MEET THE TEAM

The big news is that Linux gaming has leapfrogged Mac OS on Steam for the first time. Which classic game would you love to play again on your Linux PC?

Smarter Pi Guy

We’re not fighting the tide of the AI

LINUX FORMAT

The #1 open source mag

Linux kernel 6.5 ready to ship

The stable version of kernel 6.5 has a number of exciting updates, especially for Intel and AMD users.

Death of Bram Molenaar

The creator of Vim and other projects dies, aged 62.

GAME OVER!

Joe Brockmeier is head of community, Percona. “Sure,

NVK HAS LANDED

Faith Ekstrand is an engineering fellow at Collabora.

Happy birthday! Debian turns 30

And the Debian Project shows no sign of slowing down.

SUSE goes private

SUSE has plans to be taken private once again by owner EQT Partners.

LibreOffice 7.6 released

The Document Foundation releases another version of its powerful office suite.

Distro watch

What’s behind the free software sofa?

QUALITY CONTROL

Italo Vignoli is one of the LibreOffice and

PLUMB LINE

Jon Masters is a kernel hacker who’s been

Kernel Watch

Jon Masters keeps up with all the latest happenings in the Linux kernel, so you don’t have to.

Answers

Got a burning question about open source or the kernel? Whatever your level, email it to answers@linuxformat.com

Mailserver

WRITE TO US Do you have a burning

HotPicks

OnionShare Bulky Sweeper KDiskMark Min OnionMedia X Pwall Nostlan DevilutionX Paper Clip Menu Editor

OPEN SOURCE STREAMING

Stream all your media around your home and beyond – we look at the innovative new options!

WD Black 8TB HDD

Shane Downing likes more performance in his performance products.

AMD Radeon RX 7600

With so much competition in the market, Chris Szewczyk tries to work out whether the new RX 7600 does enough to beat the pack.

Window Maker Live

Nate Drake gets into the frame of things with Window Maker – adesktop experience reminiscent of a ’90s Mac.

OPNSense 23.7

Nate Drake has the good sense to try out OPNSense, a powerful firewall distro based (in a roundabout fashion) on FreeBSD.

Rhino Linux 2023.1

Nate Drake takes a ride on the Rhino, exploring the rich Unicorn desktop, as well as the pleasures and perils of rolling releases.

Mask of the Rose

There’s an indescribable horror in the basement. Management just employed it to do the accounting, and Joshua Wolens has to make it tea.

Personal cloud servers

Michael Reed compares five open source personal cloud servers to find out if they’re really free, what it takes to install them and what they can do.

Obtaining and installing

We want to see a variety of installation types suitable for different scenarios.

Installable apps

Some systems can do more than just file share and can be expanded.

The user interface

You’ll see it every day, so it has to be good.

Mobile apps

You probably want to be able to access your files while on the move.

File synchronisation

Automatic duplication of a folder on your computer to your cloud.

Storage back-ends

Flexibility in terms of where you store your file data is a boon.

Freemium vs free

Does the enterprise version offer vital features not in the free one?

The verdict

Personal cloud servers

A.I.-POWERED RASPBERRY Pi

Tam Hanna has followed the Raspberry Pi since the first revision, and puts the RPi 4 to work on amusing AI tasks.

Smart hardware choices

With great ecosystem diversity comes a great amount of choice.

Sounds like trouble

Recognising our northern accents will tax this poor Pi audio model.

A face for AI…

We’re not the prettiest, but perhaps our Pi might not take offence.

Our chatty AI man

Get your Pi to chat like a human, mostly.

Rejoice! 271% more Pi available than in 2022

Les Pounder wonders if 75% of all statistics are made up, but at least he can buy a Pi 4 now.

RISC-V x86

Box64 emulation.

Lichee RISC-V

Small and delicious.

MORE Pi FOR EVERYONE

Les Pounder works with groups such as the

52Pi Rack Tower

Les Pounder owns multiple Raspberry Pis but has yet to make a cluster. Perhaps this enclosure will see him put all of his Pis on the shelf?

Elegoo Neptune 4

“Smoke me a Klipper, I’ll be back for breakfast!” cries Denise Bertacchi.

Control a Pi bot with a Wiimote

Les Pounder travels back to 2014, the last time that he held a Wiimote that wasn’t embedded in an LCD TV.

Fre/e/YOUR PHONE

Tired of being tracked and spied upon by popular mobile OSes, Jonni Bidwell is ditching Android and taking back privacy with /e/OS

Next-gen Wi-Fi

Another new wireless technology, already? Darien Graham-Smith looks ahead to the seventh generation of the IEEE networking standard.

Bring your images and videos to life

Not known for his love of cameras, Shashank Sharma still knows how to turn images into presentable GIFs and video clips into masterpieces.

Mapping made easy

KDE MARBLE

Manage your photo collection with finesse

Mike Bedford explains how DigiKam enables you to manage your photos, finding what you’re looking for with the most powerful of tools…

FORTRAN – the first high-level language

It might have been the world’s first high-level language, but Mike Bedford discovers that FORTRAN is still alive and well today.

Easily manage a free VPS with Virtualmin

David Bolton demonstrates how to set up Virtualmin on a free VPS and how to configure it to add websites.

Get more out of your Steam Deck

From external controllers to an external display, Neil Mohr offers a fistful of handy gaming tips for your Steam Deck.

Using Bash aliases for an easier life

Keep things simple by creating and using aliases to run your most frequently executed commands.

SSH like a pro

A selection of quick tips that are handy to have up your sysadmin sleeve.

Purge Docker debris

Docker is great at a lot of things but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t require a dose of preventative maintenance periodically.

Bitwarden

A powerful, feature-packed open source password manager with a free option and decent pricing, thinks Mike Jennings.

ExpressVPN

Looking behind the hype machine, Mike Williams wonders whether this is as good as it sounds?

Text adventures: now in full colour!

Nate Drake embraces ancient graphics and dinky sound effects in the final part of our text adventure coding series.

Blast apart classic Breakout gaming code

PYGAME