today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 12, 2026

• Desktop/Laptop

  • Slashdot ☛ Four More Tech Bloggers Are Switching to Linux

    Is there a trend? This week four different articles appeared on various tech-news sites with an author bragging about switching to Linux.

    "Greetings from the year of Linux on my desktop," quipped the Verge's senior reviews editor, who finally "got fed up and said screw it, I'm installing Linux."

• Graphics Stack

  • [Old] Modal Labs ☛ Keeping 20,000 GPUs healthy

    This post starts with cloud instance type testing and selection. Perhaps surprisingly, there are significant performance and reliability differences between the cloud hyperscalers. We then discuss machine image preparation and instance boot checks. Next we cover the passive and active GPU healthchecking performed throughout the life of each instance. Finally we discuss observability and support, which become crucial when a GPU reliability issue slips by our automated healthchecking systems.

    We’ve chosen not to refer to cloud providers directly, but instead give them anonymized A, B, C, D identifiers. If you want know who’s who, track the clues or buy us a beer sometime.

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

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Xfce is great

    I have not been shy talking about my love of Xfce over the years here. The desktop environment has been a trusted friend ever since I first loved it on the late Cobind Desktop (still the high water mark of desktop Linux, as far as I’m concerned).

    I’m glad to see I’m not the only one. David Gerard of Pivot to AI fame recently shared this post he wrote in 2012: [...]

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Distro Watch ☛ DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

    [...] This week we handle a similar, but rarely asked question: Which flavour of BSD is ideal for a novice? We discuss the BSD families and make a recommendation in this week's Questions and Answers column. [...]

  • Luc Lenôtre ☛ Maestro: 2025 retrospective

    The goal I had planned for the end of 2026 was to have a desktop environment working.

    That involves: [...]

  • BSD

    • DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ Lazy Reading for 2026/01/11

      More BSD content than usual. Home Assistant as Personal Device Tracker. BSD PF versus GNU/Linux nftables for firewalls for us. The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure.  “The tale grew in the telling” Systems design 3: LLMs and the semantic revolution. ASP level generation autoplay. The story of Propolice, the OpenBSD stack protector.

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Being comfortable with “trying”

      Trying lowers the barrier to entry. It smashes down gatekeepers. It makes a new endeavour approachable, meaning you’re more likely to attempt it. I can’t tell you the number of times someone has asked me whether they should “try” running BSD. My answer is always the same: yes!

      To tackle a cliché with another: [...]

  • Arch Family

    • Verify Arch GNU/Linux artifacts using VOA/OpenPGP

      In the recent blog post on the work funded by Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), we provided an overview of the "File Hierarchy for the Verification of OS Artifacts" (VOA) and the voa project as its reference implementation.

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Jamie Nguyen: Curious things I discovered about Ansible in Advent of Code

      In December, I did my first Advent of Code (opens in new tab). I used Ansible, which is a terrible choice for programming challenges but that’s part of the fun!

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Doom conquers the kitchen through an electric cooking pot — classic shooter runs seamlessly after a full device firmware refresh

      Connected to it by a simple four-wire cable is the front touchscreen module. Removing that assembly exposes significantly more capable hardware. The Wi-Fi module is confirmed to be an ESP32, while the main processor on the display board is identified as a Renesas R7S721031VZ. The creator calls it “quite a nice chip,” adding that “it is quite powerful and it has a lot of GPIOs. It’s an Arm core.”