GNU/Linux Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 14, 2025

• Games

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Raspberry Pi Pico 2 Snake game console

    “My objective or goal for developing this project was to create a gaming console that used my 64×32 P3 matrix panel,” he says of a Waveshare unit he purchased from PBCWay for $22. “I thought this console would be useful for coding simple games.”

• Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • KDE & Surveillance Giant Google Summer of Code 2025

      KDE will mentor fifteen projects in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) this year. GSoC is a program that allows new contributors to open source to work on a project for 175 to 350 hours under the guidance of experienced mentors.

      Merkuro/Akonadi

      Merkuro is a modern groupware suite built using Kirigami and Akonadi. This year, the focus is on making Merkuro more viable on mobile. Pablo will work on removing the QtWidgets dependency from the Akonadi background processes, which will reduce RAM consumption. Shubham Shinde will port some configuration dialogs to QML, making them easier to use on Plasma Mobile. This project will be mentored by Aakarsh MJ, Claudio Cambra, and Carl Schwan.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • GNOME ☛ Sophie Herold: International ME/CFS Awareness Day

      May 12 is the International ME/CFS Awareness Day. Since I have been living with ME/CFS for some time, I want to use this day as an opportunity to talk a bit about this topic.

      The Illness

      The main symptom of ME/CFS is an intolerance against physical, cognitive, and emotional exertion. For me, that means that activities like preparing dinner or cleaning my room can overload my body. Usually, the full consequences of this only become visible after roughly 24 hours. The state after such an overload is also called a crash. The resulting symptoms for me include exhausted muscles, feeling like I got the flue, pain in joints and muscles, disrupted sleep, brain fog, headaches, and more. Depending on the severity, these symptoms will disappear again after a day or a week of rest. Not resting during a crash, is an easy way to prolong the symptoms and just feeling incredibly miserable. Following these limitations is a bit challenging at times. Therefore, some of these symptoms are quite a frequent issue for me.

      In contrast to severe cases of ME/CFS, I’m usually still having a considerable amount of energy available, with a score of 30 on the CFIDS Disability Scale. Cases with a score 0, which implies being constantly bedridden and unable to care for oneself, do exist. One of the recent more prominent cases has been the one of Diana (Physics Girl).

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • HaikuOS ☛ Haiku Activity & Contract Report, April 2025

    This report covers hrev58788 through hrev58847.

    jackburton79 fixed a case where the cursor color in Terminal wouldn’t be initialized, especially notable when running Terminal as a replicant. He also added support for executing commands in Terminal using the scripting Hey Hi (AI) and made the cursor when the view isn’t focused empty instead of filled.

    ilzu made a number of improvements to session management on startup in WebPositive, including restoring the previous session even if launched to open a link, saving and restoring workspaces, and more.

    OscarL adjusted StyledEdit to block most ASCII control characters from being typed.

    humdinger adjusted LaunchBox to make an error message translatable.

  • The Register UK ☛ FreeBSD fans rally round zVault upstart

    TrueNAS is alive and well, but iXsystems has shifted its focus to the Linux-based SCALE edition. For the FreeBSD faithful left clinging to CORE, a new contender is limbering up: zVault.

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Bryan Lunduke ☛ IBM DEI Lawsuit Gets Jury Trial Date

      There are 3 lawsuits against I.C.B.M. & Red Bait related to discriminatory hiring & firing by the Big Tech giant.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Ubuntu News ☛ Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 891

      Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 891 for the week of May 4 – 10, 2025. The full version of this issue is available here.

    • Launchpad News: build_by_default=False for i386

      More than 5 years ago, i386 was dropped as an architecture in Ubuntu. Despite this, i386 has remained selected by default as an architecture to build when creating new PPAs, snap recipes, or OCI recipes.

      Today, we have disabled building for i386 by default. From now on, only amd64 will be selected by default when creating new PPAs, snap recipes, or OCI recipes. This change only affects newly created PPAs, snap recipes, or OCI recipes. Existing PPAs and recipes remain unchanged.