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Lançamento do Plasma 6.8 marca aniversário de 30 anos do KDE

KDE’s 30 years anniversary is today (14th), with the release of Plasma 6.8 as part of celebrations.

Of all the desktop environments for Linux, Plasma is what I like the most. I hope to one day use it on a “daily driver” computer.

Curiosity: the email from Matthias Ettrich announcing the “Kool Desktop Environment” in 1996. “So one of the major goals is to provide a modern and common look&feel for all the applications. And this is exactly the reason, why this project is different from elder attempts.”

HomeView video ad

Apple is selling the recently announced HomeView, an iPad mini glued to a speaker that serves as a hub for the home, with a chaotic commercial in which a family runs over for breakfast. I can’t remember any other company commercial that causes anxiety and contempt for the product.

Gnome 51 “A Coruña”

This Wednesday (16th), the stable version of Gnome 51, the famous desktop environment for Linux, was released. (Announcement video.) The highlight is improvements in performance and graphics. I don’t know if it was already there, but I’m glad to see that Sushi is a default app and was ported to GTK4. It displays file content by pressing the Space key in the file manager — similar to the quick Look of macOS.

Unfortunately the new overlay of the search results, which was expected to land in Gnome 51, didn’t make the cut.

Asahi Linux on M3 chips

The Asahi Project, whose mission is to make Linux distributions viable on post-2020 Apple computers, announced on Sunday 6th support for the Apple Silicon M3 chip family. There are still important limitations, such as the lack of 3D acceleration and the inability to put the system to sleep, but it works. Because of these, support is hidden behind “expert mode.”

Nitter is shutting down after a cease and desist letter from X

Elon Musk’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to Nitter’s maintainer, a legitimate service that displays X posts through a different interface. The person, who goes by zedeus, complied with the threat, took down their own Nitter instance, and stopped development.

These guys don’t even bother hiding the hypocrisy anymore. They scrape the entire internet to feed their AI parrots, but turn around and use financial muscle and legal harassment to go after individuals doing the same thing — for more honest reasons and on a garage-shop scale.

XCancel, the popular Nitter instance I’ve been using for several months now, is still up.

Update (19h33): XCancel is down, too.

Another victim of the AI bubble: Mico, Microsoft Copilot’s mascot…

Another victim of the AI bubble: Mico, Microsoft Copilot’s mascot that looks like a blob of semen. According to the company, it’s been demoted from Copilot Voice and now only shows up in Copilot Learn Live. (What are Copilot Voice and Copilot Learn Live? Your guess is as good as mine.)

Mico’s near-demise is part of the unification/centralization process for the countless Copilot apps and services.

Wellness Ping: A simple dead man’s switch service

Early in 2026, a Chinese app that alerts trusted contacts if the user is still alive made some noise. The premise, somewhat morbid, is useful for certain groups, like activists, journalists covering high-risk areas, and people who live alone. The person has to check in at regular intervals. If they fail to, their contacts are notified automatically.

Wellness Ping is a variation on this kind of service with an approach that promises greater privacy: it’s free, requires no app download, and everything happens over email or Signal (preferred). Announcing version 2.0, its creator, who goes by Micr0byte, said that the code (which is open source) went through a full security review.

LineageOS now has a web installer

LineageOS now has a web installer. The project warns, however, that it doesn’t handle the entire process, and that you’ll still need to follow the instructions on your device’s wiki. Even so, it should make things considerably easier during those major yearly updates. In the same announcement, they report that work on LineageOS 24 — based on Android 17 — is “progressing nicely”.

Hot take: if you feel comfortable with Markdown, you don’t need…

Hot take: if you feel comfortable with Markdown, you don’t need an editor that displays the formatting. Any plain text editor will do. The rest is just fluff.

End of the line for ad-blocking extensions on Chrome and (most of) its forks

Google will remove the last traces of Manifest v2, the feature that enabled robust ad-blocking extensions like uBlock Origin, in Chrome versions 150 and 151. Chromium forks — Edge and Opera — have signaled they will follow Google’s lead, though no firm deadlines have been set. Manifest v3-compliant ad blockers work, albeit with limitations.

Firefox (and its derivatives) and Safari will continue to support Manifest v2.

At the opening of Build 2026, Microsoft lived up to the nature of the event — focused on…

At the opening of Build 2026, Microsoft lived up to the nature of the event — focused on developers — and announced, among other things, a slew of updates to make Windows 11 more appealing to this audience. The linuxification of Windows is moving forward at full steam, now with native coreutils and container support in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Beyond that, plenty of things involving AI “agents” — the big theme this year — including native support for OpenClaw.

Google presented “AI agents” capable of doing people’s work in…

Still thinking about Google I/O…

Google presented “AI agents” capable of doing people’s work in countless scenarios, none of them very believable for real people. (Who needs AI to organize a neighborhood block party?) At TechCrunch, Sarah Perez writes a solid critique of this questionable utopia that Google is trying to sell us.

On my end, I think we’re living a “Groundhog Day” moment of that Google Now feature from ~2012, which would notify you via push notification that your flight’s gate had changed. As if that information wasn’t already on your face the whole time at the airport. For 15 years Google has been using different technologies, each increasingly complex and expensive, to try to solve problems that no human being has ever actually had.

Compact tab layout in Safari 26.4

macOS 26.4, released on Tuesday (the 24th), brought back the compact tab layout to Safari (screenshot). The five of us who use this layout — which had been removed in macOS 26.0 — are grateful.