GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 03, 2026

• Desktop/Laptop

  • Mat Duggan ☛ Make tmux the OS

    The overall point of the talk was "Apple and Microsoft aren't going to innovate anymore in the desktop OS space, so it is up to us all to decide what the desktop of the future is going to look like". I would argue that the actual situation to more nuanced than that, they're trying ideas they are just extremely conservative. As Jenson points out, a lot of what we treat as "how computers work" was a workaround for hardware we stopped having years ago. So why are we still accepting those tradeoffs?

• Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization

  • LWN ☛ Linux Test Project suite stable release for September 2026

    The Linux Test Project has announced its latest stable release for September 2026. There have been 382 patches from 41 authors since the May 2026 release.

  • Adolfo Ochagavía ☛ A container is just a process

    If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know I’ve been hacking on container technology for a while now. A common misconception you see in the wild is that people conflate containers and virtual machines, thinking they are equivalent. This blog post illustrates how containerized applications are actually plain processes that run natively on your Linux machine1.

  • [Old] Medium ☛ A Few of My Favorite Things About The OpenBSD Packet Filter Tools

    At the time the OpenBSD project introduced its new packet filter subsystem in 2001, I was nowhere near the essentially full time OpenBSD user I would soon become. I did however quickly recognize that even what was later dubbed “the working prototype” was reported to perform better in most contexts than the code it replaced.

    The reason PF’s predecessor needed to be replaced has been covered extensively by myself and others elsewhere, so I’ll limit myself to noting that the reason was that several somebodies finally read and understood the code’s license and decided that it was not in fact open source in any acceptable meaning of the term.

  • [Old] BSDly ☛ That grumpy BSD guy: Forcing the password gropers through a smaller hole with OpenBSD's PF queues

    yes, that's right. A queue with a maximum throughput of 1 kilobit per second. I have been warned that this is small enough that the code may be unable to strictly enforce that limit due to the timer resolution in the HFSC code. But that didn't keep me from trying.

    And now that I had another group of hosts that I wanted to just be a little evil to, why not let the password gropers and the spammers share the same small patch of bandwidth?

• Graphics Stack

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Here's what's coming to NVIDIA GeForce NOW during October 2026 | GamingOnLinux

    NVIDIA revealed a bunch of new games coming to their cloud gaming service GeForce NOW during October, plus we had a small fix in the Linux app.

    For their Linux app, they recently released v2.0.89 that noted: [...]

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Medium ☛ Just Pick a Linux Distro and Save Yourself Some Pain

    One of the great strengths of Linux is the fact that it comes in a huge number of flavors called distributions or “distros” for short. No matter what you prefer, odds are good there’s a distro of Linux that fits your needs beautifully.

    But there’s a ditch that many new Linux fans fall into. Distro hopping. In an effort to find the perfect distribution, Linux fans sometimes bounce from one distribution to the next, never really settling.

    It’s tempting. I get it. I’ve been there.

    Sooner or later though? You have to pick something. Otherwise you’ll never actually get anything done.

  • BSD

    • Rafael Sadowski ☛ Headers Up! What's New in httpd and relayd

      As I mentioned in my Dead Software Walking: The ongoing evolution of relayd(8) and httpd(8) post, development of relayd(8) and httpd(8) was revived.