today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 05, 2026

• Server

  • Stack Overflow ☛ The Great Unracking: Saying goodbye to the servers at our physical datacenter

    For almost our entire 16-year existence, the SRE team has managed all datacenter operations, including the physical servers, cabling, racking, replacing failed disks and everything else in between. This work required someone to physically show up at the datacenter and poke the machines.

    We’ve since moved all our sites to the cloud. Our servers are now cattle, not pets. Nobody is going to have to drive to our New Jersey data center and replace or reboot hardware. Not after last week.

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

  • Michael Stapelberg ☛ Can I finally start using Wayland in 2026?

    Wayland is the successor to the X server (X11, Xorg) to implement the graphics stack on Linux. The Wayland project was actually started in 2008, a year before I created the i3 tiling window manager for X11 in 2009 — but for the last 18 years (!), Wayland was never usable on my computers. I don’t want to be stuck on deprecated software, so I try to start using Wayland each year, and this articles outlines what keeps me from migrating to Wayland in 2026.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

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

    [...] Then, in our News section, we talk about the FreeBSD Foundation working to improve laptop support and we report on a new X11 server which has entered development. We also talk about a key piece of Unix history which can be downloaded and run in an emulator. [...]

  • BSD

    • [Old] CheriBSD ☛ CheriBSD 25.03 Release Notes

      Welcome to the Spring 2025 (25.03) release of the CheriBSD operating system. As well as a general update of the baseline FreeBSD OS (corresponding to CURRENT as of October 2024) from which CheriBSD is derived, we have introduced several new research components which will be of interest to the CHERI and CheriBSD community: [...]

  • Open Hardware/Modding

    • Fjall 3.0 Targets Embedded Linux Data Storage

      Fjall 3.0 landed this week, and it’s worth a look if you build embedded Linux projects that need reliable local persistence (think Raspberry Pi-based sensor gateways, home monitoring, or lab rigs that must keep logging when the network flakes out). Phoronix describes Fjall as a log-structured, embeddable key-value storage engine similar to RocksDB, but implemented in Rust.

  • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

    • Kev Quirk ☛ I've Pre-Ordered the Clicks Communicator

      The Clicks Communicator is smaller and it has a proper QWERTY keyboard. It is all very BlackBerry, and I love that.