Table of contents for February 2025 in Linux Format

Google’s Android operating system has had great success, with around 70% of smartphones using it worldwide. ChromeOS, on the other hand, only accounts for around 2.5% of the market. Google has sold millions of Chromebooks but the company has struggled to break into the high-end tablet market. Roughly one in three owners use iPads. Android Authority claims Google wants to narrow this gap by fully migrating ChromeOS to Android. The website claims this information comes from an inside source and is in contrast to previous rumours that ChromeOS and Android would be fused into a single, new OS. This also would go beyond Google’s announcement in June 2024 that ChromeOS would start using large portions of Android’s tech stack to better integrate AI features. Since then, Google has also confirmed…

Mozilla’s T. rex design is no more. Working with the community and branding firm Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR), the non-profit has overhauled its brand. Chief among the changes is an ASCII art-style logo in the shape of a flag. The new brand identity also includes the bespoke typefaces Mozilla Semi-Slab and Mozilla Sans. The ‘Moz://a’ wordmark has been abandoned. Reactions from the online community have been mixed, with some users pointing out that it would have been better to tie in the rebrand with a new release – of Firefox, for example.…

Reasonably expensive Thank you for your hard work. Your magazine has helped me teach myself. You let us know about a price rise – I would pay eight quid. Mind you, I’m a doctor! How about an article focusing on Jupiter Broadcasting with its “value for value” model? I bet loads of your readers listen to it. I pay about seven quid a month for membership.  Keith Neil says… Are we giving away advertising now? It seems so, but thanks for the vote of confidence. More secure Thank you for your Linux Basics article covering Linux System Security in LXF321, which I read with interest, especially in light of Jay Hawkins’s letter in the same issue expressing their problems with Linux security and adding extra hard drives. It’s usual for…

We’ve been left nonplussed by recent CPU launches from Intel and AMD, but now the good times can roll as AMD’s £490 Ryzen 7 9800X3D comes with eight cores and a new version of the company’s game-boosting 3D V-Cache tech that delivers impressive performance, taking the throne as the fastest gaming processor on the market in convincing fashion. Naturally, the gains vary by title due to the vagaries of the 3D V-Cache tech, with the odd title showing little advantage, so your mileage will vary. The 3D V-Cache technology uses a beefy, vertically stacked 64MB L3 cache chiplet to boost gaming performance. AMD has moved this to the bottom, yielding substantially higher thermal headroom and higher clock rates. Meanwhile, Intel seems unable to counter AMD’s 3D V-Cache tech even after…

At LXF, we have a soft spot for Linux distros that are created mainly by one developer. Since 2022, Anderson Marques has been building versions of this OS, based on the latest release of Kubuntu. As the name suggests, the primary target market for Br OS is Brazil. The project website is in Portuguese but Google Translate ably allowed us to download the 4GB ISO. The same page also lists the system requirements, which are similar to Kubuntu’s. The project documentation is very thin on the ground, beyond a basic overview of the distro and an invitation to anyone who gets stuck to read Kubuntu support pages. There are also links to the developer’s Facebook page and Telegram channel. From reading reviews on DistroWatch, Anderson is very approachable and happy…

Everyone realises that today’s computers are the result of many years of development and that the first computers were remarkably primitive by comparison. And, over the years, we’ve looked at several of these old computers that were influential in one way or another. Somewhat less obvious, perhaps, is how computer peripherals have changed over the decades. Yet in some cases, peripherals of yore have just ceased to exist. This was the case, for example, with VDUs, otherwise known as display terminals, which we looked at a few months ago. With the replacement of minicomputers by personal computers, there was no need for VDUs. Here we’re looking at another peripheral that dates back to the early days of computing. And it’s true that newer technologies have pretty much replaced them. Yet,…

If you’ve got the desk space, a full-size gaming keyboard is totally worth it. The BlackWidow V4 Pro is Razer’s premium full-size wired gaming keyboard and it’s decked out with eight dedicated macro keys/buttons, a tactile multi-function Command Dial, and bright, immersive backlighting and underglow that extends to the included wrist rest. It is on the larger side – and it comes with a detachable wrist rest, so the full setup takes up even more space. The wrist rest is plush, padded leatherette that attaches magnetically to the keyboard and extends the underglow via a five-pin connection point. It features an aluminium alloy top plate over a plastic chassis and ABS keycaps, with machined metal media keys and a textured volume roller. The BlackWidow V4 Pro is not hot-swappable, and…

The MK770 comes in two colourways: Space Gray and Macaron, which is a unique pastel mix of mint green, light pink and pale yellow. It features a sturdy plastic chassis, with one set of flip-out feet for angle adjustment, and double-shot PBT keycaps with shine-through legends. It’s not quite as sleek as the ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless (see page 70), with a slightly larger, bulkier chassis that measures 380.9x140.4x38.7mm, but it is still pretty economical, space-wise. The MK770 comes with Kailh Box V2 switches in Red (linear), Brown (tactile) or White (clicky). We reviewed it with the White switches, which require 45g to actuate (50g to bottom out), and have an actuation point of 1.8mm, with 3.6mm total travel. The keyboard features a gasket mount design, which adds…

Now that it’s dropped in price, the Mountain Everest 60 is the best budget gaming keyboard. Our previous pick, the G.Skill KM250 RGB, is slightly cheaper than the Everest 60, but the G.Skill doesn’t make much sense with the Everest 60 being a much better overall keyboard. The Everest isn’t just a small and wallet-friendly board, it’s also incredibly practical, primarily because it’s modular. Buy an attachable numpad and you can snap it into place on either side of the keyboard, which is more handy than many like to admit. Typing in long numbers is much easier with a numpad, and alt-codes require one, too. This also lets you move your numpad to the lefthand side of the keyboard, which many would say is the way God intended At least…

AMD and Intel have traditionally released new processors every year, often with the biggest updates arriving for autumn. 2024 continued that trend, but there are new processors and there are new processors. In what has become mostly a two-year cadence, both AMD and Intel have major architectural overhauls going on, promising bigger changes than the off-year refreshes. It’s not just about desktop CPUs, either. As another sign of the times, where mobile solutions continue to outsell desktop parts, both companies have laptop-centric designs coming out. Intel even leads off with its mobile-focused Lunar Lake architecture, which has some important differences from the upcoming desktop-centric Arrow Lake designs that we’ll cover here. AMD likewise has its Granite Ridge line of CPUs that target desktops, with Strix Point processors going after the mobile…

Version: 1.26.14 Web: https://veracrypt.fr/en/ There was a time when keeping your data under a username and password was considered good enough protection. These days, however, the only pragmatic approach to keeping your personal data to yourself is to encrypt it. VeraCrypt is a fork of the popular TrueCrypt app that you can use to create encrypted silos within your filesystem or even encrypt an entire partition. To install VeraCrypt, first grab the setup tarball from its website and extract it with bunzip2 veracrypt-1.26.14-setup.tar.bz2. This will extract a bunch of installers for both 32-bit and 64-bit machines. Type. /veracrypt-1.26.14-setup-gui-x64 to launch the 64-bit installer. You’ll have to scroll through and agree to the app’s terms before VeraCrypt anchors itself to your distro. The app has an approachable interface. Click Create Volume…

Version: 16.0.1 Web: https://github.com/topgrade-rs/topgrade The Topgrade utility was first unveiled in 2018 and offered to upgrade all the different apps and utilities installed on your machine, irrespective of their installation mediums. So, instead of manually updating your Rust, Flatpak and Snap packages, and ones installed using the default software management tool on your distro, the one utility could upgrade all of them. This godsend shuttered its doors in 2022, but was forked and lives on as Topgrade-rs. This Rust utility requires a recent release of Rust, so uninstall Rust and Cargo if you already have them installed on your system, especially if you installed them from your distribution’s software repositories. You also need to install OpenSSL, Git and pkg-config. These can be installed from the software repositories on your distro.…

Version: 1.7.1 Web: https://linux-gaming.ru While Wine remains one of the most popular ways to do so, there are several solutions for running Windows games on Linux. Many of these solutions, such as Valve’s Proton project, build on Wine, or a patched version of it, and provide a more user-friendly approach. PortProton is a fork of Valve’s Proton project, and strives to provide a very easy and straightforward means to install and run Windows games on Linux. PortProton offers an intuitive and user-friendly interface that lets you install games, configure Wine, and perform an assortment of operations with only a few clicks. You won’t find it in the software repositories of desktop distros, and you’d be hard-pressed to find English language documentation about it. This offers the opportunity for you to…

In 1978, Taito released Space Invaders. The game represented the fruits of over a year of hard work by Tomohiro Nishikado, who created both the game and custom hardware to run it. The game went on to resounding success, earning its developers billions and spawning a number of clones. To this day, the symbol of one of its pixellated aliens is synonymous with video game culture. It’s unsurprising, therefore, that a Cosmic Invaders clone of the game appeared in the Giant Book of Games for Your BBC Micro in 1984. This is the basis for this four-part series, in which you will learn how to code your own Space Invaders clone using BBC Basic. Much has changed in the last 40 years in computing but Basic remains a flexible and…

Intel’s original Arc series of discrete graphics cards, code-named Alchemist, debuted in 2022 to mixed reviews. While it garnered praise for its priceto-performance ratio, the A750 drew more power relative to other mid-range cards. The latest B series, Battlemage, has now been announced, with open source graphics drivers for Linux. Both cards deploy Intel’s Xe2 architecture, like the integrated graphics used in the manufacturer’s Lunar Lake series. They also use a PCIe 4.0 interface and have three DisplayPort 2.1 and one HDMI 2.1 outputs. The more powerful Arc B580 features 20 Xe cores, 20 ray-tracing units, 160 XMX AI engines and 12GB of GDDR6 memory with a 192-bit memory interface. It’s aimed at the budget gaming market with an RRP of $249. The Arch B570 has 18 Xe-cores and raytracing…

A lthough 2025 is upon us, there’s still a number of Linux users who run x86 32-bit kernels/32-bit OS software on x86_64 processors. To this end, Linux developer Arnd Bergmann and others have released a series of patches that are devoted to cleaning up the x86 32-bit kernel code. When publishing the patches, Bergmann explained that while he agreed with running 32-bit kernels on 64-bit hardware, this should only support features available on 32-bit hardware. This did not sit well with Linus Torvalds. In response to one of the patches, which reworks the CPU compiler flags in the x86 Kconfig bits, he stated: “There is a very real model for microarchitectural features, and it’s the CPUID bits. Trying to linearise those bits is technically wrong, since these things simply aren’t…

As the home of both Linux and open source, we at LXF keep a weather eye on developments in the BSD camp. GhostBSD was first released in 2010, presenting itself as a more user-friendly alternative to FreeBSD, on which it’s based. The official ISO is 2.6GB and uses the MATE desktop, though there’s also a community image running Xfce. Whichever version you choose, downloads are available both via BitTorrent and directly from the website. After firing up the MATE version we were slightly puzzled by the notification that GhostBSD intended to ‘Replicate [the] system image to swap-based memdisk’. After reviewing the download page, we realised this is because when the OS boots, it loads directly into virtual memory. This is also why you need to have at least 4GB of…

We’ve been keen to do an in-depth review of this awesome pentesting distro since 2022. Unfortunately, just as we were poised to do an exposé on BackBox 8, Nate had to move country, so with apologies to readers, we are now poised to delve into its successor. BackBox stands out because, unlike other security-focused distros, such as Kali and Parrot OS, it’s based on the latest LTS release of Ubuntu. This explains version 9’s code name Noble Numbat. The distro also uses the ultralightweight Xfce desktop, but this isn’t reflected in the ISO, which is over 6GB. On the plus side, users can download both directly and via BitTorrent from the main site. There are also four different mirrors. Another point in this distro’s favour is that the system requirements…

There’s no denying that the field of AI is moving fast. Only eight years ago we were thoroughly impressed (and go aficionados were utterly in awe) when DeepMind (now a subsidiary of Google) demonstrated its AlphaGo program. It managed to destroy world-class players of the board game go (which from a game theory standpoint is several orders of magnitude more complex than chess). Computers playing (and being amazingly good at) board games is nothing new – the Stockfish engine has been better than human opponents at chess for many years. Indeed, if we go back a little further, we can see that what we considered to be artificial intelligence has changed radically. For example, the baddies in Doom (1993), Quake (1996) and both Half-Life games (1998 and 2004) were all…

The GPT in ChatGPT stands for generative pretrained transformer, which, depending on your experience, might not be a particularly helpful expansion. Be that as it may, many of the fancy AI models (not just LLMs) are in fact GPTs – pretty much anything that generates something based on a prompt (or other input) and a mahoosive training data set. At the crux of these is the notion of a transformer. While not quite robots in disguise, transformers, a type of deep learning neural network, are critical to modern AI. The idea of a transformer architecture was introduced in a breakthrough paper in 2017. Their key feature was the ability to process all words in a sentence (or, more generally, elements in a sequence) at once, rather than sequentially. This makes…

Email may not be fashionable, but it is essential. If you’re relying on a browser tab to access your email, you’re missing a trick. Installing a standalone client gives you access to all kinds of useful extras, from improved organisational tools to features you may not find elsewhere, including encrypting and signing sensitive emails for added privacy and security. When it comes to email, there’s one open source tool that everyone knows about: Mozilla’s Thunderbird. It may not have received the same level of care and attention compared to its big browser sibling Firefox, but having clung on to life by the skin of its teeth, the email client recently celebrated its 20th anniversary having been given some proper love (and resources). In this tutorial, we’ll take a closer look…

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Credit: https://openrgb.org If you’re weren’t aware, the keyboard world (yes, there is one) has gone a bit crazy over the last decade or so, with mechanical keyboards making a big comeback (“Did they ever go away?” you cry) and then people going mad building their own keyboards almost from scratch – the online pages written about mechanisms would fill a book. While we’re not going into the intricacies of that sort of activity – write in and let us know if you want a build-your-own keyboard feature – we thought it would be good to take some time to explain the different commercial keyboard offerings out there, along with taking advantage of at least one key feature: RGB lighting. Again, we’re not going into the full depths of PC RGB…

The Lemokey L3 is the first gaming keyboard from Keychron’s spin-off brand, and it’s a pretty impressive offering – especially if you’re looking for a gaming keyboard that you’ll also love typing on. The L3 is a wireless mechanical gasket mount keyboard with a hot-swappable PCB and a compact (but not too compact) TKL layout. It comes in both fully-assembled and bare-bones versions in three colour variations (carbon black, navy blue or space silver). The fully-assembled version comes with your choice of Gateron Jupiter Red (linear), Gateron Jupiter Brown (tactile), or Gateron Jupiter Banana (tactile) switches. The L3 is definitely an enthusiast-focused gaming keyboard – it sports a very solid build, with a CNC-machined 6063 aluminium chassis that weighs a hefty 1,976g. This keyboard is on the larger side for…

If you’re looking for a budget option, you can’t get much cheaper than the Keychron C3 Pro, which officially retails for £37, but can often be found for less. It is a wired pre-built mechanical keyboard with a TKL layout (no number pad, full function row, and full navigation cluster), and a flexible, gasket mount design. It comes in one colour – black with red accents – and can be purchased with Keychron’s Red (linear) or Brown (tactile) mechanical switches. The keyboard is entirely plastic and features double-shot ABS keycaps with shine-through legends (and it comes with extra keycaps for those who dislike the red accents), and red backlighting. It comes with a detachable USB-C cable and a keycap/switch puller in the box. The C3 Pro offers a pleasant typing…

» Sweet Home 3D » Duplicati » VeraCrypt » ImageMagick » WhatSie » Topgrade-rs » Ark » KTuberling » PortProton » MuseScore LosslessCut Version: 7.5.2 Web: www.sweethome3d.com Before you get down to renovating your castle, wouldn’t it be best if you could visualise the changes? Sweet Home 3D is a nifty little app that you can use to map everything from a bathroom to an apartment or a multistorey mansion. To get started, download the app and uncompress it with tar zxvf SweetHome3D-*.tgz. Then switch to the extracted directory and run the app with. /SweetHome3D. The app’s interface looks like any other drawing app and is divided into four resizable panes. On the right you have the floor plan of the house. You draw the walls of your home using…

Version: 7.1.1-40 Web: https://imagemagick.org Image editing is a graphical process, but one of the best image-editing apps is a command-line tool. ImageMagick can create and edit I images in more ways than you can imagine. In fact, it does the grunt work behind several popular graphical image-editing apps. The project puts out binaries for RPM-based distros like Fedora, but there’s also a distro-agnostic AppImage. Just grab the AppImage, make it an executable with the chmod +x command or via the file manager, and you’re good to go. First up, use magick identify pizza_original.jpg to get all kinds of details about an image, including its format, dimensions, file size and more. One common use for the tool is to quickly convert images from one format to another. For instance, magick dish1.jpg…

Version: 24.08.3 Web: https://apps.kde.org/ark/ Atypical desktop user works with several different file archiving utilities for their myriad needs. After all, not every tool supports every archiving format, such as GZIP, TAR, BZIP2, 7ZIP, RAR and so on. While using CLI utilities to handle these file formats is possible, it requires remembering a number of command switches and options, which vary depending on the type of file you’re working with. If you’re more comfortable working with graphical tools, you are the intended target for the Ark utility. Although developed by the KDE project, you don’t have to install the entire desktop environment to work with this nifty utility. You can instead grab it from the Snap store or install it via Flathub. Run the sudo snap install ark command if your…

Version: 4.4.3 Web: https://musescore.org Advertised as cross-platform, free music notation and composition software, MuseScore is also the only one in its class, dedicated to a specialised art form and packed with features that you’d expect from a professional app. MuseScore integrates well into any desktop environment thanks to its Qt interface (which we really like) and allows easy note entry on a virtual note sheet, with an integrated sequencer for immediate playback of the score. The developers have assumed that many people don’t have any idea how to read notes or how to write them, and have supplied extensive docs. The original version 4 release was back in 2022 after a year’s delay and a shift to GPLv3. It featured a completely new interface, and a total overhaul of the…

In the Getting Started With Xapian boxout (see page 96), we indexed one of the CSV files I and that generated files in the db folder. We’ll come back to that shortly but let’s explain some of the Xapian concepts. A database holds the details of things you want to search. It’s not a relational database but a specially formatted disk file. To add a document to a database is called indexing, and that’s what we did in the Getting Started box. First some Xapian concepts When you search the database, it returns a list of documents. Document here just means an item returned from a search. Documents are not fixed in size; it might be arbitrary text, a web page or a small paragraph – it’s just whatever you…

THIS ISSUE: Valve to open up? » Shiny new Chrome » Torvalds’s tirade » Future Flathub fees » Mozilla makeover Valve’s recent update to its branding guidelines has sparked online speculation about whether the company plans to release SteamOS 3 on other devices beside the Steam Deck. Although there have been statements to this effect, so far the OS remains on the handheld console. The branding guidelines were last updated in 2017. The new logos include one that is specifically labelled “Steam VR”. This could indicate that the first use of the revitalised branding will be on Steam’s long-awaited Deckard standalone VR headset. The guidelines also have a specific section for third parties, stating that the logo should feature less prominently on the product packaging than that of the vendor.…

In early 2023, a proposal appeared on the GitHub page of the Plaintext Group. It outlined how the Gnome Foundation had worked to add donations and payments via Stripe. However, despite Flathub’s popularity, this was never developed into a viable payment system. In December 2024, Flathub representative Robert McQueen posted another proposal, stating that the Gnome Foundation is seeking a program manager. The job description included launching payment and donation systems for applications and Flathub itself. Reaction from developers has been positive, because currently creators can’t directly sell their programs via the platform.…

Q Bits of music I ripped all my CDs into 128kb/s MP3s, using Audiograbber on a Windows laptop at the time. I’ve since ripped some of my most listened to albums in 320kb/s and now I’m seeing the benefits of FLAC. I am trying to find out which CDs need to be ripped again in 320 and FLAC. All my ripped CDs are in their respective folders and then in a base folder called Music. I am looking for a way to write a script that will get the bitrate from the MP3 and echo it to the screen, which I can then echo to a file. Ideally I will run it once and it will recursively go into each folder and check for MP3s and add them to the…

» As a big thank you for subscribing to Linux Format Print Edition, we’ve always offered digital access to past issues. It seems The Management thought it was a good idea and has rolled out a new system using Pocketmags ! This means there are now two ways of accessing LXF back issues for subscribers. The new Pocketmags service goes back to March 2014, including over 140 full issues, while our older PDF archive goes back to LXF66 (a crazy 8-bit busting 256-plus issues), though issues before LXF120 have had covers and ads stripped. We’ve outlined how to access both below. Enjoy! * Terms and conditions apply – see page 17 for full details. on page 16 FANCY NEW POCKETMAGS 1 Activate your access Head to www.magazinesdirect.com/digital-instructions/ and click the…

The GitHub project page for Tucana describes it as “an ultra customisable distro built entirely from scratch”. The OS follows a semi-stable partially rolling release model. In practice, this seems to be that new releases are made every January and July. Tucana Linux is designed for operations such as patching the kernel, hosting repositories and building custom ISOs. If this is starting to sound familiar, it should be no surprise that lead developer Rahul Chandra is one of the maintainers of Linux From Scratch. This said, Tucana differs from LFS in some important ways. For starters, you can download a 2.6GB ISO to boot into a live environment. After loading the default KDE Plasma 6 desktop with a highly-artistic background, we fired up the Calamares installer. We were impressed to…

ChatGPT » Claude » HuggingChat » Microsoft Copilot » Google Gemini Artificial intelligence (AI) is the hot topic in technology these days, and bit by bit, it’s becoming a part of our daily lives. AI chat is one of the most prominent and easily graspable applications for AI, and it has the potential to be incredibly useful. It can answer questions in a more detailed and tailored fashion than a conventional web search, but beyond simple research, it can teach us new skills. Try asking one of the services about the best game programming languages for beginners. Then ask it to elaborate with some example code, and you’ll be amazed at what these AI chat systems can do. AI chat services also give easy access to generative AI. That’s when…

We mentioned the Stockfish chess engine on the previous page (it’s open source, too – check it out at https://stockfishchess.org). Stockfish has a huge database of positions, and each is assigned a weight based on whether it favours white or black. Modern CPUs can then calculate the game tree several moves in advance and choose the ‘best’ move recursively. This approach doesn’t work for go, because the search space is so massive. So, classical go engines are still only at the intermediate level. DeepMind’s AlphaGo uses a neural network-based approach. The program initially had no knowledge of the rules of the game and was first trained on moves from several thousand amateur games. Then, once it had a handle on how humans play, it played against several different versions of…

Lhe Linux-based Steam Deck has revolutionised PC gaming with a consolelike experience in handheld form. Valve has been promising to release SteamOS for general PCs – beyond just the Deck – for ages now, but some folks have got tired of waiting and have decided to take matters into their own hands. Whether you can’t afford a Steam Deck or you just want SteamOS on another device, maybe one of these SteamOS imitators is just what you’re looking for. There’s a number of competing gaming distros now, several of which are SteamOS imitations. Right now, your choices are HoloISO, ChimeraOS and Bazzite. All three are worthy of your attention but we have chosen Bazzite because it supports the broadest range of hardware and form factors. Unlike HoloISO and ChimeraOS, which attempt…

Firefox is one of the best browsers around. It’s hardly surprising that it’s a solid, reliable application as it’s 20 years old this year, with a legacy that stretches back to even earlier browsers, such as Netscape. If we were to make a criticism of Firefox, though, it would be that it’s a bit conservative compared to some of the competition. Ticking off the features, browsers such as Brave and Opera and even Chrome have gotten ahead of Firefox when it comes to modern, useful innovations. So, that’s what we’re going to do – we’re going to add the cream of those more modern features to Firefox. What we’re focusing on is genuinely useful add-ons that improve usability and security. We’re going to add things such as VPN and AI…

The ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless is an excellent option for gaming, typing and everything in between. It’s well built and feels fantastic. It has plenty of keys (including a 10-key number pad) but it won’t take up too much of your desk space, plus it’s wireless, with tri-mode connectivity, and a whopping 1,500 hours of battery life (over 2.4GHz wireless, with the lighting turned off). The ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless has a 96% layout – which is like a full-size layout, minus a handful of keys (and squashed together). While the layout does take some getting used to if you’re coming from a full-size keyboard, once you get the hang of it, it’s the best of both worlds: a practically full-size keyboard with a 10-key number…

Fewer keys means a much smaller footprint, perfect for those who want to angle their keyboards, have a smaller desk, or need something to travel with. But fewer keys also means you need robust customisation options, which is why the Apex Pro Mini Wireless is our favourite ultra-compact gaming keyboard. It’s is a sleek, sturdily built 60% keyboard featuring SteelSeries’s OmniPoint 2.0 HyperMagnetic switches. At launch, these were called OmniPoint 2.0 optical switches but SteelSeries rebranded them as HyperMagnetic to tag on to the trend of magnetic switches – they’re the same switches and, like other magnetic switches, have adjustable actuation points. But SteelSeries pushed out a firmware update that unlocked a wider actuation range and added a Rapid Trigger option. The Apex Pro Mini Wireless features an aluminium alloy…

The mechanical keyboard hobby can be very expensive – but it doesn’t have to be. The Nuphy Halo75 V2 is a wireless pre-built mechanical keyboard with a 75% layout that offers a fantastic, enthusiast-level typing experience out of the box – and it retails for just £100. The Halo75 V2 is the second iteration of Nuphy’s full-height 75% mechanical keyboard, and it comes in five colours: ionic white, obsidian black, mojito (pale green), blue lagoon and sakura fizz (light pink). Each colour comes with matching double-shot PBT keycaps in an mSA profile and your choice of switch (Nuphy Mint, Nuphy Lemon, Nuphy Raspberry or Cherry MX Silent Red) installed; the keyboard also has a hot-swappable PCB so you can easily swap in switches of your choice. It has a sturdy,…

Version: 2.0.81 Web: https://duplicati.com Duplicati is a dexterous backup app that you can use on the desktop to back up your personal files, as well as a bunch of computers over the network. The project produces precompiled binaries for both Debian and Fedora-based distros. Grab the one for your distro and double-click to install it using your distro’s software management tools. Then follow its clear documentation to run through the rest of the process to anchor the app. When it’s installed, fire up a web browser and head to localhost:8200 to bring up the app. The browser-based interface is clean and intuitive, and can be locked with a password if you share the machine with other users. To get started click Add Backup, which launches a five-step wizard to help…

Version: 4.16.3 Web: https://github.com/keshavbhatt/whatsie Useful as it is, WhatsApp’s web client is severely limited in the features it offers. Released under the MIT Licence, WhatSie is a Qt-based desktop client for WhatsApp that boasts of a number of useful features such as app lock, keyboard shortcuts, spellchecker, dark mode, and much more. The project’s GitHub page lists the packages you need to install WhatSie, along with step-by-step instructions. However, if your system is configured for Snap packages, you can run the sudo snap install whatsie command to install the latest release. You can also install WhatSie through Flatpak with the flatpak install flathub com.ktechpit.whatsie command. For some reason, the Flatpak package isn’t mentioned on the GitHub page, even though it’s an official release and regularly updated. When you first launch…

Version: 24.08.3 Web: https://apps.kde.org/ktuberling Although it might seem a little too simplistic, KTuberling is a constructor game that can A provide hours of fun and excitement for youngsters and adults alike. Back in the day, you had to install an entire desktop environment before you could work with an app or game designed for that specific desktop environment. Thankfully, modern software packaging solutions have rendered the exercise moot. You can install KTuberling without having to install KDE first. Run the flatpak install flathub org.kde.ktuberling command to install the game on your machine. You can now launch it by clicking Menu > Games > KTuberling. The oldest iteration of the game that we can recall featured a potato guy that you could dress up with different hats, eyebrows, eyes, clothes, shoes…

Version: 3.64.0 Web: https://losslesscut.app Ever-improving mobile phone cameras have turned everyone into movie-capturing enthusiasts. Everything from your baby’s first steps to retirement parties and family reunions can be quickly captured and stored for posterity. Social media platforms have made sharing such videos an even breezier affair. But do you really want to share your raw footage with the world? Wouldn’t it be great if you could cut out the audio, replace it with something else, remove specific parts from clips, or stitch several clips together to create a video masterpiece? Using FFmpeg to perform all the video-editing operations, LosslessCut bills itself as the Swiss army knife of lossless video/audio editing. You can run the sudo snap install losslesscut command to install the latest release as a Snap package, or download…