GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 22, 2026

• Desktop/Laptop

  • HowTo Geek ☛ Stop believing the Linux rumors: 5 myths that are keeping you stuck on Windows

    Computing is always changing, but few operating systems have as much cultural baggage and conflicting stories surrounding them as Linux does. If you're used to those proprietary software ecosystems, hearing the word probably brings up a bunch of old ideas. These assumptions rely on outdated information, hearsay, or plain misunderstandings.

    For a long time, I let these rumors stop me from checking out a system I love using that puts me in charge. What surprised me the most wasn't what Linux ended up being, but realizing that my idea of it was fundamentally wrong.

• Server

  • Kubernetes Blog ☛ Announcing the Checkpoint/Restore Working Group

    The community around Kubernetes includes a number of Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and Working Groups (WGs) facilitating discussions on important topics between interested contributors. Today we would like to announce the new Kubernetes Checkpoint Restore WG focusing on the integration of Checkpoint/Restore functionality into Kubernetes.

    Motivation and use cases

    There are several high-level scenarios discussed in the working group: [...]

• Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization

  • Hackaday ☛ Block Devices In User Space

    Your new project really could use a block device for Linux. File systems are easy to do with FUSE, but that’s sometimes too high-level. But a block driver can be tough to write and debug, especially since bugs in the kernel’s space can be catastrophic. [Jiri Pospisil] suggests Ublk, a framework for writing block devices in user space. This works using the io_uring facility in recent kernels.

    This opens the block device field up. You can use any language you want (we’ve seen FUSE used with some very strange languages). You can use libraries that would not work in the kernel. Debugging is simple, and crashing is a minor inconvenience.

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

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Season Of KDE 2026 Projects

      Every year the KDE Community actively helps people to become active community members and contributors to Free Software through our Season of KDE mentorship programs.

      We would like to warmly welcome this year's mentees Aviral Singh, Keshav Nanda, Vishesh Srivastava, Varun Sajith Dass, Aditya Sarna, Jaimukund Bhan, Navya Sai Sadu, Kumud Sagar, Arun Rawat, Tanish Kumar, Ajay Singh, Mohit Mishra, Rohith Vinod, Shivang K Raghuvanshi, Onat Ribar, Hrishikesh Gohain, Aryan Rai, Advaith SK, CJ Nguyen, Siddharth Chopra, Nitin Pandey, Pavan Kumar S G, Sayandeep Dutta, Sairam Bisoyi, and J Shiva Shankar. They will be working on 21 projects covering a wide range of apps, frameworks, utilities and software in general to improve KDE.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • ZDNet ☛ This new Linux distro is a multimedia powerhouse right out of the box

    Manjaro is a sweet Arch-based Linux distribution, and it has the fans to prove it. Manjaro is designed to take Arch to new heights of user-friendliness, and it succeeds quite well.

    Of course, there are always those who believe everything can be improved, which is why a small team of developers decided to fork Manjaro and create Elegance.

  • Hackaday ☛ The Windows Interface You Didn’t Like, For Linux

    If you were asked to pick the most annoying of the various Microsoft Windows interfaces that have appeared over the years, there’s a reasonable chance that Windows 8’s Metro start screen and interface design language would make it your choice. In 2012 the software company abandoned their tried-and-tested desktop whose roots extended back to Windows 95 in favor of the colorful blocks it had created for its line of music players and mobile phones.

    Consumers weren’t impressed and it was quickly shelved in subsequent versions, but should you wish to revisit Metro you can now get the experience on Linux. [er-bharat] has created Win8DE, a shell for Wayland window managers that brings the Metro interface — or something very like it — to the open source operating system.

  • BSD

    • Miod Vallat ☛ Kernel stack hygiene

      In modern (as in, anything less than 40 to 50 years old) computer architectures, you need some form of memory organized as a stack: a scratch area where you can push data, and pop (retrieve or discard) that data later.

      The main use of that stack is to store arguments to functions before calling them, the return address, and local variables of said function while it runs. This allows function calls to be nested, and every function to be able to have some local storage.

      That is, until your so-called call stack grows too deep and you end up exhausting your stack limit, something known as a stack overflow, which gave its name to a popular community-driven help site for all kind of computing problems.