GNU/Linux and Standards-Related Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 12, 2026

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • 2026-02-02 [Older] Late Night Linux – Episode 371

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Make Tech Easier ☛ 2026-02-04 [Older] The Easiest Way to Make Linux Boot Faster: Disable Unnecessary Services

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

  • The Register UK ☛ River project swims against the Wayland tide with modular window management

    Isaac Freund's River compositor brings a little old-fashioned modularity and customizability to the brave new Wayland world.

    One of the great joys of the FOSDEM conference is catching program items that introduce radical ideas you'd never considered might be possible. Almost by accident, The Reg FOSS desk found itself in one of these – a talk titled "Separating the Wayland Compositor and Window Manager."

    In it, Freund introduced his River project, which he describes as "a non-monolithic Wayland compositor." River brings to Wayland the idea of a window manager as a separate program, and it already supports a list of ten different WMs that can work with it.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Debian Family

    • Thorsten Alteholz ☛ 2026-02-08 [Older] Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in January 2026

• Consortia

  • Standards

    • Justin Duke ☛ RIP XSLT

      I can't even be particularly upset about the decision. It makes sense and is entirely rational — the security story around libxslt is grim, and if only 0.02% of page loads use XSLT, the cost of maintaining it outweighs the benefit. And yet. It is nonetheless a bummer.

    • Bix Frankonis ☛ Whence GoDaddy’s Authority To Supersede RFC-1480?

      What’s more, GoDaddy’s own “usTLD Locality Domain Name Registration Terms & Conditions” document expressly incorporates “those policies in RFC 1480 applicable to .us domain name registrants”—the document that allows me to register within the portland.or.us zone by right. Nothing in either of these documents, nor in any of their linked and incorporated documents, gives the City of Portland any authority whatsoever over the portland.or.us zone.

      In all my searching both in 2023 and again in late 2025/early 2026, I’ve been unable to find any indication anywhere that fourth-level registrations within portland.or.us now require the approval of the City of Portland, an authority not granted the city by RFC-1480. As noted above, neither have I been able to get GoDaddy to provide me with documentation of this supposed authority superseding that of RFC-1480.