Omarchy, Free Software, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 28, 2025

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Arch Family

    • Chris McLeod ☛ Installing Arch and Omarchy on a Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio

      My three year-old Surface Laptop Studio (first generation) has been starting to feel a bit long in the tooth as Windows 11 has continued to grow fatter. It’s that slow, creeping, feeling you get when a device isn’t quite “good enough” anymore. You probably know what I mean; things take longer to open than you remember, and there’s just a little bit more “friction” using the device than you’d like. It’s small things - a few extra seconds here, a loading spinner there.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers

    • University of Toronto ☛ Why Wandering Thoughts has fewer comment syndication feeds than yesterday

      There are undoubtedly places on the Internet where discussion (in the form of comments) continues on for years on certain pages, and so a comment feed for an individual page could make sense; you really might keep up (in your feed reader) with a slow moving conversation that lasts years. Other places on the Internet put definite cut-offs on further discussion (comments) on individual pages, which provides a natural deadline to turn off the page's comment syndication feed. But neither of those profiles describes Wandering Thoughts, where my entries remain open for comments more or less forever (and sometimes people do comment on quite old entries), but comments and discussions don't tend to go on for very long.

  • SaaS/Back End/Databases

    • PostgreSQL ☛ PGConf NYC 2025 (9/29-10/1) - Schedule Announced!

      PGConf NYC 2025 (September 29 - October 1, 2025, New York City) is packed with user stories and best practices for how to use PostgreSQL. Join us in New York City and connect with other developers, DBAs, administrators, decisions makers, and contributors to the open source PostgreSQL community! We're expecting to sell out - we're not just saying that - so please register today to secure your spot!

  • Education

    • Giles Turnbull ☛ Everything I've written about 'working in the open'

      Someone on LinkedIn very kindly described this website as “a goldmine” of useful tips about working in the open. But that instantly made me think: “Hmm, you’d have a hard job finding them all.”

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Rlang ☛ Wildlife management

        Open Analytics often receives requests to visualize and summarize data from multiple data sources in a user-friendly way. Most of these projects result in in-house applications, while projects for governmental institutions typically result in publicly available web applications. A nice example is faunabeheer.inbo.be, developed for the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO) and the Agency for Nature and Forests (ANB) responding to questions from (local) authorities, land managers, hunters, researchers, journalists, citizens and farmers.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post – Beyond Open Access, Part II: Make Images Truly Accessible for All

        In Part I of “Beyond Open Access: Make Academic Content Truly Accessible for All,” we stated that open access alone is not enough to ensure genuine accessibility. Scholarly communication must go beyond simply removing paywalls. It must also be designed so that everyone, including those with disabilities and differing abilities, can engage with knowledge on equal terms. We highlighted the reality that only a tiny fraction of scholarly outputs (2.4% of PDFs) meet accessibility standards today, and we made the call for a shift toward “born-accessible” content that places empathy and inclusivity at the core of academic publishing.

        In this second part, let’s review more practical yet fundamental elements of scholarly communication: images and their descriptions. For millions of readers, images remain inaccessible, hidden behind poor or absent descriptions; alternative (alt) texts. Discover key takeaways and actionable insights to improve the accessibility of your published images.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • [Old] Juan J Martínez ☛ Back on XMPP

      Although there were multi-protocol messaging applications, and some supported Messenger, back then I was in my free software advocacy phase, so obviously I had to use a free protocol. Back then it was Jabber, until Cisco acquired Jabber Inc; and I can’t remember when but it changed to be just XMPP.