KDE, GNOME, GNU/Linux, and BSD

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 27, 2025

• Desktop/Laptop

  • XDA ☛ I'm not upgrading to Windows 11, but I'm not tolerating Linux either

    I love the excitement of a new operating system, but I'm not upgrading my old laptop to Windows 11. It's not that I have anything against it; in fact, I think it's a pretty decent step up from Windows 10. The real issue is that software's hunger for resources is growing much faster than my old hardware is giving up the ghost, and I'm sure I am not alone. At scale, this leaves a ton of perfectly good computers in a difficult limbo where they are too old for the latest mainstream operating systems, but still functional enough to save from the landfill.

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

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Post Mid-Term Evaluation | GSoC 2025

      The mid-term evaluation period for GSoC 2025 took place from July 14th to July 18th. During this phase, contributors are required to submit a progress report via the official GSoC dashboard. At the same time, mentors provided their evaluations based on our performance, communication, and code contributions.

      I’m happy to share that I’ve successfully passed the mid-term evaluation ✅

      This milestone was more than just a checkpoint — it was a chance to reflect on how far I’ve come since the beginning of the project. From setting up the development environment and understanding the GCompris codebase, to contributing my first features and collaborating with mentors, the journey so far has been packed with learning, growth, and problem-solving.

      The feedback from my mentors has been encouraging and constructive. It helped me realign and improve both in terms of development quality and clarity of communication and pacing up for final lap. With the mid-term behind me, I now feel more confident and focused heading into the final stretch of GSoC.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Sam Thursfield: Thoughts during GUADEC 2025

      Greetings readers of the future from my favourite open technology event of the year. I am hanging out with the people who develop the GNOME platform talking about interesting stuff.

      Being realistic, I won’t have time to make a readable writeup of the event. So I’m going to set myself a challenge: how much can I write up of the event so far, in 15 minutes?

    • Nick Richards: Octopus Agile Prices For Linux

      I’m on the Octopus Agile electricity tariff, where the price changes every half hour based on wholesale costs. This is great for saving money and using less carbon intensive energy, provided you can shift your heavy usage to cheaper times. With a family that insists on eating at a normal hour, that mostly means scheduling the dishwasher and washing machine.

      The snag was not having an easy way to see upcoming prices on my GNU/Linux laptop. To scratch that itch, I built a small GTK app: Octopus Agile Energy. Hopefully, it’ll land on Flathub soon for others in the UK to use. The app is heavily inspired by the excellent Octopus Compare for mobile but I stripped the concept back to a single job: what’s the price now and for the next 24 hours? This felt right for a simple desktop utility and was achievable with a bit of JSON parsing and some hand waving.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Kivikakk ☛ Fortune habits in Nix

    I recently saw and liked Judy2k’s “Using fortune to reinforce habits” — building effective habits is an under-appreciated part of learning any discipline. (And xh is one I had the exact same trouble with.) Let’s implement it in our Nix setup.

  • FreeDOS ☛ The FreeDOS Project

    Created by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston for the Apple II and later for DOS, VisiCalc was the original spreadsheet for desktop computers. Thanks to Dan for sharing a free version on his website: [...]

  • Gentoo Family

    • Gentoo ☛ EPYTEST_PLUGINS and other goodies now in Gentoo

      If you are following the gentoo-dev mailing list, you may have noticed that there’s been a fair number of patches sent for the Python eclasses recently. Most of them have been centered on pytest support. Long story short, I’ve came up with what I believed to be a reasonably good design, and decided it’s time to stop manually repeating all the good practices in every ebuild separately.

      In this post, I am going to shortly summarize all the recently added options. As always, they are all also documented in the Gentoo Python Guide.