Distributions and Operating Systems: BSD, ReactOS, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 15, 2026

• Distro Watch ☛ Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

  [...] While most similar projects simply disable the traditional package managers (RPM, DNF) to preserve the immutability of the base system, RakuOS allows their use on "overlays". [...]

• University of Toronto ☛ Linux distribution packaging and third party 'package' systems

  If you look at it from the right angle, the existence of third party package systems that sit on top of Linux distributions is rather odd. After all, these distributions already have packaging systems, yet here people are, ignoring them and writing new ones. A while back on the Fediverse, I said something on this general topic: [...]

• Liliputing ☛ Lilbits: Half Life on ReactOS, a mouse with a horizontal scroll wheel, and MS PowerToys 0.100

  All of which is to say that if you really want to run an older PC game like Half Life on an open source operating system, you have plenty of options for doing that. But it’s still pretty nifty to see that you can also now run Half Life on an open source operating system that’s not based on Linux.

• Phoronix ☛ ReactOS "Open-Source Windows" Reaches The Milestone Of Being Able To Run Half-Life

  ReactOS has been in development for 28 years now and today its developers are noting on X the ability to run the Windows version of Half-Life. Some years ago were reports of the Half-Life game at least initializing under ReactOS while given today's X coverage, it seems to be the first time reported of the game successfully running on ReactOS and handling it in-game.

• BSD

  • Dan Langille ☛ Getting Victoria Logs running on FreeBSD

    This post is only about getting Victoria Logs running on FreeBSD. A future post will go over configuration and getting logs in. I’m hoping Victoria Logs can fill the role which ElasticSearch once tried to fill, but failed; it was too finicky and fragile for my use.

    In this post: [...]

  • DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ Lazy Reading for 2026/06/14

    I found a stash of saved emails/links that I don’t think I ever posted, so they’re mixed in here. FreeBSD sh for MacOS. Biggest DynaTAC ever. 3D.City.  (via) Dice Soup.  (via The Glatisant.  Lots of other links in that source.) The best secondary prompt string possible. A hat on your calculator.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • Matthias ☛ Introducing pkgcli: A nicer command-line interface for PackageKit

    For almost two decades, the PackageKit package management abstraction layer has shipped with pkcon as its command-line client. pkcon does its job, but it was always kind of a “testing” front-end for the PackageKit daemon rather than a tool designed for everyday use. The focus has instead been on the GUI tools, automatic system updates, GUI application managers and other front-ends. Its command names mirror the D-Bus API almost one-to-one (get-details, get-updates, get-depends), output is very plain, and there is no machine-readable mode for scripting. Most importantly though, there has been no development on it at all for almost a decade, so pkcon was stuck in its rudimentary state from that era.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • It's FOSS ☛ An Hey Hi (AI) Agent Infiltrated Fedora's Bug Tracker and Wreaked Havoc

    A hijacked contributor account let an Hey Hi (AI) agent loose on Fedora's bug tracker, closing bugs, posting hallucinated fixes, and getting bad code into Anaconda.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Ubuntu 26.10 Daily Live Image is Finally Available for AMD/Intel

    Ubuntu 26.10, the next Ubuntu version planned for October 15, is finally available for testing on AMD and defective chip maker Intel PCs / laptops. The development of Ubuntu 26.10, code-name Stonking Stingray, was started in last month. It however lacked the .iso desktop image for testing on modern amd64 platform, even in the first snapshot release.

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Ubuntu 25.10 Will Reach End of Its Life on 9 July 2026

    Ubuntu 25.10, code-name Questing Quokka, will reach end of life next month on 9 July 2026. It was announced a few days ago: Ubuntu announced its 25.10 (Questing Quokka) release almost 9 months ago, on 9 October 2025 and its support period is now nearing its end.