Mint Goes Wayland, OpenBook Reader, Terminal Shortcut Tips, Linux Handheld Computers and More

Linux Mint has taken the slow road to Wayland while everyone else rushed ahead, and it looks like that paid off. Cinnamon’s Wayland session is dropping the experimental label with Mint 23 this Christmas, shipping alongside X11 as a fully supported option.

And Wayland is not really as slow as some people think. That’s what a recent benchmark study found out.

Most microcontroller boards support Lua as an afterthought. The ELM11-Feather from BrisbaneSilicon builds around it. A GOWIN FPGA runs the whole show with no separate CPU, giving you Lua at the application layer, C for drivers, and VHDL/SystemVerilog for the hardware itself.

Joey Castillo’s Open Book started as a DIY soldering project back in 2020. Six years later it’s back as Open Book Touch, a proper ready-to-use e-reader with a 4.26-inch touchscreen, ESP32-S3, microSD, user-replaceable battery, and no DRM.

One developer, a few months of work, and Chatto is now open source under AGPL-3.0. It’s a self-hosted team chat built to be light and simple enough to run by just launching an executable.

GNOME is working on an app called Test Center that would make trying experimental features less of a gamble.

📚 Linux Learning Offers

There are a few offers I came across that will help you improve your Linux skills, personally or professionally.

First is Linux Foundation offering upto 40% off on its training courses and certification exams. For people looking to make a career in the field of Linux and IT, a certification on Linux, Kubernetes and other related technologies can be of help.

Even if you don’t want to go for certifications, you should always thrive for learning more. Humble Bundle O’Reilly collection is packed with Linux and Unix books, covering everything from shell scripting to system administration and kernel internals. This should be of interest to most Linux users, professional or not.

Humble Tech Book Bundle: Linux: All the Things by O’Reilly

All things are possible with the power of Linux—learn the latest and greatest techniques from the pros at O’Reilly and help support Code for America!

And part of the money gets donated to Code for America.

Third and last, my friend has created an “AI Engineer Bootcamp” course because AI is now a useful tool, even Linus Torvalds thinks so. If this is something that interest you, you can get it an additional discount with custom link.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

Like a zombie back from the grave, the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit, one of the longest-running legal sagas in open source history, isn’t dead yet.

Unix copyright code infringement lawsuit is back from the dead — IBM still under fire from Xinuos over 2003-era bytes

What year is it?!

Cursor has an unpatched zero-day on Windows where dropping a file named git.exe at the root of any repository causes it to execute automatically when the project opens. This was known to them for months and has not been patched yet.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

I have been using Trello since 2013, watching it slowly turn into something else after new ownership stepped in. I set out to find what Trello used to be, across seven open source tools.

Seven Gentoo-based distros for people who want what Portage offers without starting completely from scratch. We have covered desktop use, penetration testing, security hardening, and audio production.

The compose key has been in Linux desktops for years, and most people have never touched it. Once you assign a key in GNOME settings, short two-character sequences let you type accented letters, copyright symbols, degree signs, and more.

On a related note, learn about remapping the CoPilot key on your keyboard to something useful. Yes, some keyboards these days come with a dedicated Microsoft Copilot key.

Since there is so much discussion around keys, let me share my favorite keyboard shortcuts that make me more efficient in the terminal.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

The ORICO 8848U4 is a 4-bay USB4 NVMe enclosure that connects over Thunderbolt and shows up as native NVMe devices on Linux without requiring any driver installation.

ORICO 88 Series 4-Bay USB4 NVMe SSD Enclosure Review: Fast Storage That Works Natively on Linux

A compact 4-bay NVMe enclosure with USB4 connectivity, tested on Linux with benchmarks.

The indie Linux handheld space is getting interesting, with many tinkerers and small companies trying their hand at crowdfunding to fund their creations.

8 Linux Handheld Computers You Can Splurge On

The rest are ready to use out of the box without requiring a spare Raspberry Pi or tinkering.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

Space Haven will have you manage a crew of humans on a spaceship trying to survive the cold, dark vastness of space.

I Mined and Built My Way Through Space Haven

An indie game studio out of Finland, Linus Torvalds’ birth country, built this game, treating Linux as a first-class citizen.

📽️ Videos for You

I still stand by this, apt update && apt upgrade needs to go away.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

On GNOME, you can resize a window using the Super key on your keyboard. First, run this command:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences resize-with-right-button true

Now, when pressing the Super key, drag a window while pressing the right-click to resize it.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

How sharp is your Linux automation knowledge?

Linux Automation: Quiz

Are you an automation expert? Or, you want to be? This quiz should be interesting for you.

What does the cat says?

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On July 15, 1928, the ENIGMA cipher machine entered service with the German Army, encrypting messages via rotor wheels and swappable patch cables. Polish cryptographers first cracked it in 1932, sharing their methods with Britain in 1939, which let Bletchley Park read German traffic throughout WWII.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: Pro FOSSer Ernest has kicked off a rather interesting thread, asking other FOSSers what they understand of AI.