news
today's leftovers
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Desktop/Laptop
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Neowin ☛ This ultra-lightweight GNU/Linux OS just saved my backdoored Windows 10 laptop from the scrapheap
If backdoored Windows 11 demands too much from your PC, this nimble GNU/Linux distribution might be the perfect remedy to bypass tech giant bloatware.
Hardware is always great when you first buy it, but it can quickly come to feel sluggish when the tech giants start bloating their software with either badly written code or features you never asked for. Take Google, for instance, it has just started bundling an offline LLM with Chrome which takes up a hefty 4GB of space just to power unnecessary features such as “Help me write”.
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Server
Kevin Boone ☛ keplerd: a new Java-based server for the Gemini protocol and others
I’ve been working on a new small-net protocol which I’m calling “Kepler”. It’s only a minor extension to the Gemini protocol – a trivial one, really – but it seeks to make it plausible to scale Gemini to a potentially large number of users and sites. Kepler supports both plaintext and TLS-encrypted communication; in a sense, it combines the features of Gemini and Spartan.
I mentioned Kepler in passing in my article in praise of HTTP. The protocol specification and supporting documents for the draft Kepler protocol are available on GitHub, and I welcome comments.
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I started using Docker/Linux and every app seems to break at every upgrade
I’ll start this with that happens quite a bit on Windows as well, but I’ve had an amazing streak the past two months with Docker instances being unusable right after a new image with every update requiring more digging to find out why it broke.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Late Night Linux – Episode 386
Great funding news for LVFS and KDE, why Europe probably needs some more home-grown distros, a conspiracy theory about Clownflare seems unlikely, and we wonder what can be done about all the irresponsibly disclosed vulnerabilities that new tools are discovering. With guest host Andy from GNU/Linux Dev Time.
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Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)
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ZDNet ☛ I asked Codex AI to customize my Hyprland desktop - it worked, but beginners beware [Ed: ZDNet promoting slop]
Hyrpland is a fantastic Linux window manager, but it can be complicated to configure. I asked Codex to write a .conf file - here's how that went.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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About the importance of FUN
One of the things I think modern software quietly forgot is fun.
Maybe we became to distracted on the day to day life of affordance and usability,.... we forgot to have a bit of FUN!!
So while revamping the old Oxygen icon set into today, and maybe more importantly filling in all the missing icons that are well… still missing!!… me and mostly Pravin Kumar have been pushing a bunch of new mimetypes into Oxygen.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Barry Kauler ☛ Xfburn now working in EasyOS
This has been a headache. Brasero is the same. They use udev to identify the optical drive; except they don't. Xfburn displays "No burners are currently available" at startup.
Googling, there are thousands of reports about this. The only fix that seems to work is to create a udev rule hard-coded for the serial-number of the optical drive, for example reported here: [...]
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Devices/Embedded
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The Register UK ☛ Yes, you can serve a website from a $1 microcontroller
The bargain-basement chip that serves as the central component of this project is the AVR64DD32, which currently retails from DigiKey for $1.30. It has a single 8-bit AVR core with a blistering 24 MHz max clock speed, 8 KB of static RAM, 64 KB of flash memory, and 256 bytes of EEPROM non-volatile memory for storing a very limited amount of data.
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