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The guides on this site are built to answer a question and get out of your way. This is where the rest goes: the maintenance archaeology that explains why a guide says what it says, the awkward conversations about money, and the occasional entry that's really just us showing our work so you can check it.
Two rules for this log. Nothing gets posted to fill a publishing calendar — if we have nothing to say for two months, the newest entry stays two months old, which is honest. And anything fragile gets a date stamped on it, because the fastest way to become wrong on the Linux desktop is to be right in 2021 and never look again.
What happened to NoiseTorch? A maintenance timeline
2026-09-20 · ~1,000 words · maintenance archaeology
The most recommended tool in Linux noise suppression hasn't shipped a release since June 2022, and the story of how it got there — a suspected infrastructure compromise, a volunteer audit that found no malicious code, a community continuation, and then a long quiet — is the best case study we know for what "maintained" actually means. Includes the four checks we run on any project before recommending it, and the specific thing that would make us change our minds about this one.
Free as in "nobody pays us"
2026-09-20 · ~900 words · site economics
Nearly every tool we recommend is free software with no affiliate programme, which makes this the worst-monetised corner of an otherwise commercial niche. Rather than hide that, here's the full accounting: exactly one paid product exists in our lane, it doesn't run on Linux, and we explain what that does to our incentives — plus the three ways sites in this niche usually distort their advice, and how you can spot them anywhere, including here.
What we're watching
Open tabs rather than promises — the things that would force a rewrite somewhere on this site:
- Whether NoiseTorch ever ships again. One tagged release moves it from 49 to 76 in our scoring, mechanically. We'd be pleased to report it.
- DeepFilterNet's pace. The heavier engine inside EasyEffects is the best free answer for messy non-stationary noise, and upstream has been quiet since 2023. Worth keeping an eye on.
- Suppression moving into the audio server. If PipeWire ever grows a first-class denoiser, the entire "which wrapper do I install" question on this site becomes a historical note.
- The LADSPA plugin's packaging. It's in Arch and thin elsewhere, which is the only real weakness of the config-file route.
No newsletter, no notification prompt, no cookie banner asking to follow you around in exchange for this. If you want to know when something changes, the dates on every page are the honest version of that.