What works is cutting the friction around your workflow, and staying on top of the mental nerfs you already carry, plus the ones that pile up over the day. There's a whole ecosystem built around fixing that, ranging from break reminder apps, Kanban boards, to Pomodoro timers and phone-to-desktop bridges.

On GNOME, you don't need to leave your desktop to get most of this. The extension ecosystem already covers timers, notes, clipboard history, and phone syncing, without asking you to juggle five different subscriptions.

Here are eight extensions worth having, plus a native GNOME feature that handles some of this for free.

1. GSConnect

Every time your phone buzzes, and you have to pick it up just to check what it was, that's a small amount of time taken away from whatever you were doing. GSConnect gets rid of that by putting your phone's notifications right on your desktop, so you can glance, decide it's not urgent, and stay exactly where you were.

Of course, this could also go the other way, making you waste more of your time, but that's on you. ☠️

It's a full implementation of KDE Connect built specifically for GNOME Shell. Beyond notifications, you get SMS from your keyboard, a synced clipboard between your phone and your Linux machine, and file sharing that goes both directions.

2. Caffeine

Caffeine does one thing. It stops your screen from dimming, locking, or suspending while it's switched on. Click the coffee cup icon in the top bar, and GNOME leaves your screen alone until you turn it back off.

It sounds minor until you're three slides into a presentation and the screen goes black, or you're deep into a long article and the lock screen interrupts you mid paragraph. You can also scroll on the panel icon to toggle it, and there's command line support if you'd rather script it.

Alternatively, you could fully disable system suspend via the Settings menu under the Power page (inside Power Saving), but that's not a good idea if you are running a laptop that needs to be functional during long sessions without AC power.

3. ddterm

Hit a keyboard shortcut, and a terminal slides down from the top of the screen. Hit it again, and it slides back up. With ddterm, you don't need to switch through workspaces or hunt for a terminal window buried under everything else.

Restart your session and every tab comes right back, and resizing is just a matter of dragging on the outer edge. The preferences panel covers the rest if you go looking for it.

It also runs natively on Wayland, which isn't something every drop-down terminal extension can claim, and its development has stayed consistent for years now, with a steady flow of releases rather than long stretches of silence between updates.

4. Clipboard Indicator

Clipboard Indicator keeps a searchable history of everything you copy, text and images both, so you're not relying on memory or copying the same thing twice.

The feature list goes further than most clipboard managers bother with. Pin entries to keep them at the top, tag them to stay organized, search with regex if you need precision, and edit an entry directly from the menu instead of copying it out, fixing it, and copying it back in.

For anyone handling sensitive information, a private mode pauses history tracking on demand, and specific apps like password managers can be excluded from tracking entirely.

5. Advanced Alt-Tab Window Switcher

GNOME's default Alt+Tab is fine until you have a dozen windows open and no way to tell them apart at a glance.

Advanced Alt-Tab Window Switcher or AATWS replaces all three of GNOME's built-in switchers with one that actually helps you find what you're looking for. This includes filtering, sorting, and a type-to-search mode that matches by title, app name, or even the executable behind it.

It's not limited to switching either. Close windows, move them between workspaces or monitors, pin one always on top, or launch a new instance of an app, all without leaving the switcher.

For anyone whose workflow is spread across multiple monitors with a lot of windows open at once, this cuts out most of the clicking and squinting that the stock switcher makes you do.

6. Tiling Shell

Tiling Shell brings proper tiling window management to GNOME, going well past the basic two column split GNOME ships with by default. Drag a window and a snap assistant shows you where it'll land, with a built in editor for building your own layouts from scratch.

Layouts aren't rigid either. Span a window across multiple tiles, resize adjacent tiled windows together, and set a different layout for each workspace on each monitor.

Keyboard shortcuts handle the tiling too, so dragging windows around with the mouse is optional rather than being a neccessity.

7. Cronomix

Most productivity extensions do one job. Cronomix does several. Timer, stopwatch, Pomodoro tool, alarm, to-do list, time tracker, and even flashcards, all bundled into a single dropdown instead of five separate tools competing for your attention.

The Pomodoro and timer functions cover the classic work-then-break rhythm, while the to-do list and time tracker give you somewhere to actually log what you did with the time instead of making guesses at the end of the day.

It follows a very different approach compared to the single-purpose extensions elsewhere on this list.

8. Notes With History

A lot of the sticky note extensions on GNOME haven't been touched in years, and installing one on a modern system usually means finding out the hard way. Notes With History puts a menu of notes in your panel instead of scattering note windows across your screen.

Click the icon, pick a note, and it's all there. 📝

Notes can be reordered to keep the most relevant ones near the top, and the panel icon itself is customizable so it's easy to spot at a glance.

9. Freon

A sluggish system without an obvious cause can be very annoying, especially when you are in the middle of a time-sensitive task with your manager breathing down your neck.

Freon puts important system stats like CPU, disk, and GPU temperature, alongside fan RPM and voltage info, right in the top bar for you to quickly figure out if there's a system-wide slowdown or an app that's misbehaving.

You can pick which sensors to show, switch between Celsius and Fahrenheit, and set the refresh rate for the metrics display. Though you will need your GPU manufacturer's driver installed to get GPU readings.

Bonus Tip ✨

If you don't want to install anything at all, GNOME has a few tricks up its sleeve, tucked inside Settings. Since GNOME 48, there's a Digital Wellbeing section that handles screen time and break reminders natively.

It tracks how much time you spend on screen each day and compares it against previous days and weeks.

You can set a daily screen time limit that triggers a notification once you hit it, with an option to turn the screen grayscale afterward as a nudge to step away. There are also built-in eyesight and movement break reminders.

It's not as configurable as something like Cronomix or a dedicated break reminder extension, but if you're already on GNOME 48 or later, the most basic productivity features are sitting right there waiting to be turned on.

Suggested Read 📖: Wireless file transfers are incredibly convenient, especially between Linux and Android devices.

When he has one, the Linux kernel mailing list hears about it, and so do we, the ones who use Linux. For the past few years, his opinion on AI was quite simple, being that it was mostly noise, and he was not interested.

But something changed; Linus has gone from calling AI "90 percent marketing" to publicly telling critics inside the Linux kernel project to fork it or walk away. Here's how that change happened along the years.

AI is hype

At the Open Source Summit Japan in December 2023, Dirk Hohndel asked Linus a direct question. Would he ever see AI-written code submitted to the kernel?

Linus said yes and guessed it might already be happening on a small scale. He wasn't particularly worried about the risk of hallucinated code either, pointing out that plain human error causes plenty of bugs on its own. "I think we're doing just fine at making mistakes on our own," he said.

Four months later, at Open Source Summit North America in Seattle, that curiosity had turned into something closer to mockery. Where he joked that he might "be replaced by an AI model," and brushed off most of the surrounding hype as nonsense, suggesting everyone wait a decade before drawing any real conclusions.

By October 2024, speaking to TFiR at the Open Source Summit in Vienna, Linus put a number on his skepticism. He called the AI industry "90 percent marketing and 10 percent reality," and said he'd mostly just tune it out until that changed.

He left himself an opening though, predicting real use cases might show up in five years, once the hype cycle burned out.

The slow burn

A year later, in November 2025, something had changed. At Open Source Summit Korea, Linus told Dirk that he was "fairly positive" about vibe coding, though only for people learning to code, not for anything that actually mattered.

He compared it to typing programs out of computer magazines as a kid, pitching vibe coding as a low-stakes way to get people excited about doing things on computers "that maybe they couldn't do otherwise."

That openness turned into a holiday project a few months later, where he built an audio effects tool called AudioNoise, writing a portion of the code himself (mostly C) and then handing over the Python visualizer tool to Google's Antigravity IDE.

Even so, the kernel itself stayed off limits. Just before announcing the project, he had replied to a heated thread about anti-LLM sentiment creeping into kernel documentation, pushing back on turning the issue into a political statement.

His argument was that people submitting genuinely careless AI patches were never going to label them as such anyway, so writing rules aimed at catching them was pointless.

That tension between personal enthusiasm and institutional caution showed up again in April 2026, when the kernel shipped its first official AI Coding Assistants policy alongside Linux 7.0.

The rules were narrow but clear. AI-assisted code still had to meet GPL-2.0 licensing requirements. AI tools were barred from adding their own Signed-off-by tags, and a human always had to take responsibility for what got submitted through a new Assisted-by tag.

That same month, stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman was found quietly running an AI-assisted fuzzing tool against the kernel from a branch nicknamed "clanker."

Coming around

By May 2026, the volume of AI-generated activity around the kernel had become its own problem. Linus complained that a release candidate had ballooned with what he called pointless pull requests, much of it AI-assisted bug hunting that produced trivial fixes late in the development cycle.

He said that he would get tougher about it, promising to be "a bit more hardnosed" from here on.

At his keynote for Open Source Summit North America in Minneapolis, Linus had pushed back hard against a different kind of AI narrative, one he found more annoying than the code itself.

Claims that "99 percent" of a project's code came from AI genuinely angered him, he said, since the same people never credited compilers for writing effectively all of their code either.

By July, at Open Source Summit India in Mumbai, that optimism came with a correction. He admitted that his own earlier "10x" productivity estimate for AI tools had been guesswork, not a real measurement.

He pointed out a real downside too. Separating a fabricated bug report from an actual one could take hours, since a hallucinated issue often doesn't announce itself until someone digs in and finds nothing there.

Then, more recently on July 14, while replying to a mailing list thread discussing perceived anti-LLM sentiment in a recent post from the Software Freedom Conservancy, Linus settled the question for good.

"Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects," he wrote, telling anyone who disagreed to fork the project or simply walk away. While also saying that AI could still be a painful tool, both for maintainer workloads and for how often it turned up embarrassing bugs.

But in his view, the answer wasn't to ignore the problem. It was making sure the tools actually helped the people maintaining the code, not just added to their load.

Closing words

Three years isn't long by kernel standards. Linus has been doing this since 1991, and some subsystems have taken longer to get right than that. But watching him go from "90 percent marketing" to "fork it or walk away" in such a short span says something.

Unlike some people, he didn't stay stuck on the idea that AI is bad. He kept updating his opinion, in public no less, admitted his slip-ups, and still called out what's lacking.

💬 So, are you still against AI? Let me know in the comments below; it's always insightful to see where our readers stand on this.

Further stating that they are inviting third-party reviewers to confirm that what gets published actually matches what's running in production.

The onboarding of reviewers could be a move to tackle a common complaint against corporate open source releases where the published code is different from what's actually deployed.

Of course, skepticism around the announced move has shown up as expected.

JerryRigEverything, a man known for his knack for taking smartphones to their breaking point, replied to the original tweet (xeet?) saying that:

Don't you say this every few months? That tracks.

And he's not wrong. Elon has made open source promises like this before, for X's codebase and for Grok's models alike, and not all of them have held up.

A pattern to take note of

X's transparency push goes back further than Grok. In March 2023, not long after taking over the platform, Elon had X (called Twitter back then) publish a partial version of its recommendation algorithm on GitHub, the platform's first real step toward opening up its codebase.

Then there's Grok 1. He tweeted back in March 2024 that xAI would open source Grok. Six days later, the company delivered, publishing the base model's weights and architecture under Apache 2.0.

In August 2025, xAI put the weights for Grok 2.5, its 2024 flagship, up on Hugging Face (listed there as "Grok 2"). Elon said at the time that Grok 3 "will be made open source in about 6 months."

That puts it somewhere in February 2026, a window that's now been closed for months with no sign of Grok 3 on Hugging Face.

Following that, in January 2026, the code behind the "For You" feed's ranking algorithm went open source too, landing in a separate repository built on a Grok-based transformer model.

This is the one that actually got the update it was promised, picking up a substantial refresh in May 2026. And more recently, Grok Build followed on July 15, the same day as the X open-sourcing announcement, with xAI publishing the coding agent's Rust source and terminal interface on GitHub under Apache 2.0.

The record, overall, is mixed rather than uniformly bad. The "For You" algorithm got the update it was promised, the 2023 algorithm release didn't (you can check the repo linked above), and Grok 3's six-month window closed back in February 2026 with nothing to show for it.

Let's see what comes of Elon's latest promise.

We kick things off with the most important usability addition. Earlier, users were stuck with the default toggle or push-to-talk bindings for recording audio during transcriptions.

Now, it is possible to set keyboard shortcuts via the Settings menu, allowing you to create a diverse range of keybind combinations using the Ctrl, Alt, Shift, and Super keys paired with any letter or number key.

Likewise, on GNOME's Wayland session, text injection is possible again when a bare XKB engine is configured, and whisper.cpp no longer defaults to using every CPU core on hybrid Intel and AMD laptops.

Remote API users get something too, where the Remote API engine now supports FunASR and SenseVoice models through OpenAI-compatible endpoints.

What is Vocalinux?

I talked about the new Vocalinux release, but I never fully explained what it was.

It is a free and open source voice dictation app for Linux, released under the GPL-3.0 license. It lives in your system tray and lets you dictate into almost any text field on your desktop, terminals, browsers, IDEs, office apps, wherever your cursor happens to be.

And everything runs locally, so your voice data stays on your machine the whole time.

The choice of speech recognition engine isn't locked either, as you get whisper.cpp as the default choice, followed by Whisper for PyTorch and NVIDIA configs, VOSK for lightweight setups, and Remote API for offloading to a network server.

I tried testing this beta release to see what it offered. I tried running it on two separate distros, Fedora Workstation and Ubuntu; the result for both runs was an app refusing to launch via the app launcher or the terminal.

It eventually did launch on Ubuntu after I followed some troubleshooting steps, but the app was unresponsive and had to be terminated. Even so, I am not too bummed out by this, as such are the risks associated with pre-release software.

Get started

You can get a quick start by trying out the demo on the Vocalinux website, which runs SpeechRecognition on your web browser. Naturally, that's for testing purposes only.

If you want to locally run speech-to-text on your Linux computer, then you can install Vocalinux by running this script:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jatinkrmalik/vocalinux/main/install.sh -o /tmp/vl.sh && bash /tmp/vl.sh --interactive

After the installation finishes, either run vocalinux or find the app icon in the application launcher. If you get caught up choosing between the engines, there's a comparo that should make your decision easier.

If you were looking for it, the source code for Vocalinux lives on GitHub.

Also, running the installer on a non-Debian-based distro like Fedora, will make it throw a warning or two about needing to install dependencies manually, take a note of that before proceeding.

My thanks to Phoronix for bringing this tool to my attention. 😄

And Wayland is not really as slow as some people think. That's what a recent benchmark study found out.

Most microcontroller boards support Lua as an afterthought. The ELM11-Feather from BrisbaneSilicon builds around it. A GOWIN FPGA runs the whole show with no separate CPU, giving you Lua at the application layer, C for drivers, and VHDL/SystemVerilog for the hardware itself.

Joey Castillo's Open Book started as a DIY soldering project back in 2020. Six years later it's back as Open Book Touch, a proper ready-to-use e-reader with a 4.26-inch touchscreen, ESP32-S3, microSD, user-replaceable battery, and no DRM.

One developer, a few months of work, and Chatto is now open source under AGPL-3.0. It's a self-hosted team chat built to be light and simple enough to run by just launching an executable.

GNOME is working on an app called Test Center that would make trying experimental features less of a gamble.

📚 Linux Learning Offers

There are a few offers I came across that will help you improve your Linux skills, personally or professionally.

First is Linux Foundation offering upto 40% off on its training courses and certification exams. For people looking to make a career in the field of Linux and IT, a certification on Linux, Kubernetes and other related technologies can be of help.

Even if you don't want to go for certifications, you should always thrive for learning more. Humble Bundle O'Reilly collection is packed with Linux and Unix books, covering everything from shell scripting to system administration and kernel internals. This should be of interest to most Linux users, professional or not.

And part of the money gets donated to Code for America.

Third and last, my friend has created an "AI Engineer Bootcamp" course because AI is now a useful tool, even Linus Torvalds thinks so. If this is something that interest you, you can get it an additional discount with custom link.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

Like a zombie back from the grave, the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit, one of the longest-running legal sagas in open source history, isn't dead yet.

Cursor has an unpatched zero-day on Windows where dropping a file named git.exe at the root of any repository causes it to execute automatically when the project opens. This was known to them for months and has not been patched yet.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

I have been using Trello since 2013, watching it slowly turn into something else after new ownership stepped in. I set out to find what Trello used to be, across seven open source tools.

Seven Gentoo-based distros for people who want what Portage offers without starting completely from scratch. We have covered desktop use, penetration testing, security hardening, and audio production.

The compose key has been in Linux desktops for years, and most people have never touched it. Once you assign a key in GNOME settings, short two-character sequences let you type accented letters, copyright symbols, degree signs, and more.

On a related note, learn about remapping the CoPilot key on your keyboard to something useful. Yes, some keyboards these days come with a dedicated Microsoft Copilot key.

Since there is so much discussion around keys, let me share my favorite keyboard shortcuts that make me more efficient in the terminal.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

The ORICO 8848U4 is a 4-bay USB4 NVMe enclosure that connects over Thunderbolt and shows up as native NVMe devices on Linux without requiring any driver installation.

The indie Linux handheld space is getting interesting, with many tinkerers and small companies trying their hand at crowdfunding to fund their creations.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

Space Haven will have you manage a crew of humans on a spaceship trying to survive the cold, dark vastness of space.

📽️ Videos for You

I still stand by this, apt update && apt upgrade needs to go away.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

On GNOME, you can resize a window using the Super key on your keyboard. First, run this command:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences resize-with-right-button true

Now, when pressing the Super key, drag a window while pressing the right-click to resize it.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

How sharp is your Linux automation knowledge?

What does the cat says?

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On July 15, 1928, the ENIGMA cipher machine entered service with the German Army, encrypting messages via rotor wheels and swappable patch cables. Polish cryptographers first cracked it in 1932, sharing their methods with Britain in 1939, which let Bletchley Park read German traffic throughout WWII.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: Pro FOSSer Ernest has kicked off a rather interesting thread, asking other FOSSers what they understand of AI.

More recently, Marco Nett decided to test the same question (along with a few others) on his gaming rig, and instead of using a mobile phone camera to calculate latency, he cooked up a DIY device to measure it himself.

What do the numbers say?

Called the Click2photon, it is a DIY device that straps a light sensor to the monitor and fires simulated mouse clicks over USB. It measures the time between a click and the resulting change on screen, giving out real end-to-end latency numbers.

As a side note, the hardware, firmware, and analysis code for the testing device are freely available on GitHub.

He ran the tests on Diabotical, a CPU-bound DirectX 11 game, through Proton on CachyOS with an RTX 4070 SUPER and a 500 Hz OLED monitor. He went looking for answers in varying scenarios.

Testing X11 against native Wayland, VRR on against off, and a DXVK low-latency fork on against off. He also ran a bonus set of tests comparing native Wayland to XWayland, with every configuration standardized at 300 clicks.

The results undercut a lot of what gets discussed online. The eight main test cases land within 0.72 ms of each other, with medians ranging from 4.21 ms to 4.93 ms.

X11 beats Wayland by just 0.14 to 0.22 ms, nowhere near enough to explain Wayland's reputation for feeling laggy. Enabling VRR cuts latency by 0.26 to 0.45 ms and tightens the spread of results, more than any other factor tested.

Up to 0.84 ms gets saved in uncapped scenarios once the dxvk-low-latency fork is turned on. The real culprit is XWayland, which adds 3.13 ms on top of native Wayland, more than every other factor combined.

Stacking every optimization together (X11, VRR, and the low-latency fork) only moved the median down by 0.72 ms compared to a plain Wayland setup.

What does this mean for Linux gamers?

For the average Linux gamer, the lesson isn't to abandon Wayland for X11. It's to turn on VRR if your display supports it, get the dxvk-low-latency fork installed if your setup allows it, and make sure games run through native Wayland instead of XWayland.

What I have covered here is a distilled summary of the testing done by Marco, I highly suggest you give the original blog a read. He has taken a lot of variables into account, and listing them individually would've made you click away from this article. 😅

The bug lives in how Cursor resolves Git binaries when a project loads. Cursor checks several locations for git, and one of them is the workspace itself.

Plant a file called git.exe at the root of a repository, and Cursor runs it the moment that project opens. This happens because the execution is integrated into the normal startup routine, something you'd probably never notice unless you went looking for it.

Mindgard proved this by renaming the Windows Calculator app to git.exe and placing it in a test repo. Opening that repo in Cursor launched it instantly, with the flaw repeatedly spawning new instances of the app.

This is not something Cursor didn't know about. Mindgard's Aaron Portnoy first reported the bug on December 15, 2025, then followed up repeatedly in the months after.

Getting anyone to respond took a public LinkedIn post asking for a security contact. Cursor's CISO eventually replied privately, blaming a broken automation for the missed HackerOne invite.

The stonewalling didn't stop there, as the bug report on HackerOne was closed prematurely, being termed "informative and out of scope." Mindgard pushed back, HackerOne reopened it, and confirmed the details had reached Cursor.

Days passed, and the silence from Cursor was more apparent. Requests for updates in February, March, and April were left unanswered, all while they were busy shipping new releases.

Five months of cat and mouse, and Mindgard finally decided to go public.

There's a response

Albeit a very vague one. Speaking to Dark Reading, an unnamed spokesperson for Cursor informed them that:

I can confirm we are addressing this and will get back to Mindgard accordingly.

That statement isn't very confidence-instilling for an issue that feels magnitudes higher.

But what do I know about handling sensitive cybersecurity issues in a big AI firm? Maybe they had good reason to ignore the issue and were working on some shiny new AI feature. 🤷

Suggested Read 📖: Did you know a storage bug on Windows 11 could eat up disk space?

That gets worse on image-based systems like GNOME OS, where the base image is read-only and you can't just swap out a package and move on.

GNOME wants to fix that with a new app it's prototyping, tentatively called Test Center.

Something new to tackle testing

It is meant to act as a one-stop solution for installing, running, and removing anything experimental, whether that's an app or a piece of the system itself.

For apps, you skip the usual grind of hunting down CI artifacts or building your own Flatpak bundle by hand. A developer hands you a link, you tap it, and the build shows up tagged as experimental, set to expire on its own.

System components run on sysext images instead of Flatpaks, though the idea plays out the same way. Take something like parental controls, still early in development, you'd grab the sysext tied to that merge request through Test Center, and it lands on your system as an overlay rather than a replacement.

Remove it, and you restore your system to the same state before the experimental change was applied.

Plus, there's a good reason system-level testing has been such a mess up to now.

According to Modal Collective, the closest thing on a regular package-based distro is packaging your changes into an unofficial repo like a COPR or PPA and asking testers to install from there themselves.

Once they do, the experimental packages don't sit next to the stable ones, they replace them outright. Break something, and it's on you to fix it. You won't get proper updates again until you do.

What's next?

All this effort is part of the GNOME OS Developer Tool Suite, a project that's been in funding through Germany's Prototype Fund since June 2026. Tobias Bernard, Jonas Dreßler, and a few others are working on this under the Modal Collective umbrella.

In a related plan, an easier way to distribute command-line developer tools on image-based systems is also part of the same project, though the team says more details on that are coming in a separate post.

If you're developing for GNOME OS and have opinions on what's currently annoying about testing and development workflows, the team wants to hear from you on Matrix, in the #gnome-os room, or in person at the GNOME OS BoF during GUADEC.

After its acquisition and recent AI surge, Trello has changed a lot. But I still miss its simplicity in Kanban style tools I have tried so far.

As I lean more towards, open source and self-hosting, I have collected a bunch of projects that can be considered in the same league as Trello.

My search for open source Trello alternatives was based on mainly finding simple kanban boards with team collaboration and public boards option. Integration to external services, mobile apps and the ability to import Trello projects are also worth considering. Since we are in the AI era, automation and AI agent access shouldn't be ignored either.

So, let's begin to see what open source tool can replace Trello for you.

1. Kan.bn

Kan is a sleek, modern looking Kanban task board. Built with Typescript, Kan provides a modern user interface and experience. It comes with all of the classic Trello features so you get boards and workspaces, labels and filtering. You also have the ability to comment and check activity logs on the tasks.

There is no automation or AI feature at the time of writing this article. Which is not entirely a bad thing because sometimes simplicity itself is a feature.

One thing that does bother me is the lack of smartphone apps. I like to keep a track on tasks while on the move.

That doesn't mean Kan doesn't provide ways for efficient work. They are already working on implementing templates so that you can easily create same type of tasks. Integrations with external tools is also a work in progress.

The biggest feature for people moving away from Trello is that you can import your Trello boards directly in Kan. That makes it a true open source alternative to Trello.

Kan can be self-hosted or you can pay for their hosted service. Hosted service is free for single user.

2. Planka

If you want to use something that looks and feels like Trello, look no further than Planka. Look at the screenshots, and you'll feel like you are looking at Trello itself.

You get all the usual Trello and kanban board features. You have lists with tasks and those tasks can have deadline and time tracking. Kanban, grid and list views are available. You should also be able to import your Trello tasks here.

REST API with 50+ webhook events helps you integrate task management with external tools in your workflow.

Public boards were supposed to arrive with version 2 but I don't think that has happened yet.

Organizations can have single sign on along with Google, Azure AD and more.

There are no official mobile apps for now. If you must use one, there is a community app in progress. I would suggest waiting for the official mobile apps, instead.

Licensing and pricing are issues here. There are two versions: community and pro. Both versions are available in hosted and self-hosted formats. The pro version has additional features like user roles, recurring cards, UI customization for organization branding etc. You can self-host the community edition for free. Everything else has a price tag, including self-hosting the pro version.

Licensing is 'fair use' and it is not clear that they use a clear, open source solution. I would keep them in 'source open' category.

3. Vikunja

Vikunja is primarily and an open source, self-hostable Kanban board that you can use on your own and with your team. You can add labels, create relation between tasks, add deadlines and priorities.

Tasks and boards can be shared with public, too. This makes it easy to collaborate with external people and they don't even have to create an account.

Apart from Kanban, you also get list, tabular and Gantt chart views. Recurring tasks, sub tasks, due date notification, you get them all.

I like the idea of the "quick add magic". It's a helpful featuere specially if you work with AI to create task description. In the description, use keywords like mention a date and it adds that as a due date. This saves you the trouble of manually assigning labels, due dates, priorities etc.

Vikunja doesn't have smartphone apps but it does let you import your Trello projects.

Written in Go, Vikunja claims to be speedy. How to verify the claim? Well, there is a demo board you can test, no log in required.

It is AGPL licensed and you can self host it on your own or opt for managed hosting from Vikunja itself.

4. Wekan

Wekan is one of the OG open source Trello alternatives. You can self host it on your servers. It feels more enterprise and organization oriented than individuals and lean team. The interface is a bit dated for my liking but still good enough for managing tasks without eye candy.

The promise is simple. You get boards, lists and tasks. It is collaborative and since its enterprise oriented, there is option to purchase commercial support.

There are mobile apps listed on their website but I didn't find anything on the Trello import. No AI integration as far as I can see.

5. Tududi

Funny sounding name aside, Tududi is somewhat of a Clickup alternative. You have boards, areas (work, life, personal) and the ability to create notes. Which is a great way to share common docs with the team.

There are plenty of features to like here. Recurring tasks, subtasks, priorities, labeling, deadlines. All the usual stuff is already here with a few smart features. Progress can be tracked with completion stats and productivity patterns.

No smartphone apps but responsive design makes it easy to follow tasks on web browser on your mobile devices. Don't see automation or AI features here, either. Not sure about public board, too.

It can be self-hosted via Docker or you can use the hosted service from the developer.

6. Leantime

While not exactly a Trello clone, Leantime is a project management tool created specifically with ADHD and neurodivergence in mind. So you get more color codings, emoji-based priority features.

There is a "personal view" that shows all your tasks in one place irrespective of which board they belong to. This is something I have seen in ClickUp.

You can also take notes that won't be saved in the main tasks and would only be used in personal view.

You can track productivity with built in reports and see how the project is coming together.

Another thing that I feel is helpful is the ability to create a blueprint for a project. So instead of creating the main project board immediately, this can be used for the (pre) planning phase.

Leantime also has builtin whiteboard for creating mind maps and wireframes to visually represent your thoughts.

7. Fizzy

From the makers of Basecamp, Fizzy is a relatively new tool and claims to make "Kanban as it was supposed to be". Which means it is keeping things simple by giving you boards with only the most essential features.

We have been using Fizzy for the past several months for managing our tasks here at It's FOSS.

Auto close is the feature that you won't easily find in other project management tools. Once you add a task, it gets added to Maybe list by default. And if the task sees no activity (edits, comments, moving to other lists), it gets moved to a "Not now" list that is hidden from the main view.

Another thing here is that no matter how many lists (columns) you add, you can only view two of them at a time. Helps with focus, apparently.

Fizzy has smartphone apps that makes it easier to manage tasks without sitting in front of a computer.

My biggest gripe with Fizzy is that it doesn't have a deadline feature. Everything is either Maybe, Intermediate lists or Done. And then removing tasks from Done list is done one by one manually, no multi-select here. So if your board has hundreds of finished tasks and you didn't delete them immediately, you have to delete them one by one. Or you just let them stay in the Done section which kind of looks odd when the number increases.

Public boards are available in Fizzy so you can use it for sharing project roadmaps. Webhooks let you integrate to external tools.

Fizzy also has CLI version and thus allowing you to use an AI agent for accessing and managing the board, if that's your thing.

There is no direct way for importing Trello projects in Fizzy. So that's something worth noting. Also, Fizzy is source available, not open source.

You can self-host it or use the hosted service which is free anyways.

Bonus: Schedule

Now this one is completely different than the rest of the Trello alternatives mentioned here. Schedule is a simple, kanban style todo list of your Linux desktop. It doesn't have collaboration features, cannot be self hosted or accessed via web browsers.

It's a desktop application. You install it, you create your boards, add tasks and work on them. Sometimes you need that. Either you don't work with a team or external collaborators or you just want a separate place for your personal projects.

And if that's the case for you, a regular desktop kanban app like Schedule does the job.

Which tool should you use to replace Trello?

I have deliberately not included these in my list here:

• Nextcloud Deck: Kanban feature is good but it's just one part of a different type of software suite.
• Plane, Mattermost and OpenProject: Full-fledged project management suite. Overkill for just Kanban feature.
• Kanboard, Restyboard, Taskboard: No longer actively developed.
• Nocobase, Baserow: More of no code CRM oriented tools than just Kanban boards.

And to answer the question...it all depends on your requirements.

If you want a simple Kanban tool that looks modern, go with Kan. You can use it for free or self host it or opt for the paid hosted version. Fizzy is also a good choice if you don't need deadline features. Vikunja is also rising in popularity and worth a dekko.

I would suggest checking each tool and its features and see if they will be your ideal open source Trello alternatives.

Your turn now. Which Kanban tool do you use? Did you find something worth trying in this list? Share it in the comments,

But no matter how good it is, it is not open source. 🙃

Thankfully, the open source space has no shortage of alternatives. Rocket.Chat, Mattermost, Zulip, and Matrix-based clients like Element have all built up loyal followings among teams who want to own their data.

Now there's a new name to add to that list. It's called Chatto, and it's still early in its development cycle, with a stable 1.0 release yet to arrive.

Chatto goes open

After spending the past few months developing Chatto, Hendrik Mans has decided to offer the project openly under AGPL-3.0+ with a few Apache-2.0 exceptions for certain components.

It's built as a self-hosted option for teams who would otherwise reach for Slack, Teams, or Discord. Hendrik wanted something light on resources, simple enough that an administrator can just run the executable and get started.

It covers the essentials you would expect from a chat app. That includes channels, rooms, file sharing, video embeds, and a roles and permissions system for fine control over which user gets what kind of access.

You also get screen sharing, along with end-to-end encryption on every voice and video call, and the number of people that can join comes down to what kind of capacity your server has.

Going forward

Right now, there's no dedicated desktop or mobile client. Chatto's roadmap lists both as something that could be worked on, but they're still in the discovery phase, meaning that they are still deliberating on whether to offer those.

Beyond the client apps, the roadmap lists a dedicated Slack to Chatto migration tool, along with GDPR-compliant data export, thread locking, and thread deletion as planned feature additions.

Hendrik is currently working on new room types, bot accounts with dedicated API tokens, Chatto hub integration, and server-wide user suspension. Next in line are an emergency lockdown mode for admins, slow mode, in-app message reporting, and server invites.

For anyone who'd rather skip the self-hosting altogether, Chatto Cloud is entering public beta soon too. It'll run on European-owned infrastructure, with neat perks like automatic scaling and nightly backups.

Don't worry about vendor lock-in either, as moving data in or out of it will be made accessible.

Suggested Read 📖: Best Open Source Slack Alternatives

That is when I found Space Haven, a native Linux space-themed colony sim with base building, survival, and combat elements built into it.

It is the work of Bugbyte, a Turku-based indie game studio who initially introduced the game on Kickstarter back in 2019, running a successful crowdfunding campaign, and eventually making it out of Early Access.

Here's how my playthrough of it went.

Worth your time?

I say yes! If you are someone who is a buff for building intricate bases and micromanaging the smallest of details, then this game can be a good play for you.

I completed the tutorial before starting a full playthrough, which walked me through the basics quite well, but it did take some considerable time to finish.

There's a lot to keep track of once you are actually playing. Crew health and mood depend on beds, food, privacy, and toilets, so you cannot just build a ship and forget about the people living on it.

Powering the ship adequately matters just as much, where you place power generators and power nodes to route power distribution throughout your ship, keeping life support equipment like the oxygen generator and water purifier running to keep the crew alive.

Below you can see how I had to add a power node to provide electricity to the oxygen generator, with power-related metrics visible on the right. In this case, I was completing a quest objective to expand the ship's power grid.

Resource extraction comes next. Pod hangars support mining, building, and starfighter types, and once you assign a mining pod hangar, it automatically sends out a pod to a selected resource and starts mining.

For moving beyond the current region, hyperspace jumps are the only way. After ensuring that you have installed a Navigation Console and Hyperium Hyperdrive, you can use the Starmap to chart your way forward.

Then there's the combat. The ship can be protected by placing Point Defense Turrets for shooting down incoming asteroids as well as enemy drones and spacecraft. The crew members themselves can be drafted and equipped with weapons too!

You can send them aboard derelict ships to salvage for resources, and any aliens or clankers they run into get shot on sight once you give the order.

Room for improvements

Two things bugged me while playing. The camera stays locked to one angle; there is no way to rotate the view to see the ship or its contents from a different side. Loading a new map also means clicking through a checkmark button every single time before you can proceed, which will get annoying.

What I have covered here is only the surface of what Space Haven has to offer. There is a lot more to dig into, including deeper ship combat, faction missions, and even prison management, if you go further than I did.

Even with the fun I had, it would be wrong to exclude an issue that can be a dealbreaker for you. Crew members treat every task as a separate event instead of chaining related jobs together, placing a single wall block before wandering off, or returning to base after each mining haul instead of heading straight back out.

That is something the developers can fix in a future patch. For me, it was not much of a dealbreaker, as I am used to making things hard for myself. ☠️

🎮 How to Play?

As this is a native Linux game, you can run it on any computer that meets the minimum hardware requirements, provided the distro you install it on has the necessary components to run recent video games.

It costs $24.99, with prices going lower during sales. You can grab it from GOG for a DRM-free copy that you can share with others, or from Steam if you want access to mods.