Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 17, 2026

• Sal ☛ It's hard to find objective advice about text editors

  If someone is an expert in Vim or Emacs, they probably spend a lot of time in it. That’s time they haven’t spent learning other editors. It seems plausible, then, that the more experienced someone is in a specialized editor, the less able they are to give a fully informed opinion of how it compares to some other editor. Especially given just how much time those editors take to master.

• Bozhidar Batsov ☛ Simplifying Session Management in CIDER

  Session management is one of those areas where the “smart” solution and the good solution turned out to be different things. Seven years of friendly sessions taught me that users don’t actually want their tools to be clever - they want them to be predictable, and fast, and clever only when the cleverness is cheap and explainable in one sentence. “Your project’s files use your project’s REPL” passes that bar; “your buffer matches some session’s classpath” never did.

• Mark Litwintschik ☛ Flight Planning with Little Navmap

  The application reminds me of QGIS, which has a code base that is an order of magnitude larger. Little Navmap only needs 14K lines of C++ for routing; the main UI is ~7K lines; the map display and interaction lean heavily on KDE's Marble, so only 21K lines are needed and weather support only needs 2K lines of code.

• It's FOSS ☛ FOSS Weekly #26.29: Mint Goes Wayland, OpenBook Reader, Terminal Shortcut Tips, GNU/Linux Handheld Computers and More

  Is wayland slow?

  Linux Mint has taken the slow road to Wayland while everyone else rushed ahead, and it looks like that paid off. Cinnamon's Wayland session is dropping the experimental label with Mint 23 this Christmas, shipping alongside X11 as a fully supported option.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Christian Cleberg ☛ Re: Your RSS Reader Is Robbing You

    I don't read posts in my feed reader to look at styles, I do it to consume content - to read their thoughts.

    I use my feed reader because it's configured exactly how I like it. The colors are tweaked to a palette that's pleasing to my eyes and doesn't cause strain. The font family, font size, and other elements are customizable and configured exactly how I like them.

    I can't tell you how many times I've opened a great blog post and struggled to read it and had to enable Reader Mode in my browser just to get through it.

  • Chromium

    • Dave DeGraw ☛ Is your browser up to date?

      I can’t say I know for sure why seemingly every running instance of Chrome is perpetually outdated, but I have a few hunches.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ PostgreSQL 19 Beta 2 Released!

    The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces that the second beta release of

    Upgrading to PostgreSQL 19 Beta 2

    To upgrade to PostgreSQL 19 Beta 2 from an earlier version of PostgreSQL, upgrading.

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

  • Brennan ☛ 300 Minutes a Month: Cutting My Eleventy Netlify Build Time in Half

    A couple of months ago I wrote about making my Eleventy build five times faster by fixing a handful of embarrassing filters. I wrote about developer experience and the feedback loop of "I write a line" and "I see the result."

    Why am I writing a sequel already? Well, the answer is money. Or more accurately, keeping things free.

• GNU Projects

  • GNU ☛ libtool @ Savannah: libtool-2.6.2 released [stable]

    Libtoolers! The Libtool Team is pleased to announce the release of libtool 2.6.2.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ How much have prices increased?

      The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a widely used measure of the prices of goods and services purchased by households. It’s the primary tool for tracking inflation and changes in the cost of living over time. The index is built from monthly price collections on a “basket” of goods and services from a sample of retail and service establishments. Historical CPI data is easy to download