Recent Coverage About GNU/Linux and BSD in Valnet

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 07, 2026

• Desktop/Laptop

  • XDA ☛ Windows 11 still does one thing better than Linux, and it has nothing to do with apps

    Linux has slowly closed almost every gap that used to keep people chained to Windows. Gaming works through Proton, the desktop is polished, and for a lot of users a modern distro is a perfectly viable daily driver. There is, however, one key feature that Linux has a hard time matching, and it doesn't have anything to do with app parity.

    When you plug in a peripheral or another piece of hardware, both operating systems will detect it, but the bigger question is about drivers. Plug an unfamiliar device into a Windows 11 machine and there is a good chance it simply works, often without the user ever knowing a driver was installed. Do the same on Linux and the outcome is less predictable, and often takes user intervention if it is to function as intended at all.

  • XDA ☛ COSMIC’s first big update in six months continues stripping GNOME out of the OS

    Near the end of 2025, the developers behind Pop!_OS's desktop environment, COSMIC, made a big decision. When they added COSMIC, it was a little more than a modified GNOME environment; however, they began to realise that they'd be better off making their own from scratch using Rust.

    As such, in December of 2025, the developers began stripping COSMIC of its GNOME apps, but they didn't quite get every tool. Now, with a new COSMIC Epoch update, the team has removed another GNOME remnant in its quest to make COSMIC its own thing.

• Graphics Stack

  • XDA ☛ I held onto X11 longer than I should have, and switching to Wayland fixed these things I didn’t know were broken

    I'd been an X11 user for decades, so when I saw that the developers of KDE were dropping support in favor of Wayland, I didn't know how to feel. If you were an early Linux user, you couldn't get away from the X Window System unless you wanted to use the command line without a GUI, and we all grew up knowing how to use and tweak it.

    But with GNOME and KDE Plasma finally retiring the 42-year-old desktop system, it was time for me to move on, too. Wayland felt familiar in a different way after decades of macOS and Windows, and I can't deny the security and fringe benefits it offered. I don't doubt that some people will stay on X11 for philosophical or app support reasons, but for me, I'm embracing the future of Linux desktop environments.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Make Use Of ☛ I replaced 5 classic terminal commands and my shell feels much more efficient

    My most repetitive terminal tasks are navigation and search, but for a long time, I kept using tools that felt like they belonged to a few decades ago. Eventually, typing out massive file paths and memorizing convoluted flags stopped feeling efficient. So I replaced five utilities, and my daily workflow became more efficient. While my shell isn't fundamentally doing anything new, I've cut down on mindless keystrokes, and work is more enjoyable.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • BSD

    • XDA ☛ I installed FreeBSD as my daily driver, and it was surprisingly good

      FreeBSD has a reputation problem, and I’ll admit I bought into part of it before installing it as my daily driver. I expected something sturdy, serious, and maybe a little hostile to normal desktop habits. I figured I’d spend most of my time fighting the system instead of using it. What I found was much more interesting than that, because FreeBSD felt less like a punishment and more like a system with very specific priorities.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • XDA ☛ Ubuntu dominates servers, but one choice killed it on the desktop

      When spinning up a VPS or a local LXC, reaching for Ubuntu has almost become reflexive for me. It's what most tutorials assume, the server images are tuned for it, and it's what many of the internet's Linux instances already run, but you hardly see it land on an enthusiast's daily-driver desktop anymore. The preferred distros for desktop use have firmly shifted toward Arch-based flavors, Fedora, and Mint. If you've been paying attention, you'd know that this is hardly an accident, and one particular design decision explains a lot of it: Canonical's all-in bet on snap packages.