GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 23, 2026

• Desktop/Laptop

  • ZDNet ☛ I tested the System76 Thelio Mira: it's the custom Linux desktop of my dreams

    Sure, you could build a more powerful Linux workstation, but even then, you'd be hard-pressed to make a better machine than System76's new 2026 Thelio Mira Custom desktop PC. That's because the computer is both very powerful and quiet as a whisper.

    The 2026 Mira refresh is built around AMD's Ryzen 9000 "Granite Ridge" platform on an X870 motherboard. This setup gives you PCIe 5.0 for GPUs and SSDs, providing up to 32 gigatransfers per second (GT/s) per lane, which adds up to 64 gigabytes per second (GB/s) and 128 GB/s of bidirectional throughput. Combine that power with Gen5 Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) sequential throughput of up to 15 GB/s, and we're talking seriously fast I/O.

• Server

  • [Old] Erik Thorsell ☛ State of the Homelab 2026 (Servers edition)

    The fall of 2014 I built my first real server. The purpose was to supersede the Synology NAS and build something reasonably “production grade”. (Albeit, as a second year university student, I was not familiar with the concept of production grade.) I did a lot of reading and listened to a lot of podcasts on the subject. At the time, I was a huge fan of the various Jupiter Broadcasting shows. In particular, I found the BSD Now podcast (then hosted by: Allan Jude) very fascinating. Persuaded by the BSD folks, I decided to go with FreeNAS (which would be renamed to TrueNAS Core in 2021) as my server OS.

    I went all in on FreeNAS and BSD and hosted a handful of applications in jails. At some point I was unable to build some application for FreeBSD and struggled a lot with running Linux VM:s under FreeNAS to get Docker support. It worked, but it was not particularly pleasant. In 2016 the woman who would become my wife moved to Sweden, and in with me, meaning I now had an additional issue: Another user, who had uptime and availability expectations on the few services she enjoyed using (mostly Plex)… Safe to say, I was becoming more and more frustrated with FreeNAS as an “application hosting OS”.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Hackaday ☛ FLOSS Weekly Episode 876: There Is No Money Fairy

    This week Jonathan chats with Michael Meeks about Collabora! What’s the origin story in this consulting company, why do they have an outstanding office suite, and where is the world headed to accomplish digital sovereignty? Watch to find out!

  • APNIC ☛ [Podcast] DNS query duplication

    Why does APNIC Labs experimental systems see almost all DNS queries twice or more?

  • Graham Cluley ☛ Smashing Security podcast #477: How 14 orders of chicken McNuggets helped nail a suspected Russian hacker

    A Russian intelligence-linked hacker is arrested in Thailand while enjoying a beach holiday – and the trail of evidence that nailed him to the Russian government includes 14 separate orders of chicken McNuggets.

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

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Sam Thursfield: 22nd July 2026

      I got funding from my employer to attend the GNOME conference, and one of the requirements is that I write a “conference report” mail with a summary of what I got out of it.

      I’m going to share that email here, with a bit of extra context. If you’re reading my blog — you’re either quite involved in GNOME, or maybe you know me personally and don’t have much of a clue why I go on about gnomes all the time. This email was written for an audience which is largely software engineers, many with an interest in open source and many using GNOME to do their work, but relatively few who are actively developing desktop software or participating as volunteers in big open source projects.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Barry Kauler ☛ Easy Installer first test

    I posted about a new graphical installer:

    https://bkhome.org/news/202607/started-work-on-easyos-graphical-installer.html

    A lot of work since then. Really "went down a rabbit hole"; many nights "burning the midnight oil".

    Here is the latest snapshot of the main window: [...]

  • BSD

    • NetBSD ☛ NetBSD 11.0 RC7 available!

      The NetBSD project is pleased to announce the seventh release candidate of the upcoming 11.0 release, please help testing!
      

    • Klara ☛ If Scrubs Hurt, Your ZFS Design Is Broken

      ZFS scrub performance shouldn’t come at the expense of production worklaods. If scrubs cause latency or downtime, your pool lacks the IOPs and metadata performance needed for healthy maintanance. Learn why scrub performance suffers, how pool design contributres to the problem, and how metadata offload with sepcial VDEVs can improve both scrub and resilver performance.

  • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • OpenSUSE ☛ Open Developers Summits Head to Barcelona and Dallas in 2027

      The first summit is scheduled to take place on Feb. 18, 2027, in Barcelona, Spain, held alongside SUSECON. The second is scheduled to take place on April 14, 2027, in Dallas, Texas. Both are one-day summits that bring together SUSE partners, openSUSE contributors, open-source community projects and enthusiasts for a day of shared ideas and collaboration. Whether you’re deep in the code or just passionate about open source, there’s a place for you at each.