The recent Firefox 151 release adds merging documents to that list.

If you've ever searched "merge PDF online" and ended up wading through ads and signup walls just to get your own file back, then you should know that there's a privacy angle worth thinking about too.

Every time you upload a document to one of those sites, you're handing your files over to a server you know nothing about.

Firefox handles everything locally, so your documents stay on your machine.

Merge PDFs using Firefox

First, you need to open a PDF file that you want merged with another. Then, unhide the sidebar menu by clicking on its toggle (looks like a square with a line in it), and click on the "+" button next to the Pages label.

Doing so will open the file picker. In my case, it was the Files (Nautilus) app on GNOME, but yours might be a different file manager on a different desktop environment with similar functionality.

Pick the PDF you want to merge in, then click Select. Firefox will append its pages to the end of the document you have open, and the page count in the toolbar will update to reflect the new total.

You can also reorder pages by dragging them in the sidebar, or delete any you don't need by selecting them and using the Manage menu. 👇

Once the pages are in order, select all of them using the checkboxes, and then open the Manage dropdown and click "Export selected..." A save dialog will open up on your file manager.

Give the file a name, hit Save, and the merged PDF lands wherever you pointed it. Though if you mistakenly try to quit the application before the merged PDFs are saved, Firefox will promptly notify you. 👇

The prompt reads "Save PDF before leaving?" and clicking "Save" opens the same file picker. Hitting "Don't Save" will close Firefox without saving, and "Cancel" keeps you in the same window.

So, what was actually triggering it? Just the word "Linux" in the User-Agent string it looks like. heise online tested this by setting a Linux User-Agent on Firefox under Windows and on Safari under macOS, and both got blocked.

People noticed

Heise had picked up on a thread from Reddit's r/deutschebahn as evidence that real users were being affected. Someone had posted about getting locked out just from clicking "earlier connections" a few times while planning a trip.

They, as you know, tested it on their end and found out that Linux systems were being blocked.

Later in the thread, a commenter tied it to the wave of vibe-coded projects, specifically ones built to scrape Deutsche Bahn's fare data. Another commenter identified themselves as a DB employee, pointing out that internal staff have to deal with DB Systel's problems regularly.

Before you ask, DB Systel is the train operator's IT and digital solutions provider.

DB's official response

Deutsche Bahn has responded to heise online. A spokesperson said Linux users are supposed to be able to use bahn.de and DB Navigator without issues, and that the company's security systems look at traffic behavior, request origins, and browser traits to identify potential threats.

Normal traffic can get caught in this sometimes, they said, while emphasizing that they are working to bring those cases down. Heise ran a test again the same day and found out that a Linux User-Agent on a Windows machine still triggered the block.

I ran two tests of my own. The first was on a Fedora Workstation system with a VPN active, where I accessed bahn.de on Firefox in private mode and spammed various header menu options, reloading repeatedly.

The portal never locked me out. I did the same on an Ubuntu virtual machine and got the same result. So it is safe to assume the fixes have been made, though false positives may still happen occasionally.

Suggested Read 📖: Rust Could Eliminate 80% of Linux Kernel CVEs

The issue has been notorious, with a lot of new users being discouraged immediately after joining, and the benevolent dictator Linus Torvalds himself giving the bird to Nvidia, a sentiment shared by almost every user who had tried to make Nvidia work on Linux a few years ago.

Things have been getting better recently, though, especially with LVFS (Linux Vendor Firmware Service) on the scene now, providing hardware vendors a portal to upload firmware updates, which can then be downloaded and installed by users through clients such as GNOME Software or fwupdmgr.

Why does LVFS matter?

The relief and effort of LVFS cannot be understated, as before a central secure portal for firmware, the users only had the option to trust some random third party upload on the internet, often breaking or worse, infecting their systems. LVFS fills a space where the vendors can provide secure firmware, with Linux-specific .cab files.

The roadbloack...

The issue, however, obviously, had been funding with the largest contributors being the usual suspects, Framework and Open Source Framework Foundation, at $10K a year. Recently, however, Lenovo and Dell joined suite as Premier sponsors, which is the highest tier at $100K a year each, making the project more sustainable and manageable. These companies contributing makes a lot of sense, considering they are two of the bigger computer companies which offer Linux by default in some cases, especially with Lenovo's ThinkPads being the Linux users' favorite for decades.

Welcome the newcomer!

And now, as you'd have it, HP has followed suit as a Premier sponsor, also providing $100K a year, right alongside Dell and Lenovo. This is already being reflected on the homepage of LVFS, with a quote from HP's Senior Vice President as well:

“LVFS enables quick, easy and timely BIOS updates, so countless customers can enjoy the flexibility of open source Linux-based systems.”
— Xavi Garcia, HP

This calls for a celebration as users, of course, and also a major bout of appreciation for HP will be well deserved. I'm delighted as an HP user on Fedora myself, this is a remarkable day.

The question still remains, however, where are the other vendors? What are they waiting for?

Where are the others?

The image of Linux as a "niche" user community, left to their own devices (literally) to figure out the solutions to the hardware problems the vendors are unwilling to solve, is a view as outdated as it is ridiculous. It is like they expect us to unlock a door of which they have the only key.

This major move by these three companies should not only be seen as a sign of relief and wider acceptance of the usage of Linux, but as a beacon for other vendors to follow, who ought to make their hardware more accessible to the open-source community. This change is only in their best interest, as every year shows the percentage of Linux's desktop market share going upwards.

Wrapping Up

HP, Dell and Lenovo all being the highest possible contributors to Linux firmware inspires a lot of confidence among the users, a sign of better support and easier updates. Their efforts are much appreciated and applauded, and we hope that more companies show up to the party. Hope this brightens up your day a little bit, if you're a Linux user on HP. Cheers!

This week, the developers pushed a notable update. Oz can now serve as a unified control plane for Claude Code, Codex, and the native Warp Agent, all manageable from a single dashboard.

This allows teams to compare how each harness performs, assign the right one according to the task, and maintain consistent access controls and audit logs across all three.

What's new in Oz?

For complex, long-running tasks, Oz can now spin up and coordinate multiple subagents in parallel without you having to configure that manually. Think codebase-wide migrations or multi-repo feature work, anything that benefits from several agents tackling different parts at the same time.

You get real-time tracking and steering across all of them, and it works across all three supported harnesses (mentioned above).

Warp is also introducing Agent Memory, a cross-harness memory system that lets agents carry context forward across sessions, repos, and projects.

How this works is that agents build up working knowledge about how your team operates over time, and that context carries forward regardless of which harness triggered the next run.

The memory store is owned by the organization deploying it, and Warp can either host it for you or you can build and maintain your own. This particular feature is in research preview for now.

Per-team billing and individual credit caps are part of this release too, along with more granular permissions per agent. Each agent gets scoped access based on what its task actually requires, rather than receiving blanket permissions across your infrastructure.

Self-hosting is more flexible now too. Oz works in Kubernetes pods, with or without Docker, and fits into existing remote dev environments without requiring any changes to your configuration.

Get Warp

Warp (partner link) runs on Linux, Windows, and macOS. Linux packages are available as .deb, .rpm, .tar.zst, and AppImage for both x64 and ARM64.

You can get started with Oz on the official portal with any Warp account, free or paid.

Suggested Read 📖: Things Are Quietly Changing at Bitwarden

That is not a small claim. This is coming from someone who has personally reviewed every kernel security bug since the Linux kernel security team was formed in 2005.

C's blind spot

The core problem, as Greg sees it, is untrusted data. Every time data arrives from user space or from hardware, the kernel should treat it with suspicion. C has never had a reliable way to enforce that.

Once data gets copied from user space into the kernel, it becomes a regular pointer and loses all context about where it came from. It gets passed around freely, and the external checkers that should catch issues do not always get run.

Hardware adds another layer of the same problem. The kernel was designed assuming hardware is trustworthy, and that assumption is getting harder to hold as malicious hardware becomes a real and growing threat.

What Rust already fixes

Before the new proposal even ships, Rust is already making a difference. Failing to check error return values and forgetting to release locks are two notable contributors to kernel CVEs, and Rust handles both at compile time.

Greg estimates those two fixes alone cover around 60% of kernel bugs.

And it doesn't stop there. Writing Rust bindings for existing C code has quietly pushed kernel maintainers to actually document and think through their APIs, working out ownership semantics, lock rules, and const-correctness.

Enter, the "untrusted" type

Greg's proposed solution is a Rust type called Untrusted<T>, developed with kernel contributor Benno Lossin. It attaches to data coming in from user space or hardware as a compile-time marker, with no runtime cost.

And you cannot access the underlying data without going through a validation step that explicitly converts it to trusted. That pushes all validation code into one visible, reviewable spot.

What this means for you as a Linux user? A significant number of the CVEs that currently trickle down to your distro as security updates simply would not exist in the first place.

But, it is not merged yet. Changes are still needed in the Rust compiler, and related work on field projections is running alongside it. Greg concluded his presentation by asking for more Rust kernel developers, and pointed towards the Rust for Linux mailing list as the starting point.

Suggested Read 📖: Fedora Pulls the Plug on Deepin

The vote passed with +7, 0, 0 at a May 19 meeting. On top of that, the release engineering team has been told not to reinstate any of these packages unless they go through a fresh review.

A year in the making

The story starts with openSUSE. In May 2025, their security team published a detailed report on Deepin's packages, stating that they had pulled them from their repos after a review had flagged serious problems across multiple components.

The deepin-file-manager daemon had significant D-Bus interface issues, some of which stayed unfixed even after partial patches. Both deepin-api and deepin-system-monitor were found using deprecated Polkit authentication in an unsafe way.

That report prompted Adam Williamson of the Fedora QA team to open a ticket with a pointed question attached. If SUSE's security team found all of this, what did Fedora's situation look like?

Turns out Fedora had been shipping these packages without any meaningful security review, and the project's own package review guidelines were found lacking without any requirements, tools, or instructions for reviewers to consider security issues.

A thing to note here is that some security-related guidelines did exist at one point but were deleted years ago.

Was already on life support

By the time FESCo cast its vote, the Deepin packages were already in rough shape on their own. Core packages had been failing to build across Fedora 42, 43, and 44.

The desktop environment had already been pulled from Fedora spins and fedora-comps months earlier because essential packages simply could not build.

The ones who were supposed to be the stewards of this effort in Fedora, the DeepinDE SIG, lost many of its key members over time. One of the original maintainers, Zamir Sun, who had served as the SIG's coordinator, confirmed as much in a reply to FESCo's outreach email:

To make a long story short, all the initial packagers of the Deepin DE packages(namely felixonmars, mosquito(no longer with Fedoraproject) and cheeselee in FAS, and me as the coordinator) are being too busy for the vast amount of work in maintaining DeepinDE. And we never got active packagers to take the effort so we have to see it going away from Fedora.

That left a certain Felix Wang (topazus) as the one person still actively touching the packages, who has not been replying to bug reports, maintainer pings, or direct emails.

And whenever Fedora's build failure policy automatically orphaned a package, topazus would simply reclaim it without fixing anything.

FESCo sent its formal outreach on May 5 and gave four weeks for a response. With nothing substantive coming back, the committee moved to retire the full package set. Release Engineering has also been told not to reinstate any of these packages unless they go through a proper review first.

So that is the end of line for Deepin on Fedora, for now. If, in the future, some people step up and take the packages through a fresh review, maybe this desktop environment will make a comeback.

But given the state things were left in, that is not a bet anyone should be making just yet.

Since then, things got a little complicated for the project. Nextcloud and IONOS launched Euro-Office, a European fork of ONLYOFFICE, citing concerns about the project's Russian development roots, lack of transparency, and resistance to outside contributions.

ONLYOFFICE hit back, accusing the fork of violating the additional conditions attached to its AGPLv3 license.

Now, the developers have released ONLYOFFICE Docs 9.4, which covers a fair bit of ground across all the editors and introduces a licensing update.

🆕 ONLYOFFICE Docs 9.4: What's New?

Starting with form management, you can now assign specific recipients and track their filling status directly within the editor. Previously, that meant going outside the editor entirely, making the whole experience more clunky than it needed to be.

Horizontal lines in documents are in too, which was apparently a frequently requested feature on their social media pages. You can insert them to visually separate sections via the "Borders" button in the Home tab.

Similarly, the signature field in forms now defaults to the last image you used. Thanks to this, you don't need to dig around for the same file each time you sign a batch of documents.

Then there's the Presentation Editor, which picks up 25 new ready-to-use themes, covering a fairly wide range of styles, accessible from the Design tab. There are also 20 new slide transitions under the Transitions tab for adding a bit more polish to your next pitch.

The Spreadsheet Editor gets a dedicated Dark Document mode. With the general dark theme on, the spreadsheet canvas can be switched to a dark background as well via the View tab.

The community version (for self-hosting) also sees some structural work. The code is no longer minified, making it easier to read through, and it now runs as a single process with no reliance on RabbitMQ or databases.

That trims down what the host machine needs to run, and starting with this release, the 20-connection cap is gone.

Finally, the licensing terms have been updated. ONLYOFFICE has clarified its AGPLv3 conditions, with clearer language around attribution, copyright notices, labeling of modified versions, and trademark rights under a separate Trademark Policy (was error 404 at the time of writing).

If you recall, the Euro-Office dispute was specifically about whether a fork could drop those additional Section 7 conditions. The developers haven't said this update was a response to that, but we can confidently infer that from what has happened so far.

📥 Download ONLYOFFICE Docs 9.4

Like usual, you will find there are two main flavors. One is for self-hosting users who want to deploy ONLYOFFICE on their infrastructure, and the other one is for people who want a reliable office suite on their computer.

For more details on this release, you can refer to the changelog.

Suggested Read 📖: The TDF Questions Whether Euro-Office is Truly Sovereign

But that comes at a cost; any hit to its image matters a lot when we are talking about software that holds extremely sensitive information.

So when things start looking a little off, people pay attention. And over the past few months, a few things have looked a little off.

Some things changed at the top

The first change worth noting happened in February. Bitwarden's longtime CEO, Michael Crandell, stepped back to an advisory role. The company said nothing about it publicly, and one would have to check his LinkedIn profile to find out.

The new CEO is Michael Sullivan, who was previously CEO of Acquia and, before that, InsightSoftware. What got people worried was his experience of working across "all facets of mergers and acquisitions," with named private equity firms, including Hg, Vista Equity Partners, and TA Associates.

That is a very particular background for someone to be stepping into a head honcho role at a password manager company. Bitwarden's CFO also changed, where Stephen Morrison left in April and Michael Shenkman, who previously ran InVision, came in as his replacement.

None of these major executive changes were officially announced.

Quiet changes

I referred to the Wayback Machine and found that the term "Always free" had been on Bitwarden Personal's product page for a long time, sitting inside the plan comparison table.

It disappeared sometime in mid-April and was only restored sometime after May 14.

According to a company employee who posted on the r/Bitwarden subreddit, all of that was supposedly due to an oversight by the Bitwarden marketing team.

Then there's the other issue of values being quietly changed. Bitwarden has used the GRIT acronym to describe its company culture for years, standing for Gratitude, Responsibility, Inclusion, and Transparency.

I again checked the Wayback Machine, and the values were still intact as of March 14, 2026. At some point after that, they were quietly changed. GRIT now stands for Gratitude, Responsibility, Innovation, and Trust.

The 2022 blog post Crandell wrote laying out the original GRIT values was edited to reflect the new ones. Except the editing stopped halfway. The explanatory paragraph further down in the same post still describes Inclusion and Transparency as the values.

Bitwarden's stance

Sullivan published a blog recently, laying out his first 100 days at Bitwarden and also hashing some things out.

The free tier is not going anywhere. He ruled out a trial model or bait-and-switch and said that the open source foundation and the ability to audit the code, self-host, and verify are what make Bitwarden different from everything else in the space.

He also acknowledged that changes are coming, but those would be explained properly.

Should you be worried?

The post referenced above is the most direct on-record statement Bitwarden has about the free tier. But a pattern of ambiguity has already been established.

For such a sensitive piece of software, unannounced leadership changes and a values rewrite are the kind of thing that should make you nervous. But unless Bitwarden does something drastic like axing the free tier or pulling a Cal.com, there is not much to act on just yet.

Suggested Read 📖: Bitwarden vs. Proton Pass

Brendan Burns, co-founder of Kubernetes and Corporate VP for Azure OSS and Cloud Native at Microsoft, delivered a keynote on their technological shift from cloud native to what the company is calling the "AI native era."

The announcement covered quite a bit of ground, so here's a breakdown.

What was announced?

The Linux part of the announcement has two updates. Azure Linux 4.0 is coming to Azure Virtual Machines as a public preview, though it is still in active development and no downloads are available yet. Microsoft has a sign-up form open for early access.

Azure Container Linux is now generally available, with a full rollout planned during Microsoft Build on June 2. It is an immutable, container-optimized OS, which by design means no package manager and a read-only system image.

This is aimed at teams handling regulated or security-sensitive deployments, with the intent to keep the attack surface relatively limited while Microsoft maintains the supply chain end to end.

For agentic AI, Microsoft is pushing several building blocks for what it calls an open agentic stack. The Microsoft Agent Framework is an open source SDK and runtime for multi-agent systems, consolidating earlier work from Semantic Kernel and AutoGen into one foundation.

Alongside that is the Agent Governance Toolkit, which covers identity, policy, and audit controls for AI agent deployments and A2A (agent-to-agent) protocols for cross-vendor, cross-framework agent communication.

We saw this coming

The announcement doesn't mention Fedora once, but the Azure Linux 4.0 branch on the project's GitHub paints a different picture.

The README file for 4.0 explicitly describes Fedora as an "upstream base" for Azure Linux, describing the distro as a set of TOML configuration files and targeted overlays applied on top of Fedora.

Likewise, packages come straight from Fedora's upstream repositories, with any deviations from that kept minimal and clearly documented.

Last month, we reported on discussions from a Fedora ELN SIG meeting where it became clear Microsoft was backing a proposal to build x86-64-v3 packages for Fedora 45.

Kyle Gospodnetich, a Linux engineer at Microsoft, was co-authoring the change proposal, with the motivation tied directly to Azure Linux's need for x86-64-v3 performance gains.

There was also talk of Microsoft forking the distribution entirely at one point, but they were guided toward working within the Fedora ecosystem instead. We called it "a big if" at the time.

Now, the 4.0 branch confirms it. 🤓

As for why Microsoft stayed quiet about the Fedora connection in its announcement blog post. Fedora is effectively Red Hat's upstream, and Red Hat is both an Azure partner and a competitor in the enterprise Linux space. I presume that it would make for an awkward read in that context.

Suggested Read 📖: Fedora Hummingbird Debuts As a Hardened Linux Distro

They range from quick CLI scripts to full-blown graphical applications. Some focus on browser data; others go deeper into system logs, package caches, and temporary files.

One of the more popular offerings among those is BleachBit, which is a free and open source system cleaner for Linux and Windows that handles all that. It's developers have now given everyone an early look into how its text-based user interface (TUI) is shaping up.

BleachBit TUI works well

The TUI is simple to navigate. The space bar toggles cleaning options on or off, and Enter expands a category to show the file list underneath.

For previewing what would be cleaned, there are two options: lowercase p runs a full preview across all selected items, while uppercase P previews just the focused component.

Once done, d handles deletion for everything selected, and D deletes the focused component specifically. On my first attempt, the deletion failed because I had not launched the TUI with elevated privileges.

Re-launching with sudo python3 bleachbit_tui.py fixed that. Once initiated, I had to press Y to confirm the action, and when it completed, a dialog appeared in the bottom-right showing the files deleted and space recovered.

There is also a palette menu, accessible via Ctrl+P. From there, you can search commands, maximize a selected component, quit BleachBit, save a screenshot, and bring up the keys/help side panel.

Since the TUI shares its backend with the regular BleachBit GUI, it picks up all the same settings automatically. That covers your selected cleaning options, keep list, custom cleaning list, and cookie keep list.

It also supports changing display themes and some mouse interaction alongside keyboard navigation, including the scroll wheel. On Windows, the TUI ships as both an installer and a portable package, compiled as a native 64-bit binary, unlike the 32-bit stable GUI and CLI builds.

If you want to try it out on Linux, the official announcement has quick-start instructions for running the TUI on Ubuntu, and if that doesn't suit you, then you could build from source.

It can handle project planning, resource allocation, time tracking, and progress reporting, and its target customers are organizations that want full control over their own infrastructure and data.

Now, they have introduced a new release that adds some useful features around collaboration, project tracking, and a pretty notable expansion of language support.

What's new?

The 1.6.0 release arrives with email support for major user groups, per-project document repositories, and configurable email templates with notification support.

Project managers also get a few new visibility tools. There is now an issue and risk log, a pipeline overview, project margin tracking, and traffic light-style status indicators in the project list view.

The last addition in particular should be handy, letting you spot which projects need attention at a glance without you needing to click through each one.

Moving on to the highlight of this release, we have the expanded language support, which takes the earlier four languages supported number all the way to 19.

These include Czech, Chinese, German, Persian/Farsi, Russian, Italian, Norwegian Bokmål, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Simplified Chinese.

None of these new additions have been through manual review, though. They were put together using AI tooling, and the project is counting on the community to spot mistakes and tighten things up.

Get LibrePlan

LibrePlan 1.6.0 is available now, with Docker images for the Community Edition available on Docker Hub, and a live demo environment is accessible on the official website.

There's also a separate enterprise-focused version called LibrePlan Enterprise for organizations looking to deploy this release, and the source code for the Community Edition lives on GitHub.

You can learn more about this release in the announcement blog.

Suggested Read 📖: Fedora's AI Move Hits a Roadblock

Sander Hilven, a developer, has put together a working recipe that works on Wine 11.8 staging with Lightroom CC 9.3.1. Interestingly, they have not done any of the actual work themselves.

The dev just told Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.7 what the goal was and left it to figure out the rest, while providing an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription for the AI to work with.

The AI dug through crash logs and Wine compatibility issues autonomously, figuring out what needed fixing. It verified its own work by screenshotting the running Lightroom instance and clicking through the interface to confirm whether each fix held up.

Though, several fixes were needed to get things going. Some Windows APIs that Wine doesn't implement were bringing down the entire Creative Cloud process on launch, some DLLs Lightroom depends on simply did not exist in Wine, and there were naming mismatches between how Lightroom looks for its files and how Adobe actually ships them.

The Remove/Heal tool was the trickiest fix. It kept crashing mid-use, and the AI traced it back to a dependency that Wine ships in the wrong place.

Currently, browsing, editing, exporting, and the Remove/Heal tool all work. Not everything is perfect though; tutorial videos don't play, some GPU-accelerated effects may not render correctly, and there's a bug with double-clicking thumbnails.

I won't touch it

The sole human developer's GitHub has no bio to speak of, and outside this repo, there is nothing that tells you much about who they are.

The entire project, including the patched DLLs and the assurance that they work, was produced by an AI agent. No human has looked at those binaries independently.

That is a lot of trust to put in AI-generated Windows DLL patches running inside your Linux computer.

I won't be testing this due to all that and because I don't have an Adobe subscription. But if you have one and have a spare machine lying around, why not give it a try and post your findings on our forum?

Yeah, that is a not-so-subtle nudge to visit it and interact with the other FOSSers. 😉

Think of them as a local home for your inbox that comes equipped with the necessary tools for composing, organizing, and syncing your content. 📥

I had one of my earliest experiences with these through Thunderbird, which I used at a previous workplace. It did the job well enough at the time, and I have no real complaints about it from back then.

Eventually I drifted toward just using the web apps of whatever email service I was on. So, when I came across Aerion, I thought to myself, why not give email clients another shot?

Aerion: A Home For Your E-Mails

This is an open source, lightweight desktop email client maintained by a team of developers that is sponsored by 3DF, which covers the infrastructure and human resource-related costs.

The project takes inspiration from GNOME's email client Geary, with a focus on being resource efficient and offering a clean interface without the baggage that tends to weigh down the older solutions on Linux.

Before you blurt out "Electron!," know that Aerion uses Wails and Svelte under the hood. It also comes with a CASA Tier 2 certification, which was assessed by TAC Security, a Google authorized assessor under the App Defense Alliance.

This means that the app's codebase has been scanned and verified against the OWASP ASVS standards by an independent third party. For a small indie project that handles your email credentials and account access, that is a big reassurance.

Feature-wise, it covers the essentials like support for multiple accounts, conversation threading, a WYSIWYG composer powered by TipTap, contact sync (via CardDAV, Google, and Microsoft), multiple color themes, and keyboard navigation with vim-style shortcuts.

For email providers, Aerion works with Gmail, Microsoft 365/Outlook, Proton Mail (via paywalled Proton Bridge), iCloud Mail, GMX Mail, and generic IMAP/SMTP setups.

Yahoo, Fastmail, Zoho Mail, AOL Mail, and Mail.com are listed as well, though these were marked as untested at the time of writing.

I Used It

Getting started meant adding my Gmail account, and that process was smoother than I expected. Aerion hands you off to the browser for the OAuth flow, where you go through Google's usual permissions and disclaimers routine, at the end of which you land back in Aerion, authenticated and ready to go.

There's a nasty catch here, though. If you accidentally click somewhere outside the "Add Email Account" window while it is open, the whole thing closes and discards whatever progress you made. You won't get any warning or confirmation popup; it will just f*ck right off.

When Aerion finishes fetching your emails, you will notice that remote image loading is blocked by default. You can manually allow loading per email or add specific domains to an allowlist to avoid having to do it every time.

With Gmail connected, I spent some time sending and receiving mail, and the basics work as you would want them to. The composer has all the tools you need to put together a well-written email, and new messages are delivered with proper sync happening with the Gmail servers.

Below is a quick example of me sending a test mail from Aerion to my Proton Mail account. It landed without issue, showing up in Gmail's sent folder and in the Proton Mail inbox.

Where things got a bit less clean was with notifications. When I received new mail, I received no notification in Aerion's interface or GNOME's notification dropdown.

I had to manually hit the sync button to get the mail to appear, though Aerion does auto-sync in the background. The catch is that there is no way to configure how often it syncs, at least for Gmail, so if you are used to mail showing up the moment it lands, adjust your expectations accordingly.

What I missed was that there is a way to configure sync intervals. It is hidden away under the Accounts settings, where one has to click on the pencil icon for a specific account and go into the "Server" category and look for "Sync Options."

And if you like keeping your mailbox clean, Aerion has you covered. You can mass delete emails that land in the "Bin" first, or you can go the extra step and permanently wipe them to free up cloud storage. Either way, the changes reflect on Gmail's servers without issue.

Though there's one more inconvenience that some of you might not like. Before you can start using Aerion, you are asked to agree to its Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

The terms are fairly standard. It is pre-release software, so bugs and shifting features are part of the deal, there are no warranties, and the whole thing is provided under the Apache 2.0 license.

On the privacy side, things are more reassuring. Aerion does not collect or transmit any of your data to external servers, so no telemetry, no analytics, and no ads to worry about. When it connects to Google or Microsoft APIs, that access is limited strictly to the email functionality you configured.

Install it Now

People running Linux-powered distributions can get Aerion from Flathub. Those on platforms like ARM64, Windows, and macOS will have to visit the releases page to get the relevant packages.

If neither of the options are your thing, then you could always build from source.