GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 04, 2025

• Make Use Of ☛ I borrowed these habits from Linux and my Windows setup is better for it [Ed: Back doors with "Linux" in the title]

• ZDNet ☛ How to switch your Windows 10 PC to Linux Mint - for free

  The clock is ticking on Windows 10. But what if you've looked at Windows 11 and you hate it? Or your Windows 10 PC is perfectly fine and dandy, but Microsoft won't support Windows 11 on it? The answer: Switch from Windows to an easy-to-use Linux distro.

  Is Linux easy to use? Yes! The days when you had to be a tech wizard to run Linux are long over. Sure, you can get more out of Linux if you know shell commands, but you can get more out of Windows if you know PowerShell, too, and how many of us are PowerShell gurus? If you can run Windows, you can run Linux.

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

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GSoC'25 KWin Project Blog Post: Week 5-6

      It's been another few weeks of progress on the KWin GameController Plugin and I've got a lot to share! After spending the previous weeks setting up the foundation, I've progressed things forward by improving the logic a bit more, creating a few integration tests, integrating it into System Settings, and making sure it runs well on real hardware like the steamdeck.

      The primary change was splitting up GameController into two classes. The new one being GenericInputDevice which lives in emulatedInputDevice.{cpp/h}. This allowed me to separate the GameController logic responsible for emulating keyboard and mouse into it's own separate class. Now GameController wrapper class is just responsible for monitoring controller input, resetting idle timer on user activity, and logging.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • BSD

    • Dan Langille ☛ Cannot override /etc/newsyslog.conf with /etc/newsyslog.conf.d/newsyslog.conf

      FreeBSD has a great concept of establishing default values and letting the user override them.

      That approach does not apply to newsyslog, and specifically, newsyslog.conf

      This idea came up on IRC after I said I was looking forward to a new FreeBSD 15 which allows the compression specified in newsyslog.conf to be overridden. Using /etc/newsyslog.conf.d

  • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • Dominique Leuenberger ☛ Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2025/40

      Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

      The last trimester of 2025 has begun, and the northern hemisphere of the planet is getting colder; days are grey and short. What could be better than updating your Tumbleweed system? Only one thing: contributing to the package pool! Remind yourself: openSUSE is maintained by a vibrant community, and everybody is invited to help make the distributions better. Of course, Tumbleweed does not want to steal the spotlight from Leap 16.0 this week

  • Debian Family

    • Guido Günther: Free Software Activities September 2025

      Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. Nothing stands out too much, I enjoyed doing the OSK changes the most as that helped to improve the typing experience further. Also doing a small bit of kernel work again was fun (still need to figure out the 6mq's touch controller repsonsiveness though).