Valnet on GNU/Linux and Free Software

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 30, 2026

• GNU/Linux

  • Graphics Stack

    • XDA ☛ Vintage AMD Radeon GPUs are getting a second life with AI-optimized Linux drivers

      I'm a proud owner of an old passively-cooled Radeon HD 6850. It was quite the card back in 2010, and while the series didn't completely change the game for AMD, it did enough to warrant a purchase by a few gamers, myself included. Since then, AMD and Nvidia have continued to battle hard to take the top spot in the GPU market. A large part of this is driver maturity. The HD 6850 may be almost two decades old at this point, but it's still receiving driver updates, along with countless other older AMD GPUs.

      The most recent driver changes were assisted by AI, clearing up shader compiler code, which should affect overall performance. AI-assisted development is almost commonplace at this point, but it's interesting for it to be used to help make notable changes to open-source drivers for older GPUs.

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

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • XDA ☛ GNOME 50 doesn’t feel like Linux anymore, and that's exactly why I use it

        GNOME has a bit of a reputation in the Linux community for being an OS that tells you how it should be used. It's opinionated, and for some, its out-of-the-box defaults are comfortable enough, but for me, I've bounced between it and KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, and others looking for an experience that feels natural. GNOME 50 doesn't do anything drastically different, and it still needs plenty of extensions to tweak the experience, but the result is a desktop shell that doesn't feel like Linux, and that's why I like it so much.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Make Use Of ☛ A failed Bell Labs OS called Plan 9 is hiding inside everything you use

    Plan 9 should have been a way bigger deal. After all, it came from Bell Labs, the same place that gave the world Unix and C, and tried to fix a lot of Unix’s broken components instead of just cloning them.

    The problem is that almost nobody outside of OS nerds ends up using it. Commercially, it went absolutely nowhere. But while the OS faded into oblivion, some of its ideas are still in use inside software I use every single day.

    The Unicode standard UTF-8 was built for Plan 9. Its 9P file protocol still appears in Linux, virtualization, and WSL. Its ideas about files, networks, and namespaces all feel strangely modern now. That’s why I absolutely had to try it out.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • XDA ☛ Most people will miss Ubuntu 26.04’s biggest security upgrade — and that's the point

      Ubuntu 26.04 has the kind of headline feature that makes for an easy screenshot: GNOME 50. That matters, especially for desktop users coming from Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, because the visual and workflow changes will be the first thing they notice. A new desktop environment gives the release an obvious identity, and it’s the part people can judge within five minutes of booting the installer. Still, that’s not the change I think will matter most after the first week.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

    • Make Use Of ☛ There's only one way to browse that truly leaves no trace, but it has a huge issue

      Incognito windows are a false sense of security. Your ISP can still see what you're doing, and the websites you visit still fingerprint your browser.

      Incognito clears your local history. That's it.

      There is one tool that solves the entire problem: Tails OS. You'll be more secure than ever, but that security comes with a significant cost that most folks aren't prepared for.

  • Programming/Development

    • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

      • HowTo Geek ☛ I customized my terminal with Oh My Zsh and just a little bit of vibe coding [Ed: Could just copy-paste something instead of using slop]

        Nobody wants a boring terminal, and the more you use it, the more you want it to work according to your specific needs. From custom prompts to aliases and shell functions, there are many ways you can improve your command-line experience.

      • HowTo Geek ☛ Every web developer needs to try these 3 open-source TUIs before starting their next project

        As web developers, we deal with text all the time. Whether it's JSON, HTML, URLs, Markdown, or something else. Nobody talks about the utilities that boost your productivity when managing these, so I will. I have three tools that'll help you make faster remote API calls, build and learn jq more quickly, and transform strings from one format to many others.