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- Exclusive: 2 new open source projects + COSMIC desktop + Matomo
Exclusive: 2 new open source projects + COSMIC desktop + Matomo
Welcome to edition #47 of the We ❤️ Open Source newsletter!
Atomic co-founder Lee Faus joins the podcast for an exclusive look at two new open source projects. Plus, we're celebrating System76's COSMIC desktop after 20 years, owning your analytics with Matomo, exploring agent-native development with Circuit Breaker, leveling up RAG retrieval systems, and running any distro's apps with DistroBox.
Made and curated by real humans.🙂 This week we'll look at...
Version control needs to evolve for the age of AI agents
Developers need a new way to handle pipeline failures
Good thing Lee Faus, CEO and founder of Atomic Software and long-time technologist and version control expert, has started a company and created two new open source projects to solve both problems. And, he's hiring for multiple positions after raising a significant pre-seed round. What he's doing is original and exciting - and we feel you'll agree. Check it out and learn more below!
Articles
 | System76 celebrated 20 years by releasing COSMIC, a completely re-imagined Linux desktop environment. From accessibility options at first login to choosing between floating and tiling windows, COSMIC puts customization and user choice first. Take a hands-on tour of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS and discover what makes this modular desktop special. WHY WE ❤️ IT: This article is a step-by-step guide to downloading COSMIC for yourself - from installation to your first log in to customizing your desktop. Very cool. |
 | Most analytics platforms lock you into vendor contracts and blur the line between your data and theirs. Matomo flips the script. Learn how to self-host, integrate via REST API, track without consent banners, and own every byte of analytics data. Your complete 2026 guide to privacy-first analytics that actually respects your users. WHY WE ❤️ IT: We love the comprehensive nature of this developer guide, and it's part of the e-book The ultimate 2026 guide to open source marketing automation for developers, a free download from We Love Open Source. |
 | AI agents are already submitting patches and breaking CI at scale. But our version control still assumes humans typing at keyboards. Atomic SCM and Circuit Breaker are two open source projects exploring what software development looks like when agents are full participants. Discover why the primitives for agent-native development must be open source. WHY WE ❤️ IT: We love the final section that explains "Why this must be open source". Lee and his team are dogfooding the two projects highlighted, and making sure of it in the process. |
 | Traditional RAG systems retrieve documents based on semantic similarity, but struggle with complex questions. Rationale-guided retrieval uses chain-of-thought reasoning to decompose queries and guide targeted retrieval. Learn how to implement this with open source LLMs like Llama and Qwen, plus when the trade-offs are worth it. WHY WE ❤️ IT: Readers should be able to take what's in this post and experiment on your own use cases. We hope you'll share your findings with us and the overall open source community! |
What's in your technology toolbox?
Want to run Fedora apps on Ubuntu or Arch packages on Debian? Learn Linux TV shows you how DistroBox makes it incredibly simple. Install it in minutes, create containers with a single command, and run applications from any distribution without dual-booting or VMs.
From the We ❤️ Open Source Podcast
 | Lee Faus, co-founder from Atomic joins us on the podcast. We explore why traditional version control hits its limits with agentic workflows, how the hourglass effect in development reveals a new validation bottleneck, and why petri nets might solve the pipeline restart problem developers face every day. |
Wrap Up
If you've made it this far (thank you!), check out everything we do, our YouTube channel with 1000's of open source talks, the many meetups we host around the southeast and NYC, the All Things AI spring event we co-host, and of course All Things Open, the largest open source tech conference on the US east coast.
We hope you learn something new this weekend!
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