FOSS Weekly #25.01: 2 New Free Books, Homelab Dashboards, Plan 9 and More

by: Abhishek Prakash
Thu, 02 Jan 2025 06:11:30 GMT

Happy new year 2025 🥳

The Tuxmas Days continue in full swing. Main highlights are:

Tuxmas Day 3 introduced the new commenting system. You'll see it in action when you leave a comment on the website.

Tuxmas Day 4 introduced the lifetime membership option. Instead of a recurring fee, you get the Plus membership forever with a single payment of $76 till 7th January. After that it will be $99. If you wanted to support It's FOSS with Plus membership, this would be the best time and chance 🙏

Tuxmas Day 5 has Linux Terminal and Bash series converted into downloadable PDF eBook.

Follow the entire Tuxmas series here. And your feedback is greatly appreciated.

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

• Serpent OS's alpha release.

• An open source 3D printer.

• Rediscovering an operating system.

• And other Linux news, videos and, of course, memes!

📰 Linux and Open Source News

• Serpent OS Alpha is out for testing with new hardware support.

• GNOME's new image viewer is set to receive some handy upgrades.

• A new open source 3D printer has appeared, can be built using off-the-shelf parts.

• NVIDIA says that it will open source Run:ai, a platform that it is said to have acquired for $700M.

And finally, open source tools are adding AI features. Better late than never.

Kdenlive is Adding an AI Background Removal Tool

You can easily remove backgrounds with this new tool.

It's FOSS NewsSourav Rudra

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

What's your new year resolution?

My Linux and Open Source Resolutions for 2025

Here’s what I have decided for 2025. What are your resolutions?

It's FOSS NewsSourav Rudra

Ankush's favorite distro of 2024 is one that you might not have expected.

My Favorite Linux Distro for 2024 is Not Ubuntu, Not Mint, It’s This

Revealing my favorite Linux distribution before 2024 ends.

It's FOSS NewsAnkush Das

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials and More

• Start 2025 with some good note-taking apps.

• If you were looking to distro hop, you could take ArchBang Linux for a run.

• Following that, you could learn how to use the apt search and apt show commands in Ubuntu.

And if you are still unfamiliar with the Linux command line, use the new year motivation and get acquainted with the essentials in this series.

Linux Command Line Introduction [Free Course]

Want to know the basics of the Linux command line? Here’s a tutorial series with a hands-on approach.

It's FOSSAbhishek Prakash

👷 Maker's and AI Corner

Your homelab will thank you for using a dashboard tool to manage it effectively.

Imagine that the genius minds like Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan and Bjarne Stroustrup collaborated on a new operating system and yet it flopped.

Rediscovering Plan9 from Bell Labs

An OS that was developed by the likes of Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Bjarne Stroustrup and yet it did not achieve the success.

It's FOSSBill Dyer

📹 Videos we are watching

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, too

✨ Discover handy tools

A dope looking GUI-based system monitor for Linux.

NeoHtop - Modern System Monitor

A beautiful, efficient system monitor built with Rust and Svelte. Monitor processes, CPU, and memory usage in real-time.

NeoHtopYour Name

🧩 Quiz Time

Call yourself a terminal junkie? Find the wrong paths with this puzzle.

Find The Wrong Path

Spot what’s wrong, and solve the quizzes!

It's FOSSAnkush Das

If that's too tricky, then you can try your hand at the Essential Ubuntu Shortcuts puzzle.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

In a terminal, you might already know that you can select a word by double-clicking on it.

However, if you hold the Shift key and left-click on another word after that, all the text between the first and last selected text will also be highlighted. No need to manually drag the cursor to select those.

It may not work in all the terminal emulators (i.e. terminal applications).

🤣 Meme of the Week

Oh, that would be something. 🤌 ✨

🗓️ Tech Trivia

On December 31, 1889, American Bell reorganized and transferred its assets to AT&T to bypass Massachusetts laws. By becoming the parent company, AT&T took control of the Bell System. This move eventually led to AT&T becoming a legalized monopoly in the U.S.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 FOSSverse Corner

What was your favorite distro in 2024? Join other FOSSers and share yours!

What’s your favourite Linux distro? Why do you use that one?

You have to move with the times. When you retire you may have the luxury of doing it your way. Snaps are like static binaries, but with some extra crud to fit them into the package system. I dont see why they should startup slowly… there must be some clunky scripts involved. A static binary is large, but not so large that it would affect load time. I have one app (keenwrite) that comes as a static binary… it loads quite fast and my machine is rather like your Dell with early corei7 and…

It's FOSS Communitynevj

❤️ With love

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Enjoy using Linux in 2025 🐧