Package Forge: The Lesser Known Snap/Flatpak Alternative Without Distro Lock-In
An anonymous reader shared this report from the site It’s FOSS:
Linux gives you plenty of ways to install software: native distro packages, Flatpak, Snap, AppImage, source builds, even curl-piped installers. The catch is that each one solves a different problem, yet none of them fully eliminates the “works here, break … ⌘ Read more
Inaugural ‘Hour of AI’ Event Includes Minecraft, Microsoft, Google and 13.1 Million K-12 Schoolkids
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Last September, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org pledged to engage 25 million K-12 schoolchildren in an “Hour of AI” this school year. Preliminary numbers released this week by the Code.org Advocacy Coalition showed that [halfway through the f … ⌘ Read more
@prologic@twtxt.net You write so much code … it’s incredible. 😅
This feels useful: Rust’s Block Pattern
AMD ISP4 Linux Driver Patches Update Again For HP ZBook Ultra G1a, Future Ryzen Laptops
One of the features that sadly didn’t make it into the recent Linux 6.19 merge window was the long-awaited AMD ISP4 driver for supporting the web camera found with the high-end HP ZBook Ultra G1a and also expected to be used by future flagship AMD Ryzen laptops… ⌘ Read more
Will Work Change Over the Next 20 Years?
What is the future of work? The Wall Street Journal asked five workplace experts and practitioners.
So while AI “is already doing tasks once relegated to newly minted college graduates in many professions,” the Journal predicts that in the next 20 years AI “will have an impact on the role of managers, how organizations measure business outcomes and accelerate tasks that once took months.”
A sen … ⌘ Read more
FSF Says Nintendo’s New DRM Allows Them to Remotely Render User’s Device ‘Permanently Unusuable’
“In the lead up to its Switch 2 console release, Nintendo updated its user agreement,” writes the Free Software Foundation, warning that Nintendo now claims “broad authority to make consoles owned by its customers permanently unusable.”
“Under Nintendo’s most aggressive digital restric … ⌘ Read more
Trump Admin to Hire 1,000 for New ‘Tech Force’ to Build AI Infrastructure
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:
The Trump administration on Monday unveiled a new initiative dubbed the “U.S. Tech Force,” comprising about 1,000 engineers and other specialists who will work on artificial intelligence infrastructure and other technology projects throughout the federal government.
Participants wi … ⌘ Read more
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org These tables get shuffled around every time your OS switches to another process. It’s crazy that so much is going on behind the scenes.
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I was surprised by that as well. 😅 I thought these were features that you can use, but no, you must do all this.
By the way, I now fixed the issue that I mentioned at the end and it works on the netbook now. 🥳
https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-12-21/0/netbook.jpg
Intel Prepares For KVM Guest VMs To Support Advanced Performance Extensions (APX)
Since Linux 6.16 the Intel APX support has been ready for the kernel infrastructure and goes along with the compiler toolchain support for Advanced Performance Extensions with the likes of GCC and LLVM/Clang. The latest element being worked on for APX enablement in the open-source/Linux world is for allowing KVM guest virtual machines (VMs) to make use of APX… ⌘ Read more
While Releasing ‘Avatar 3’, James Cameron Questions the Future of Movies
“If I get to do another Avatar film, it’ll be because the business model still works,” James Cameron tells CNN in a video interview — adding “That I can’t guarantee, as I sit here today. That’ll play out over the next month, really.” He says theatre is a “sacred space,” and while it will never go away, “I think that it could … ⌘ Read more
Linux 6.19-rc2 Adding Support For CRKD Guitar Controllers
Most notable with the input subsystem updates sent out today ahead of the Linux 6.19-rc2 release is some new hardware support. New this week is adding support for CRKD Guitars for those into musical gaming/apps… ⌘ Read more
WMI Marshalling Support For Linux Aims To Match Windows’ ACPI/WMI Handling
Open-source developer Armin Wolf has been working most recently on marshalling support for the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) platform code within the Linux kernel. This WMI marshalling support is to better match the behavior of Microsoft Windows’ WMI ACPI driver and ultimately to allow for better compatibility with some ACPI firmware and enhancing some WMI drivers… ⌘ Read more
Linux 6.19 Lands Fix For Seagate Barracuda HDD Taking Down The SATA Bus
It’s not often getting to talk about hard drives on Phoronix these days, but there’s an important fix merged to the Linux 6.19 kernel today ahead of Linux 6.19-rc2. If you happen to be using a Seagate ST2000DM008 Barracuda 2TB HDD, an important fix was merged to avoid it taking down the systems’ SATA bus and/or potentially other issues… ⌘ Read more
Darktable 5.4 RAW Photography Software Reaches Parity Between X11 & Wayland
Darktable 5.4 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source RAW photography software. Besides improving camera support, UI enhancements, and more the Wayland support has been improved with Darktable. With today’s Darktable 5.4 release, the Wayland support should be on par with the X11 support… ⌘ Read more
Wow, @movq@www.uninformativ.de, so many tables. No idea what I expected (I’m totally clueless on this low-level stuff), but that was quite an interesting surprise to me. https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-12-21/0/POSTING-en.html
@kiwu@twtxt.net Ta, same to you!
Is America’s Tech Industry Already Facing a Recession?
America’s unemployment rate for tech jobs rose to 4% in November, and “has been steadily rising since May,” reports the Washington Post (citing data from the IT training/certifications company CompTIA).
Between October and November, the number of technology workers across different industries fell 134,000, while the number of people working in the tech industry decline … ⌘ Read more
Rust’s ‘Vision Doc’ Makes Recommendations to Help Keep Rust Growing
The team authoring the Rust 2025 Vision Doc interviewed Rust developers to find out what they liked about the language — and have now issued three recommendations “to help Rust continue to scale across domains and usage levels.”
— Enumerate and describe Rust’s design goals and integrate them into our processes, helping to ensure they … ⌘ Read more
Bell Labs ‘Unix’ Tape from 1974 Successfully Dumped to a Tarball
Archive.org now has a page with “the raw analog waveform and the reconstructed digital tape image (analog.tap), read at the Computer History Museum’s Shustek Research Archives on 19 December 2025 by Al Kossow using a modified tape reader and analyzed with Len Shustek’s readtape tool.” A Berlin-based retrocomputing enthusiast has created a page with … ⌘ Read more
GotaTun Open-Source Rust WireGuard Implementation Announced By Mullvad
The Swedish VPN service Mullvad announced this week GotaTun, an open-source Rust-based WireGuard implementation that is forked from Cloudflare’s BoringTun… ⌘ Read more
Does AI Really Make Coders Faster?
One developer tells MIT Technology Review that AI tools weaken the coding instincts he used to have. And beyond that, “It’s just not fun sitting there with my work being done for me.”
But is AI making coders faster? “After speaking to more than 30 developers, technology executives, analysts, and researchers, MIT Technology Review found that the picture is not as straightforward as it might seem…”
… ⌘ Read more
I quit LinkedIn
I recently quit LinkedIn. Ironically, the post I made about why I was
quitting was probably the most viewed thing I ever posted. Haha.
If you need to see my CV it’s right here on my website:
This is what I wrote back in November:
I’m terminating my account on LinkedIn next week. This is possibly
some kind of career suicide.I’m very seldom visiting LinkedIn, so I’m probably late to the party,
as usual. Perhaps there has already been a lar … ⌘ Read more
The phone situation
I need to write something about this or I’ll burst.
I have a new phone. It’s an old iPhone SE 2022. Yes, I know. Evil,
evil Apple. Won’t someone please think of the privacy issues? Right,
well, Apple has at least better reputation about these things than
Google does, but we’ll come to that.
It feels like I’m betraying the FLOSS cause. I feel horrible, although
probably not just because of this.
Let’s recap:
Parrot OS Switches to KDE Plasma Desktop
“Yet another distro is making the move to the KDE Plasma desktop,” writes Linux magazine.
“Parrot OS, a security-focused Linux distribution, is migrating from MATE to KDE Plasma, starting with version 7.0, now available in beta.”
Based on Debian 13, Parrot OS’s goal is a shift toward “modernization, focusing on clearing technical debt and future-proofing the system.” One big under-the-hood c … ⌘ Read more
Flock Executive Says Their Camera Helped Find Shooting Suspect, Addresses Privacy Concerns
During a search for the Brown shoogin suspect, a law enforcement press conference included a request for “Ring camera footage from residents and businesses near Brown University,” according to local news reports.
But in the end it was Flock cameras according to an article in Gizmodo, after a Redd … ⌘ Read more
Intel Readies Multi-Queue Support For Linux 7.0 As New Feature For Crescent Island
In addition to this week’s drm-intel-next pull request to DRM-Next adding Nova Lake display support, a drm-xe-next pull request was also sent out on Friday that prepares a new multi-queue feature for Xe3P_XPC – initially just the “Crescent Island” AI inference accelerator card. Plus other new features too for this Xe kernel driver in the upcoming Linux 7.0~6.20 kernel version… ⌘ Read more
Military Satellites Now Maneuver, Watch Each Other, and Monitor Signals and Data
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post. (Alternate URL here):
The American patrol satellite had the targets in its sights: two recently launched Chinese spacecraft flying through one of the most sensitive neighborhoods in space. Like any good tactical fighter, the American spacecraft, known … ⌘ Read more
Arch Linux’s Main NVIDIA Driver Packages Now Using The Open Kernel Modules
With the Arch Linux packages for the NVIDIA official graphics driver moving to the now-stable NVIDIA 590 driver series that drops the GeForce GTX 900 and GTX 1000 series GPU support, Arch Linux users with those old Maxwell and Pascal graphics cards will need to transition to using the NVIDIA legacy driver packages from the Arch Linux AUR. Meanwhile for those on Turing and newer with the NVIDIA 590 driver will enjoy the open-source ke … ⌘ Read more
‘Subscription Captivity’: When Things You Buy Own You
A reporter at Mother Jones writes about a $169 alarm clock with special lighting and audio effects. But to use the features, “you need to pay an additional $4.99 per month, in perpetuity.”
“Welcome to the age of subscription captivity, where an increasing share of the things you pay for actually own you.”
What vexes me are the companies that sell physical products for a hef … ⌘ Read more
EV Battery-Swapping Startup That Raised $330 Million Files for Bankruptcy
In 2023 Slashdot covered a battery-swapping startup that promised to give EVs a full charge in about the same time it takes to fill a tank of gas.
They just filed for bankruptcy, reports Inc:
Ample was founded in 2014 with a goal of “solving slow charging times and infrastructure incompatibility” for commercial EV fleets su … ⌘ Read more
Firefox Will Ship With an ‘AI Kill Switch’ To Completely Disable All AI Features
An anonymous reader shared this report from 9to5Linux:
After the controversial news shared earlier this week by Mozilla’s new CEO that Firefox will evolve into “a modern AI browser,” the company now revealed it is working on an AI kill switch for the open-source web browser…
What was not made clear [in Tuesday’s … ⌘ Read more
GNU Debugger 17.1 Released With CET Shadow Stack Support, New DAP Features
The GNU Debugger “GDB” 17.1 is out today with a number of new features for enhancing the open-source debugging experience… ⌘ Read more
Linux Mint 22.3 Beta Released With Cinnamon 6.6 Desktop
The beta release of Linux Mint 22.3 “Zena” is now available for testing ahead of the holidays for this latest incremental update to this desktop OS built atop an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base… ⌘ Read more
Pro-AI Group Launches First of Many Attack Ads for US Election
“Super PAC aims to drown out AI critics in midterms,” the Washington Post reported in August, noting its intial funding over $100 million from “some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful investors and executives” including OpenAI president Greg Brockman, his wife, and VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. The group’s goal was “to quash a philosophical debate … ⌘ Read more
Gemini AI Yielding Sloppy Code For Ubuntu Development With New Helper Script
A few weeks ago it was mentioned by a Canonical engineer how trying to use AI to modernize the Ubuntu Error Tracker yielded some code that was “plain wrong” and other issues raised by that Microsoft GitHub Copilot code. The same Ubuntu developer shifted to trying Gemini AI to generate a helper script to assist in Ubuntu’s monthly ISO snapshot releases. Google’s Gemini AI also generated some sloppy code for a Python script to assist in tho … ⌘ Read more
Mesa 26.0 NVK Driver Lands Improvement For NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 “Turing” GPUs
In addition to the open-source NVIDIA “NVK” Vulkan driver in Mesa merging compression support for big performance wins, another performance optimization was merged earlier in the week that stand to benefit GeForce RTX 20 “Turing” graphics processors… ⌘ Read more
LoongArch Promoted To Being An Official Architecture For Debian 14
Two years and a few months after LoongArch 64-bit “Loong64” was added to Debian Ports, it’s now been promoted to being an official architecture for Debian Linux… ⌘ Read more
KDE Plasma 6.6 Finally Supporting Ambient Light Sensors, Fixing Windows Games With HDR
There are some nice KDE Plasma 6.6 improvements that were merged ahead of Christmas… ⌘ Read more
Trump Dismantling National Center For Atmospheric Research In Colorado
echo123 shares a report from PBS: The Trump administration is dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, moving to dissolve a research lab that a top White House official described as “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.” White House budget director Russ Vought criticized the lab i … ⌘ Read more
James Webb Space Telescope Confirms 1st ‘Runaway’ Supermassive Black Hole
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Space.com: Astronomers have made a truly mind-boggling discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): a runaway black hole 10 million times larger than the sun, rocketing through space at a staggering 2.2 million miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per second). That not … ⌘ Read more
@movq@www.uninformativ.de @kiwu@twtxt.net it just so happens to be a happy coincidence that I’m extending mu’s capabilities to now include a native toolchain-free compiler (doesn’t rely on any external gcc/clang or linkers, etc) that lowers the mu source code into an intermediate representation / IR (what @movq@www.uninformativ.de refers to as “thick layers of abstractions”…) and finally to SSA + ARM64 + Mach-O encoder to produce native binary executables (at least for me on my Mac, Linux may some later?) 🤣
@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe But I thought Alpine was one of the good distro’s left. 😢 What’s it doing wrong?
@kiwu@twtxt.net Assembly is usually the most low-level programming language that you can get. Typical programming languages like Python or Go are a thick layer of abstraction over what the CPU actually does, but with Assembler you get to see it all and you get full control. (With lots of caveats and footnotes. 😅)
I’m interested in the boot process, i.e. what exactly happens when you turn on your computer. In that area, using Assembler is a must, because you really need that fine-grained control here.
Google Sues SerpApi Over Scraping and Reselling Search Data
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Search Engine Land: Google said today that it is suing SerpApi, accusing the company of bypassing security protections to scrape, harvest, and resell copyrighted content from Google Search results. The allegations: Google said SerpApi:
-Circumvented Google’s security measures and industry-standard crawling controls. … ⌘ Read more
Airbus Moving Critical Systems Away From AWS, Google, and Microsoft Citing Data Sovereignty Concerns
Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to move mission-critical systems like ERP, manufacturing, and aircraft design data onto a digitally sovereign European cloud, citing national security concerns and fears around U.S. extraterritorial laws like the CLOUD Act. “I need a so … ⌘ Read more
Chrome/Chromium Add Support For Printing Via XDG Portal
Google’s Chrome/Chromium web browser code has merged support for Linux printing via the XDG Portal. This is important to allow print support from within Flatpak or Snap sandboxed versions of Google’s web browser… ⌘ Read more
Stanford Computer Science Grads Find Their Degrees No Longer Guarantee Jobs
Elite computer science degrees are no longer a guaranteed on-ramp to tech jobs, as AI-driven coding tools slash demand for entry-level engineers and concentrate hiring around a small pool of already “elite” or AI-savvy developers. The Los Angeles Times reports: “Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find … ⌘ Read more
Ten Mistakes Marred Firewall Upgrade At Australian Telco, Contributing To Two Deaths
An independent review found that at least ten technical and process failures during a routine firewall upgrade at Australia’s Optus prevented emergency calls from reaching Triple Zero for 14 hours, during which 455 calls failed and two callers died. The Register reports: On Thursday, Optus published an indepen … ⌘ Read more