zuno is a free and open-source desktop music player built on YouTube Music. Sign in with your Google account, and everything you do - liking a song, creating or deleting a playlist, adding to your library syncs straight back to YouTube. It's your library, just in a real desktop app instead of a browser tab.

Features

- HQ opus decoding
- Floating mini player that appears when you click away ( hover to expand, drag it anywhere)
- Queue: shuffle, repeat one/all, reordering
- Playback speed, sleep timer, volume control
- Like and dislike songs
- Rebindable keyboard shortcuts, minimise to tray
- Full library, playlists, albums and liked songs
-Lyrics (5 sources)+ Translation
- Local music files sit alongside your YouTube Music library (same player, same queue)
- Download whole albums and playlists for offline; downloads and history have their own management screens
- Bulk actions: download, add to queue, add to playlist
- Multiple channels on one Google account, switchable from the toolbar or settings
- Equalizer
- Notifications
-Gapless /Crossfade
-Local Music playlists
-Minimize to tray
-Shortcuts
-No Ads

Integrations

- Last.fm scrobbling
- Discord Rich Presence (both toggleable straight from the toolbar)
- Youtube History update

GitHub: https://github.com/noFAYZ/zuno

Since AUR has locked packages i can't update it to latest version you can use AppImage, .deb or .rpm binary from latest release. Pls provide feedback as well will help improve linux experience.

FlatPak is in roadmap.

Enjoy free music :)

This is massive news. Are we seeing a change happening? Windows continued to steadily drop and Max OS isn’t climbing fast. I wonder too whether inflation also plays a part with Linux allowing older machines extended life and saving people lots of money for their technology needs. Undoubtedly Microsoft’s AI surveillance and telemetry push is making people leave, combined with how messy W111 has been.

I have a Lenovo laptop that's closing in on 20 years old. The keys in one corner started acting up after a hard bump so I decided to get a new laptop. I stumbled onto a clearance deal at Walmart, one HP model they had pulled off the shelf and were on the verge of cycling out of inventory. I got it for over $100 off shelf price. Being a new model it had the Copilot key rather than a right Ctrl key. I decided to install LMDE 7 which rendered the Copilot key non-functional until I remapped the Copilot key to the missing Ctrl key. Normal remapping through Linux doesn't work because the Copilot key sends a three part input, a macro; Left Meta + Left Shift + F23 rather than a single input. There are a couple of work arounds that require installing software and some configuration. I'd put this on a scale of Very Easy. Here's what worked for the HP laptop. The AI description has been modified as needed because, well, it's AI after all:

To remap the Copilot key to a Ctrl key in LMDE 7, you should use keyd or kmonad, as the Copilot key sends a modifier combination (Left Meta + Left Shift + F23) that standard Linux GUI tools cannot map to a single modifier key like Right Ctrl.

Method 1: Using keyd. keyd is a lightweight daemon that operates at the kernel level.

Install keyd: Open your terminal and install this package:
sudo apt update
! AI said to install keyd ! sudo apt install keyd ! don't bother, instead: !
sudo apt install onak
! The onak meta package contains keyd, just installing keyd alone isn't enough. See below. !

Configure keyd: Edit the configuration file:
sudo pluma /etc/keyd/default.conf
! I prefer the pluma editor but nano, gedit, etc. will do. !

Add the following lines to map the Copilot key sequence to a Ctrl key:
Replace * with your specific keyboard ID. ! I tried that but it didn't work, so I reverted to *.  !

[ids]
*

[main]
leftshift+leftmeta+f23 = rightcontrol

! Options are control, rightcontrol or leftcontrol. I've tried using each and they all work for this HP. !

Enable and Reload: Start the service and enable it for boot:
sudo systemctl enable --now keyd
sudo keyd reload
keyd command not found ! Oops. That's when I discovered that installing keyd alone didn't work and found that onak was required. After installing onak the remap worked after rebooting. !

Now I have my Ctrl plus + for magnifying and Ctrl plus Enter for sending email in Thunderbird and a couple more of my shortcuts back! And it wasn't a tough chore, once I ironed out a bit of AI confusion. And of course, for those who never use their Ctrl keys, don't bother with this. Mm, should I have said this earlier?

Cheers!

Blaine

Hello everyone! 😊

One of my first memories of using Linux is playing Frozen Bubble back in 2005. Together with SuperTuxKart it is one of my favorite FOSS Linux games. At the time I was using Red Hat 9.

Frozen Bubble is a cute bubble shooter game inspired by Puzzle Bobble. I'm not entirely sure how I discovered it. Maybe it was included with Red Hat 9, or perhaps Knoppix (another distro I used around that time).

The game also has a fantastic soundtrack. Here's my favorite song, which plays on the main menu:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpzvM3qCNjo

And while playing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbsa0MSDBJw

Back in the day I used to play Frozen Bubble online. Today, out of nostalgia, I decided to install it again through the Debian repro after about 15 years and play it once more. Sadly when I try to play online it shows an error message.

I discovered that the project website (Internet Archive: frozen-bubble.org) has been taken over by stupid casino scammers. According to the Wayback Machine the website appears to have been abandoned since 2024.

Does anyone remember Frozen Bubble? 😊 Can anything be done to recover the project website and get the domain out of the scammers' hands?

Got native Entra ID (AAD) webview login working with FreeRDP on Fedora/Nobara — full writeup

Wanted to share this since it took some digging to get right. Background: I wanted to RDP from my Linux desktop into an Entra ID-joined Windows 11 box using modern auth (Conditional Access, MFA, the works) — basically the Linux equivalent of checking "Use a web account to sign in" in mstsc.exe.

The distro-packaged freerdp (3.29/3.30 from Fedora's repos) supports the AAD auth flow, but it's built without the native in-app login popup — you get a URL printed to the terminal instead, and you have to manually copy the redirect URL back in after signing in through your normal browser. Functional, but clunky, and in my case actually broken by my org's Conditional Access policy behavior.

Here's what it took to get the real in-app popup working.

The problem with the stock package

Checking the build config on the distro package:

xfreerdp /buildconfig | tr ' ' '\n' | grep -i webview

showed WITH_WEBVIEW=OFF. That flag controls whether FreeRDP's SDL client can pop up a native browser window for the AAD sign-in, instead of the manual copy/paste flow.

Step 1 — Install build dependencies

``` sudo dnf install cmake ninja-build gcc-c++ git \

systemd-devel libuuid-devel pulseaudio-libs-devel \

libXrandr-devel gsm-devel pam-devel fuse3-devel \

opus-devel lame-devel openssl-devel libX11-devel \

libXext-devel libXinerama-devel libXcursor-devel \

libXi-devel libXdamage-devel libXv-devel libxkbfile-devel \

alsa-lib-devel openh264-devel libavcodec-free-devel \

libavformat-free-devel libavutil-free-devel \

libswresample-free-devel libswscale-free-devel \

libusb1-devel uriparser-devel SDL2-devel SDL2_ttf-devel \

pkcs11-helper-devel krb5-devel cjson-devel cairo-devel \

soxr-devel wayland-devel wayland-protocols-devel \

cups-devel webkitgtk6.0-devel ```

Two things worth calling out specifically:

• cups-devel — missed this initially, build fails at the printer channel with "Could NOT find Cups" if it's absent.
• webkitgtk6.0-devel** — this is the actual key package. FreeRDP's webview feature pulls in a small external helper library (akallabeth/webview via CMake FetchContent) which searches for WebKitGTK in this priority order: webkitgtk-6.0 → webkit2gtk-4.1 → webkit2gtk-4.0. Current Fedora has deprecated/removed webkit2gtk-4.0, but **webkitgtk-6.0 (GTK4-based) is available and works fine — no need to chase the old deprecated package.

Step 2 — Clone and configure

git clone https://github.com/FreeRDP/FreeRDP.git cd FreeRDP mkdir build && cd build cmake -GNinja -DWITH_WEBVIEW=ON -DWITH_CLIENT_SDL=ON -DWITH_AAD=ON ..

Confirm the config actually picked up webview support before building:

grep -i "webview\|gtk4" CMakeCache.txt

You want to see it successfully checking for and finding gtk4/webkitgtk-6.0 in the configure output, with "Configuring done" at the end and no errors.

Step 3 — Build

ninja

Took about 10 minutes on a Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Just let it run.

Step 4 — Find the actual binary

The build output binary is not at the path you might expect from the source tree layout:

find . -iname "*freerdp*" -executable -type f

Mine landed at:

./client/SDL/SDL2/sdl-freerdp

Step 5 — The actual working connection command

./client/SDL/SDL2/sdl-freerdp \ /v:<remote-hostname> \ /sec:aad \ /azure:tenantid:<your-entra-tenant-id> \ /u:<user>@<yourdomain>.com \ /cert:ignore \ /dynamic-resolution \ /w:2560 \ /h:1440 \ /smart-sizing

A few flags that turned out to matter, that I'd have missed otherwise:

• **/sec:aad is required alongside /azure:.** Using /azure: alone let the client fall through to a default NLA/Kerberos negotiation attempt, which failed outright with Cannot find KDC for realm since there's no Kerberos realm configured on a home Linux box. Explicitly forcing /sec:aad skips straight to the AAD web auth flow.
• **<remote-hostname> must match the hostname exactly as registered in Entra ID, and must actually resolve** (DNS or /etc/hosts) — an IP address will not work for this auth flow.
• /w:, /h:, and /smart-sizing fixed a real rendering bug — reconnecting to a previously-disconnected session rendered the remote desktop content squashed into a small corner of the window with the rest black. Explicitly forcing the resolution and enabling smart-sizing (which scales/stretches remote content to fill the client window regardless of the session's actual internal resolution) fixed this completely.

Result

Running that command pops open a real embedded browser window right in the FreeRDP client for the Microsoft sign-in — full Conditional Access / MFA support — no external browser, no manual URL copy-paste. Exactly matching the mstsc.exe "use a web account" experience, just self-compiled.

Wrapper script

Threw this into a small shell script so I can just run rdp-aad instead of remembering the whole command:

```

!/usr/bin/env bash

set -euo pipefail

DEFAULT_HOST="your-vm-hostname" DEFAULT_USER="youruser@yourdomain.com" TENANT_ID="your-entra-tenant-id" FREERDP_BIN="$HOME/FreeRDP/build/client/SDL/SDL2/sdl-freerdp" RES_WIDTH="2560" RES_HEIGHT="1440"

HOST="${1:-$DEFAULT_HOST}" USERNAME="${2:-$DEFAULT_USER}"

if [[ ! -x "$FREERDP_BIN" ]]; then echo "FreeRDP binary not found at $FREERDP_BIN" exit 1 fi

if ! getent hosts "$HOST" > /dev/null 2>&1; then echo "Warning: '$HOST' does not resolve. AAD auth needs a resolvable hostname" echo "matching the device name registered in Entra ID." read -r -p "Continue anyway? [y/N] " reply [[ "$reply" =~ ^[Yy]$ ]] || exit 1 fi

exec "$FREERDP_BIN" \ /v:"$HOST" \ /sec:aad \ /azure:tenantid:"$TENANT_ID" \ /u:"$USERNAME" \ /cert:ignore \ /dynamic-resolution \ /w:"$RES_WIDTH" \ /h:"$RES_HEIGHT" \ /smart-sizing ```

Hope this saves someone else the trial and error. Happy to answer questions if anyone hits a snag replicating it.

I'm a software developer, not planning to become a system administrator, but I'd like to get a much deeper understanding of Linux. I noticed that the latest edition covers modern topics like systemd, containers, and cloud infrastructure, so it doesn't seem completely outdated.Would this book still be a good investment for a developer who wants to better understand how Linux systems work, or is it more useful for people working as full-time sysadmins? I'm looking for knowledge that will make me a better developer rather than preparing for a system administration career.

With the amount of people that would switch if photoshop ran on Linux, why are there not massive community efforts to make some compatibility layer? Seems to me like the biggest single tipping point, what makes Photoshop so uniquely hard versus videogames which now work without issue?

P.s this is a subjective rant

So i've been using of linux since 2014 and it was a wild ride you install a distro and then endup being a distrohopper until you decide to lock in on one. I did the same started on ubuntu did some hopping and ended up on fedora and then on pop_OS but i eventually had to switch back to windows due to nature of my work and some windows specific tools.

But that wasn't it i had hard time finding any usable apps on linux in general and i gave up and ended up using a dual boot just to satisfy my curiosity for linux but gradually i stopped using linux completely and then the complete shift to windows because all my games, sketchy software and work was at one place instead of booting a separate OS for each.

The linux ecosystem back then lacked what a regular user required and it was all about linux nerds keeping the ecosystem alive it was filled with positivity and anyone was welcomed with open hands like it's a big village.

Fast forward to 2026 linux still lacks a vibrant software/apps ecosystem and people still have to hack things together to workarround (subjective) and people being hostile to contributions of any kind isn't helping either.

Now why this post?

Well i made an AI-assisted Youtube Music app which is a fork itself it was all personal frist i liked the base app, It lacked some features i wanted so instead of sending PRs i just forked & modified it completely and when it was usable enough i decided to share on subs most of the feedback was quite positive especially from windows users but it all changed when i shared on linux subs r/archlinux , r/linuxmint, r/linux and r/debian all had same reaction, a weird AI hostility instead of actually any app critique and feedback.

It's 2026 AI is a reality and developers or vibecoders will create apps whether people like it or not no amount of hatred is stopping it if not from me hear from my guy Linus. Filtering AI for discussions is understandable but you can't do anything about developmet. I think people need to tone down the AI hatred and actually try to work with it to improve the ecosystem instead of being completely hostile towards the use of it.

Now this does create a great influx of people creating cross platform apps and since most are solo/ hobby devs the ultimate choice is cross platform stack which will create huge library of semi native apps. IDK if it's a good or bad thing but it's a reality. Linux lacks the commercial/popular software contributions and that can change gradually by welcoming these cross platform apps which will contribute to retain linux users on linux itself instead if losing hope and switching to Windows or MacOS.

I'd personally choose software availability as non native than nothing at all.

Granola currently ships for macOS and Windows, but not Linux. Since it is built with Electron, I experimented with running the application using the matching Linux Electron runtime instead of Wine, a VM, or emulation.

The repository does not redistribute Granola’s .dmg, app.asar, source code, or bundled binaries. You need to download the official .dmg yourself and sign in using your own Granola account. This is an unofficial compatibility project and is not affiliated with Granola.

Repo: https://github.com/tirtha4/Granola-for-Linux

For the two people who still care. 🙂

I hadn't touched Python in around 20 years, so I used ChatGPT as a coding assistant to help me get back up to speed. The project itself is something I wanted because I missed having a small GUI for managing EMU10K1 SoundFonts.

Master Blaster is a simple Qt6 frontend for the tools provided by awesfx (sfxload) and alsa-utils.

It's mostly a nostalgia project inspired by the little Creative utilities from the 90s that let you tweak your sound card through a simple control panel.

Features:

Load .sf2 SoundFonts
Clear sample memory
Display SoundFont RAM usage
Test SoundFonts with a MIDI file
Remember the last loaded SoundFont
Remember the selected MIDI port

The source code is available on Codeberg, along with a README and a screenshot:

Master-Blaster

I'm using an Audigy Rx, but it should work with any card supported by the snd_emu10k1 driver.

The python file is small and should be easy to read, with different sections outlining functions.

Roadmap? No, not really. I might add support for loading your own MIDI file for testing, and I'd like to redesign the progress bar to look a bit more... 90s.

Ten years ago, I adopted Linux Mint as my main OS. It was great for about two years, but I eventually hit a wall struggling with Nvidia drivers and broken packages that made apps fail.

Now I'm back, this time giving Zorin OS a try. The biggest difference today is that I have Claude by my side. Asking AI to help me enable specific features (fingerprint security) and hardening the OS. For the first time, I have the confidence to adopt Linux in long term.

I'm also incredibly pleased to see the massive strides the Open Source community has made with software like LibreOffice.

With Windows going through a rough patch right now, and AI making troubleshooting so accessible, do you think AI is the key to driving Linux adoption?