Valnet on KDE, Feodra, Arch, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 22, 2025

• GNU/Linux

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

    • XDA ☛ One of the best Linux desktop environments for Windows escapees raised 296% for its annual fundraiser

      If you ask me what the ideal Linux distro is for people trying to flee Windows, I'll point to Linux Mint. If you ask me what the ideal Linux distro is for people who have tried Linux Mint and want to explore deeper into what Linux can do, I'd recommend checking out a distro with KDE. I personally ended up settling with Fedora KDE, and now, every time I try out a new operating system, I try to get KDE up and running on it. Arch Linux became a lot easier to digest once I had all my familiar KDE tools at hand.

      Fortunately, it appears the KDE community loves the software as much as I do, as it has rallied to help support the desktop environment with its yearly fundraiser. Right now, KDE has raised 296% of its desired total, and it's only going to keep rising.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Arch Family

    • XDA ☛ I run Arch Linux as a virtual machine, and I wouldn't have it any other way

      Now that I’ve spent a long time with different flavors of Linux over the course of my distro-hopping journey, I’ve started to gravitate towards certain distributions for my DIY projects. For example, I adore NixOS and Qubes OS for their quirky, yet highly-useful collection of features, while Alpine Linux is my distro of choice when running VMs on a low-power PVE node. I also love Debian due to its stable nature and solid compatibility, and it’s the distro that powers my automation and home server projects.

      Then there’s Arch Linux, which lies on the other end of the beginner-friendly spectrum. While it does have a learning curve and lower stability, I’ve been using Arch for my Linux-based dev environments for the last couple of months – so much so that it currently houses most of my project files. The catch? I run it as a virtual machine to get rid of most of the drawbacks plaguing a standard bare-metal Arch setup.

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • XDA ☛ Fedora Silverblue is the first Linux distro that actually feels like the future

      A little while ago, I gave Fedora Silverblue a spin, and it felt futuristic to me. Not futuristic in the way that it felt like I was using a computer straight out of The Jetsons, but it was more like a glimpse into what I believe is the very real future of Linux distros and how they'll work in the future.

      Once I had finished playing around with Fedora Silverblue, I went back to regular Fedora to better gauge how I feel about using a mutable vs. an immutable system. If I just use one system, I'm prone to developing strong "grass is greener on the other side" feelings toward the other, and my views end up biased. So, after flipping between Fedora KDE and Fedora Silverblue, here's why I feel the latter is the future.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • HowTo Geek ☛ How open source quietly won the software wars

    It might be hard to imagine now, but not too long ago the idea of free software with source code that anyone can modify wasn't one with much enthusiasm behind it. How could that be safe? What about support? Could you trust mission-critical stuff to this software?

    Today, almost everything we rely on in the world of computer technology runs, at least in part, on open-source code. It's in your phone, our web servers, appliances, cars, and basically anything with a microchip that runs code. Open source is going from strength-to-strength.

  • Programming/Development

    • HowTo Geek ☛ PhpStorm 2025.3 arrives with full PHP 8.5 support and a new theme

      PhpStorm has stuck around as one of the best PHP development environments, and now JetBrains has released a new major version. PhpStorm 2025.3 is now available with PHP 8.5 support, a new theme, Claude agent integration, and much more.

      The most important upgrade here might be full support for PHP 8.5, which was released in November with a new pipe operator, better object cloning, URL parsing, persistent cURL share handles, and other improvements. You'll have to change the language version in your project to try the new features, either by editing your composer.json file or using the "Switch to PHP 8.5 language level" quick-fix suggestion.

      PhpStorm will also be proactive in helping you adopt new PHP 8.5 features. For example, it might suggest replacing a 'clone' operation with 'cone with' syntax, and it can highlight invalid callable in a pipe operator chain.