Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 25, 2025

• The Register UK ☛ You don't need Linux to run free and open source software [Ed: "Misses the point that running Free software on top of NSA back doors is sort of dumb and lame"]

  Compare OpenAlternative.co, which is snazzy and effects-heavy, with the decidedly low-tech Best FOSS Alternatives, which is very simple and austere. The latter has nothing to sell; it's just a plain, simple categorized list of FOSS tools. If you scroll to the end, it even has a short list of alternatives to itself.

  Always remember the KISS principle. As a general rule, try to favor things that are plain, simple, and unornamented – there's less to go wrong.

  As a general rule, we suggest treating app stores for desktop OSes with suspicion and keeping them at arm's length. Apple has integrated its App Store deeply into macOS since 2001's Mac OS X 10.0, but you don't need it, and it's full of things that you can get for free elsewhere. Most native macOS apps update themselves, so even the App Store's handy automatic background updates aren't essential.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Chromium

    • University of Toronto ☛ Some notes on using the Sec-CH-UA HTTP headers that Chrome supports

      A while back, Chrome proposed and implemented what are called user agent hints, which are a collection of Sec-CH-UA HTTP headers that can provide you with additional information about the browser beyond what the HTTP User-Agent header provides. As mentioned, only Chrome and browsers derived from Chromium (or if you prefer, 'Blink') support these headers, and only since early 2021 (for Chrome; later for some others). However, Chrome is what a lot of people use. More to the point, Chrome is what a lot of bad crawlers claim to be in their User-Agent header. As has been written up by other people, you can use these headers to detect inconsistencies that give away crawlers.

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

  • Paul Heinlein ☛ Hugo Package Install on MacOS

    Beginning with version v0.153.0, the Hugo developers starting shipping the MacOS release of Hugo as a Mac-native pkg file rather than in the traditional compressed tar format.

    Since I use Hugo to build this site, I had long maintained a shell script that automated the installation of the old tar.gz distribution files, so I needed to rework my script to deal with the pkg file. The reworked version is below.

  • Joost de Valk ☛ The generalization tax: why WordPress is still the smart architectural base

    I lean toward the Bull case, but not because I want to protect the old way of doing things. I believe WordPress is the superior long-term option because it is the only way to prevent “AI Slop”.

    Using WordPress (along with robust tools like ACF) as a base for custom applications is a sophisticated architectural choice. If you let an AI generate a “lean, custom engine” from scratch today, you are creating a massive maintenance liability for tomorrow. Without a standardized base, that AI-generated code will eventually become “slop”: unpatchable, insecure, and disconnected from the global web standards.

• Education

  • APNIC ☛ 2025 APNIC Fellows in their own words

    The 2025 APNIC Fellowship Program brought together 41 emerging and established professionals from across the Asia Pacific region to participate in technical workshops, policy discussions, and community-building activities. Fellows represented diverse economies and backgrounds, united by a shared commitment to strengthening Internet infrastructure, governance, and security in their local contexts.

    In this blog post, we asked fellows from the recent 2025 program to reflect on their experiences.