GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 27, 2026

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

  • System76 ☛ COSMIC Hits Keep Coming With New System Monitor

    A system monitor is often neglected as a run-of-the mill utility app in the desktop experience – a source of important performance data but an afterthought in UI and UX design.

    And that’s exactly why the new COSMIC System Monitor was given the same attention to form and function that we’ve devoted to the rest of the DE.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • This Week in GNOME ☛ This Week in GNOME: #255 Curated Updates

      Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 19 to June 26.

      I have overhauled Bazaar’s curated page. Vendors, such as distributions, can now make use of several widget types to showcase the apps they want to promote to their users. One of these widgets displays articles, which can be used to recommend apps or share general news about the OS in a place where users will naturally discover them.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • BSD

    • Christian Hofstede-Kuhn ☛ FreeBSD Foundationals: The Boot Process - From the Loader to Boot Environments

      The two previous articles in this series covered the things that store your data and the things that run your workloads. This one covers the part that nobody thinks about until it’s three in the morning and the machine won’t come back up: how FreeBSD actually boots, and - more importantly - how to make a bad boot recoverable.

      This is the third article in the FreeBSD Foundationals series. The first covered Jails, the second covered ZFS. We’re covering the boot process now because everything else depends on it and because, compared to other UNIX-like systems, FreeBSD keeps the early boot chain unusually small and inspectable. There’s a small, documented chain of stages, a text file you edit by hand, and - if you’re on root-on-ZFS - a recovery mechanism that is genuinely one of the best reasons to run FreeBSD on a server.

      By the end of this article you’ll understand what each boot stage does, where to put a setting and why, the difference between a tunable and a sysctl (people get this wrong constantly), the modern way to load kernel modules, and how boot environments turn “I bricked it during an upgrade” into a non-event.

  • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • OpenSUSE ☛ When the Code Stays Clean and Trust Collapses Anyway

      Why Europe’s third way needs sovereign open-source assurance, and what the openSUSE community, the SUSE ecosystem and the businesses built on them should do about it Accompanying article to the openSUSE Conference 2026 keynote by Hans de Raad (OpenNovations) - “Open Source Won Distribution. Now It Must Win Assurance.”

  • Debian Family

    • Jonathan Wiltshire: Streamlining Debian Updates with AI: The Stable Update Adviser

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Ubuntu ☛ Challenges designers face in open source (and how to fix them)

      Because OSS projects have historically been driven by developers, they tend to be highly flexible and functional, but they can lack critical usability considerations. This often makes them difficult for everyday users to navigate and adopt. To bridge this gap, there is a need for more designers to contribute to open source and improve user experiences.