GNU/Linux, BSD, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 25, 2025

• Graphics Stack

  • Dave Airlie ☛ Dave Airlie (blogspot): ramalama/mesa : benchmarks on my hardware and open source vs proprietary

    One of my pet peeves around running local LLMs and inferencing is the sheer mountain of shit^W^W^W complexity of compute stacks needed to run any of this stuff in an mostly optimal way on a piece of hardware.

    CUDA, ROCm, and defective chip maker Intel oneAPI all to my mind scream over-engineering on a massive scale at least for a single task like inferencing. The combination of closed source, over the wall open source, and open source that is insurmountable for anyone to support or fix outside the vendor, screams that there has to be a simpler way. Combine that with the pytorch ecosystem and insanity of deploying python and I get a bit unstuck.

• Applications

  • Linux Links ☛ erb_lint – lint your ERB or HTML files

    erb_lint is a tool to help lint your ERB or HTML files using the included linters or by writing your own.

  • Neowin ☛ Windows 11 is unsupported? This app automatically moves important backdoored Windows 10 data to Linux

    There is a new unofficial backdoored Windows to GNU/Linux migration tool in town that is said to make it easy for users to make the jump.

• Games

  • Boiling Steam ☛ New Steam Games with Native GNU/Linux Clients, including The Drifter and The Wandering Village - 2025-07-23 Edition

    Between 2025-07-16 and 2025-07-23 there were 50 New Steam games released with Native GNU/Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 524 games released for backdoored Windows on Steam, so the GNU/Linux versions represent about 9.5 % of total released titles. There’s a couple of very good picks, such as The Drifter which seems to be an exceptional entry in the Point’n click adventure game genre. Great art and design and a story to keep you hooked until the end. In a totally different genre, there’s also The Wandering Village, a really cool village / colony management game with a twist: your people live on the back of a huge creature that roams around the world. I have already started playing it and so far, very good impressions after a few hours in the game.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • BSD

    • Distro Watch ☛ BSD Release: DragonFly BSD 6.4.2

      The DragonFly BSD project has published a new update to the operating system's 6.4 series. The new release, DragonFly BSD 6.4.2, fixes a disk size issue when running in a QEMU virtual machine, corrects an issue when using IPv6 addresses, and corrects a problem when a program would crash when creating many child processes. The release announcement reports: [...]

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Red Hat ☛ How PagedAttention resolves memory waste of LLM systems

      Large language models (LLMs) use a key-value (KV) cache to store the context of ongoing text generation. However, managing the memory for this cache is challenging because its size is dynamic and unpredictable. In other words, when we run LLMs, we store something called the KV cache in memory. This helps the model remember what it has generated so far.

    • Red Hat ☛ Submit remote RayJobs to a Ray cluster with the CodeFlare SDK

      One of the chief benefits of the CodeFlare SDK within Red Hat OpenShift AI is its ability to provide Ray features to a data scientist, abstracting away many infrastructure requirements. A user of the CodeFlare SDK simply needs to execute a small number of Python cells to get access to a Ray cluster running on OpenShift. 

  • Debian Family

    • Linuxiac ☛ Debian Plans Long-Awaited Wiki Modernization

      The Debian Wiki is set to get a revamp as the project transitions to MediaWiki, leaving behind the aging MoinMoin platform.

    • Valhalla's Things: Things I Have Learnt At DebConf

      And I still haven’t watched the recordings of those talks that I couldn’t (or decided not to, because the hallway track was more interesting) attend.

  • Open Hardware/Modding

    • CNX Software ☛ Xiaomi TV Stick 4K (2nd Gen) – A quad-core Cortex-A55 TV Stick with Surveillance Giant Google TV

      We’ve just written about the Ugoos X5M Pro as one of the first Amlogic S905X5M TV boxes, but the market is expanding, and Xiaomi TV Stick 4K (2nd Gen) Surveillance Giant Google TV dongle is now available as a smaller version of the company’s Xiaomi TV Box S (3rd Gen) based on the same or similar processor. The TV stick features 2GB RAM, 8GB eMMC flash, a 4K-capable HDMI male port, and WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity, and not much else, as one would expect from an HDMI TV stick./blockquote>

    • Hackaday ☛ Comprehensive Test Set Released For The Intel 80286

      Remember the 80286? It was the sequel to the 8086, the chip that started it all, and it powered a great number of machines in the early years of the personal computing revolution. It might not be as relevant today, but regardless, [Daniel Balsom] has now released a comprehensive test suite for the ancient chip. (via The Register)

    • CNX Software ☛ $12 WLED controller board supports WS2812 RGB LED strips

      “xcrhom WLED Type-C” is a tiny ESP32 board designed to run WLED open-source firmware that supports WS2812(B) RGB LED strips. It also supports audio-reactive effects using an “external microphone”, which appears to mean the microphone on the smartphone running the WLED app, more on that later.

  • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

    • Android Police ☛ Doom on Linux on Android just opened up a world of software potential

      Android is, at its heart, based on the Linux operating system’s kernel. It is heavily modified in many ways, and in practice, an entirely different beast. But the underlying structure — how the hardware communicates with the software on a fundamental level — started from Linux, and still shares its bones.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Zimzi ☛ Jitsi privacy flaw that enables one-click stealth audio and video capture

    Jitsi is an open-source web conferencing application. Jitsi also hosts a public instance, with millions of monthly active users.

  • Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

    • Remkus de Vries ☛ The Fine Line Between Editorial Focus and Echo Chambers in WordPress

      I deliberately don’t cover page builders, not because they aren’t valuable (they are to many), but because I don’t use them anymore, and my approach to WordPress has cemented in staying as close to native WordPress as possible. For reasons related to performance, vendor lock-in, and a bunch of other things. My audience comes for the great finds, dev-oriented news on what’s new in WordPress, WooCommerce, and plenty of great finds for all kinds of solutions. That, and performance, tooling, and sustainable best practices.

      That’s where my attention goes.

      That means I amplify creators and resources in those areas rather than trying to cover the entire spectrum of WordPress content. It’s not a “you’re in or you’re out” thing. It’s about curation.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Access/Content

      • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post - Beyond Access: Untangling Copyright Confusion in Asian Open Access Journals

        While much of the global conversation centers around transformative agreements, read-and-publish models, and Plan S compliance, journals in Asia face a more fundamental hurdle — clarifying what “open” actually means. Recent research, especially from China, reveals legal ambiguities that risk undermining the credibility and usability of OA content. While countries like Japan and Korea have made significant strides, many regions still struggle with foundational issues. Biomedical publishing, in particular, presents a mixed picture, vividly illustrated by recent research from Ming Ni and Linhui Wang (see Figure 1).