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Cloudflare data suggests desktop Linux usage in North America has climbed to 6.4%, up from 4.1% a year earlier, with one post-holiday workday briefly spiking to 22%. ZDNet reports: [B]elieve it or not, on Monday, July 6, when people were back after the July 4 holiday, Linux usage jumped to a high of 22%. The users of these systems are not AI agents or bots, but real people. I set Cloudflare to count humans rather than bots. If you include people and bots, Linux has a 9.7% market share. That proportion is similar to StatCounter's score. By Cloudflare's count, bots alone come to 19%. These numbers tell us that workers are leading the way to the Linux desktop. [...] However, past performance doesn't explain present trends. So, why are we now seeing such a bump in Linux desktop growth? Experts believe this trend is largely AI developers and Linux users running AI Agents. For example, as David Linthicum, former managing director and chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte Consulting and AI and cloud influencer, recently observed, while "Windows 11 can technically run local AI workloads, but as you begin using multiple tools, managing different projects, and installing various dependencies, the friction starts to build," it's a different story for Linux users. Linthicum continued: "Linux delivered what I can only describe as a true 'AI desktop' experience. Setup was straightforward, mainstream AI instructions matched what you'd actually see in your environment, and GPU-accelerated apps simply worked -- consistently. I spent far less time troubleshooting and far more time actually executing on projects." As for agents, Linux Foundation CEO Jim Zemlin summed up their role succinctly: "Linux is the OS of choice for AI agents." Desktop Linux is also gaining momentum as frustration with Windows 11 and the end of Windows 10 support push users to alternatives, particularly on older PCs that can't officially upgrade. At the same time, Linux has become much easier to use, install software on, and game with, lowering many of the traditional barriers to switching.

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British researchers have found that the number of kids seeking hospital treatment with e-scooter injuries has increased more than 20-fold since 2019.

The Office star, 53, shared on Tuesday that she'd been diagnosed with incurable stage four breast cancer, and she 'doesn't know how long she has left'.

The Scottish rocker, 81, sparked fresh health fears just the day before after cancelling another concert due to a mystery medical issue.

'We're clearly in one of those cycles right now where people are very, very, very thin,' she observed of the Ozempic era in the September issue of Vogue.

Kaia's mother Cindy Crawford was married to Homer's father Richard Gere from 1991 to 1995, when both halves of the couple were at the height of their stardom.

A Syrian court sentenced ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad along with his younger brother to death in absentia today for crimes against humanity and war crimes during Syria's 14-year conflict

The actor first went sober after splitting from Jolie amid accusations that he poured booze on her and their children during a volatile flight on board a private jet in 2016.

We are all concerned about the decline of our High Streets and town centres. Sometimes, the only businesses that seem to be proliferating are vape shops, betting shops and mini-marts.

The Communities Secretary said she cannot give up smoking e-cigarettes despite trying to quit because her nicotine addiction has led her to a 'lifetime of purgatory'.

Ian Clarke (aka ancient Slashdot reader Sanity), designer of the peer-to-peer communication platform Freenet, is back with an update on the project's progress following the launch of its P2P network in March. He writes: Earlier this year, Slashdot covered the launch of the completely redesigned Freenet. I recently gave a talk about what we've been building since then. Unlike traditional web applications, apps on Freenet have no central server or database; instead application state is distributed across the network. These now include decentralized group chat, publishing, search, and fully decentralized Git hosting. The talk also gets into some of Freenet's internals, including how we use machine learning for network routing.

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Chris Rock has been spotted on celebrity dating app Raya, where his profile is being shown to young women in London.

President Donald Trump was secretly smuggled off Air Force One inside a catering truck in a covert operation to foil potential Iranian assassins, new reports claim.

One big caveat, though: You need your contact's phone number

Sysadmins, welcome to your new norm

Draft memo taps AI data analysis biz for help with military production efficiency

The new filing accuses Trump of improperly sidestepping the Supreme Court and its ruling on birthright citizenship two months ago.

Bellway's boss Jason Honeyman said more needed to be done for first-time buyers struggling to afford new homes as the near-term outlook remained 'uncertain'.

Gemini has become Google's fastest-growing product ever, reaching 1 billion monthly active users faster than any of the company's 13 other billion-user services. Ars Technica reports: Gemini has wormed its way into virtually every Google product and service, powering email organization in Gmail, document summary in Drive, and much more. Gemini is also core to Google's flagship search experience, with AI Mode and AI Overviews becoming increasingly hard to avoid. The 1 billion-user metric has nothing to do with any of that, though. These 1 billion users may also be encountering Gemini in all those places, but that's not the MAU metric. Pichai is talking only about people who are opening the Gemini app or visiting the Gemini web interface to enter a prompt or access Gemini Live. If you used Gemini only once in the past month, you are part of this cohort.

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NatWest said it was reaching out to its 42,000 farming customers to offer loan repayment holidays and emergency overdrafts.