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Swap, ZRAM, Zswap and Hibernate on NixOS
Matthew Brunelle untangles swap vs ZRAM vs zswap for suspend-then-hibernate on NixOS: why hibernate needs real swap, how swap files complicate resume, and the config that finally worked after several wrong turns.
3 min · 780 words
Is COSMIC DE mogging KDE Plasma?
Niccolò Venerandi of LibreNews revisits System76's COSMIC desktop a year after last trying it, now at stable releases, comparing its focused, polished feature set with KDE Plasma's deep customization, and explains why he still prefers Plasma's community, themes and modular shell that powers projects like Plasma Mobile and BigScreen.
12 min · 2,645 words
Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month
Cody Ho and a collaborator reverse-engineered Apple's M4 AGX GPU firmware ABI and built a fully OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant Linux driver in roughly one month, a process that normally takes years. The work was done in a clean-room manner using only hardware traces from a custom hypervisor, not Apple binaries.
1 min · 299 wordsagent-written
Running Ubuntu on the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet
A hands-on walkthrough of firmware hacking a Lenovo IdeaPad Duet Chromebook (ARM64 MediaTek) to run Ubuntu after ChromeOS and postmarketOS fell short.
38 min · 8,821 words
A 40ms Go GC pause caused by swap
Running swap in production to absorb memory spikes, the author found that Go's garbage collector reads off-heap metadata during a stop-the-world pause, and when that metadata is swapped out the pause jumps from a median of about 51 microseconds to 40ms. Includes eBPF measurements and a note on Go 1.26's Green Tea GC.
3 min · 785 words
Why Your Linux Kernel Starts With 'MZ' (Yes, the DOS/PE One)
A deep dive into why the Linux kernel image begins with the DOS/PE 'MZ' header—boot compatibility history, EFI stubs, and what the legacy magic bytes still do on modern systems.
9 min · 2,082 words
Tuning a Server for Benchmarking
How to tune a Linux server so benchmarks are repeatable: isolating noise from CPU frequency scaling, interrupts, and background services so small performance wins are actually visible.
5 min · 1,109 words
The "$60 Gaming PC" — AMD BC-250
The AMD BC-250 is a single-board PC based on a binned PlayStation 5 APU (RDNA 2 GPU, Zen 2 CPU, 16GB GDDR6) originally designed for cryptocurrency mining. The post documents how to acquire one for roughly $60–100 and configure it under Linux to run modern games like Cyberpunk 2077 at playable framerates.
1 min · 268 wordsagent-written
Abandoning Scientific Linux Was a Mistake
Mohamed Elashri argues CERN and Fermilab undervalued Scientific Linux’s option value: after CentOS and RHEL source-access shifts, accelerator controls are now moving thousands of machines to Debian to keep old hardware alive.
9 min · 2,133 words
Flatpak - an insecurity nightmare
Despite its title, Yves Auxier’s post defends Flatpak: it argues the Linux desktop needs sandboxed distribution, that insecure static permissions reflect old or unmigrated apps rather than a broken sandbox, that runtimes get security updates, and cites the fractureiser malware as a case where the sandbox helped.
6 min · 1,444 words
Ana Hobden walks through installing and using Nix on the Steam Deck: keeping SteamOS intact while getting a reproducible Linux userland for development and custom tooling.
13 min · 2,993 words
The container throttling problemOriginal article link with an AI-written directory summary
Dan Luu and David Mackey examine why CPU-bound services can suffer severe performance degradation well below their reserved container capacity. The article connects Linux scheduling and CPU quotas with real service behavior.
1 min · 94 wordsagent-written
When a glibc update accidentally breaks Chromium's audio
A debugging story from the Chromium Flatpak maintainer: a runtime update to 21.08 broke video playback with audio renderer errors, and tracing the failure led through the Chromium sandbox to a glibc change, with the fix and lessons on testing even small runtime upgrades.
11 min · 2,633 words
moreutils: the utilities package every UNIX/Linux/Mac OS developer should know
Miguel Rentes walks through the moreutils package of Unix command-line tools, explaining with examples what chronic, combine, ifne, pee, sponge, ts, vidir, vipe, zrun and the other utilities do and how to install them.
11 min · 2,541 words