The 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup for July 20th, 2025, brings news about KDE Plasma 6.4.3, Blender 4.5 LTS, VirtualBox 7.1.12, GStreamer 1.26.4, Wireshark 4.4.8, Rescuezilla 2.6.1, LibreOffice 25.2.5, Calibre 8.7, and more.
Last year I reviewed the CrowView Note, a portable monitor with battery, keyboard and trackpad that makes it devilishly easy to use a Raspberry Pi as a laptop — albeit a laptop with a single-board computer sticking out the side!
As much as I love (and continue to use) the CrowView Note—the HDMI input lets you use anything with it, even a phone—it is far from elegant.
Argon Forty, makers of the most well-engineered and popular Raspberry Pi cases (the Argon ONE range), clearly took note and thought: “hold my fruit punch”.
Argon ONE Up Runs on a CM5
The Argon ONE Up is a is a laptop computer powered by a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5. Yup, the CM5, not the full-size Pi SBC.
You remove a panel on the bottom of the laptop, slot in your CM5 (and an M.2 SSD or expansion board, like the AI+ HAT), and bam: a Raspberry Pi-powered laptop. No SBC dangling out the side, and no super-thick chassis to house it internally.
Though this is not modular in the way the Framework line of laptops are (you can replace everything in those), the Compute Module can be swapped out (I’m not sure if alternative boards using the same connector exist, but if so: more choice) so there’s potential.
Here’s a video of the Argon ONE Up in production because, why not:
Warning: jazz music
The Argon ONE UP is going to launch via a Kickstarter campaign sometime soon. No price or battery life details are known, but the aluminium alloy chassis houses:
14-inch IPS LCD display (1920×1200)
1080p webcam
Backlit keyboard with multitouch trackpad
Built-in stereo speakers
microSD card reader
M.2 2280 slot (PCIe 2.0 – can run AI HAT)
Ports include:
2× USB 3.1 Gen1 (Type-A)
2× USB Type-C (PD + Data + OTG)
HDMI 2.0 (4K@60 Hz output)
3.5mm audio jack
There’s also an additional add-on able to connect to the USB Type-C ports to provide an external 40-pin GPIO header, with power button — these folks know their market.
So when can you buy one buy and how much will it cost?
As yet unknown.
Argon’s been teasing an upcoming Kickstarter campaign for a few weeks—it unveiled the ONE Up at a conference earlier this year—and a preview page for the campaign is live1 (but you can’t back it). Keep an eye there if you’re interested in getting one.
Argon Raspberry Pi products have a good rep in the community, and I’ve no doubt many of you reading will already own some – so shout out your kit in the comments!
Fun drinking game: neck fruit punch for every use of the word ‘level’ in the campaign blurb. ︎
KDE Plasma is getting in on the rounded bottom window corners action in its next major release.
“Breeze-decorated windows now have their bottom corners rounded by KWin automatically! This feature is on by default, but can be turned off if you preferred the older style,”notes KDE’s Nate Graham in a roundup of recent changes.
Graham also who commented on the related merge request to note though the change is reliably small it “will make a lot of folks very happy.”
Here’s a screenshot of Dolphin, the KDE file manager, sporting those subtly smoother corners in current development builds of KDE Plasma 6.5:
Image: Nate Graham
The change is subtle.
KDE plans to ship this visual tweak in KDE Plasma 6.5 which is not out until later this year, so don’t go play hunt-the-rounded-bottom-corner in existing or older versions of the DE just yet.
It’s also not going to apply to all apps, only Breeze-decorated windows. Breeze is KDE’s default window decoration theme and is what provides the title bar, borders and window controls shown around around applications.
On Ubuntu, native GTK4/libadwaita apps already have rounded bottom corners. Though older GTK3 apps use sharp corners on the bottom of app frames, there are tools and workarounds to force them to use rounded bottom corners – the same as on KDE.
Third-party desktop customisation tools like KDE Rounded Corners are great at forcing apps to smooth out their jagged corners but they are not as efficient as a native, built-in approach.
Adding consistent corner radii to KWin (KDE’s window manager handles how windows appear and behave) will ensure content shown inside of a window isn’t clipped by radii; that system resources and video memory get used efficiently; outlines are drawn correctly, and so on.
Some popular apps use non-Qt toolkits or custom theme adaptations and may vary in whether they use these even when running on KDE Plasma 6.5. Firefox tested rounded bottom corners on Linux a few years ago, though the effort stalled and the browser recently binned its GTK and CSS theme tweaks.
Those with a preference for pointy window corners should not panic. Rounded corners will be enabled by default in Plasma 6.5 but KDE devs plan to provide a preference to allow users to pick their preferred approach.
If curvaceous bottoms are your thing, you’ll be able to opt for a sharper look.
Intel Linux software engineers have recently been busy working on Wildcat Lake support primarily for the kernel drivers while now that work has been extended to Mesa for the Intel Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV Vulkan drivers...
While we await AMD to officially release ROCm 7.0 as the next major release of their open-source GPU compute stack, out this afternoon is ROCm 6.4.2 as the newest stable point release. ROCm 6.4.2 expands the officially supported Radeon consumer GPUs as well as bringing various fixes and enhancements to the various libraries and components making up this AMD GPU compute ecosystem stack...
Mozilla Firefox 141 serves as the latest monthly update to the famed open source browser, and adds several new features – including AI-assisted tab grouping.
This release also delivers a reduction in memory usage for Linux users, adds a handy unit converter to the address bar, and expands Picture-in-Picture support to more online streaming services.
Last month’s Firefox 140 release was a big one as it’s served as both a regular monthly release and the latest cumulative ESR snapshot for home and enterprise users who favour stability over new feature churn.
Among its features were a tab context menu entry to force unload a site from memory, easier adding of custom search engines (from any search field), listing local AI models the browser has downloaded (for built-in features) on the about:addons.
The new Firefox 141 release offers a similarly focused set of changes.
Firefox 141: What’s New?
AI-Enhanced Tab Groups
AI-enhanced tab groups: hit and miss
Tab grouping was added in Firefox 137 and has, in subsequent releases, improved the feature. If you want to group tabs together based on theme, task or topic, you can. Then, you can collapse the group to free up space in the tab bar.
But what if you like the idea of sorting your tabs into groups, but not the cognitive burden and manual hassle involved in doing it?
Enter Firefox 141’s AI-assisted tab groups (for some, this feature was present in Firefox 140).
This feature is able to “automatically collect your tabs into groups”, generating a name for the tab group based on inferred content, and suggest other open tabs (it thinks) match the same theme/topic.
Mozilla says automatic tab groups will “help you to stay focused, save time, and reduce clutter”. As the AI-side of the equation happens on your device no details on which tabs you’re viewing are sent to the cloud for processing.
It also says the feature may not work reliably. You may spend more time manually adding tabs to/from groups, regardless.
Unit conversion in Address Bar
Convert on the fly in Firefox 141
Something nifty: you can use the address bar in Firefox as a unit converter (I’d wager most of us already use search engines or the GNOME Shell overview to do this).
Firefox’s unit converter supports converting units of length, temperature, mass, force, and angular measurement, and timezones. Clicking on a result in the dropdown copies it to your clipboard.
Vertical Tab Tool Resizing
Drag this to control how many tool icons show
Building on the vertical tab improvements in Firefox 140, this update adds a resize grip to the bottom of the sidebar. You can drag the divider to adjust how many tool icons (like AI chatbot, AI summary, history, etc) are visible, giving more vertical space to your tabs
Drag the dividing line down to hide tools in an overflow menu, or drag it up to see more of those icons on show.
Lower Memory Usage on Linux
According to the official release notes, Firefox 141 “uses less memory”, and a “forced restart” is no longer required on Linux builds after an update has been applied by a package manager.
How is it using less memory than before, and why is a forced restart no longer required? Mozilla doesn’t provide any details, so I’m not 100 percent sure. However, a sift through Bugzilla suggests it’s might be due to the addition of a “fork server“.
This new fork server address the situation when the package manager updates Firefox even though it is running, and browser trues to spawn new processes from the updated build while the old version is in memory. This is why a restart was usually required.
The fork server keeps a “pre-initialized” process ready to go (a bit like a template), which new content processes can be forked from using copy-on-write memory sharing1.
Instead of each new tab or process starting from scratch (and use more memory as a result), they share memory pages with the template process, only copying data when they need to change it. This means each process uses less memory.
More Streaming Services in PIP
Firefox 141 adds support for Peacock, SkyShowtime, Showmax, and Now TV to Picture-In-Picture (PiP) mode, along with optional formatting to captions displayed within the PiP window. If you subscribe to those services, this will be a welcome change.
Other Changes
Elsewhere, Firefox 141 enables the WebGPU API by default — but only on Windows. The Mozilla Graphics Team plan to ship WebGPU on Mac and Linux “in the coming months”, and then on Android.
WebGPU is available in Firefox Nightly builds on all platforms (apart from Android) already, so if you’re looking to test it, you don’t need to wait for it to hit stable.
Web developers may be interested to know Firefox 141 will clear the back-forward-cache when receiving the Clear-Site-Data: "cache" response header.
Besides that, some other changes:
Pinned shortcuts on New Tab page only show pin icon on hover
Text Fragment creation now uses a less memory-and CPU intensive algorithm
In all, this is another welcome batch of changes which both ardent fans of the free and open source web browser and those who use it begrudgingly will benefit from. Let me know what you think of this month’s feature drop by leaving a comment!
Download Firefox 141
Ubuntu user? You will be upgraded to Firefox 141 automatically, in the background, without you needing to do anything.
Linux Mint user? You can update to Firefox 141 via the Mint Update tool from July 22, as Firefox continues to be provided as a .deb package that is updated from an APT repo.
If you use Ubuntu but you don’t have Firefox installed, and want it, you have ample choices: the official Snap or Flatpak build; the Mozilla APT repo to install the Firefox DEB; and the option to download a distro-agnostic Linux binary from the Mozilla website directly.
Last week NVIDIA open-sourced 12k lines of C header files for Blackwell GPUs to help in the open-source driver efforts, namely for Nouveau / NVK and the in-development NOVA Rust driver. On Friday they made public some additional header files for helping in the Blackwell and Hopper open-source driver enablement...
With the Mesa 25.2 open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics driver code having been branched last week ahead of its stable release in August, I carried out some fresh benchmarks on AMD's exciting Strix Halo platform using the Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 with Radeon 8060S Graphics to see where the Linux performance is now at for the RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics.
The EROFS read-only file-system ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window has been working on metadata compression support to allow for even smaller container image sizes but at the cost of higher I/O latency...
Space Drilling Station has you manage and automate a drilling station on a distant planet. The developer detailed their Steam Deck work with a new demo.
Breaking on Friday afternoon was word that Intel is shutting down its Clear Linux project effective immediately after ten years of maintaining this high performance Linux distribution that relentlessly optimized for the best Linux x86_64 performance -- even when it benefited AMD x86_64 processors too. Here is a look back at the most popular of our Clear Linux testing over its decade in existence as a high performance Intel Linux OS...
The LLVM compiler toolchain has begun upstreaming support for Distributed ThinLTO "DTLTO" as a new means of handling ThinLTO compilations for leveraging link-time optimizations...
At last week's DebConf25 Debian developer conference in France, Rust packaging within Debian Linux was talked about by Fabian Grünbichler. There an interesting statistic was shared around the growing expanse of Rust usage within Debian and the open-source ecosystem at large...
TROMjaro is a Manjaro-based Linux distribution with a customised Xfce desktop. Compared to its parent, TROMjaro offers several user-friendly utilities, such as Layout Switcher with six different layouts or Theme Switcher with several accent colours. It also provides various enhancements, including the integration of the Chaotic-AUR repository with pre-built binary packages, a selection of custom wallpapers and icon packs, and extra configuration options in Settings Manager. The distribution comes with support for AppImage files and a heavily-tweaked Firefox browser with custom add-ons.
HarfBuzz 11.3 released on Sunday as the newest release of this open-source text shaping engine. HarfBuzz 11.3 brings some nice performance improvements for this text shaping engine that is used by many prominent software programs and toolkits like Google Chrome, Firefox, GNOME / GTK, KDE / Qt, LibreOffice, OpenJDK, Godot, and many closed-source programs too like Adobe Photoshop and others...
RED OS is an independently-developed Russian Linux distribution for workstations and servers. It uses the RPM and DNG tools for package management. The workstation edition provides a choice of three desktops, KDE Plasma, GNOME and MATE, while the server variant includes a custom server administration utility called RED ADM. The distribution is developed by Russia's RED SOFT, a company that also provides technical support and Linux training, as well as various administration, virtualisation and database software products.