today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 25, 2025

• GNU/Linux

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ 2025-05-18 [Older] Linux Weekly Roundup #325

  • Games

    • GamingOnLinux ☛ Proton Experimental update enables gamepad input for all game launchers on Linux, SteamOS / Steam Deck

      Valve released a brand new and exciting update to Proton Experimental for Linux, SteamOS / Steam Deck gamers. This brings some new fixes, as well as an interesting change for their Xalia integration.

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

    • Carl Svensson ☛ Picking the right (archaic) Window Manager

      Presented here is a small selection of old-timey window managers - some actively maintained, others frozen in time in more ways than one. Many of them are still available in the package repositories of various BSD flavours and Linux distributions. They are rated for Archaicness - how rigid their config and feature set is, Configurability - the level of user customization available, Compatibility - how well they work with modern applications, and Maintenance - how actively they're being maintained and developed. Each window manager can be awarded between zero and five X cursors in each category. (The ratings are - naturally - highly subjective, but should be able to provide some kind of guidance.)

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • University of Toronto ☛ Fedora's DNF 5 and the curse of mandatory too-smart output

      DNF is Fedora's high(er) level package management system, which pretty much any system administrator is going to have to use to install and upgrade packages. Fedora 41 and later have switched from DNF 4 to DNF 5 as their normal (and probably almost mandatory) version of DNF. I ran into some problems with this switch, and since then I've found other issues, all of which boil down to a simple issue: DNF 5 insists on doing too-smart output.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Ted Unangst ☛ I wrote a news server

    The NNTP protocol is specified by RFC 3977. It’s a pretty easy read, and filled with lots of examples, which I found very helpful. Read a section, then copy the client line into the parser and copy the server line into the output. There’s words, too, but it’s much less ambiguous to always see exactly the format of commands and results.

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers

    • Standards/Consortia

      • Jason Becker ☛ Any attack on links is an attack on the web

        Search and social sharing have always been how we discover content on the web. There is no web without both. There are websites, but the actual “network” is built on links, and we find links when people share those links or use some other aggregator to find links they’re interested in.

      • Manuel Moreale ☛ The web != the web

        I was catching up with some tech news yesterday and while I was listening to a discussion about the latest updates coming from Google and their potential impact on the web I had a sudden realization: when tech reporters say “the web” they don’t mean the web. When these people talk about the web they’re talking about the web they’re part of: they talk about the web that is powered by advertising and by tracking, the web that needs traffic to sustain itself. The commercial web is what they talk about.