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Linux YouTuber Brodie Robertson liked It's FOSS' April Fool joke so much that he made a detailed video on it. It's quite fun to watch, actually 😄

💬 Let's see what else you get in this edition

• A new APT release.
• Photo management software
• Steam Client offering many refinements for Linux.
• And other Linux news, tips, and, of course, memes!
• This edition of FOSS Weekly is supported by Internxt.

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📰 Linux and Open Source News

• The Proton VPN app has received many refinements.
• Steam Client's April 2025 update has a lot to offer for Linux gamers.
• Pinta has launched a redesigned website in collaboration with RolandiXor.

The APT 3.0 release has finally arrived with a better user experience.

A Colorful APT 3.0 Release Impresses with its New Features

The latest APT release features a new solver, alongside several user experience enhancements.

It's FOSS NewsSourav Rudra

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

Mozilla has begun the initial implementation of AI features into Firefox.

I Tried This Upcoming AI Feature in Firefox

Firefox will be bringing an experimental AI-generated link previews, offering quick on-device summaries. Here’s my quick experience with it.

It's FOSS NewsSourav Rudra

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials and More

• Get started with Pamac GUI package manager in Arch Linux.
• A list of photo management software on Linux.
• Learn how to install Logseq on your Linux system.
• 7 code editors you can use for Vibe Coding.

7 Code Editors You Can Use for Vibe Coding on Linux

Want to try vibe coding? Here are the best editors I recommend using on Linux.

It's FOSSAbhishek Kumar

👷 Homelab and Maker's Corner

This time, we have a DIY biosignal tool that can be used for neuroscience research and education purposes.

DIY Neuroscience: Meet the Open Source PiEEG Kit for Brain and Body Signals

The PiEEG kit is an open source, portable biosignal tool designed for research, measuring EEG, EMG, EKG, and EOG signals. Want to crowdfund the project?

It's FOSS NewsSourav Rudra

✨ Apps Highlight

Clapgrep is a powerful open source search tool for Linux.

Clapgrep: An Easy-to-Use Open Source Linux App To Search Through Your PDFs and Text Documents

Want to look for something in your text documents? Use Clapgrep to quick search for it!

It's FOSS NewsSourav Rudra

📽️ Videos I am Creating for You

See the new features in APT 3.0 in action in our latest video.

🧩 Quiz Time

Take a trip down memory lane with our 80s Nostalgic Gadgets puzzle.

80s Nostalgic Gadgets

Remember the 80s? This quiz is for you :)

It's FOSSAbhishek Prakash

How sharp is your Git knowledge? Our latest crossword will test your knowledge.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

In Firefox, you can delete temporary browsing data using the "Forget" button. First, right-click on the toolbar and select "Customize Toolbar".

Now, from the list, drag and drop the "Forget" button to the toolbar. If you click on it, you will be asked to clear 5 min, 2 hrs, and 24 hrs of browsing data, pick any one of them and click on "Forget!".

🤣 Meme of the Week

The glow up is real with this one. 🤭

🗓️ Tech Trivia

On April 7, 1964, IBM introduced the System/360, the first family of computers designed to be fully compatible with each other. Unlike earlier systems, where each model had its own unique software and hardware.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 FOSSverse Corner

One of our regular FOSSers played around with ARM64 on Linux and liked it.

ARM64 on Linux is Fun!

Hi, I’ve been playing with my Pinebook Pro lately and tried Armbian, Manjaro, Void and Gentoo on it. It’s been fun! New things learned like boot from u-boot, then moving to tow-boot as “first boot loader” which starts grub. I tried four distroes on a SD, Manjaro was the official and Armbian also was an .iso. Void and Gentoo I installed thrue chroot manually. I’m biased but it says something (at least I think so) that I did a Gentoo install twice to this small laptop. First one was just to try it…

It's FOSS Communityihasama

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Enjoy FOSS 😄

Overview

On Thursday, February 6, 2025, multiple Cloudflare services, including R2 object storage, experienced a significant outage lasting 59 minutes. This incident resulted in complete operational failures against R2 and disruptions to dependent services such as Stream, Images, Cache Reserve, Vectorize, and Log Delivery. The root cause was traced to human error and inadequate validation safeguards during routine abuse remediation procedures.

Impact Summary

• Incident Duration: 08:14 UTC to 09:13 UTC (primary impact), with residual effects until 09:36 UTC.

• Primary Issue: Disabling of the R2 Gateway service, responsible for the R2 API.

• Data Integrity: No data loss or corruption occurred within R2.

Affected Services

1. R2: 100% failure of operations (uploads, downloads, metadata) during the outage. Minor residual errors (<1%) post-recovery.

2. Stream: Complete service disruption during the outage.

3. Images: Full impact on upload/download; delivery minimally affected (97% success rate).

4. Cache Reserve: Increased origin requests, impacting <0.049% of cacheable requests.

5. Log Delivery: Delays and data loss (up to 4.5% for non-R2, 13.6% for R2 jobs).

6. Durable Objects: 0.09% error rate spike post-recovery.

7. Cache Purge: 1.8% error rate increase, 10x latency during the incident.

8. Vectorize: 75% query failures, 100% insert/upsert/delete failures during the outage.

9. Key Transparency Auditor: Complete failure of publish/read operations.

10. Workers & Pages: Minimal deployment failures (0.002%) for projects with R2 bindings.

Incident Timeline

• 08:12 UTC: R2 Gateway service inadvertently disabled.

• 08:14 UTC: Service degradation begins.

• 08:25 UTC: Internal incident declared.

• 08:42 UTC: Root cause identified.

• 08:57 UTC: Operations team begins re-enabling the R2 Gateway.

• 09:10 UTC: R2 starts to recover.

• 09:13 UTC: Primary impact ends.

• 09:36 UTC: Residual error rates recover.

• 10:29 UTC: Incident officially closed after monitoring.

Root Cause Analysis

The incident stemmed from human error during a phishing site abuse report remediation. Instead of targeting a specific endpoint, actions mistakenly disabled the entire R2 Gateway service. Contributing factors included:

• Lack of system-level safeguards.

• Inadequate account tagging and validation.

• Limited operator training on critical service disablement risks.

The Risks of CDN Dependencies in Critical Systems

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) play a vital role in improving website performance, scalability, and security. However, relying heavily on CDNs for critical systems can introduce significant risks when outages occur:

• Lost Revenue: Downtime on e-commerce platforms or SaaS services can result in immediate lost sales and financial transactions, directly affecting revenue streams.

• Lost Data: Although R2 did not suffer data loss in this incident, disruptions in data transmission processes can lead to lost or incomplete data, especially in logging and analytics services.

• Lost Customers: Extended or repeated outages can erode customer trust and satisfaction, leading to churn and damage to brand reputation.

• Operational Disruptions: Businesses relying on real-time data processing or automated workflows may face cascading failures when critical CDN services are unavailable.

Remediation Steps

Immediate Actions:

• Deployment of additional guardrails in the Admin API.

• Disabling high-risk manual actions in the abuse review UI.

In-Progress Measures:

• Improved internal account provisioning.

• Restricting product disablement permissions.

• Implementing two-party approval for critical actions.

• Enhancing abuse checks to prevent internal service disruptions.

Cloudflare acknowledges the severity of this incident and the disruption it caused to customers. We are committed to strengthening our systems, implementing robust safeguards, and ensuring that similar incidents are prevented in the future.

For more information about Cloudflare's services or to explore career opportunities, visit our website.

By this point, it’s not a secret to most people that I like Tailwind.

But, unknown to many people (who often jump to conclusions when you mention Tailwind), I don’t like vanilla Tailwind. In fact, I find most of it horrible and I shall refrain from saying further unkind words about it.

But I recognize and see that Tailwind’s methodology has merits — lots of them, in fact — and they go a long way to making your styles more maintainable and performant.

Today, I want to explore one of these merit-producing features that has been severely undersold — Tailwind’s @apply feature.

What @apply does

Tailwind’s @apply features lets you “apply” (or simply put, copy-and-paste) a Tailwind utility into your CSS.

Most of the time, people showcase Tailwind’s @apply feature with one of Tailwind’s single-property utilities (which changes a single CSS declaration). When showcased this way, @apply doesn’t sound promising at all. It sounds downright stupid. So obviously, nobody wants to use it.

/* Input */
.selector {
  @apply p-4;
}

/* Output */
.selector {
  padding: 1rem;
}

To make it worse, Adam Wathan recommends against using @apply, so the uptake couldn’t be worse.

Confession: The `apply` feature in Tailwind basically only exists to trick people who are put off by long lists of classes into trying the framework.

You should almost never use it 😬

Reuse your utility-littered HTML instead.https://t.co/x6y4ksDwrt

— Adam Wathan (@adamwathan) February 9, 2020

Personally, I think Tailwind’s @apply feature is better than described.

Tailwind’s @apply is like Sass’s @includes

If you have been around during the time where Sass is the dominant CSS processing tool, you’ve probably heard of Sass mixins. They are blocks of code that you can make — in advance — to copy-paste into the rest of your code.

• To create a mixin, you use @mixin
• To use a mixin, you use @includes

// Defining the mixin
@mixin some-mixin() {
  color: red; 
  background: blue; 
}

// Using the mixin
.selector {
  @include some-mixin(); 
}

/* Output */
.selector {
  color: red; 
  background: blue; 
}

Tailwind’s @apply feature works the same way. You can define Tailwind utilities in advance and use them later in your code.

/* Defining the utility */
@utility some-utility {
  color: red; 
  background: blue; 
}

/* Applying the utility */
.selector {
  @apply some-utility; 
}

/* Output */
.selector {
  color: red; 
  background: blue; 
}

Tailwind utilities are much better than Sass mixins

Tailwind’s utilities can be used directly in the HTML, so you don’t have to write a CSS rule for it to work.

@utility some-utility {
  color: red; 
  background: blue; 
}

<div class="some-utility">...</div> 

On the contrary, for Sass mixins, you need to create an extra selector to house your @includes before using them in the HTML. That’s one extra step. Many of these extra steps add up to a lot.

@mixin some-mixin() {
  color: red; 
  background: blue; 
}

.selector {
  @include some-mixin(); 
}

/* Output */
.selector {
  color: red; 
  background: blue; 
}

<div class="selector">...</div>

Tailwind’s utilities can also be used with their responsive variants. This unlocks media queries straight in the HTML and can be a superpower for creating responsive layouts.

<div class="utility1 md:utility2">…</div> 

A simple and practical example

One of my favorite — and most easily understood — examples of all time is a combination of two utilities that I’ve built for Splendid Layouts (a part of Splendid Labz):

• vertical: makes a vertical layout
• horizontal: makes a horizontal layout

Defining these two utilities is easy.

• For vertical, we can use flexbox with flex-direction set to column.
• For horizontal, we use flexbox with flex-direction set to row.

@utility horizontal {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: row;
  gap: 1rem;
}

@utility vertical {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  gap: 1rem;
}

After defining these utilities, we can use them directly inside the HTML. So, if we want to create a vertical layout on mobile and a horizontal one on tablet or desktop, we can use the following classes:

<div class="vertical sm:horizontal">...</div>

For those who are new to Tailwind, sm: here is a breakpoint variant that tells Tailwind to activate a class when it goes beyond a certain breakpoint. By default, sm is set to 640px, so the above HTML produces a vertical layout on mobile, then switches to a horizontal layout at 640px.

If you prefer traditional CSS over composing classes like the example above, you can treat @apply like Sass @includes and use them directly in your CSS.

<div class="your-layout">...</div> 

.your-layout {
  @apply vertical; 

  @media (width >= 640px) {
    @apply horizontal;
  }
}

The beautiful part about both of these approaches is you can immediately see what’s happening with your layout — in plain English — without parsing code through a CSS lens. This means faster recognition and more maintainable code in the long run.

Tailwind’s utilities are a little less powerful compared to Sass mixins

Sass mixins are more powerful than Tailwind utilities because:

1. They let you use multiple variables.
2. They let you use other Sass features like @if and @for loops.

@mixin avatar($size, $circle: false) {
  width: $size;
  height: $size;

  @if $circle {
    border-radius: math.div($size, 2);
  }
}

On the other hand, Tailwind utilities don’t have these powers. At the very maximum, Tailwind can let you take in one variable through their functional utilities.

/* Tailwind Functional Utility */
@utility tab-* { 
  tab-size: --value(--tab-size-*);
}

Fortunately, we’re not affected by this “lack of power” much because we can take advantage of all modern CSS improvements — including CSS variables. This gives you a ton of room to create very useful utilities.

Let’s go through another example

A second example I often like to showcase is the grid-simple utility that lets you create grids with CSS Grid easily.

We can declare a simple example here:

@utility grid-simple {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: repeat(var(--cols), minmax(0, 1fr));
  gap: var(--gap, 1rem);
}

By doing this, we have effectively created a reusable CSS grid (and we no longer have to manually declare minmax everywhere).

After we have defined this utility, we can use Tailwind’s arbitrary properties to adjust the number of columns on the fly.

<div class="grid-simple [--cols:3]"> 
  <div class="item">...</div>
  <div class="item">...</div>
  <div class="item">...</div>
</div>

To make the grid responsive, we can add Tailwind’s responsive variants with arbitrary properties so we only set --cols:3 on a larger breakpoint.

<div class="grid-simple sm:[--cols:3]"> 
  <div class="item">...</div>
  <div class="item">...</div>
  <div class="item">...</div>
</div>

This makes your layouts very declarative. You can immediately tell what’s going on when you read the HTML.

Now, on the other hand, if you’re uncomfortable with too much Tailwind magic, you can always use @apply to copy-paste the utility into your CSS. This way, you don’t have to bother writing repeat and minmax declarations every time you need a grid that grid-simple can create.

.your-layout {
  @apply grid-simple; 
  @media (width >= 640px) {
    --cols: 3;
  }
}

<div class="your-layout"> ... </div>

By the way, using @apply this way is surprisingly useful for creating complex layouts! But that seems out of scope for this article so I’ll be happy to show you an example another day.

Wrapping up

Tailwind’s utilities are very powerful by themselves, but they’re even more powerful if you allow yourself to use @apply (and allow yourself to detach from traditional Tailwind advice). By doing this, you gain access to Tailwind as a tool instead of it being a dogmatic approach.

To make Tailwind’s utilities even more powerful, you might want to consider building utilities that can help you create layouts and nice visual effects quickly and easily.

I’ve built a handful of these utilities for Splendid Labz and I’m happy to share them with you if you’re interested! Just check out Splendid Layouts to see a subset of the utilities I’ve prepared.

By the way, the utilities I showed you above are watered-down versions of the actual ones I’m using in Splendid Labz.

One more note: When writing this, Splendid Layouts work with Tailwind 3, not Tailwind 4. I’m working on a release soon, so sign up for updates if you’re interested!

Tailwind’s @apply Feature is Better Than it Sounds originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.