Distributions and Operating Systems: "The Distroless Linux Future", Haiku Activity & Contract Report, Init System in Artix Linux, and Fedora GNU/Linux in the Air

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 13, 2026

• Hackaday ☛ The Distroless Linux Future May Be Coming

  Over the decades the number of Linux distributions has effectively exploded, from a handful in the late ’90s to quite literally hundreds today, not counting minor variations. There lately seems to be a counter-movement brewing in response to this fragmentation, with Project Bluefin’s Distroless project being the latest addition here. Also notable are KDE’s efforts, with KDE Linux as its own top-down KDE-based distro, but now with a switch to BuildStream from Arch likely as a distroless move.

• HaikuOS ☛ Haiku Activity & Contract Report, December 2025

  This report covers hrev59188 through hrev59261.

  axeld fixed light-mode colors in the Sudoku application (though dark-mode still needs work.)

  korli fixed SIGUSR1 being incorrectly masked for child processes of Terminal (like shells.) He also implemented support for hyperlinks specified by CLIs (as Terminal itself has already supported automatically “linkifying” any URLs that appear in console output for a long time.)

  axeld changed AboutSystem to open with a golden-ratio window size, for a better appearance.

• UNIXdigest ☛ How to change the init system in Artix Linux to Dinit

  Dinit is a great init system designed to work on POSIX operating systems such as Linux and BSD. It is written in C++ and uses the Dasynq event handling library, which was written especially to support Dinit.

• Sal ☛ Linux in the air

  After spending a few hours trying and failing to walk what I assumed was the path of least resistance — begrudgingly paying Microsoft for an OS I didn't even want — I gave up and installed Fedora. It's been great.