GNU/Linux Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 15, 2026

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • mintCast Podcast ☛ mintCast 478 – The Anti-Windows Cast

    First up in security and privacy: Euro firms ditch American Clouds and systemd stuff

    Then in our Wanderings: Joe, Majid does yoga with his distros, Charles is our security guru, Jim explores the new Mint release

• Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization

  • The Register UK ☛ Contain your Windows apps inside Linux Windows

    For all the abilities of modern Linux, there are some apps – especially paid commercial ones – that still require Windows. We outlined three ways to run Windows apps on Linux in May 2025. WINE is amazing and the current version can run a lot of Windows apps smoothly on Linux – but there are limits to its compatibility: for instance, there's no Microsoft Store. The main alternative is to run a real copy of Windows inside a virtual machine, and when you need those specific tools, fire up the VM, and use the apps inside it. (Since late 1994, the desktop version of VMWare is free to use – and it both offers pretty good performance for Windows guests, and some helpful integration tools.) Even so, managing a VM does require some effort, and moving your files and data between host and VM inevitably means some extra legwork.

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

  • University of Toronto ☛ The (very) old "repaint mode" GUI approach

    Today I ran across another article that talked in passing about "retained mode" versus "immediate mode" GUI toolkits (this one, via), and gave some code samples. As usual when I read about immediate mode GUIs and see source code, I had a pause of confusion because the code didn't feel right. That's because I keep confusing "immediate mode" as used here with a much older approach, which I will call repaint mode for lack of a better description.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • The New Stack ☛ HackerOS is what a GNU/Linux enthusiast’s OS should be

    There are over 1,000 GNU/Linux distributions on the market.

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Christian Hofstede-Kuhn ☛ RHEL on ZFS Root: An Unholy Experiment

      Let me be absolutely clear from the start: this is a terrible idea. Red Hat does not support ZFS on root. The supported solution in the RHEL ecosystem is Stratis. If you do this in production, you’re on your own. If you call Red Hat support with ZFS issues, they will politely suggest you reproduce the problem on a supported configuration before they even look at it.

      This was purely an experiment for the lolz. Here’s what I did and why you shouldn’t.

  • Debian Family

    • Debian ☛ Bits from Debian: DebConf 26 Registration and Call for Proposals are open

      Registration and the Call for Proposals for DebConf 26 are now open. The 27th edition of the Debian annual conference will be held from July 20th to July 25th, 2026, in Santa Fe, Argentina.