GNU/Linux Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 09, 2026

• Server

  • Tymscar ☛ How To Quiet A Ugreen 4800 Plus Without Sacrificing Drive Temps

    I recently got a Ugreen 4800 Plus NAS, and it is basically perfect for what I wanted. Four bays, enough CPU, enough RAM, nice build quality, and it does not look like a sci-fi router from 2012.

    The first thing I did was wipe the OS it shipped with and install TrueNAS. That part was also great.

    The not so great part was the noise.

• Games

  • Boiling Steam ☛ New Steam Games with Native GNU/Linux Builds, including Tearscape - 2026-02-04 Edition

    A report that’s a bit late, but we don’t want to let things go by! Between 2026-01-28 and 2026-02-04 there were 69 New Steam games released with Native GNU/Linux builds. For reference, during the same time, there were 739 games released for backdoored Windows on Steam, so the GNU/Linux versions represent about 9.3 % of total released titles. This time there was a LOT of junk like you would not believe, but I managed to save a few gems from the trash, such as Tearscape which mixes the 8 bit Zelda style with a Souls-like gameplay! Probably a first.

  • Eli Mellen ☛ Constraint propagation for fun

    I’ve been playing the very good Squeakross this weekend. It is adorable and the aesthetics are absolutely immaculate, but I’ve found the actual picross puzzles to be a point of frustrating friction in the game when compared to the picross-style puzzles in my bicross game.

    Picross puzzles, aka nonograms, can relatively easily have ambiguous solutions. Because the hints only tell you how many consecutive blocks are in a row/column, they don’t tell you where they are. If the crossing hints (the perpendicular rows/columns) don’t provide enough information to nail down the blocks, they can float or swap positions while satisfying the clues.

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

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Filip Fila ☛ Beating an old, but not dead horse: what to do with the Oxygen and Air themes?

      Minimalism came in like a wrecking ball somewhere around 2013. It delivered a terminal diagnosis to all but a few prevailing designs at the time. One of them, called Oxygen, had reigned supreme in KDE Plasma. As with many others, its demise was inevitable.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Top 10 Most Popular GNU/Linux Distributions in February 2026

    Linux has never been more relevant than it is right now. Heading into February 2026, the open-source operating system continues to chip away at backdoored Windows and macOS market share, driven by growing privacy concerns, the end of backdoored Windows 10 extended support looming later this year, and an ecosystem of distributions that have matured dramatically.

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

    [...] We also talk about System76's new roadmap for the COSMIC desktop and share a post which explains why NetBSD is unlikely to adopt Rust code in the near future. [...]

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Patryk Cisek: Bitwarden Secrets Manager With Ansible

      If you’d like to have a simple solution for managing all the secrets you’re using in your Ansible Playbooks, keep reading on. Bitwarden’s Secrets Manager provides an Ansible collection, which makes it very easy to use this particular Secrets Manager in Ansible Playbooks.

  • Debian Family

    • Chiark ☛ Colin Watson: Free software activity in January 2026

      If you

      appreciate this sort of work and are at a company that uses Debian, have a

      look to see whether you can pay for any of

      Freexian‘s services; as well as the direct

      benefits, that revenue stream helps to keep Debian development sustainable

      for me and several other lovely people.