Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 25, 2025

• Wireshark ☛ Wireshark 4.6.1 Release Notes

  This is the first release of the 4.6 branch.

• [Old] Philipp Hagenlocher ☛ Is LaTeX worth it?

  While LaTeX is rightfully praised for its qualities, its (sometimes obvious) flaws are often ignored or downplayed. The learning curve is quite steep and its usability is far from optimal. Is it even worth it to learn LaTeX? What kind of work can we realistically get done using it? Are there alternatives? When do we really need LaTeX?

• OMG Ubuntu ☛ Surveillance Giant Google Releases its New Google Sans Flex Font as Open Source

  Surveillance Giant Google has made its ‘next generation brand typeface’, Google Sans Flex, available for download — under an open source license, which is welcome news. A modern sans serif font purpose-designed for use on screens and OSes, Google Sans Flex is a ground-up, multi-axis rebuild of the proprietary Google Sans font, by typographer David Berlow (of Font Bureau fame).

• Unicorn Media ☛ Rochko Steps Down as CEO, Leaving Mastodon Healthy

  Eugene Rochko announced that he was stepping down, after spending over nine years as the CEO of Mastodon, the social networking platform that he started. While most people don’t like change, especially at a project that defied the odds by becoming a popular — and open — program that pretty much works without drama, the result of his stepping down should be more transition than shakeup.

  Until last week’s announcement, Rochko pretty much owned Mastodon, and ran it as something of a benevolent dictator. That doesn’t mean that others haven’t had an ownership role too, but in a complicated way. Unlike most other social destinations — X comes immediately to mind — Mastodon isn’t monolithic but is federated. That means that while users see a unified interface that’s not unlike X, it’s really a collection of independently run servers — called “instances,” which is where all user accounts are located.

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • Clayton Errington ☛ Static.Quest review

    A year of a new Webring, Static.Quest! Wow, time has flown by. A little over a year ago Benjamin was giving away a domain name, and I always had a great idea for this type of domain. He was able to transfer it to me, and I took my idea and made a great project out of it.

  • [Old] Lesley Lai ☛ Self hosting comments with Comentario

    For years, I used the cloud-hosted version of Commento. However, Commento had been unmaintained for a long time, and the $99 annual fee always feels too expensive. I’d been wanting to switch to something else for a while but never quite had the motivation. That changed this year when the cloud service start to fail sporadically, and I even thought I had lost all the past comments. I also happened to be redesigning my website around the same time, so it felt like a natural moment to make the switch.

    Compare to years ago, nowadays there are much more options for comments, but I settled with Comentario , a fork of Commento, as it is easy to migrate and has all the features that I already used. The only issue is that Comentario only supports self-hosting, which is something I don’t have experience with.

• GNU Projects

  • GNU ☛ parallel @ Savannah: GNU Parallel 20251122 ('Mamdani') released [stable]

    GNU Parallel 20251122 ('Mamdani') has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4

• Standards/Consortia

  • Jim Nielsen ☛ My Number One “Resource Not Found”

    Why fix it? I have very little faith that the people who I want most to respect what’s in that file are not going to do so.

    So for now, I’m good serving a 404 for robots.txt.

  • Dan Q ☛ SVGs that feel like GIFs

    The moving image below is only 49Kb and has an incredibly high resolution.