GNU/Linux, Hardware, Programming, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 11, 2025

• GNU/Linux

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Install Chromium browser Debian 13 | 12| 11 Linux

      The steps provided here for installing Chromium on Debian 13, 12, and 11 will also work for Debian 10 Buster and other previous versions, including Ubuntu, GNU/Linux Mint, MX Linux, Kali Linux, and more.  Chromium is an open-source browser from Google, on which “Google Chrome” is based.

    • Jon Chiappetta: Buffer Bloat Buster – Running a TCP VPN tunnel with large memory buffer sizes

      I have been running the highly modified version of OpenVPN which is a TCP VPN with large sysctl memory buffers set and I am trying a new add-on experiment of using an extra dedicated thread to send dummy/mock UDP data at a specific bit rate, for example 1024 kbps, through the tunnel at a constant consistent pace. It works with both client and server modes to get the virtual IP addresses (or you can specify one yourself) and auto sends random bytes to each one in attempt to keep the tunnel active at all times!

  • WINE or Emulation

    • FEX ☛ FEX 2509 Tagged

      After last month’s enormous improvements, this release will look quite tame in comparison. Although we still did a bunch of work, so let’s dive in.

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

    • Linuxiac ☛ Hyprland 0.51 Released with Reworked Gestures, New Options

      Hyprland 0.51 tiling Wayland compositor brings reworked gestures, new config options, smoother animations, and lot of fixes.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • LWN ☛ Changing GNOME technical governance?

        The GNOME project, which recently celebrated its 28th birthday, has never had a formal technical governance; progress has been driven by individuals and groups that advocated for—and worked toward—a particular goal in an ad hoc fashion. Longtime GNOME contributor Emmanuele Bassi would like to see that change by adding cross-project teams and a steering committee for the project; to that end, he gave a talk (YouTube video) at GUADEC 2025 in late July on his idea to establish some technical governance for the project. He also put together a blog post with his notes from the talk. The audience reaction was favorable, so he has followed up on the GNOME discussion forum with an RFC on governance to try to move the effort along.

        In the RFC, Bassi described the motivation for the change. He laid out the current situation, which has changed little ""from the 'rag tag band of misfits' of the halcyon days of the project's youth"". Governance is highly informal, which leads to difficulties with the project's overall direction. ""Decision-making is an exercise of sisyphean patience, where people must push the boulder of the community uphill only to watch it roll back down with every cycle.""

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • LWN ☛ OpenSUSE disables bcachefs

      The openSUSE project has announced

      that the bcachefs filesystem will be disabled in its kernel builds starting

      with 6.17; bcachefs users will have to make other arrangements. "The

      current 6.16.* is NOT affected. Neither is Slowroll (for now)."

  • Debian Family

    • LWN ☛ Removing Guix from Debian

      As a rule, if a package is shipped with a Debian release, users can count on it being available, and updated, for the entire life of the release. If package foo is included in the stable release—currently Debian 13 ("trixie")—a user can reasonably expect that it will continue to be available with security backports as long as that release is supported, though it may not be included in Debian 14 ("forky"). However, it is likely that the Guix package manager will soon be removed from the repositories for Debian 13 and Debian 12 ("bookworm", also called oldstable).

      Debian has the Advanced Package Tool (APT) for package management, of course, but Guix offers a different approach and can be used in conjunction with other distribution package managers. Guix is inspired by Nix's functional package management; it offers transactional upgrades and rollbacks, package management for unprivileged users, and more. Unlike Nix, its packages are defined using the Guile implementation of the Scheme programming language. There is also a GNU Guix distribution as well; LWN covered both NixOS and Guix in February 2024, and looked at Nix alternative Lix in July 2024.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Linux 6.17 Kernel Arrives in Ubuntu 25.10 Daily Builds

      Ubuntu 25.10 daily builds are now running on the GNU/Linux 6.17 kernel. GNU/Linux 6.17 isn’t released until late September, but the Canonical kernel team has changed its policy to always use the latest in-development kernel release in new Ubuntu version going forward, irrespective of whether its actually been released. So, for the time being, GNU/Linux 6.17 is an “unstable” – a technical, not literal term – kernel snapshot based on a recent release candidate but with the usual Canonical patches, tuning and modifications applied on top of it.

  • Open Hardware/Modding

    • CNX Software ☛ Baguette S3 ESP32-S3 board gets the breadboard-friendly crown

      We often write about breadboard-friendly boards, which typically means they plug nicely into a breadboard, but usually leave only one or two rows to play with on each side. So far, the best option we have come across is probably the Raspberry Breadstick, which is designed for full-length breadboards, but is limited by the I/Os on the Raspberry Pi RP2040 MCU. When it comes to breadboard friendliness, it’s hard to beat The Pi Hut’s Baguette S3, as it provides a single 30-pin header designed to be inserted in one of the rows of a breadboard, leaving plenty of space for prototyping.

    • John Goerzen ☛ John Goerzen: ARM is great, ARM is terrible (and so is RISC-V)

      I’ve long been interested in new and different platforms. I ran Debian on an Alpha back in the late 1990s and was part of the Alpha port team; then I helped bootstrap Debian on amd64. I’ve got somewhere around 8 Raspberry Pi devices in active use right now, and the free NNCPNET Internet email service I manage runs on an ARM instance at a cloud provider.

      ARM-based devices are cheap in a lot of ways: they use little power and there are many single-board computers based on them that are inexpensive. My 8-year-old’s computer is a Raspberry Pi 400, in fact.

      So I like ARM.

  • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

    • Zimbabwe ☛ End of an Era: Nova Launcher Development Halts After 13 Years

      For Android users who loved customising every detail of their home screens, Nova Launcher has been the go-to app for over a decade.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Libre Arts ☛ LibreArts Weekly recap — 7 September 2025

    Week highlights: new releases of ShineStacker, OurPaint, Mixxx, and LSP plugins; new features in Inkscape and FreeCAD.

  • Programming/Development

    • Buttondown LLC ☛ Many Hard Leetcode Problems are Easy Constraint Problems

      In my first interview out of college I was asked the change counter problem:

      Given a set of coin denominations, find the minimum number of coins required to make change for a given number. IE for USA coinage and 37 cents, the minimum number is four (quarter, dime, 2 pennies).

      I implemented the simple greedy algorithm and immediately fell into the trap of the question: the greedy algorithm only works for "well-behaved" denominations. If the coin values were [10, 9, 1], then making 37 cents would take 10 coins in the greedy algorithm but only 4 coins optimally (10+9+9+9). The "smart" answer is to use a dynamic programming algorithm, which I didn't know how to do. So I failed the interview.

    • Andrea Corbellini: Testing crash recovery features in a CI environment

      About two years ago I wrote a Rust crate to fulfill this promise:

      If a crash occurs while updating a file, the file either contains the old contents, or the new contents, nothing in between.

      This crate essentially solves the following problem: when you update a file, generally you open it, truncate it, write to it block-by-block, and eventually close it. The problem with this process is that if a crash occurs at any point during this process (the program segfaults, the kernel panics, the machine loses power, …), your file will be left in an intermediate state where the old contents are completely lost, and the new contents are only partially written (if at all). My crate solves this problem by making file updates atomic.