Merry Christmas to you and family from It's FOSS family 🎄💚
This is the last FOSS Weekly of the year 2025. For two years in a row, I managed to send the newsletter for all 52 weeks of the year. Not only that, I also uploaded one YouTube video each week this year. That was one of my new year resolutions for 2025. I am lowkey proud of these achievements, especially when I had a busy time mid-year with the arrival of my second child.
It's Christmas time, and I have come bearing gifts. Here's a PDF that contains a compilation of various nifty command line tips. Enjoy.
More gifts 🎁: If you are a Plus member, you'll find a Docker eBook and a couple more in the Pro member resource page.
Christmas is the time for gifting. If you think It's FOSS is doing a great work, please support us by opting for a Plus membership. You also get 5 eBooks on Linux, Docker and Bash scripting.
Our lifetime membership option is available for $89 (instead of $149). This special price is applicable till 31st December only.
In the true Christmas spirit, I would also appreciate donations via our Ko-Fi page. No amount is too small 🙏
Here's the highlight of this edition of FOSS Weekly:
- elementary OS 8.1 release.
- Another Linux phone.
- First Rust CVE in Linux kernel.
- An interesting take on Linux desktop fragementation.
- And other Linux news, tips, and, of course, memes!
- This week of FOSS Weekly is supported by Depot.
📰 Linux and Open Source News
- Red Hat has bought Chatterbox Labs.
- Docker's Hardened Images are now free for all.
- PeerTube has recently received two major updates.
- A Christmas gift has landed in the form of elementary OS 8.1!
- Tiger Data has open-sourced its PostgreSQL BM25 extension.
- Ubuntu 26.04 has been confirmed to ship with Linux kernel 6.20.
- The first Rust CVE in the Linux kernel was recently found and patched.
Sourav Rudra
🧠 What We’re Thinking About
It's time to look forward to the next year. Sourav and I collectively wrote an article to make some predictions about desktop Linux ecosystem in 2026.
Abhishek Prakash
Roland has an interesting take on why Linux desktop fragmentation is a good thing.
Roland Taylor
🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings
A Linux system monitor that actually shows more than CPU and RAM.
Roland Taylor
Trying out Package Forge for easier Linux app management.
Roland Taylor
Make GitHub binary installs effortless using these handy helpers.
And here are some of the new distros we covered on It's FOSS in 2025.
Pulkit Chandak
👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner
Learn step-by-step how to run your own photo server with PhotoPrism in your homelab.
Bhuwan Mishra
This year's Steam Winter Sale has some great titles for Linux gamers to grab!
Sourav Rudra
Kyocera, the Japanese congloromerate, has introduced Meta-Lens, a really cool piece of tech that uses an ultra-thin, flat lens to control light in new ways.
Void Phone VX1 debuts as an enterprise-ready Linux smartphone.
✨ Apps and Projects Highlights
Ditch the cloud with this open source kanban board:
Neville Ondara
The upcoming Armbian Imager looks promising.
📽️ Videos I Am Creating for You
Enjoy the 'Kristmas Kustomization' video 😉
💡 Quick Handy Tip
If your mouse has more than three buttons, then you can assign those buttons to be used for desktop actions in KDE Plasma. To do that, first right-click on an empty place in the desktop and select "Desktop and Wallpaper". Here, go into the "Mouse Actions" menu.
Now, click on the "Add Action" button and start assigning actions to the various mouse buttons. There are options to switch activity, window, paste from clipboard, and a few others.
Click on "Apply" when you are done assigning.
🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse
Call yourself a command-line guru? Prove your skills then.
Ankush Das
🤣 Meme of the Week: Santa can be very mean sometimes. 😮💨
🗓️ Tech Trivia: On December 19, 1974, the Altair 8800 microcomputer went on sale from MITS, becoming the first commercially successful personal computer and helping spark the modern PC era despite requiring users to assemble the kit and operate it using only switches and indicator lights.
🧑🤝🧑 From the Community: Neville, a long-time FOSSer, has kicked off an interesting conversation surrounding curved monitors.
nevj
📊 Year 2025 for It's FOSS in numbers
It's FOSS website had more than 24 million pageviews. And an overwhelming percentage of those views have been from repeat visitors. Which means there are regular readers who read most of the content we write 🙏
With 52 weeks of consistency on YouTube, we saw gradual improvements. Our videos were watched over a million time in 2025.
Our Instagram account grew almost doubled to 99,600 followers. We actually post lots of fun content there which is more for people from 18-39 years of age but can surely be enjoyed by people of all age groups.
X (formerly known as Twitter) account grew to 154,000 people.
Our Mastodon profile now has 46,000 followers and that's a pleasant surprise. I did not expect such a huge following on a non-mainstream social media platform. Even our BlueSky account is nearing the 10,000 mark.
Our Telegram channel has over 11,000 members now. Our group chat could still not be restored, so it's pretty much one-way communication here.
We started posting on Facebook again as some of our regulars are active there. And we saw gradual improvements in engagement as well as followers count.
The FOSS Weekly newsletter now has over 30,000 subscribers but only around 600 Plus members. More than 300 of them are lifetime Plus members. Perhaps you would like to join the lifetime membership, get free ebooks and support us at the same time?
Abhishek Prakash
❤️ With love
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Enjoy FOSS 😄
