The Download: Linux 486 retirement, DeepSeek v4, TanStack AI & more

Friends goes all in on Linux for its public sector. China's newest open source model is dropping inference cost again and 10 stack shipped an open source SDK that takes on vendor lock in. All this and more in today's episode of the download. Welcome back to another episode of The Download, the show where we cover the latest developer news and open source projects. Please like and subscribe. I'm Andrea and I debug all this news so you don't have to. Let's get into it. France is going allin on digital sovereignty. The government's digital agency DInnum is rolling out a plan for every ministry to migrate to Linux as part of a broader effort to keep data and infrastructure decisions in operator hands France controls. This is not new ground for them. The Genda Maria National, their police force, has been running a custom Ubuntu bill called Gendu since 2008. As of last year, it was on more than 100,000 workstations across the force, saving roughly €2 million a year in licensing. That is the model the DINUM is now pointing to for the rest of the government. The thing to watch here is the procurement signal. a G7 country picking Linux as this scale. Open source just got one heck of a customer. Canonical laid out his plan for local inference features in Ubuntu. The idea is to run models on the device instead of round tripping to a cloud API. The pitch is simple. Privacy stays local. Latency drops. You stop paying per token for stuff that does not need a frontier model. And if your network is flaky, the model still runs. Canonical's BP of engineering Joe Ziger said the roll out will happen across the next year. Focus on open way models, open- source harnesses, and local inference where possible. Distribution is through snaps, which keeps confinement consistent with how the rest of Ubuntu handles permissions. If you're building developer tools or internal apps, it's worth a look. Sometimes the cheapest, fastest, most private interference is the kind that never leaves your machine. All the links are in the show notes. DeepSick dropped a preview of V4 on April 24th. Open source pro and flash variants tune for popular agent tools. The release notes name check claw code open claw and open code which tells you exactly who you think their customers are. Hint, it's me. It's us. Strong capabilities at prices that seem to keep dropping. B4 Pro launched at $348 per million output tokens and DPS has since cut that further with a limited time promotional discount running through May. At the time of recording for comparison, that same volume output tokens will cost around $30 on OpenAI and 25 on Entropic. So, DIPC is undercutting the closed source Frontier by close to an order of magnitude. The real story here of course is cost. Paying Frontier API race for every little task adds up fast and open claw even made D4 flash already its default model just two days after launch. This matter pattern is mixing models. Use a cheap one for routine things a frontier one for hard reasoning. Well, Deepseek just made the cheap end of that mix a lot more interesting. In tooling and open source news, Tanstack, the beloved team behind some of the most used libraries in the React ecosystem, has been building a framework agnostic AI toolkit called Tanstack AI. Fully open source, no service layer, no platform fees. The team is calling it the Switzerland of AI tooling. The alpha already ships with adapters for OpenAI, Antropic, Gemini, and Olama, server libraries in Typescript, PHP, and Python, and client libraries for VanillaJS, React, and Solid with a spelt on the way. The piece that stood out to me here is what they're calling isomorphic tools. You define a tool once with meta definitions, then provide isolated server and client implementations. That gives you type safety across both sides of the connection, which is genuinely rare in this space. Per model typing means your ID knows which modalities each model supports, less guessing, fewer runtime surprises. It's still an alpha, so expect some sharp edges, but the through line is consistent. You own your stock and no vendor decides for you. And we'll close with one for the Colonel Nerds. A new patch series merging into Linux is removing Intel 486 support from the kernel. Linux 7.1 is the version where the i486 started walking off the stage. The 486 is 37 years old. It shipped back in 1989 and the technical recent tracks. The 486 doesn't have some of the instructions modern colonel codes lean on. So the colonel has been carrying emulation glue to basically pretend and fake it for years. That glue was causing more problems that the architecture was worth. Lionus has been arguing for dropping it since 2022. And this patch by Ingo Molnar is what finally moved that needle. If you're one of the people running a current Linux kernel on a 486, don't worry. The long-term support kernels will still work. You're not stranded. I have to admit there is something kind of beautiful about a colonel that ran on a 486 back in 1991, still running on that same lineage today. Linux outlasted the ship it was born on, and that is one heck of a running software. And that's it for this week. Let me know in the comments your thoughts on any of the topics we discussed this week. And if you like this episode, please give us a thumbs up, leave me a comment. I reply to every single one of them. And please subscribe to this YouTube channel for all your nerdy needs. See you next time.