GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 20, 2025

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Jupiter Broadcasting ☛ Chris' Smart Home Disaster | LINUX Unplugged 637

    The biggest failure in seven years, right before a trip. What broke, how Chris pulled it back together, and how Wes would fix it right.

• Kernel Space

  • Jons Mostovojs ☛ All You Wanted to Know About STDIO

    Sometimes, while working on complex code bases that are executed in UNIX systems, we need to have different processes communicate with each other. This approach is broadly called inter-process communication (IPC), and there are many similar but different ways in which this can be achieved. The most basic one is using standard input/output (stdio) to set up such communication. In this article we shall take a deep-dive into this approach hoping to demystify it.

    For it to be at least somewhat practical, we provide some snippets and tips at the end of this article. An additional practical benefit of this article is that we use Zig code snippets in this article to illustrate the concepts. If you always were interested in what this language looks like and how to work with it, this article is for you.

• Games

  • Notebook Check ☛ Asus ROG Xbox Ally X: YouTuber installs Bazzite Linux to recreate a SteamOS-like experience, but it may not be a good idea

    YouTuber Dawid Does Tech Stuff experimented with installing Bazzite, a Linux distro inspired by SteamOS, on the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X to explore whether it could offer a smoother, more console-like experience than Windows 11. The experiment showed promising responsiveness but also exposed several hardware and software limitations.

    We recently received the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X for review, and it feels like a significant improvement over its predecessor, the ROG Ally X. Although the latest Xbox-branded handheld from Asus comes pre-installed with Windows 11, or rather a more optimised version of it for gaming, some users still prefer Linux-based systems like SteamOS for their smoother, more console-like experience.

    One could argue that SteamOS served as a wake-up call for Microsoft. It might even be part of the reason why Windows 11 received such a gaming-focused overhaul, as SteamOS has been gaining traction among OEMs. Lenovo, for instance, recently partnered with Valve to offer the officially certified Lenovo Legion Go S featuring SteamOS.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Distro Watch ☛ DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

    [...] Before we dive into those details, we begin with a look at Kubuntu 25.10. The Kubuntu distribution was the preferred flavour of Ubuntu in last week's Opinion Poll and we share the new developments in this KDE-focused flavour of Ubuntu. [...]

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ DOSBox Pure Unleashed is ready for Windows, Mac, and Linux computers after five years in development — enhanced standalone release no longer restricted to being a RetroArch core

    The first public release of DOSBox Pure Unleashed, a new version of the DOS emulator by Psyraven, was made available on Saturday evening. This is a fork of DOSBox Pure by the same coder, which runs as a RetroArch core. As well as being a standalone app for Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, the new DOSBox Pure Unleashed comes with its own convenient UI, and the developer calls out some interesting enhancements, like experimental support for Windows 9X.

  • New Releases

    • Barry Kauler ☛ EasyOS Excalibur-series version 7.0.23 released

      The previous version, 7.0.20 (originally announced as 7.0.19), was released on October 5: [...]

    • Barry Kauler ☛ gFTP now in Easy Excalibur

      That was a surprise... I wanted to use gFTP, which is a GUI FTP client; but it isn't in the Debian Trixie repository. Yes, there is a package named 'gftp', but it is just a frontend for dependency 'gftp-text', which is only a CLI app. The original gFTP package contains text-mode and GTK2 binaries, and the Debian maintainer has decide to drop the gtk2 binary.

  • BSD

    • Ruben Schade ☛ I have more NetBSD than FreeBSD installs

      Admittedly this is as much the fault of FreeBSD’s useful features than NetBSD’s utility. I had a project in the last year to consolidate as many disparate services into a single FreeBSD bhyve and jail host at home, and a couple of cloud VMs for backup and orchestration. FreeBSD’s tooling and OpenZFS integration is what made this possible, and seamless. I’m a begrudging Linux guy at work, but I do encourage clients and internal teams to use FreeBSD as a viable alternative where possible, especially for storage.

  • Arch Family

    • Étienne Pflieger ☛ Filter packages to upgrade on Archlinux

      It’s very nice to begin you day, knowing that you’ll be able to directly update one or more packages, which have been released over night. However, if you don’t want to lose any productivity, or reboot your laptop you just start, you might have to pay attention to the list of available update to avoid applying a kernel, glibc or else update, which would require a reboot.

      Other time, you don’t want either to apply immediatly all the update, even if they are mostly innocuous (i.e. I’m looking at you shellcheck’s haskell dependencies).