Linux Kernel Patches & Device Tree Additions For PCIe M.2 Connectors
On ACPI-enabled systems Linux users can enjoy PCIe M.2 connected peripherals that “just work” without any extra fuss. But for those relying on Device Tree (DT) handling by the kernel, new patches from Qualcomm are working on representing PCIe M.2 connectors within DT files… ⌘ Read more

NILFS2 File-System Seeing Renewed Interest With Additional Maintainer
It’s been a while since having anything major to talk about with the NILFS2 file-system but it looks like that could be changing. NILFS2 as a reminder is a log-structured file-system with continuous snapshotting with its NILFS predecessor having been in the mainline kernel for two decades since the mid Linux 2.6 days… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 25.3-rc4 Brings Fix For Many Steam Play Games To Properly Run On Intel Linux Driver
Mesa 25.3-rc4 is available for testing as the latest weekly candidate as we work toward the Mesa 25.3 stable release this month… ⌘ Read more

IncusOS Announced As Immutable Linux OS With ZFS For Running Containers
It has been two years already since the Linux Containers project forked Canonical’s LXD project as Incus. Now joining the Incus family is IncusOS as an immutable Linux OS built atop a Debian base with OpenZFS file-system support and designed around running containers with Incus… ⌘ Read more

Intel’s Rewrite Of Linux MM CID Code Showing Some Nice Gains For AMD
Posted last month were new Linux kernel scheduler-related patches rewriting the MM CID management code. The main takeaway for end-users from this set of 19 Linux kernel patches from an Intel engineer was seeing 14~18% improvement in a PostgreSQL database benchmark but that more benchmarks were needed. Curiosity got the best of me and I recently tested these patches on an AMD EPYC server to seeing some very enticing results for this in-development c … ⌘ Read more

Intel’s Rewrite Of Linux MM CID Code Showing Some Nice Gains For AMD
Posted last month were new Linux kernel scheduler-related patches rewriting the MM CID management code. The main takeaway for end-users from this set of 19 Linux kernel patches from an Intel engineer was seeing 14~18% improvement in a PostgreSQL database benchmark but that more benchmarks were needed. Curiosity got the best of me and I recently tested these patches on an AMD EPYC server to seeing some very enticing results for this in-development c … ⌘ Read more

Linux To Gain ML-DSA/Dilithium Post-Quantum Cryptography For Module Signing
New code likely to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel would introduce ML-DSA/Dilithium post-quantum cryptography to be initially used for dealing with kernel module signing… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Contributing “RAMDAX” Driver For Upcoming Linux 6.19 Kernel
A new driver planned to be sent to the mainline Linux kernel for the upcoming Linux 6.19 merge window is yet another new contribution from Microsoft… ⌘ Read more

Archinstall 3.0.13 Adds WiFi Connection Menu To Arch Linux Installer
Just days after the Archinstall 3.0.12 release for this text-based Arch Linux installer, Archinstall 3.0.13 is now available to deliver a new feature. That new feature is a text-based interface for being able to connect to a WiFi network within Archinstall… ⌘ Read more

CachyOS Continues Delivering Leading Performance Over Ubuntu 25.10, Fedora Workstation 43
With Intel having sunset Clear Linux, when it comes to aggressive out-of-the-box Linux performance there is the Arch Linux based CachyOS as the leading contender. Given the recent releases of Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora Workstation 43, if you are curious about the out-of-the-box performance here are some fresh benchmarks of all three using the Framework Desktop. ⌘ Read more

CodeWeavers Launches CrossOver Preview For Linux ARM64
CodeWeavers announced this morning a new CrossOver Preview that includes Linux ARM64 support for the first time. This commercial software built atop Wine is now comfortable with the state of running Windows x86/x64 apps on Linux ARM64 and even the ability ro enjoy many Windows games on ARM64 Linux devices like the System76 Thelio Astra… ⌘ Read more

RadeonSI + ACO Brings Some Performance Gains For Radeon Workstation Graphics
Last week Mesa 26.0-devel enabled the ACO back-end by default within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for all supported Radeon graphics cards by this open-source Linux driver. This move was done in the name of better performance, faster shader compilation times, and ACO being all-around better than the AMDGPU LLVM back-end these days for both OpenGL and Vulkan use. It was also noted that RadeonSI has “slightly better” viewperf performance w … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.18 Lands Electronic Privacy Screen Hotkey Handling For Some Dell Laptops
Merged yesterday to the mainline Linux 6.18 development kernel were the latest round of x86 platform driver fixes. Mostly some small fixes but standing out is electronic privacy screen hotkey support for some Dell laptops… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Preparing For Hopper & Blackwell GPU Support With Open-Source Nova Driver
NVIDIA engineers continue working a lot on the open-source and upstream Nova driver for the Linux kernel. This modern, Rust-written open-source NVIDIA driver is still taking shape as an alternative to NVIDIA’s official downstream open-source driver and the aging and reverse-engineered Nouveau driver. Out on the horizon for Nova is Hopper and Blackwell GPU support… ⌘ Read more

FEX 2511 Delivers More Performance Improvements For Linux x86 Binaries On ARM64
FEX 2511 is out today for this open-source emulator akin to Apple’s Rosetta that allows running x86/x86+64 applications on ARM64. But in the case of FEX, for ARM64 Linux devices and akin to other open-source projects like Box64… ⌘ Read more

More Intel Crescent Island Enablement Prepped For Linux 6.19
Following Intel’s disclosure less than one month ago of Crescent Island as a upcoming Xe3P graphics card with 160GB of vRAM focused on enterprise-level AI inferencing, Intel’s open-source Linux graphics driver engineers have been quick to begin plumbing the Xe kernel graphics driver for this next-generation graphics card… ⌘ Read more

Linux Patches Updated For Snapdragon X Elite Powered TUXEDO Elite 14 Gen1 Laptop
In mid-2024, Bavarian PC vendor TUXEDO Computers began teasing a Snapdragon X Elite powered Linux laptop with hopes of having it available by Christmas 2024. As we approach Christmas 2025, there still are no immediate signs of this new ARM-based TUXEDO laptop soon shipping but there are signs of life still with new Linux kernel patches posted for enabling this Snapdragon X Elite laptop… ⌘ Read more

Fwupd 2.0.17 Released With More Hardware Support & Features
Days after the Linux Vendor Firmware Service celebrated 135 million firmware downloads, a new version of the Fwupd utility is now available for firmware updating systems and peripherals under Linux… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 To Support Additional Arm Mali & Vivante Graphics Hardware
Sent out today to DRM-Next was the latest weekly batch of drm-misc-next patches for enhancing the various smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers within the kernel. Included with this week’s update is supporting some additional Mali and Vivante hardware as well as continuing to enhance the in-kernel accelerator “accel” drivers… ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Nothing, yet. It was sent in written form. There’s probably little point in fighting this, they have made up their minds already (and AI is being rolled up en masse in other departments), but on the other hand, there are – truthfully – very few areas where AI could actually be useful to me.

There are going to be many discussions about this …

This is completely against the “spirit” of this company, btw. We used to say: “It’s the goal that matters. Use whatever tools you think are appropriate.” That’s why I’m allowed to use Linux on my laptop. Maybe they will back down eventually when they realize that trying to push this on people is pointless. Maybe not.

Linux 6.19 Will Finally Support Intel’s Adaptive Sharpness Filter “CASF” With Lunar Lake
Going all the way back to early 2024, Intel Linux engineers have been working on supporting an Adaptive Sharpening Filter new to Lunar Lake. While Lunar Lake later launched in September 2024, the Linux patches for this feature remained under review and discussion. Besides the Intel driver implementation itself for Lunar Lake and newer, it also ushers in a new DRM sharpness property to help standardize such functionality … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Uh, that actually looks not that terrible. Somehow, I remember Swing GUIs being way uglier.

As for Visual Basic, I only had to use VBA once in my life. That was in the beginning of my career when I inherited a project from a leaving coworker. Fuck me, was that awful. Just alone the damn compiler error dialog box popping up in my face all the time while editing and the compiler already trying to parse the unfinished and hence of course uncompilable code. Boy, that left a lasting impression on me. I ported everything to Java very quickly. Luckily, the code base wasn’t all that large at that point in time. I had to add a bunch of new features after that, so I was very glad that I convinced my workmate/project manager to do that first. We didn’t even need a GUI, the button in Excel was transformed to a command line program that just generated the large file.

But I cannot comment on the VB GUI designer, I never used that. Your screenshot looks very similar to the Delphi one, though. Only towards the end of my Delphi days I found out about the possibility to make the widgets snap to window edges and corners (I don’t remember how that was called), so that resizing the windows was actually possible without messing up their entire contents.

Switching to Linux, Delphi wasn’t an option anymore. For some reason I couldn’t use Kylix. Maybe it was already dead by the time I changed OSes. Or I couldn’t get it to run. I just don’t remember. I just recall that the unavailability of Delphi was the reason it took me a while to actually settle on Linux. I then fully switched to Java. The GridBagLayout was my absolutely favorite Swing layout manager. I reckon I used it 98% of the time, because it was so powerful and made the windows resize properly, just as I had learned to do in Delphi shortly before.

Up until discovering Swing, I used Java’s AWT for a short amount of time. That was very limited I think and I hit the limits fairly quickly. Later at uni, we had one project making use of SWT. Didn’t convince me either. I could be wrong, but I think there was also a SWT GUI designer plugin for Eclipse. If there really was, that one wasn’t in the same street as Delphi’s (there must be a reason I forgot about it ;-)).

And maybe I should go back to using GUI designers. Haven’t used those since the Visual Basic days. 🤔 It wasn’t pretty, but you got results very quickly and efficiently.

(When I switched to Linux, I quickly got stuck with GTK and that only had Glade, which wasn’t super great at the time, so I didn’t start using it … and then I never questioned that decision …)

https://movq.de/v/eaa24b109b/vb.png

There are no really good GUI toolkits for Linux, are there?

They’re either slow (like GTK4, Qt6), don’t support Wayland (like Tk), and/or unmaintained (like GTK2 and many others).

Today, I experimented with Linux Capabilities as a continuation to my Unix Domain Sockets research from a few months ago: https://lyse.isobeef.org/caller-information-via-unix-domain-sockets/#capabilities

I learned that I don’t know hardly anything and there is heaps more to explore. Tomorrow, I will do the same in Go and see how that feels.

All good things come to an end, I guess.

I have an Epson printer (AcuLaser C1100) and an Epson scanner (Perfection V10), both of which I bought about 20 years ago. The hardware still works perfectly fine.

Until recently, Epson still provided Linux drivers for them. That is pretty cool! I noticed today that they have relaunched their driver website – and now I can’t find any Linux drivers for that hardware anymore. Just doesn’t list it (it does list some drivers for Windows 7, for example).

I mean, okay, we’re talking about 20 years here. That is a very long time, much more than I expected. But if it still works, why not keep using it?

Some years ago, I started archiving these drivers locally, because I anticipated that they might vanish at some point. So I can still use my hardware for now (even if I had to reinstall my PC for some reason). It might get hacky at some point in the future, though.

This once more underlines the importance of FOSS drivers for your hardware. I sadly didn’t pay attention to that 20 years ago.

@prologic@twtxt.net No, this is a Linux manpage from the man-pages project: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/man/man7/ascii.7

I do have an idea what’s going on. Could be an unfortunate interaction between the table preprocessor tbl and the man macro package. 🤔

@zvava@twtxt.net Going to have to hard disagree here I’m sorry. a) no-one reads the raw/plain twtxt.txt files, the only time you do is to debug something, or have a stick beak at the comments which most clients will strip out and ignore and b) I’m sorry you’ve completely lost me! I’m old enough to pre-date before Linux became popular, so I’m not sure what UNIX principles you think are being broken or violated by having a Twt Subject (Subject) whose contents is a cryptographic content-addressable hash of the “thing”™ you’re replying to and forming a chain of other replies (a thread).

I’m sorry, but the simplest thing to do is to make the smallest number of changes to the Spec as possible and all agree on a “Magic Date” for which our clients use the modified function(s).

Hmm, not experiencing that. Using Zen (Firefox), under Linux, with uBlock Origin.

Is that really necessary? How hard is it to make a 32-bit build? 🤔 Honest question. https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2025/09/05/firefox-32-bit-linux-support-to-end-in-2026/

@dce@hashnix.club Apart from the crap produced in Redmond two decades ago, I only ever used and still happily use Linux, mainly Debian and Ubuntu. I’ve no idea, but maybe something in there catches your eye: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_operating_systems (I know, what a silly recommendation.)

I’ve got a prototype of my hardcopy simulator going. I’m typing on the keyboard and the “display” goes to the printer:

https://movq.de/v/56feb53912/s.png

https://movq.de/v/235c1eabac/MVI_8810.MOV.mp4

The biiiiiiiiiig problem is that the print head and plastic cover make it impossible to see what’s currently being printed, because this is not a typewriter. This means: In order to see what I just entered, I have to feed the paper back and forth and back and forth … it’s not ideal.

I got that idea of moving back/forth from Drew DeVault, who – as it turned out – did something similar a few years back. (I tried hard to read as little as possible of his blog post, because figuring things out myself is more fun. But that could mean I missed a great idea here or there.)

But hey, at least this is running on my Pentium 133 on SuSE Linux 6.4, printer connected with a parallel cable. 😍

(Also, yes, you can see the printouts of earlier tests and, yes, I used ed(1) wrong at one point. 🤪 And ls insisted on using colors …)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz yeah it’s pretty terrible these days. Most recent trouble I had was something as simple as installing and setting up the Tailscale client. On literally all my other devices (Linux and Android) that was a cinch, but on Windows…. ohh boy, I had to mess around with reg edits and all sorts of crap and eventually bludgeoned it into working, but it was a bloody pain.

Distrobox is pretty handy and kind of amazed I haven’t played with it before now. I wanted to quickly try out Proton’s Authenticator they just released, but they only had binaries for Ubuntu and Fedora (naturally), but I’m on Void Linux on this laptop.

Installed the latest basic Fedora image with Distrobox, used dnf to install the downloaded rpm file within it, and presto, running the app within Void like I’d just downloaded it though the normal repos.

(Just for fun, SuSE Linux 6.4 from ~25 years ago: https://movq.de/v/dc62d0256c/s.png )

In 1996, they came up with the X11 “SECURITY” extension:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4w548u/what_is_up_with_the_x11_security_extension/

This is what could have (eventually) solved the security issues that we’re currently seeing with X11. Those issues are cited as one of the reasons for switching to Wayland.

That extension never took off. The person on reddit wonders why – I think it’s simple: Containers and sandboxes weren’t a thing in 1996. It hardly mattered if X11 was “insecure”. If you could run an X11 client, you probably already had access to the machine and could just do all kinds of other nasty things.

Today, sandboxing is a thing. Today, this matters.

I’ve heard so many times that “X11 is beyond fixable, it’s hopeless.” I don’t believe that. I believe that these problems are solveable with X11 and some devs have said “yeah, we could have kept working on it”. It’s that people don’t want to do it:

Why not extend the X server?

Because for the first time we have a realistic chance of not having to do that.

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html

I’m not in a position to judge the devs. Maybe the X.Org code really is so bad that you want to run away, screaming in horror. I don’t know.

But all this was a choice. I don’t buy the argument that we never would have gotten rid of things like core fonts.

All the toolkits and programs had to be ported to Wayland. A huge, still unfinished effort. If that was an acceptable thing to do, then it would have been acceptable to make an “X12” that keeps all the good things about X11, remains compatible where feasible, eliminates the problems, and requires some clients to be adjusted. (You could have still made “X11X12” like “XWayland” for actual legacy programs.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org True, at least old versions of KDE had icons:

https://movq.de/v/0e4af6fea1/s.png

GNOME, on the other hand, didn’t, at least to my old screenshots from 2007:

https://www.uninformativ.de/desktop/2007%2D05%2D25%2D%2Dgnome2%2Dlaptop.png

I switched to Linux in 2007 and no window manager I used since then had icons, apparently. Crazy. An icon-less existence for 18 years. (But yeah, everything is keyboard-driven here as well and there are no buttons here, either.)

Anyway, my draft is making progress:

https://movq.de/v/5b7767f245/s.png

I do like this look. 😊

Only figured this out yesterday:

pinentry, which is used to safely enter a password on Linux, has several frontends. There’s a GTK one, a Qt one, even an ncurses one, and so on.

GnuPG also uses pinentry. And you can configure your frontend of choice here in gpg-agent.conf.

But what happens when you don’t configure it? What’s the default?

Turns out, pinentry is a shellscript wrapper and it’s not even that long. Here it is in full:

#!/bin/bash

# Run user-defined and site-defined pre-exec hooks.
[[ -r "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec ]] && \
        . "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec
[[ -r /etc/pinentry/preexec ]] && . /etc/pinentry/preexec

# Guess preferred backend based on environment.
backends=(curses tty)
if [[ -n "$DISPLAY" || -n "$WAYLAND_DISPLAY" ]]; then
        case "$XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP" in
        KDE|LXQT|LXQt)
                backends=(qt qt5 gnome3 gtk curses tty)
                ;;
        *)
                backends=(gnome3 gtk qt qt5 curses tty)
                ;;
        esac
fi

for backend in "${backends[@]}"
do
        lddout=$(ldd "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" 2>/dev/null) || continue
        [[ "$lddout" == *'not found'* ]] && continue
        exec "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" "$@"
done

exit 1

Preexec, okay, then some auto-detection to use a toolkit matching your desktop environment …

… and then it invokes ldd? To find out if all the required libraries are installed for the auto-detected frontend?

Oof. I was sitting here wondering why it would use pinentry-gtk on one machine and pinentry-gnome3 on another, when both machines had the exact same configs. Yeah, but different libraries were installed. One machine was missing gcr, which is needed for pinentry-gnome3, so that machine (and that one alone) spawned pinentry-gtk …

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hm, I don’t think so, the requested page was a Linux-specific post. 🤔 I sometimes wonder if privacy-oriented browsers might do this on purpose, to create garbage data? 🤔 No idea.

This is it, boys and girls! The year of the Linux Desktop is this! I can smell it! :-D

For the first time, Linux has officially broken the 5% desktop market share barrier in the United States of America! It’s a huge milestone for open-source and our fantastic Linux community.

PSA: setpriv on Linux supports Landlock.

If this twt goes through, then restricting the filesystem so that jenny can only write to ~/Mail/twt, ~/www/twtxt.txt, ~/.jenny-cache, and /tmp works.

The Linux installation on my main PC turned 14 today:

$ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
[2011-07-07 11:19] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club This wasn’t always the case, though. Quake3, Quake4, Unreal Tournament 99 and 2004 are examples of games that used to run very well as native Linux games. But that was 20+ years ago …

@movq@www.uninformativ.de reminds me how many Windows games using Proton (or WINE with similar patches) on Linux run better than some of the old native Linux binaries.

In all fairness, GOG says that Forsaken is only supported on Ubuntu 16.04 – not current Arch Linux. If you ask me, this just goes to show that Linux is not a good platform for proprietary binary software.

Is it free software, do you have the source code? Then you’re good to go, things can be patched/updated (that can still be a lot of work). But proprietary binary blobs? Very bad idea.

I bought the “remastered” versions of Grim Fandango and Forsaken on GOG, because they’re super cheap at the moment. Both have native Linux versions.

And both these Linux version crap their pants. 🫤 The bundled SDL2 of Forsaken says it “can’t find a matching GLX visual” and I couldn’t figure out how to fix that. I didn’t spend a lot of time on Grim Fandango.

Both work great in Wine. 🤦

(I do have the original version of Grim Fandango from the 1990ies, but that one does not work so well in Wine. I figured, if it’s so cheap, why not. And I now get to play the english version. 😃 The german dub is pretty damn good, actually, but I always prefer the original these days.)

Speaking of Wine, Arch Linux completely fucked up Wine for me with the latest update.

• 16-bit support is gone.
  
• Performance of 3D games is horrible and unplayable.
  

Arch is shipping a WoW64 build now, which is not yet ready for prime time.

And then I realized that there’s actually only one stable Wine release per year but Arch has been shipping development releases all the time. That’s quite unusual. I’m used to Arch only shipping stable packages … huh.

Hopefully things will improve again. I’m not eager to build Wine from source. I’d rather ditch it and resort to my real Windows XP box for the little (retro)gaming that I do … 🫤

OpenBSD has the wonderful pledge() and unveil() syscalls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXO6nelFt-E

Not only are they super useful (the program itself can drop privileges – like, it can initialize itself, read some files, whatever, and then tell the kernel that it will never do anything like that again; if it does, e.g. by being exploited through a bug, it gets killed by the kernel), but they are also extremely easy to use.

Imagine a server program with a connected socket in file descriptor 0. Before reading any data from the client, the program can do this:

unveil("/var/www/whatever", "r");
unveil(NULL, NULL);
pledge("stdio rpath", NULL);

Done. It’s now limited to reading files from that directory, communicating with the existing socket, stuff like that. But it cannot ever read any other files or exec() into something else.

I can’t wait for the day when we have something like this on Linux. There have been some attempts, but it’s not that easy. And it’s certainly not mainstream, yet.

I need to have a closer look at Linux’s Landlock soon (“soon”), but this is considerably more complicated than pledge()/unveil():

https://landlock.io/

SuSE Linux 6.4 and Arachne on DOS also work (with Windows 2000 as a call target):

• https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-05-31/0/POSTING-en.html#suse-linux-64
  
• https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-05-31/0/POSTING-en.html#arachne-on-dos

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev

You need break the routine.

I haven’t really done that lately. 🤔 Maybe have another go at Rust (given its increasing importance in the Linux kernel)? Or Elixir, yes, I only had some very, very brief contact with it. 🤔

I just came across an old forum posting of mine about Prolog. That brought up some memories. Prolog is pretty alien, but I do miss stuff like that because it’s so different.

Just thinking out loud here. 😅