AI crawlers are causing serious problems for open source projects, an example of disclosure by vagueposting, Zorin does something good and something bad, LibreOffice downloads are doing well, Thunderbird is planning new services, a quick KDE Korner, and more.

News

Open source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries

Wikimedia Foundation bemoans AI bot bandwidth burden

It might be a good time to temporarily uninstall atop

Panic averted: It was just a bug in Atop after all

Dash to Panel lives on, thanks to Zorin sponsorship

Zorin OS 17.3 takes Brave step of changing default browser

Stop using Brave Browser

Look Mum No Computer on Steam

LibreOffice downloads on the rise as users look to avoid subscription costs 

Firefox maker Mozilla prepares Gmail-like Thundermail

Thundermail and Thunderbird Pro Services

KDE Korner

Roadmap for a modern Plasma Login Manager

Akademy 2025

1Password Extended Access Management

Secure every app, device, and identity – even the unmanaged ones, at 1password.com/latenightlinux

Tailscale

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Joe accidentally tried vibe coding and it was as much of a disaster as you’d imagine. Amolith has also tried it, and does his best to defend the use of LLMs with development. Kevin and Andy are mostly bemused. We all have concerns about the ethics and environmental issues.

This episode has a bit more bad language than usual.

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The best way to cope with a huge spike in traffic on a product launch day, and the most important public and private cloud technologies to learn.

Send your questions and feedback to [email protected]

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Whether tech debt is inevitable and where the blame lies, how to properly organise ZFS datasets, and selectively managing updates.

Plugs

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ZFS Orchestration Tools – Part 2: Replication

SysCloud

Over 2,000 IT admins already trust SysCloud to protect their SaaS data. Head to SysCloud.com for a 30-day free trial—and for a limited time, use code 25ADMINS to get 50% off your first purchase.

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In this episode:

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What if Google hadn’t come along in the late 90s? What would search, mobile devices, and the web in general look like? Plus a musical discovery, and why moving to a new distro just means moving to new little problems to fix.

Discovery

Wilsonic MTS-ESP

Tailscale

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We look at postmarketOS on various devices old and new, Arm and x86, and are impressed.

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The key differences between throughput and latency – and when they matter, the tech that we’d keep if we stopped working in IT, and avoiding bitrot with rsync backups.

Plugs

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Core Infrastructure: Why You Need to Control Your NTP

Free consulting

We were asked about avoiding bitrot with rsync backups.

Parchive

SysCloud

Over 2,000 IT admins already trust SysCloud to protect their SaaS data. Head to SysCloud.com for a 30-day free trial—and for a limited time, use code 25ADMINS to get 50% off your first purchase.

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Home Assistant gets even more credible and sustainable, open source users are entitled, changes in KDE land, Fedora says hello to Plasma and goodbye to X11, Ubuntu looks to drop GNU coreutils, GIMP 3 is out and still has a terrible name, and new Pebble devices will be shipping soon.

News

Home Assistant officially Matters

Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28

Dash to Panel maintainer quits after failed donations drive 

Jonathan Riddell Stepping Down From KDE Plasma Release Management

Announcing Techpaladin Software

Fedora 42 Beta now available

Ubuntu 25.10 plans to swap GNU coreutils for Rust

Carefully But Purposefully Oxidising Ubuntu

GIMP 3.0 Released

The first new Pebble smartwatches are coming later this year

Tailscale

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Our advice on how to move into a career in software development including making and contributing to projects, advocating for your work, collaborating, avoiding exploitation, learning Git, and loads more.

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