GNU/Linux and Free Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 22, 2025

• GNU/Linux

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Tux Digital ☛ This week in Linux 316: KDE Plasma 6.4, Arch GNU/Linux Wine, Kali Linux, Valve flips the Proton switch, & more GNU/Linux news

      This week in Linux, we have a jam packed episode for you. The KDE team have released a brand new version of the Plasma desktop. We’re also going to talk about some big changes coming to Arch GNU/Linux and the pentesting distro, Kali Linux.

    • This week in Linux316: KDE Plasma 6.4, Arch GNU/Linux Wine, Kali Linux, Valve flips the Proton switch, & more GNU/Linux news

      00:50 KDE Plasma 6.4 Desktop Released

      07:56 Arch GNU/Linux switches to WoW64 Wine

      10:51 Kali GNU/Linux 2025.2 Released

      14:40 Sandfly Security, agentless GNU/Linux security [ad]

      16:37 Valve hits 20,000 playable Steam Deck games and flips Proton on by default

      19:36 DreamWorks Animation's OpenMoonRay adds NUMA Support

      22:26 20 Years of the Open Invention Network

      24:19 SDL Implements the Pointer Warp Protocol

      29:31 Outro

  • Kernel Space

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Legendary Sound Blaster ISA sound card gets a driver update 30 years later — patch squashes first bug report after 25 years

      Creative Sound Blaster AWE32 fixes arrive for the Linux 6.16-rc3 kernel.

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

    • University of Toronto ☛ Chris's Wiki :: blog/sysadmin/VirtualScreensVsWindowGroups

      I've written about how I use virtual screens in my desktop environment, although a bit of that is now out of date. The short summary is that I mostly have a main virtual screen and then 'overflow' virtual screens where I move to if I need to do something else without cleaning up the main virtual screen (as a system administrator, I can be quite interrupt-driven or working on more than one thing at once). This sounds a lot like window groups, and I'm sure I could do it with them in another window manager. The advantage to me of fvwm's virtual screens is that it's very easy to move windows from one to another.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KTimeTracker 6.0.0 has been released

        It took a year for me to actually make a release, but KTimeTracker 6.0.0 is now out!

        Major changes

        The major thing about it is that KTimeTracker has been ported to Qt6. For end users this means up-to-date GNU/Linux distributions that had orphaned KTimeTracker will get the package back once a package maintainer steps up.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Kevin Fenzi: 10 days to datacenter move

      Super busy recently focused on the datacenter move that's happening in just 10 days! (I hope).

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Databases

    • The Register UK ☛ EDB enhances PostgreSQL analytics with open source add-ons

      EDB claimed the new engine, which pushes queries to open source Apache DataFusion, returned queries 30x faster than standard Postgres while tiering offloads cold transactional data to storage is up 18x more cost-efficient.

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

    • Jono Alderson ☛ The long-term cost of short-term platforms

      But under the surface, something important isn’t happening.

      You’re not planning your content model. You’re not thinking about how you’ll manage products at scale, or publish articles in multiple languages, or segment your customers across regions. You’re not asking how this platform handles canonical logic, image delivery, caching, structured data, or version control.