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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Programming Leftovers
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Make Use Of ☛ Everyone’s switching to this GPU-accelerated terminal — and I get it
At first glance, the idea does sound extremely unnecessary. A terminal window just displays text; it does not play any videos or render any 3D scenes. So why would it ever need GPU acceleration?
The problem is that modern terminal usage is nothing like the old “type a command, get a line of output” workflow anymore.
Think of something common, like installing a big app or watching a build scroll by while you wait. The terminal suddenly fills up with lines flying past faster than you can read. Try scrolling back, resizing the window, or switching focus mid-command, and you will often feel it slow down or stutter for a moment. It doesn't happen ALL the time, but it can definitely occur if you're using your terminal as a full-blown IDE.
That is where hardware acceleration starts to matter. Instead of your CPU juggling both the actual work and the rendering of thousands of characters, the GPU takes over the drawing entirely. The CPU can focus on actually running your commands, while the GPU handles everything else.
It also helps massively with displaying images and other media directly inside the terminal, without the hacks older CPU-bound terminals use to do this.
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LWN ☛ A 2025 retrospective
The lead prediction last year was that the extensible scheduling class would be "a game changer"; the reality has been a bit more subdued. Development on sched_ext itself continues apace, and there is definitely interesting work happening on specific schedulers. The scx_lavd gaming-oriented scheduler continues to advance, and was the subject of multiple sessions at the recently concluded series of conferences in Tokyo. But it is not clear that ideas from sched_ext are filtering back into the mainline scheduler, and the use of sched_ext schedulers is not, yet, widespread. At least, it is not widespread in any public way; it seems that private use is on the rise.
On the other hand, the prediction that Rust code would enter the kernel at an increasing rate has been borne out nicely. In hindsight, the removal of the "experimental" tag from Rust in the kernel was also somewhat predictable, but we missed that one.
We predicted that another XZ-like backdoor attempt would come to light; that did not quite happen, though we did see the usual malicious uploads to various language-specific and distribution repositories. There is little doubt that such attempts are ongoing, but they have not yet been discovered. There are signs that single-maintainer projects are being seen as carrying more risk, as predicted.
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Kushal Das: 2025 blog review
After 2005 again in 2025 I wrote only 8 blog posts. The year was difficult in many different ways. But, from September things became a bit better. I could not do a lot of things which I thought I would do, or rather I promised to do.
I hoping to catch up on those promises in the coming months. That not only includes blog posts on vairous things I am writing/building, but also I have a huge backlog of photos to work on and publish.
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Events
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LWN ☛ Tools for successful documentation projects
At Open Source Summit Japan 2025, Erin McKean talked about the challenges to producing good project documentation, along with some tooling that can help guide the process toward success. It is a problem that many projects struggle with and one that her employer, Google, gained a lot of experience with from its now-concluded Season of Docs initiative. Through that program, more than 200 case studies of documentation projects were gathered that were mined for common problems and solutions, which led to the tools and techniques that McKean described.
She introduced herself as a developer-relations engineer in the Google open-source-programs office; part of her job—""and it's a fun job""—is to ""help open-source projects have better docs"". She was also an honorary fellow of the ""late, lamented"" Society for Technical Communication and runs the online, non-profit Wordnik English-language-dictionary web site. Beyond all of that, she runs the Semicolon Appreciation Society; some of us here at LWN should probably join said society.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Mozilla
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It's FOSS ☛ An X11 Thing! Your Favorite Middle-Click Paste is Likely to be Disabled in Future GNOME Releases [Ed: Mozilla's Assisted Suicide, Assisted by GNOME]
Proposals for both GNOME and Firefox would disable the feature by default, but the final decision is still pending.
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Jonathan Almeida: Rebase all WIPs to the new main
A small pet-peeve with fetching the latest main on jujutsu is that I like to move all my WIP patches to the new one. That's also nice because jj doesn't make me fix the conflicts immediately!
The solution from a co-worker (kudos to skippyhammond!) is to query all immediate decendants of the previous main after the fetch.
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Jonathan Almeida: Update jj bookmarks to the latest revision
Got this one from another colleague as well but it seems like most folks use some version of this daily that it might be good to have this built-in.
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Programming/Development
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HowTo Geek ☛ The best laptop for learning to code is probably the one you already have
While you might think you need a high-powered machine to learn to code, your current machine or even an older laptop will likely be all you need to get started. Here's why.
Programming tools will run on low-end machines
With memory and other PC hardware getting more expensive, more people will likely have machines of 8GB or less for a while. While you might think this will be a handicap, lower memory won't stop you from installing programming tools.
If you're learning to code, you'll likely be working with something like Python. A basic Python installation will already be more than enough, even on a lower-end machine. Python is small enough that it's replaced BASIC on graphing calculators. It's already more than enough with the standard library to run on today's machines.
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