Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 19, 2026

• Protesilaos Stavrou ☛ Emacs: testing common colour values with the doric-themes

  The doric-themes are the minimalist counterpart of my modus-themes and ef-themes. They define few colours and exercise restraint in how they customise faces. This means that there rarely is a context that has red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, and cyan. Those are reserved for cases where colour-coding is needed. Whereas with my other themes colour is used with the dual intent of establish rhythm and order in addition to any colour-coding.

• Stephen Hackett ☛ TimeCapsuleSMB - 512 Pixels

  I can’t speak to the patch’s effectiveness, but dang, I love that someone is out there keeping these things running.

• Joshua Blais ☛ Studium Emacs - The Universe of Joshua Blais

  In 2019, I started using DOOM emacs as my main emacs “distribution”. A decision which I figured I’d stick with for many years to come. In late 2023, I switched back to neovim for some time, and finally came back to the light early last year.

  However, we all knew this day would come.

  I have been bitten by the vanilla emacs bug, the call to craft my own lisp environment being too loud to ignore any longer. After some polishing work, I am content with introducing: [...]

• File Systems

  • Klara ☛ ZFS vs Ceph: Do You Actually Need Ceph?

    Ceph and ZFS solve different storage problems. Ceph is designed for distributed storage across many servers, while ZFS focuses on maximizing performance, reliability, and simplicity on a single storage system.

    Distributed storage introduces operational and performance trade-offs. Ceph provides horizontal scalability and resilience against multiple node failures, but requires additional networking, coordination, and management overhead that can increase latency and complexity.

    Many organizations don’t need distributed storage. Modern ZFS systems can deliver exceptional capacity, performance, and availability with significantly lower operational complexity, making them a strong alternative for virtualization, databases, backups, and enterprise storage.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Open Web Advocacy ☛ 28% Faster: The Blink Prototype That Shows Why Apple's iOS Browser Engine Ban Must End

    A natural question arises: how could a browser engine, not yet optimised for iOS, outperform Safari by such a large margin? Surely a company as well-resourced as Apple should be able to deliver competitive performance on its own platform.

    In our view, the answer is lack of competition. Apple had no need to invest in better iOS Safari performance as no one could compete with them due to their browser engine ban. All other browsers on iOS are equally under-performant due to being forced to use the same bundled WebKit engine.

  • Mozilla

    • PC World ☛ Mozilla redesigns Firefox settings menu to make it easier to use

      According to Mozilla, the settings pages have become increasingly difficult to navigate over time, with related options scattered across several different locations. The new design groups similar features into clearer categories, and adds updated descriptions alongside a more modern layout.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • The New Stack ☛ The database storage problem is solved. Here’s what comes next.

    However, some of the most important innovations in the Postgres ecosystem today have little to do with storing data. They have to do with reducing the need to move it around.

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • Jan van den Berg ☛ Auditing and cleaning my WordPress wpcontent directory - Jan van den Berg

    I've written before about the mess that is my WordPress /wpcontent folder on my daily blog. This WordPress installation is 20+ years old. I made some bad decisions and was not always completely aware of how WordPress handled images, which also changed over the years.

    In that post I describe what I do now to make sure no extra -- unneeded -- images are created.

• Education

  • CCC ☛ Practical software freedom with GNU Guix

    This talk will introduce to the four software freedoms that govern free software, why they are important, and their practical limitations. You will learn how the GNU Guix package manager enables you to verify, change and share the software that you depend on to ensure your everlasting freedom.

• FSF / Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty

  • April ☛ Despite its good intentions, the European Commission is missing the opportunity to champion free software as a genuine priority | April

    Despite the Commission's apparent clarity of thought on several points, it misses the opportunity to establish a normative principle of priority for free software, which is a minimum measure that is necessary to reverse the balance of power still deeply in favour of "digital giants", a balance largely maintained by the dependence of public institutions in many Member States. While the Commission states in its communication that an "open source first principle […] could reverse this trend", this ends up, in the draft regulation on cloud computing and artificial intelligence - which is already limited in scope - as a mere "encouragement" of the use of free software. It is therefore merely a declaration of intent, without normative force, exactly as was the case in France with Article 16 of the Law for a Digital Republic in 20162.

    Even worse, according to CNLL3, it would seem that the European Commission has even backtracked: a few days before its official communication, its strategy contained a more ambitious principle and closer to a real priority, before eventually falling back on a version devoid of political, normative and operational impact.

    Free software is increasingly recognised, at an institutional level, as one of the essential components of a coherent "strategic autonomy" policy, and this Tech Sovereignty Package is a new example of this. It presents a number of observations, as well as interesting and welcome measures in a context of an ongoing significant dependence on "digital giants".

• Programming/Development

  • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • Preparing for GSoC: My First Contributions to Autogits

      Before the official GSoC coding period started, I began contributing to the autogits repository. These initial tasks focused on making obs-status-service easier to develop, test, and use.

      obs-status-service exposes Open Build Service (OBS) build results as SVG, JSON, or XML so they can be integrated into the openSUSE Git workflow. Before working on the issues, I studied the service, the surrounding repository, and the connection between Gitea, Redis, and OBS.