today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 02, 2026

• Server

  • Android Authority ☛ Here’s why I’ve installed a Dead Man's Switch on my home server

    Recently, I had to guide my family through the complexities of my SMB-grade internet setup — a system that, much to their frustration, has no traditional “off” switch. That experience led to a stark realization: if I were to become suddenly unresponsive, my family would be effectively locked out of a decade of photos, financial records, and essential services. To solve this, I decided to install a dead man’s switch on my home server using an open-source tool called Aeterna.

• Graphics Stack

  • Dave Airlie ☛ Dave Airlie: drm subsystem contributor numbers

    I'm doing a podcast recording this week, so I wanted to run some numbers so I could have some facts rather than feels. It turns out my feels were off by a factor of 3 or so.

    If asked, I've always said the contributor count to the drm subsystem is probably in the 100 or so developers per release cycle.

    Did the simplest:

    git log --format='%aN' v6.14..v6.15 drivers/gpu/drm/ include/uapi/drm/ include/drm/ | sort -u | wc -l

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

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • SWHID and pURL

      pURL and SWHID are both software identifiers with similarities, but they are fundamentally different. pURL is assigned by a registry. SWHID is derived from the code itself. They are not competitors — they complement each other.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • ZDNet ☛ No internet? This 'survival computer' has everything you need offline - including AI

    Imagine that you've landed in some sort of post-apocalyptic, dystopian future. In that future, it's not necessarily the strong that will survive, but rather those with access to information.

    Information could wind up being the most sought-after commodity, the difference between survival and, well, not.

    But how do you gain access to information? You might not have a network connection, which means no internet. And that means no search engine or AI.

  • BSD

    • Miod Vallat ☛ OpenBSD on Motorola 88000 processors

      Did you notice a new name in the To: line of one of the previous emails? This is because, a few days before, out of the blue, Paul Weissmann had pointed me to Kenji Aoyama's work on porting OpenBSD to the Luna-88K!

  • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • OpenSUSE ☛ Closing Out a Roughly 8-Year Era

      The Leap 15 journey began it journey on May 25, 2018, when 15.0 was released as a fresh community build on top of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15. It brought a huge variety of new software along with a easy migration to SLE, transactional updates, server roles, scalable cloud images, and more.

  • Arch Family

    • You’re probably ready for Arch Linux. Here’s how to tell

      If you're new to Linux, you might have heard Linux experts talking about how good Arch Linux is. You might be wondering if you're ready to go beyond your first "beginner" distro and learn a distro that will teach you how Linux actually works. Here are some ways to tell you're ready to take the next step.

  • Debian Family

    • Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in March 2026

    • The New Stack ☛ Sparky Linux 9 brings a rolling release to Debian

      You might also be surprised that there are Debian-based rolling release distributions. That’s right, the “Mother of all distributions” has inspired a few itself, which is a bit counter to the ethos of a distribution that prides itself on rigorous testing and a slower release cycle.

      And yet, there are Debian-based rolling release distributions, such as Sparky Linux.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Ubuntu quietly raises its minimum system requirements

      You’ll need at least 6GB of RAM to run Ubuntu 26.04 LTS comfortably, as the upcoming version of the distro raises its minimum memory requirement for the first time since 2019. According to the official specs, “Ubuntu Desktop 26.04 LTS requires a 2 GHz dual-core processor or better, a minimum of 6GB RAM and 25 GB of free hard drive space.“ CPU and storage requirements stay unchanged. Ubuntu last bumped its recommended processor requirements with the release of 17.10, when it also dropped support for 32-bit Intel/AMD CPUs.