GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 25, 2025

• Desktop/Laptop

  • The Register UK ☛ LisaGUI recreates Apple’s Lisa interface in your browser

    When you double-click on a Lisa Office component, it doesn't open a program, because LisaOS tried to blur away the distinction between programs and documents. What look like app icons are little stacks of stationery templates and double-clicking one creates a new piece of that kind of stationery. You drag it somewhere to store it, and then you can work on it. This also, almost as a byproduct, means no "save" and "load" dialog boxes. Those are commands for interacting with a program, and that's not how the Lisa was intended to work: the important things were documents, not the tools that created them.

    What paid for the R&D that went into the Lisa was the success of the Apple II range, which while a pioneering eight-bit micro, stuck closer to the conventions set by the minicomputers that came before it. To set it up, you inserted cards into slots, and then Apple II users had to learn about all sorts of concepts like what programs were and that you had to load them into memory and then, later, save data files from those programs onto media (cassette tapes or, for the wealthy, floppy diskettes). The same sort of concepts lay behind CP/M and then in turn MS-DOS.

• Kernel Space

  • Vermaden ☛ ZFS Boot Environments Explained

    This article will not be a general ZFS explanation attempt – we will focus on ZFS Boot Environments only. There are a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings when it comes to them – some people do now know what is inside and outside of ZFS BE – but even worse – some people do not understand them at all.

    The Table of Contents for this article is: [...]

  • Collabora ☛ Implementing Bluetooth LE Audio & Auracast on Linux systems

    LE Audio introduces a modern, low-power, low-latency Bluetooth® audio architecture that overcomes the limitations of classic Bluetooth® profiles. Get a detailed look at its features, how its supported on Linux, and what lies ahead.

• Games

  • Fabian Sanglard ☛ Quake Engine Indicators

    I was working on a bug in Chocolate Quake netcode. The issue was an edge case where starting two clients on the same machine resulted in the second one zombifying the first one. When the bug occurred there was no disconnection but the client could no longer move. Instead the screen would show an "indicator" looking like an unplugged Ethernet cable in the upper left corner.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ SteamVR 2.14 brings fixes for a Linux memory leak, a Steam Link freeze for AMD GPUs and more | GamingOnLinux

    The latest stable release of SteamVR is out now! SteamVR 2.14 is a maintenance release focused on fixing up bugs and nuisance issues. Nice to see the Linux fix make it in here, as no doubt that was quite annoying.

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

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Korcenji ☛ Korcenji

      I've been using KDE Plasma for four and a half years. The community is sweet and the software is stellar, and I see a bright future for it. I want it to be the best it can be! So, I'd like to talk about a small incident that I want KDE to lean away from.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • HaikuOS ☛ The Gerrit code review iceberg

    Recently some discussions on the forum led to asking about the status of our Gerrit code review. There are a lot of changes there that have been inactive for several years, with no apparent interest from anyone. To be precise, there are currently 358 commits waiting for review (note that Gerrit, unlike Github and other popular code review tools, works on a commit-by-commit basis, so each commit from a multiple-commit change is counted separately). The oldes tone has not seen any comments since 2018.

    Today, let’s have a look at some of these changes and see why they are stalled. Hopefully it will inspire someone to pick up the work and help finishing them up.

  • BSD

    • DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ Lazy Reading for 2025/11/23

      No theme though a bit dark. The only existing copy of UNIX v4.  (via) readtape, for Magnetic tape data recovery in software.  Related. The Internet of Things That Don’t Work.