news
GNU/Linux Leftovers
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Desktop/Laptop
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HowTo Geek ☛ This is the Linux release I'm looking forward to most this year
There are major Linux distributions dropping releases and patches every week. That means it can be hard to tell which ones really matter. There's one in particular coming later this year though that will change the game for me.
I've been on Kubuntu LTS for over a year
In my PC configuration, I have a tower computer where I do a lot of distro-hopping. I want to try out new distros on the scene and find out how (if at all) they differ from each other. So I'm constantly replacing the operating system on that computer and having to rebuild my desktop.
One of the ways I stay sane in such a chaotic and ever-changing setup is by having a go-to computer on backup that I'm confident will always work just the way I need it to. That computer runs Kubuntu Linux, and I've been on it for about a year and a half now.
Specifically, it's a Kubuntu Focus Ir14 Gen 2 laptop, and it runs Kubuntu Focus 24.04 LTS, which is a slight variation of Kubuntu 24.04 LTS. It adds the Kubuntu Focus suite of tools and a custom kernel developed by the folks at Kubuntu Focus, all optimized to run on the company's devices.
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Applications
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Dima Kogan ☛ Dima Kogan: mrcal 2.5 released!
mrcal 2.5 is out: the release notes. Once again, this is mostly a bug-fix release en route to the big new features coming in 3.0. One cool thing is that these tools have now matured enough to no longer be considered experimental. They have been used with great success in lots of contexts across many different projects and organizations.
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Games
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Boiling Steam ☛ New Steam Games Playable on the Steam Deck, with Big Hops - 2026-01-17 Edition
Between 2026-01-10 and 2026-01-17 we selected 4 newly released games that are rated as Verified or Playable on the Steam Deck, and meeting specific criteria in terms of user ratings. If you like frogs you are going to be happy with that edition, since we get Big Hops, a retro 3D platformer featuring a green hero.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Distro Watch ☛ DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.
[...] Meanwhile, Haiku is improving EFI support and the Redcore project is streamlining its repository branches. [...]
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Kenneth Finnegan ☛ Installing AlmaLinux Over the Network With No Hands | The Life of Kenneth
As part of a broader project, I’ve been working on setting up the infrastructure to be able to power on new servers, have them boot over the network to download and run the complete Linux installation process, and then reboot into the freshly provisioned operating system with zero human interaction. This ability to fully reinstall the entire OS on any new (or replaced) hardware is a big win for servicability when you want to be able to freely add more servers, swap servers, wipe servers and reprovision them, or replace failed hard drives in a server and have it fully recover autonomously. I originally solved this problem a few years ago as part of the MicroMirror project, where I shipped each free software download mirror appliance with a recovery ROM on a USB flash drive plugged into the internal USB port on the motherboard of each system (which I still need to document), but this is a partially different problem than what I am trying to solve here, which is booting not off a load USB drive but completely over the network using nothing but the firmware and wherewithal baked into the hardware itself.
Zero touch installation of Linux always feels like a sort of holy grail acheivement to me; there is an overwhelming field of a problem space to deal with and frustrating little documentation that’s useful or up to date. So I’m not going to solve the problem here that hands off Linux installation seems like a closely protected dark art, but I am going to write down my opinionated set of steps I’m following for this one specific project setup in the year 2026, so while this article will very likely not be specifically useful to the reader’s objective or shelf stable enough to be useful to you in the future, this is what I did.
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