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Fixing KIO copy to USB stick and network filesystems
KDE developer Méven Car tells the story of fixing a 15-year-old high-priority KIO bug where copies to USB sticks and network shares reported progress against the page cache rather than the device, using sync_file_range() so Dolphin's copy now finishes when the data is really on the stick and network progress tracks the server.
14 min · 3,190 words
A build log for the slurptop, a home-built cyberpunk luggable computer using a Ryzen 7 mini PC, a custom 82-key mechanical keyboard, an integrated trackball and a UPS that runs on swappable 24V Kobalt power tool batteries, covering design, power delivery, bill of materials, filaments and battery life.
10 min · 2,252 words
Ben Hardill describes his Lenovo X1 Carbon developing crashing tabs and BTRFS checksum errors, confirming faulty soldered RAM with memtest86+, and working around the bad addresses with the Linux memmap kernel parameter instead of replacing a module, arguing soldered RAM is especially painful amid today's shortage-driven memory prices.
5 min · 1,068 words
Putting Linux on my RTX Spark laptop because I don't have a Microsoft account
Josephine Pfeiffer gets Arch Linux ARM running on the Windows-only ASUS ProArt P16 with NVIDIA's N1X chip, publishing a bootable installer and patches, comparing CPU performance against Windows in 7-Zip, explaining the 116 GiB unified memory split, and benchmarking local Qwen inference.
6 min · 1,453 words
Finding a home amidst the wreckage
Eskild Hustvedt describes growing apathetic as free software projects and Linux distros embrace LLMs, and how he found a new home in Chimera Linux, which takes a stand against LLM-generated contributions, along with other distros, BSDs and non-LLM forks that do the same.
3 min · 677 words
Epic's EAC2 v2 seems fairly easily bypassable
Matthew Garrett looks at Epic’s Easy Anti-Cheat Linux v2 announcement and argues the design still looks bypassable in practice—walking through why userland anti-cheat on Linux is a hard security problem.
3 min · 683 words
Using Artificial Intelligence to reverse engineer hardware
Christian F.K. Schaller describes using Claude Code with a Windows VM capturing USB traffic to write a working Linux SANE driver for his Plustek 8200i film scanner within hours, then reusing the setup to patch the kernel and libcamera for his laptop's MIPI camera, and releasing hw-harness, a generic toolkit to help AI agents reverse engineer undocumented hardware.
8 min · 1,760 words
My self-hosted infrastructure with Incus OS
My self-hosted infrastructure with Incus OS](2026-10-15-selfhosting-infrastructure-incus-os.html) Written by Solène, on 15 October 2026. Tags: selfhosting security linux containers
14 min · 3,147 words
On the 30th anniversary of KDE's original announcement, long-time contributor Cornelius Schumacher reflects on joining the project in 1999, the values of digital freedom it embodies, how its community keeps renewing itself, and the goals it set for enterprise, documentation and styling.
2 min · 462 words
yet another place where a linux man page is inaccurate
A short systems note on initstate(3) and related RNG APIs: where the Linux man page wording diverges from observed behavior, with a segfault surprise along the way.
2 min · 493 words
Linux Lockdown and Hibernation (again)
Matthew Garrett revisits why Linux kernel lockdown disables hibernation, how a hibernation image could be used to tamper with a locked-down kernel, and updated technical approaches using TPM-sealed keys to make secure hibernation possible.
14 min · 3,194 words
Railroads, UPenn, and a Well-Loved UNIX Machine
A restoration log for an AT&T 3B2/300: from a 43MB hard-drive backup the author reconstructs the machine's history, from short-line railroad operations to railroad expert-witness consulting, plus development material for UPenn's telephone class-registration system PARIS, with records spanning 1984 to 2002.
5 min · 1,116 words
Compiler bootstrapping depends on more than you might think
Chris Siebenmann on bootstrapping the Go toolchain from C sources, and how OS and environment changes complicate the “start from source” story more than the language docs suggest.
3 min · 627 words
Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit
deafbeef bought a TP-Link EAP770 Wi-Fi 7 AP that corrupts large downloads; with the device already EOL, TP-Link's shell blocked the sysfs fix, so he wrote a kernel exploit against his own access point to flip two zeros and make transfers reliable.
13 min · 3,102 words
What I Self-Host, What I Don’t, and Why
A personal tour of a mini-PC home server running 17 native and 11 Podman services under systemd — what the author self-hosts (media, photos, etc.), what they deliberately don't, and the reasoning behind each choice.
14 min · 3,240 words
11 of 23 Core Open Source Projects Run on 1 or 2 People
Linux Stans walks through a sheets.works analysis of 23 projects that phones, browsers and servers depend on, finding 11 had only one or two regular contributors in the past year, covering maintainers of tzdata, xz, sudo and SQLite, the funding that does or does not reach them, and r/linux pushback.
13 min · 3,007 words
HIP and ROCm as first-class citizens
Ludovic Courtès reports that Guix developers migrated the whole AMD HIP/ROCm stack from the Guix-HPC channels into Guix proper starting with 7.1.1: more than 40 packages covering the toolchain, linear algebra libraries, rocHPL, a ROCm Open MPI and profiling tools, plus HIP variants of scientific software.
6 min · 1,485 words
WSL2 vs WSL3 Benchmarks: Performance, Memory, and Syscall Scaling
Tony Metzidis benchmarks WSL 2.6.3.0 (Linux 6.6) against WSL 3.0.2.0 (Linux 6.18) across kernel microbenchmarks, memory bandwidth and an end-to-end GoReleaser build, finding WSL3 roughly 5-60% faster depending on workload and explaining where the gains come from.
3 min · 757 words
Creating distro build tooling for a small community
A long post from the Chimera Linux project making the case for cbuild, its custom package build system. It explains how the tooling is designed to cater to a small contributor community, how templates, dependencies and shared library providers are handled, how sandboxed builds work, and the self-hosted multi-architecture builder fleet behind the distro.
19 min · 4,352 words
Last rites for Gentoo's Chromium package
LWN covers Gentoo's decision to last-rite its Chromium package: maintenance burden, toolchain and sandbox complexity, and what the end of a distro-packaged Chromium means for Linux users who relied on it.
58 min · 13,293 words