GNU/Linux Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 20, 2026

• Desktop/Laptop

  • Heise ☛ Raspberry Pi OS spruces up the desktop

    Meanwhile, it is based on a significantly different foundation with Wayland and labwc, write the Raspberry Pi developers in their announcement. Although they have refreshed the look now and then, for example with new icons, themes, and desktop backgrounds, there are now hardly any similarities between the Raspberry Pi Desktop and the original LXDE. However, what has always remained the same is the fundamental look and feel of the desktop with the taskbar, the icons, and the starter of the main menu. While these are intuitive to operate, modern desktops now offer more functions. And the developers now want to introduce those as well.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Noah Petherbridge ☛ Asahi Linux with LUKS Encryption

    At the time, Asahi Linux had support for M1 and M2 Apple Silicon devices so I thought it'd be maybe a year or so until M3 was supported. It took a little while longer than that, but as of this month they have released M3 support and I went ahead and installed it. It was quite easy to set up with their automated installation script.

    There seem to be just a couple of issues they are still working out, which they mention in that blog post but briefly they are: [...]

  • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • Dominique Leuenberger ☛ Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2026/38

      Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

      This week saw the release of 6 snapshots (0910, 0911, 0912, 0914, 0915, and 0916).

      The star of this week’s show was undoubtedly KDE, which delivered a stellar triple-header across consecutive releases: KDE Plasma 6.7.5 landed in snapshot 0910, KDE Frameworks 6.30 followed in 0911, and KDE Gear 26.08.1 completed the desktop suite’s major updates in 0912. Beyond the graphical interface, core system integrity was a major focus. Snapshot 0915 brought a crucial security-hardening round, delivering backported glibc CVE fixes alongside security updates for cups, alsa, and gvfs. Snapshot 0916 followed up with further CVE mitigations in freeipmi, 7zip, and xz (fixing a critical invalid memory access bug in the lzma decoders).

      Under the hood, snapshot 0915 brought exciting architectural enhancements to Mesa, including enabling the ‘rocket’ Gallium driver for Rockchip NPUs on AArch64 and shipping the ‘Teflon’ TensorFlow Lite delegate in a new subpackage. OpenCV also expanded its media capabilities, enabling native support for both JPEG XL and AVIF, while the GNU/Linux Kernel progressed to version 7.2.5 in snapshot 0914.

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Kevin Fenzi: misc fedora bits: third week of sep 2026

      A somewhat busy week for me, so lets get into it..

      RHEL10 Database migrations

      So, I had finished off all the staging databases except for one the week before, so I spent a fair bit of time this last week looking at the last one. It's a pretty fun case, our db-datanommer.

      This is the database that stores all the messages that go accross our message bus and allows you to search them via datagrepper. Because of the nature of the data in it, it uses the timescaledb extention on top of postgres. It's currently (in both staging and production) a rhel9 vm with postgresql 13 and timescaledb 2.10.1.

  • Debian Family

    • Fekir ☛ How to pin packages in Debian · Fekir's Blog

      I use mostly Debian testing as my main operating system because of multiple reasons, two of which are:

      • nearly all programs I use are already packaged and maintained on Debian

      • the testing "branch" is up-to-date enough

      No system is perfect; some packages might not be available or might be too old. In that case, it is possible to add other repositories.

      This is not a complicated process, but what if two repositories provide the same package?