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Plasma 6.8 released (KDE’s 30th birthday)
KDE announces Plasma 6.8 for its 30th anniversary: foundation work for future Plasma, desktop improvements, Wayland polishing, and app updates across the stack.
6 min · 1,283 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
Gentoo developer Michał Górny asks Python package maintainers not to adopt uv-build as their build backend, arguing that its size and Rust toolchain requirement break builds on less common architectures and downstream distributions, while its benefits over backends like flit-core or hatchling are minimal.
3 min · 579 words
Use the Tello's GameSir T1d controller as a Linux gamepad
A guide to making the BLE-only GameSir T1d controller sold with the Ryze/DJI Tello drone work as a regular Linux gamepad by speaking its proprietary GATT protocol and exposing it as a virtual input device, with every button verified.
7 min · 1,703 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
Ending the Casuarina Linux Experiment
Wesley Moore announces he is winding down Casuarina Linux, the distro he started: things continue as-is until the end of October 2026, after which package updates stop, with infrastructure staying up until the end of 2026. He explains why he is ending the project and what happens to the package repo and website.
4 min · 831 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
A GNU Guix blog tutorial on extending Guix with new guix commands: listing available extensions, the existing extension packages and meta-package, and walking through creating an extension's project directories and Scheme module so it can be distributed and used by others.
5 min · 1,143 words
Building Dn-FamiTracker on Linux
rexim (Alexey Kutepov) documents how to cross-compile the MSVC/MFC-based Dn-FamiTracker chiptune tracker on Linux for Windows using msvc-wine, CMake and a patch replacing a CMD build script with Bash, then running the result under Wine.
3 min · 731 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
Janet on x32: 32-bit Pointers, 64-bit Speed, 25% Less RAM
Alex Alejandre tests whether compiling the Janet language for 32-bit pointers saves memory: an -m32 build on Arch cut memory about 20% but ran 50% slower, while the x32 ABI on an old Ubuntu server averaged about 25% less RAM with mixed speed changes, not enough to justify a broader call to action.
11 min · 2,564 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
Raspberry Pi Desktop now available for PC and Mac
Simon Long announces an updated Debian Trixie with Raspberry Pi Desktop image for PCs and Macs, including a Raspberry Pi Connect client, and recounts how the x86 version began as a 2016 side project after Eben Upton asked whether the desktop could run on his Mac.
4 min · 1,020 words
Methods for Migrating Virtual Machines From VMware ESXi to Linux-Based Hypervisors
LINBIT's Matt Kereczman surveys ways to move VMs off VMware ESXi to Proxmox VE, KVM/libvirt, oVirt/OLVM, OpenShift Virtualization, OpenNebula or XCP-ng: copying VMDKs and converting with qemu-img, virt-v2v, OVF/OVA export, platform-specific import tools and other approaches, plus what to plan for and how to choose.
8 min · 1,760 words
John Murray walks through installing Nix on Valve's Steam Frame headset using the official installer's Steam Deck mode, then managing apps and dotfiles declaratively with standalone Home Manager, including launcher integration, system files on SteamOS's immutable root, Tailscale, and the Frametop desktop.
9 min · 2,004 words