GNU/Linux Distributions and Other Operating Systems

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 18, 2026

• OSTechNix ☛ 12 Linux Headaches We Thankfully Never Have to Deal With Anymore

  Over the last 25 years, Linux has removed hundreds of small frustrations from everyday computing. Most of them disappeared so completely that many new Linux users do not even know they once existed.

  If you started using Linux in the late 1990s or early 2000s, this list will probably bring back a few memories. If you are new to Linux, you may wonder how we ever lived through some of these.

• TheEvilSkeleton ☛ Hari Rana: How far would hostile distributions go to hurt application developers?

  Introduction

  The GNU/Linux desktop has an upstream maintenance problem due to many reasons for it, such as the lack of paid work. No one is entitled to a volunteer’s free time apart from the volunteer themself. This is especially true to volunteers working on upstream projects, as they are at the mercy of downstream distributions, who have the final say.

• BSD

  • Dan Langille ☛ Updating FreeBSD 15.0 to FreeBSD 15.1 (via pkgbase)

    I decided that Thursday morning at 8:27 AM was the right time to start my first update from FreeBSD 15.0 to 15.1 – all my hosts are now on pkgbase. I used the pgkbasify script. Now it’s time to update again.

• Arch Family

  • OSTechNix ☛ How to Use the AUR Safely

    In June 2026, attackers compromised more than 1,500 packages in the Arch User Repository (AUR). Sonatype researchers named the campaign Atomic Arch. It is one of the largest attacks against the AUR to date.

    The AUR is a community-maintained collection of package build scripts. It is separate from Arch Linux's official repositories. The official repositories were not affected.

    The attack did not exploit a flaw in Arch Linux or pacman. It abused the AUR's package adoption process to take over orphaned packages that users already trusted.

    This article explains what happened, why it worked, and what you can do to reduce the risk in the future.

• Debian Family

  • Sergio Cipriano: Running Graphical Applications in Incus Containers

    I didn't know how easy it is to display the graphical console of a virtual machine until I tried recently.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu ☛ Tracing a memory leak bug in PID 1 and contributing an upstream fix: a Linux support story

    This is the story of how Canonical Support helped a global retail organization trace the cause for an unusual memory leak originating in PID 1, the very first process started by the kernel during the system boot sequence. The memory footprint was 10 times higher than expected. By investigating the issue across three separate system layers – a misconfigured storage orchestrator, a kernel race condition, and glibc’s allocator – our team was able to identify the source and fast-track a patch.