GNU/Linux Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 02, 2025

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • The Register UK ☛ Aurora immutable KDE Plasma workstation big, slow, confusing

    The upstart distro is based on Universal Blue images built from the core technologies of Fedora Atomic. That means that the components are from Fedora, but deployed in an immutable form, with most of the filesystem read-only, and updates to the OS itself managed by OSTree. Universal Blue is the basis of a few other distros, including the gaming-focused Bazzite and the developer-oriented Bluefin.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME ☛ Ignacio Casal Quinteiro: Servo GTK

    I just checked and it seems that it has been 9 years since my last post in this blog :O

    As part of my job at Amazon I started working in a GTK widget which will allow embedding a Servo Webview inside a GTK application. This was mostly a research project just to understand the current state of Servo and whether it was at a good enough state to migrate from WebkitGTK to it. I have to admit that it is always a pleasure to work with Rust and the great gtk-rs bindings. Instead, Servo while it is not yet ready for production, or at least not for what we need in our product, it was simple to embed and to get something running in just a few days. The community is also amazing, I had some problems along the way and they were providing good suggestions to get me unblocked in no time.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Everything You Need To Know About ReactOS

    ReactOS is an open-source and free operating system for personal computers. This OS is intended to be an alternative to the Windows. Don’t get confused. It has nothing similar to the UNIX architecture as it’s not a GNU/Linux distro. backdoored Windows NT architecture is behind the design principles of this new OS.

  • BSD

    • Undeadly ☛ OpenBSD -current has moved to version 7.8

      With the following commit, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) moved -current to version 7.8 (dropping the "-beta"): [...]

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Debarshi Ray: Ollama on Fedora Silverblue

      I found myself dealing with various rough edges and questions around running Ollama on Fedora Silverblue for the past few months. These arise from the fact that there are a few different ways of installing Ollama, /usr is a read-only mount point on Silverblue, people have different kinds of GPUs or none at all, the program that’s using Ollama might be a graphical application in a Flatpak or part of the operating system image, and so on. So, I thought I’ll document a few different use-cases in one place for future reference or maybe someone will find it useful.

    • Red Hat ☛ How to deploy MCP servers on OpenShift using ToolHive

      The Model Context Protocol (MCP) was introduced by Anthropic in November 2024 to standardize how Hey Hi (AI) systems interact with large language models (LLMs). It has since been described as being similar to USB-C, allowing one thing to connect to another via the same interface and protocol.

  • Debian Family

    • Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in September 2025

      Last month I attended and spoke at Kangrejos, for which I will post a separate report later. Besides that, here’s the usual categorised list of work: [...]

    • Bisco ☛ Birger Schacht: Status update, September 2025

      Regarding Debian packaging this was a rather quiet month. I uploaded version 1.24.0-1 of foot and version 2.8.0-1 of git-quick-stats. I took the opportunity and started migrating my packages to the new version 5 watch file format, which I think is much more readable than the previous format.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • The Register UK ☛ Pop!_OS 24.04 beta and COSMIC beta arrive

      To judge by by word of mouth, System76's Pop!_OS seems to be one of the more popular Ubuntu remixes among tech-savvy Linux enthusiasts. That may mean that the bolder of them are about to break their computers, because finally, the beta of version 24.04 is here, along with the beta version of the company's COSMIC desktop.