GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 19, 2025

• Ruben Schade ☛ Answering technical questions you wished they asked

  Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. You’ll go online, ask a question about $FOO, and be given an answer regarding $BAR. Maybe they don’t like $FOO, or think you should be running $BAR instead.

  One of the examples I was grilled for last year was my assertion that some people need to run Windows, irrespective of what we all might like. The responses from certain members of the GNU/Linux community were exactly what you expect. Instead of answering people’s concerns about Windows, they wished the question had been “can I run GNU/Linux instead?” and “how would I do that?”

  Even if my hypothetical engineer had been initially sympathetic to the idea of running Penguins in lieu of an expensive SPLA arrangement, this attitude is counterproductive. People don’t respond well to being told their choices are stupid, or that they’re wasting their time. This is basic, basic human psychology, though it took me working part-time in a pre-sales engineering team for a few years to understand why.

  One of the biggest things to understand is that people are rarely transparent with their motivations about running something. This goes as much for for big corporates as it does individuals.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Jupiter Broadcasting ☛ 25.05 Reasons to NixOS | LINUX Unplugged 615

    With NixOS 25.05 around the corner, we sit down with a release manager to unpack what's new, what's changing, and what's finally getting easier. Spoiler: it's not just the tooling.

• Applications

  • Ergo Chat v2.16.0, a new stable release

    We’re pleased to announce Ergo v2.16.0, a new stable release.

  • Top Red Team Tools by Category

    Collection of most effective Top Red Team Tools by Category for cybersecurity assessments. This comprehensive guide covers reconnaissance, initial access, delivery, command and control, credential dumping, privilege escalation, and defence evasion tools for professional red team operations.

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

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Sam Thursfield: Book club, 2025 edition

      It’s strange being alive while so much bad shit is going on in the world, right? With our big brains that invented smartphones, quantum computers and Haskell, surely we could figure out how to stop Benjamin Netenyahu from starving hundreds of thousands of children? (Or, causing “high levels of acute food insecurity” as the UN refer to it).

      Nothing in the world is simple, though, is it.

      Back in 1914 when European leaders kicked off the First World War, the collective imagination of a war dated back to an era where the soldiers wore colourful jackets and the most sophisticated weapon was a gun with a knife attached. The reality of WWI was machine guns, tanks and poison gas. All that new technology took people by surprise, and made for one of the deadliest wars in history.

      If you’re reading this, then however old or young you are, your life has been marked by rapid technological changes. Things are still changing rapidly. And therein lies the problem.

      In amongst the bad news I am seeing some reasons to be optimistic. The best defense against exploitation is education. As a society it feels like we’re starting to get a grip on why living standards for everyone except the rich are nosediving.

      Lets go back to an older technology which changed the world centuries ago: books. I am going to recommend a few books.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Distro Watch ☛ DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

    [...] Finally, the Site News column brings updates to the list of packages tracked on the distributions' pages, as well as three new additions to the site's database to try out - Loc-OS, MiniOS and Kicksecure. Happy reading!

  • Barry Kauler ☛ Packages compiled in Yocto/OpenEmbedded 5.0.9 revision-5

    Easy Scarthgap is built with packages compiled in Yocto/OpenEmbdded Scarthgap release, now at version 5.0.9:

    https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/Releases

    I have named this recompile as "revision-5" and all the binary packages have "-r5" in their filename. The previous compile was version 5.0.6, revision-4: [...]

  • BSD

    • [Old] C0ffee ☛ FreeBSD on a Laptop

      As I stated my previous post, I recently dug up my old ThinkPad T530 after the embarrassing stream of OS X security bugs this month. Although this ThinkPad ran Gentoo faithfully during my time in school, these days I'd much rather spend time my family than fighting with emerge and USE flags. FreeBSD has always been my OS of choice, and laptop support seems to be much better than it was a few years ago. In this guide, I'll show you the tweaks I made to wrestle FreeBSD into a decent experience on a laptop.

      Unlike my usual posts, this time I'm going to assume you're already pretty familiar with FreeBSD. If you're a layman looking for your first BSD-based desktop, I highly recommend checking out TrueOS (previously PC-BSD): they've basically taken FreeBSD and packaged it with all the latest drivers, along with a user-friendly installer and custom desktop environment out of the box. TrueOS is an awesome project–the only reason I don't use it is because I'm old, grumpy, and persnickety about having my operating system just so.

  • PCLinuxOS

    • PCLOS Official ☛ PCLinuxOS Recent Updates

  • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • Unicorn Media ☛ SUSE Is Giving YaST the Dodo Bird Treatment

      A quarter-century ago when SUSE was the cream of the crop, most GNU/Linux distros were envious of the YaST configuration tool.