GNU/Linux Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 30, 2026

• Games

  • Boiling Steam ☛ Valve Takes Crazy Pills and Jacks Up Steam Deck Pricing

    On May 27, 2026, Valve’s leadership apparently smoked a little too much and the company officially announced a massive price hike for the Steam Deck OLED models. We are talking about prices increasing up to $300 USD (a 46% increase!!). NPCs will be quick to attribute this price hike to “the semiconductor shortage” caused by surging demand for Hey Hi (AI) datacenter memory components, but that’s a poor argument to make. This kind of things don’t happen in a vacuum. The ROG Ally X that was released last year has remained at $999 since it was out, so either ASUS has some magical, extra-terrestrial access to cheap components that nobody else has, or Valve is taking the opportunity to make more profits while nobody is looking. After all, Gabe gotta buy new yatches. Valve updated its store listings overnight, applying the following new prices across most markets (US, UK, Europe, Canada, Australia): - Steam Deck OLED 512GB: Increased from $549 to $789 (+$240 / ~44% hike).

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Hackaday ☛ Linux Distributions And Who Is Responsible For The Software

    The topic of downstream and upstream is an important one in the Linux ecosystem, where from one base distribution you can go many layers of distros deep before even looking at all the other base distributions. Within that veritable jungle you get questions about who is responsible for packaging software, where to report bugs found with a specific application, as well as what ‘LTS’ truly means in a consumer context. These and other points are raised in a recent video by [Brodie Robertson], with many examples of things going tragically wrong.

    There’s a good argument to be made that ultimately it is the distro that is responsible for the software that they provide via their repositories. As [Brodie] shows in the video, there are a few cases where an ‘LTS’ distro uses an old version of some software that contains a bug that has been fixed a while ago, so reporting it to the developer is rather pointless, while the distro maintainers should fix it with backporting of patches or updating the version.

  • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • Introducing Shared Canned Responses

      Introduction OBS has featured canned responses for a while now. Previously, users could only create personal canned responses under their profiles. With this latest update, we have expanded the feature so they can be shared across projects and packages. We started the redesign of the request workflow in August 2022. Then, in September 2022, we focused on the support of multi-action submit requests.

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Licensing / Legal

      • SPDX Cryptographic Algorithm List: Spring 2026 Update

        The SPDX Cryptographic Algorithm List keeps growing. New cryptoClass values, a structured docs folder, PQC as a new property, and SCANOSS as our first user-contributor. Here is what happened in the past months.

    • Programming/Development

      • Xe's Blog ☛ Dancing mad with sandboxing

        Kefka is a Go-native shell sandbox with coreutils, Python via WebAssembly, and more. Learn the works of madness that went into making this happen!