GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 15, 2026

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • The Ask Noah Show ☛ Ask Noah Show: Ask Noah Show 475

    What is the role of tape backup in 2026? Should ZFS be used on tape? Steve takes us back to his days at IMAX and gives us some things to think about when using tape. We answer your questions, take your feedback

  • RiskyBiz ☛ Risky Business #820 -- Asian fraud kingpin will face Chinese justice (pew pew!)

    Risky Business returns for 2026! Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau talk through the week’s cybersecurity news, including: [...]

• Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization

  • Klara ☛ Understanding ZFS Scrubs and Data Integrity

    ZFS scrubs are a core part of how ZFS ensures data integrity. By walking the entire pool, verifying every block against its checksum, and repairing minor corruption early, scrubs prevent silent data loss before it becomes catastrophic. This article explains how scrubs work, how to interpret zpool status output, and how regular scrubbing supports long-term reliability in production ZFS systems.

• Applications

  • Unicorn Media ☛ Why Ditching VirtualBox for KVM and Virt‑Manager Makes Sense

    Moving away from VirtualBox doesn’t have to be complicated. Jack Wallen walks you through installing virt‑manager and spinning up your first VM with KVM.

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

  • PC Gamer ☛ An absolute madman has recreated the Windows 8 UI—for Linux

    The first time Windows users started looking for an alternative OS en masse it was 2012, and Microsoft had just released a desktop UI so bad it would be almost entirely purged from existence within just three years. Windows 8 was all about big, square icons designed for a new wave of touchscreen-enabled laptops and Windows phones. The classic desktop designed for mouse and keyboard was gone, based on a prediction that soon everyone would want to use all their devices in the same way (this has still not come to pass).

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • GNOME ☛ Asman Malika: Think About Your Audience

      When I started writing this blog, I didn’t fully understand what “think about your audience” really meant. At first, it sounded like advice meant for marketers or professional writers. But over time, I’ve realized it’s one of the most important lessons I’m learning, not just for writing, but for building software and contributing to open source.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Debian Family

    • Adriaan de Groot ☛ Debian SBuild for FreeBSD People

      For other-$WORK I am doing a bit of Debian packaging (prep-work) and upstream wrangling to bring some projects into a more-modern world. So now I have a Debian 13 workstation and need to build things for Debian Unstable without breaking my host system. On FreeBSD, this is a job for Poudriere. Here’s my notes on how I do something half-assedly similar on Debian (as usual, mostly documentation for “future me”).

      As an example of something I’m updating, libaccounts is one.