernation vs suspend: What's the difference?

Both features are about saving your session, which simply means everything you have open like your apps, windows and documents.

When you suspend (also called sleep), your computer keeps your session in RAM and powers down almost everything else. Waking up takes a couple of seconds. The catch is that RAM needs power to hold that data, so a suspended laptop keeps draining its battery.

If the battery dies while suspended, your session is lost, along with any unsaved work.

Hibernation copies your session from RAM to your disk and then powers off the machine completely. It uses no power at all. When you turn the computer back on, the session loads back from disk and your apps and windows are exactly where you left them.

In short, suspend is fast but needs power. Hibernation is slow but survives a dead battery.

Why Ubuntu and other distros dropped hibernation

Ubuntu disabled hibernation by default back in Ubuntu 12.04, I think. The reason was that it was unreliable slow, and that having two suspend modes confused people.

Every Ubuntu-based distro, including Linux Mint, inherited that decision. Actually, it's not just Ubuntu. Many other Linux distros also do not offer hibernation option anymore.

Speed is indeed a problem. Writing gigabytes of RAM to disk and reading it back can take longer than a full reboot, especially on older hard drives.

Hibernation also needs a lot of swap. Your swap space has to be at least as large as the RAM in use so the whole session fits. Ubuntu ships a small swap file by default, and Fedora uses zram, which lives in RAM and is useless for hibernation.

Then there's Secure Boot. With Secure Boot enabled, the Linux kernel runs in lockdown mode, and lockdown blocks hibernation because the saved image on disk isn't signed and could be tampered with.

Since most new computers ship with Secure Boot on, hibernation simply doesn't work for a large chunk of users. This is one of the main reasons Fedora Workstation doesn't offer hibernation out of the box either.

The three sleep modes in Linux Mint

The new Sleep Modes page gives you three options. You pick the one that suits how you use your computer. You can enable all of them and choose which one to use from the power menu (at least that's what it looks to me).

Hibernation

This is the classic mode. Your session is saved to disk and the computer shuts down completely, using no power. It's slower than suspend and can take longer than a reboot to hibernate and resume.

Hybrid Sleep

Hybrid Sleep suspends your computer and saves the session to disk at the same time. Most of the time, you get the quick wake-up of suspend. If the battery runs out, you'll need to plug in the charger, but your session is still there to resume from disk.

Suspend-then-Hibernate

This one suspends first and switches to hibernation only when the battery level gets critical. I think this is the most practical option for laptop users. You get fast resume in normal use and a safety net when the battery is about to die.

What Mint's new sleep mode doesn't fix

None of this removes the old limitations. You still need plenty of swap, and the tool flags a lack of swap as a problem. If Secure Boot is enabled, the tool lists it under Detected Problems. The good thing is that the tool writes its settings to its own systemd file, so you can turn these modes on and off without messing up your system.

I like how Mint takes a subtle approaches to "new features". Not every new feature needs to have AI in it. This is not a shiny new change but it's one of those changes that everyday Linux users are likely to use. Am I right?

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/5sQVoPa
via IFTTT

France’s Weird Per-Gigabyte Data Tax Could Cost VLC Over €1 Million a Year!

At least that's what VLC thinks when protesting the new French law.

France's National Assembly has voted in favour of a new "internet tax" that would charge companies for every gigabyte of data they send to users in France.

The idea is to make Netflix, Google, Meta and the rest of Big Tech pay more.

That sounds like a dream come true for many of us who prefer taking ownership of data in our own hands but unfortunately things are not that simple.

The way this law is written, it doesn't stop at Big Tech. Even VLC, a free and open source media player maintained by a non-profit, could end up paying this new tax.

What the new French internet tax says

The measure is amendment I-1358 to France's 2027 finance bill, tabled by Laurent Lhardit. It creates a tax on "producers of digital data" at €0.055 (5.5 euro cents) for every gigabyte delivered to subscribers of French internet providers.

Internet providers would measure how much data each sender pushes to their customers, with the collection supervised by telecom regulator Arcep and the tax administration DGFiP. Only the volume is counted, not the content or where it goes.

The amount is capped at 15% of the company's revenue in France or 2% of its total revenue, as per the amendment. Note that it's 15% of French revenue, not of total network traffic. And the text joins the two caps with an "or" without saying which one applies when they differ.

How much money are we talking about?

The amendment cites an Arcep estimate of 200 billion GB a year flowing to French internet subscribers. It expects the tax to bring in €10 billion a year. It also names Google, Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Amazon, Netflix and Akamai (cloud server provider) as the senders of about half of that traffic.

You'd think the money goes to the telecom operators who build and maintain the networks. That's the "fair share" argument European telcos have pushed for years.

But that's not the case. The revenue goes straight into the state budget, and the amendment's own justification talks about tax fairness between local businesses and digital multinationals, plus the ecological benefit of compressing data.

Why VLC is angry

A gigabyte of open source software counts the same as a gigabyte of Netflix. VideoLAN, the French non-profit behind VLC, posted on X that the tax would cost it over €1 million a year.

So, the French socialists, and Parliament members just voted a tax, that they don’t understand, which would cost VideoLAN more than 1 million euro per year.

They are probably the most clueless politician on Earth? And they claim they want technological sovereignty…… https://t.co/JX7tW6iJrP

— VideoLAN (@videolan) October 30, 2026

Lhardit replied that the cap would protect VideoLAN. He also said he didn't see how the tax could be passed on to users of Facebook, Instagram or TikTok since those services are free.

VideoLAN didn't take that well:

You have no idea what you are talking about.

What you said about Facebook and Insta and other social networks are not targeted because they are free, means you don’t understand the basics of economy. You don’t understand the difference between Revenue and Profit. Nor what is a… https://t.co/09TSNbto5y

— VideoLAN (@videolan) October 30, 2026

You have no idea what you are talking about. What you said about Facebook and Insta and other social networks are not targeted because they are free, means you don't understand the basics of economy. You don't understand the difference between Revenue and Profit.

VideoLAN (@videolan), October 30, 2026

The cap may limit what a low-revenue non-profit owes. But there is no explicit exemption for associations, free software or free content anywhere in the text. VideoLAN's €1 million is the possible figure before the cap, and right now nobody can tell the exact figure for certain because of all the ambiguity.

VLC isn't alone. OVHcloud founder Octave Klaba put his company's gross exposure at around €70 million a year, and Free's (Teleccom) Xavier Niel called the authors "ignares incompétents", roughly "incompetent ignoramuses". Those are French companies, by the way. Not exactly the US giants this internet tax bill was meant to tame.

At the end, the consumer pays the bill

See, a "war on Big Tech" sounds great in a headline, and European governments are fond of laws that squeeze extra money out of American tech companies. But I don't buy the idea that Netflix will pay them out of their pocket.

Netflix will do what it always does and raise subscription prices. And Facebook is "free" only because advertisers pay for it, which is exactly the revenue versus profit point VideoLAN was making.

So the government gets extra money, Big Tech protects its margins, and you end up paying. Meanwhile, non-profit projects like VLC, which never had a price to raise in the first place, are left wondering how big their bill will be.

Let's just hope that this doesn't take the form of law. Because this will set a precedence. I wouldn't be surprised to see other European countries try their own version. No government will say no to extra tax revenue.

Like GDPR, this has all the ingredients of another mess. If a law is going to tax "internet companies", it needs to say in black and white which ones. Right now, it doesn't.

What do you think? A fair way to make Big Tech pay, or a blunt instrument that hits everyone else? Let me know in the comments.

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/jNiuo8Y
via IFTTT

This Tool Lets You Install Linux Without a USB Key, Straight From Windows

Remember Wubi from the 2000s? For people who were afraid of going into BIOS and booting from CD/DVD/USB, Wubi provided an easy way to install Ubuntu Linux straight from Windows.

This concept has made a comeback in the form of Libertix although the core idea remains the same: install Linux in dual boot from inside the Windows.

Libertix is a Windows application. You use the .exe to install the tool and run it. The tool analyzes your system and if the test passes, it lets you resize the disk to install Linux Mint or Zorin on your system. Those are the two distros supported at the moment.

It configures a dual-boot menu for both BIOS/MBR and UEFI/GPT machines. This way, you do not need to create a live USB.

Libertix: Install Linux from Windows

Libertix is an open source software developed by Ekimia, a French company. From the looks of it, they sell Linux preinstalled computers in France. They launched a €3,000 campaign in June 2026 to pay a full-time contributor over the summer to work on this project.

Here's how it works.

Before touching anything, Libertix runs a compatibility test. It looks at your firmware type (BIOS or UEFI), your disk layout, BitLocker status and how much space can be taken from the Windows partition. If something doesn't fit, it won't proceed.

If everything checks out, it lets you shrink the Windows partition and then it downloads the chosen distro ISO. Checksum is verified before downloading the ISO.

Libertix then stages the files on disk and tells your computer to boot into its own live environment just once. On UEFI systems, that's done through the BootNext firmware variable. On older BIOS systems, it uses GRUB4DOS and a temporary Windows boot entry.

After the reboot, the Libertix live system checks the plan and hardware again, creates an ext4 partition and installs Linux on it.

The final setup gives you a customized, beautiful-looking GRUB menu with entries for Linux, Windows, shutdown and advanced options.

If you enabled file sharing, your Windows folders show up in Linux. Your Linux files are also accessible from Windows, but in read-only mode, which makes sense as it avoids filesystem corruption.

I like that there's a recovery path built in. Libertix tracks every stage it completes. If something fails or you cancel midway, it undoes only the steps that were done and restores the Windows boot.

🚧

Libertix is in the early stage of development and since partitioning is involved, I suggest taking a full backup of your important data on an external disk before you experiment with Libertix.

Worth a try?

I wanted to give Libertix a try and show the installer in action. But for that, I would need a functional Windows system. And I don't have one right now. I'll see if I can arrange one and showcase this tool's functioning to you.

Till then, if you feel like, you can give it a try on a spare system because this is in early stages of development. If you are not comfortable with partitions and stuff, don't get over excited and mess up your system.

Still, overall, this is a nice tool to exist and I hope it supports more distros in the future. For many Linux beginners, creating the live USB and dual booting from it seems intimidating. If this tool helps lower that barrier, I am rooting for it.

If you want to explore the project, look at its architecture and technical documentation; head over to its GitHub repo.

from It's FOSS https://ift.tt/4hkPM0O
via IFTTT