Dank Linux, the Wayland desktop suite built around DankMaterialShell (DMS), has put out its final post on X under that name, bidding farewell to its old identity. Accompanying it is DMS 2.0, codenamed "Heisenberg," which reached GitHub just a few hours ago.
If you didn't already know, the shell is a Quickshell and Go project that stands in for tools like waybar, swaylock, mako, and fuzzel. Around it sit a greeter, a calendar app, a system monitor, and a search service.
It began as a hobby project, with 1.0 shipping in December last year. Since then, newer releases have added niceties like desktop widgets, a new launcher, and spring-based motion.
With that many components in the suite, the project has now put all of them under a new name.
The rebranding covers the whole suite. DMS is now Dux Shell, and the greeter, search tool, system monitor, and calendar are now Dux Greeter, Dux Search, Dux GOP, and Dux Calendar, respectively.
Dank Linux gets renamed Dux Labs, which also acts as the new name for the project as a whole and for every app in the suite.
Dux Files is a standalone file manager that is the one piece that's new instead of being renamed. It offers features like tabs, split views, trash, and network shares. It picks up your DMS theme if the shell is running.
Dux is the suite's mascot, and the name echoes Linux's penguin mascot, Tux. Starting with a D also lets the dms, dcal, and dgop commands keep their names.
The project's reasoning to go through the rebrand is that a name built around one product no longer fits a suite with its separate collection of apps and a plugin community.
Another thing to note is that the earlier release, DMS 1.6, still carried the Dank name, and its roadmap listed a standalone file browser and phone integration, but a rename was never really mentioned.
As for the DMS 2.0 release, it is a packed one that adds a Material 3 Expressive redesign, plugins for the dashboard and dock, and a lock screen with widgets you can arrange yourself.
It also adds Dux Dot, a free-floating companion or replacement for the bar that can turn into notifications, weather, media, and wallpaper views, as well as the control center, dashboard, and launcher.
The project has already moved from the AvengeMedia umbrella to a new GitHub organization called Dux Labs.
You will find many repositories that used to be known by their Dank names, including dux-shell (previously DankMaterialShell), dux-gop (dgop), dux-search (danksearch), dux-calendar (dankcalendar), and dux-greeter (dank-greeter).
Personally, I preferred the Dank branding. But if the developers feel this is the best approach and the community accepts it, there's no point talking about what was.
Suggested Read 📖: CutefishOS is back with a vibe-coded desktop.
There are plenty of online PDF tools that let you edit documents without installing anything on your computer. You just open a website, upload your file, make the changes, and download the edited document.
But there is a catch. You are handing your files over to a third-party service, and you may not always know how it handles your data. Some services may have questionable privacy practices, while others are outright malicious.
In fact, the FBI has warned people about fraudulent online file converters that steal sensitive information and spread malware in the past.
These tools scrape uploaded files for personal details, banking information, email addresses, and passwords, making them particularly risky when dealing with confidential work documents that should've never left an organization's secure environment.
BentoPDF is an open source alternative that advertises itself as a privacy-first tool that processes files directly in your browser instead of uploading them to a server, helping avoid some of the aforementioned privacy risks associated with online PDF tools.
homepage ss here
Created by Alam, a developer out of India, BentoPDF traces its origins to an internal tool that was being used for merging and splitting PDFs. Soon after its creation, the lead dev decided to share his work with the world via Reddit, and a few weeks later the code was live on GitHub.
BentoPDF uses WebAssembly, which lets heavy programs run right inside your browser. Its OCR tool, for instance, runs on Tesseract.js, a port of the Tesseract OCR engine. That way, the processing happens on your computer, and nothing is uploaded to a server.
The project is dual-licensed, where the code is provided under the AGPL-3.0, making it free to use and open for anyone looking to fork it. A separate commercial license is available for closed-source use and costs $79 as a one-time purchase.
Alam also publishes two other open source projects, Hyper Compress and Kura. The first is a PDF compression engine, while the latter converts PDFs to standards like PDF/A and PDF/UA.
Anyhow, coming back to the PDF editor, I took it for a test run on Vivaldi, a Chromium-based browser, covering a few tools to see how it holds up in everyday use.
The Edit PDF Text tool shows each block of text in the document with a dashed outline, and picking one brings up the formatting sidebar, which houses the usual editing controls.
It has buttons for tweaking the font, size, colors, alignment, and character spacing, along with bold, italic, underline, and strikethrough formatting.
I could also make it fetch all the fonts installed on my Linux system using the System fonts button, and the info button at the bottom was useful for glancing over the metadata of a document.
Once done editing, exporting the file is only a matter of clicking the "Export" button.
The PDF Editor is mainly meant for annotation work, with tools for highlighting, strikethrough, ink, text insertion, and comments. You pick the relevant tool and drag your cursor over a piece of text to apply it.
Adding watermarks to documents is also possible via the Add Watermark tool, which should come in handy for protecting your work or marking a document as sensitive. It offers a lot of flexibility, letting you choose between a text or image type watermark, a single or tiled layout, and granular controls for the pages, text, and visibility.
Common keyboard shortcuts like the ones for copy (Ctrl+C), paste (Ctrl+V), undo (Ctrl+Z), and redo (Ctrl+Y) also work well here.
Sometimes a PDF is nothing more than a set of page images, like a scanned report or a document full of charts. You cannot search through it or copy anything out of it because there is no text for your PDF viewer to find.
The solution to that problem is to run OCR on it, which converts the pages into machine-readable text.
OCR PDF handles this in BentoPDF by letting you upload a file, select the relevant language(s) found in the document, and start the process. During my test, I used a two-page brochure for a motorcycle I like to window shop for and left the advanced settings untouched.
It took a while to process the pages, but the output was mostly accurate. Only the very small, lossy text at the bottom of the document tripped it up. I could copy everything to the clipboard or export it as a .txt or searchable PDF file.
BentoPDF has a range of file conversion tools available, and I tested out two of them. PDF to JPG converts each page of a PDF into a JPG image, and using it is quite simple. You upload a PDF file, set the image quality with a slider (the pre-set value is 90%), and click "Convert."
Images to PDF does the reverse, and it accepts an array of formats beyond JPG, including PNG, BMP, HEIC, and PSD.
There are plenty more conversion tools on offer, covering formats like ODP, CSV, EPUB, JSON, WebP, and Markdown, among others.
Usually, when handling PDF files that need to be sent via email, its file size matters a lot. Popular email services like Gmail, Proton Mail, Outlook.com, and Yahoo Mail cap attachments at around 20 to 25 MB.
To tackle that, the Compress PDF tool offers two algorithms, "Condense", which is the recommended one, and "Photon," that's tailored for photo-heavy PDFs. Alongside them are four compression levels that run from "Light" to "Extreme.".
For checking it out, I stuck with Condense and only changed the compression level, going with Extreme to see how small the file could could get.
It took quite a while to process, but BentoPDF brought my 120.4 MB PDF down to 28.5 MB, a 76.3% reduction. That is still a little over the usual email limits, but for a 214-page document, it's a good result.
The text and images stayed very readable too, and I only noticed the loss in quality when I zoomed into the images.
There's a lot more BentoPDF has to offer than what I have covered above. Just scroll down on the homepage to see its full list of 100+ PDF tools. There are some security-focused ones that I am sure many of you will like.
If you are looking for the source code, then you should visit the project's GitHub repository, which also contains details on the tech stack that powers BentoPDF.
A file manager is one of the most basic tools a Linux distribution comes with, and desktop environments ship their own, such as Nautilus on GNOME, Dolphin on KDE Plasma, and Nemo on Cinnamon.
It is where people browse folders, move and rename files, preview what is inside them, and clean up any cluttered directories. Thanks to the platform's openness, you can also install more than one file manager on your system and use whichever you prefer.
A new one that has made an appearance recently is Strata, which is tailored for Omarchy and, to some extent, Arch Linux. Other glibc-based distributions might be able to run it, provided they meet its library requirements.
This file manager is written in Rust with GTK4 and released under the MIT license, with its lead developer, Pierre, announcing its first stable release a few hours ago. He claims that in 45 days, the project has picked up over 30 contributors and 700+ commits, with ~300K lines of Rust now in the codebase.
It can show folders side by side, so opening one reveals its contents in a new pane to the right while its parents stay visible, like the column view in macOS Finder. Icon and list views are available too, and being a keyboard-first app, it supports navigation with the arrow keys or the vi-style h, j, k, and l keys.
Ctrl+K opens a fuzzy search over your Home folder and every mounted local drive, which matches file names and paths but not file contents. The 1.0 release adds exclusions in Settings for skipping folders like node_modules or a single directory.
Tabs are another new addition that let any folder be opened in a new tab, with keyboard support for switching/reordering them, and previously open tabs being restored after a restart.
Strata also stores sort order and icon size per folder, where one folder can be sorted by date with large icons while another stays alphabetical with small ones, and each opens that way the next time.
Pressing Space toggles a preview panel for images, camera RAW files, PDFs, source code, audio, and video.
It includes a diverse range of themes too, and an in-app editor lets you create your own and save them as TOML files. Code and config files also get language-specific icons based on Catppuccin, in brand colors or the theme's accent.
Strata has an interactive installer for Omarchy and Arch Linux that runs from a single cURL command:
Log in
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lgse/strata/main/install.sh | bashThe installer detects the CPU architecture, the glibc version, and whether the system runs Omarchy 3 or 4 or Arch Linux. It installs the latest stable release for the current user in ~/.local/bin.
Optional extras such as a desktop entry, a default folder handler, SMB support, and Omarchy keybindings are also available. You can even feed Omarchy's onboard AI agent a specific prompt to get it installed on your computer.
If you just want to check out Strata before committing to it, the project's homepage has a demo that lets you play around with it. Building from source is also possible.
This week, AI went to the "office". Linus Torvalds says he actually likes using AI, and his new kernel branch credits Claude Code for the code, the tests and even a draft of the commit message. Office suites are being rebuilt so agents can edit your documents. And Big Tech wants its agents inside every work app you use, including the office app.
The question I keep asking is whose desk the agent sits on. If it lives in someone else's cloud, so does your work. That's why the local and self-hosted options matter.
I've been testing openKylin 3.0. It ships with Kylin bot, an AI assistant that can change desktop settings for you. With openKylin's own hosted model, I could successfully make the agent change the system settings.
But my local and frontier models did not fare as well. When assigned a task, my Qwen model with Ollama replied that it changed system settings when it was not changed in reality.
I will be sharing all this in a video later this week. Stay tuned for that.
BetterOffice is an Apache-2.0 office suite you embed in your own web app, with DOCX, XLSX and PPTX editors built on Rust and WebAssembly. The interesting part is that an AI agent edits as a peer, and its changes show up as tracked changes you accept or reject.
ArtCraft, the folks behind those Adobe clones, has moved on to Microsoft Office. WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft are Rust clones of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, built with Claude. The READMEs claim high parity with Office, but the numbers are self-reported and the apps are pre-alpha. I'll believe it when it is tested in real world, with real use cases.
Razorpay open sourced slashdocs, a self-hosted place where agents publish HTML reports and your team comments on them. The agent reads the comments and pushes the next version. It's MIT licensed and ships as a single Go binary.
Raven calls itself a "harness of harnesses." It splits a task into pieces and hands them to specialist agents, including Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and Hermes. It's Apache-2.0 and pre-alpha (again). Sorry but so many new tools in alpha stage these days. But that's the joy of discovering new tools, right?
Two big announcements this week, not that you can download them (yet).
Mistral Large 4, nicknamed "Le Chonk," is a 1-trillion-parameter multimodal MoE with roughly 50B parameters active. It's API-only in preview, and Mistral promises the weights by the end of October. No license has been announced yet.
Reflection AI's Beam is a 501B model with 23B active, aimed at coding and agentic work. The weights are due later this month under Apache 2.0. Reflection's benchmark claims haven't been independently verified yet.
Neither will fit on our regular machine anyway. If you want something small for coding agents, JetBrains released Mellum2.1 Thinking, a 12B model with about 2.5B parameters active.
At its Windows event, Microsoft pitched agents that run on your device when possible and in the cloud when not. Its MAI-Code-1.1-Flash runs locally as a 3-bit build with 256K context. Local calls are free, but the recommended RAM is 120GB or more (LOL).
Meanwhile, Google's new Gemini agent works across Workspace, Microsoft 365 and Slack for hours or days at a time. OpenAI launched always-on Dots agents in ChatGPT. Meta plugged its Muse agent into Slack, Shopify and QuickBooks. Everyone wants a seat at your desk.
Remember Kylin bot claiming it changed the system setting? That was a tool calling failure.
A model can't touch your computer on its own. It can only produce text. Tool calling is how it asks the app to act: the app tells the model which tools exist, like set_volume, and the model replies with a structured request to use one. The app runs the tool and sends the result back.
Smaller models are often bad at this. They describe the action, or skip the call entirely and just say it's done. That's why tool support matters when you pick a model for an agent.
An old meme that never really gets old.
A quick check before you plug a local model into an agent like Hermes.
Run ollama show <model-name> and look at the Capabilities section. If tools isn't listed, the model wasn't trained for tool calling, and your agent will struggle no matter how you configure it.
Even if tools shows up, test it with a harmless action and verify the result yourself.
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See you next week.
Last week, we saw a wave of developers determined to reverse engineer everything with AI. This week, there's a new wave, and to be honest, I like this one better.
Some people have found an unusual way of using AI for something that actually matters to them. They are making their smart TVs usable again by stripping the operating system of ads and junk.
If you own a budget Android TV, you know the drill. You switch it on, wait for the home screen to load, scroll past a sponsored banner, and only then reach the app you wanted. People are now asking Claude to fix that for them.
It all started with Ryan Doyle's tweet where he used Claude to clean up his smart TV.
He then followed up with how much faster the TV had become after the cleanup.
Soon, someone else did the same. "Gathin" went a step further and put everything in a GitHub repo called tv-vibehack. It has the prompt, a custom launcher, and a list of gotchas he ran into.
According to the README, it began as an afternoon fixing his parents' Xiaomi Mi TV, which showed them an advert before they could even reach Netflix. The repo is MIT licensed and has crossed 1,300 stars and 146 forks at the time of writing.
There's no magic here. Android TV has the same Android Debug Bridge (ADB) as your Android phone, and Claude simply does the changes for you.
You enable Developer Options on the TV by going to Settings -> Device Preferences -> About and pressing OK on Build seven times. Then you turn on USB debugging (or wireless debugging, if your TV has it). Some TVs,, like Xiaomi, don't show a wireless debugging toggle at all, but USB debugging alone opens network ADB on port 5555.
Next, you run Claude Code or the Claude desktop app on a computer connected to the same Wi-Fi network. You ask it to connect to the TV's IP address and suggest which non-essential apps can go. Some people use Codex or other coding agents too, but the approach is the same.
Almost all the working examples I came across follow the same pattern. The target is Android TV or Google TV, which covers Sony, TCL, Xiaomi, Hisense, OnePlus, etc.
Samsung (Tizen), LG (webOS) and Roku are run entirely different systems so the debug trick doesn't work here. Perhaps someone will find a way out here as well. Amazon Fire TV needs extra care (more on that later).
Claude lists the installed packages and disables (not uninstalls) the ads, sponsored rows, telemetry and preloaded bloat with pm disable-user. Many people also install a minimal custom launcher in place of the ad-filled stock home screen and tone down the animations.
Everything is meant to be reversible. And it should be. Good prompts insist on a backup of the package list first and ask before touching anything important, such as HDMI inputs, firmware updates or the keyboard. The tv-vibehack prompt, for example, quizzes you on which streaming apps you use and whether to keep the voice assistant, Chromecast and updates.e
As per the README, the first run on a 1 GB Mi TV took an afternoon. With the repo as context, people report getting it done in about fifteen minutes.
People who have done it have shared a few lessons, and they are worth reading before you let an AI agent loose on your TV.
The first and biggest one: disable, don't uninstall. Uninstalling system packages is the way to brick the Home button or lose HDMI input switching. Even the order matters. tv-vibehack warns that if you disable the stock launcher before the new one is installed, the Home button lands you on a factory test app.
Turn off USB or wireless debugging when you are done. You don't want an open ADB port sitting on your home network.
Many of the cheap Android TVs ship with only 1 to 2 GB of RAM, so how much faster your TV gets depends on what it shipped with. That's also why the tv-vibehack launcher skips blur, video and background services.
And then there's Claude itself. Some people reported that some sessions refuse when they tried with "hack my TV". You are likely to get better results by sharing the model number and package list first and asking it to clean up ads and speed things up.
In my opinion, you should not disable every service just for the sake of it. Ads and telemetry, sure, get rid of them. But not every background service is bloat.
Disabling voice input and screencast may make the TV a bit faster. But it also takes away the convenience of searching with your voice or casting a YouTube video from your phone to the big screen. If other people in the house use the TV, they may not thank you for that.
The same goes for firmware updates. Most debloat lists turn off the manufacturer's update service, which also means you stop getting fixes. Decide what you actually use before you let AI decide what to cut.
Since it became a trend, more GitHub repos have popped up to make the smart TV dumb again. One of them is dumbtv, and it covers a few gaps tv-vibehack leaves.
tv-vibehack doesn't support Amazon Fire TV, while dumbtv is built for it. It has been tested on a Fire TV Edition television running Fire OS 7.7.1.7 (based on Android 9).
It also goes further than just disabling apps. It disables around 65 packages, including Amazon's ACR (screen fingerprinting), ad ID and watch-time analytics. It runs personalDNSfilter on the TV to block Amazon telemetry and update servers, and replaces the home screen with its own 41 KB launcher that has no permissions at all.
This repo is written for AI agents as much as for humans as it ships an AGENTS.md, a CLAUDE.md, an llms.txt and a skill file, so you can point Claude at the repo and let it follow the steps. Still, read the skills or have it vetted on your own.
This is the real way real people are using AI. Finally some good use of AI to take back control of a device you already paid for, and yet see ads anyway.
If you have an old Android TV that is pathetically slow, this might be worth a weekend afternoon. Just mind to disable instead of uninstalling, and keep the features your family actually uses.
Would you use something like this? Comment section is yours.
