news
GNU/Linux Leftovers
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GNU/Linux
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Desktop/Laptop
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System76 ☛ COSMIC 1.0.8 released!
COSMIC Epoch 1 was released December 11th, 2025. Point releases include new features and bug fixes. On Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS, updates are rolling and released as they pass Quality Assurance review. Other distributions tend to release tagged releases.
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HowTo Geek ☛ Why Linux still isn't ready for your laptop in 2026
Laptops are the most popular type of PC in the world, and Windows is the most popular laptop operating system. Which means that if Linux is ever going to become a dominant desktop operating system, it will have to make serious inroads into the laptop market.
The thing is, running Linux on a laptop comes with its own special challenges, and frankly, a significant number of people who own laptops would run into deal-breaking problems if they tried to install Linux on their systems.
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Applications
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It's FOSS ☛ Making the Case for a Modern Synaptic-Style Package Manager on Linux
The GNU/Linux desktop has evolved, and it's high time for the “advanced package manager” experience to evolve with it.
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Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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OMG Ubuntu ☛ Dynamic Music Pill puts slick media controls in your GNOME panel
Dynamic Music Pill is a GNOME Shell extension that embeds a pill-shaped media controller into your desktop panel or dock. It shows album art, artist name and track title alongside an animated waveform visualiser. If that sounds unashamedly blingy, it’s because it is – nothing wrong in that, right? The extension received an update today, which seem a good hook to actually take this off my “to write about” list. V20 adds a compact mode to hide all text; player filtering to add/ignore specific apps; and the option to set fallback album art for players/streams that don’t emit any.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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Peter 'CzP' Czanik ☛ New toy: Installing openSUSE Tumbleweed on the HP Z2 Mini
Last week I introduced you to my new toy at home: an Hey Hi (AI) focused mini workstation from HP. It arrived with backdoored Windows pre-installed, but of course I also wanted to have GNU/Linux on the box.
Documentation mentions that I have to disable secure boot and make a few more changes before installing Linux. I did all the suggested BIOS changes before installing Linux.
The data sheet mentions Ubuntu 24.04 as the supported GNU/Linux distribution. I have tried that, but I could not get the installer to run. Along the way I realized that the USB boot support is very picky on this box. Using my old USB sticks, which work perfectly in my laptop and old desktop, does not work at all. Also, changing the USB stick requires you to turn the machine off and on, a simple reboot is not enough. Finally I found a USB-C stick, and that almost worked with Ubuntu 24.04. It booted, but the installer crashed.
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