GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 29, 2026

• Server

  • Tedium ☛ Self-Hosting Tools: Still Worth Trying In 2026?

    Today in Tedium: It’s a tough time to be a financially-conscious computer user. We’re living deep in a RAM crisis, and you’ve probably heard the stories about well-spec’ed computers slowly suffering from a nagging case of Unobtainium. Meanwhile, SaaS just keeps SaaSing, with costs adding up (and tech companies getting bigger) every month. In the past, my recommendation for working around SaaS involved buying a mini PC, loading it up with containers, and using those to get work done. But at a time when a 2-terabyte SSD costs 2.5 to 3 times what it did a year or two ago, does that advice still hold? And I’m a nerd—could it be a decent option for a regular user? With that in mind, I decided to dig in. Does turning a mini PC into a little home server make sense in 2026? Let’s find out, together. — Ernie @ Tedium

• Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization

  • Dark Reading ☛ China Upgrades the Backdoor It Uses to Spy on Telcos Globally

    BPFdoor was already one of the world's most sophisticated malware implants before it was upgraded. Its signature trick was to lay dormant inside of a Linux kernel, doing nothing interesting or even observable, while passively using the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) to inspect incoming network traffic for a specially crafted activation message.

    Researchers at Rapid7 now report that the Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) behind BPFdoor, Red Menshen, has modified that listening system. Since around last November, it's also tacked on a few more stealthy tricks to help BPFdoor stay even quieter, and get closer to the heart of telecommunications subscriber traffic worldwide.

  • Hans Wennborg ☛ Big-Endian Testing with QEMU

    In computing, the terms big endian and little endian refer to the order in which a value's bytes are stored in memory: with the most significant (big) or least significant (little) part first.

  • Old VCR ☛ 6o6 v1.1: Faster 6502-on-6502 virtualization for a C64/Apple II Apple-1 emulator

    I'm doing periodic updates on some of my long-term projects, one of them being 6o6, a fully virtualized NMOS 6502 CPU core that runs on a 6502 written in 6502 assembly language. 6o6 implements a completely abstracted memory model and a fully controlled execution environment, but by using the host's ALU and providing a primitive means of instruction fusion it can be faster than a naïve interpreter. This library was something I wrote over two decades earlier for my KIM-1 emulator project for the Commodore 64, and relatively recently I open-sourced and discussed it in detail. It runs on just about any 6502-based system with sufficient memory.

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

  • Thomas Leondard ☛ Linux input devices (with libinput-ocaml)

    I've been investigating how keyboards, mice, etc work in Linux. In this blog post we'll see how input events work, using libinput-ocaml, and then use that to write a little game.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Strand PWA Runtime (Part 2.5)

      Strand is a PWA runtime for running web applications in a more integrated manner for KDE Plasma.

      Right now Strand has two parallel development tracks; an AI-driven prototyping track to test the feasibility of features, and a second human-driven track where I’m building the final product.

      I’ll mostly cover the events of the Hey Hi (AI) track in this post, which I’ve been dogfooding as I slowly get the human track on-rails. The usual caveats of code quality and security are in full effect.

    • KDE ☛ [SoK 2026] Final Update for 'Automating Promo Data Collection' Task

      Hi all! Just finished up the last bit of work for my Season of KDE task of automating data collection for the KDE promotional team.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Thibault Martin: I realized that I created too much friction to publish

      I love writing on my blog. I love taking a complex topic, breaking it down, understanding how things work, and writing about how things clicked for me. It serves a double purpose: [...]

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Top 10 Most Popular GNU/Linux Distributions in March 2026

    With the growing trend of Hey Hi (AI) applications and tools, the adoption of GNU/Linux distros is increasing among netizens and developer communities. Last month, we did a similar article in which we listed the popular GNU/Linux distros of February, and now here we are again with the March list.

  • BSD

    • Ruben Verweij ☛ Playing with FreeBSD

      "What’s all the fuss about FreeBSD? What is it, anyway?", I remember these thoughts going through my head, sometime last year. There were quite a few people posting enthusiastically about FreeBSD on the Fediverse. Having used Linux for many years, I was vaguely aware of the idea that BSD is some flavour of Unix—a family of free and open source computer operating systems. My curiosity was triggered, and I decided to learn more about it. I guess even the Fediverse has influencers.

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Tim Waugh: Visualising vision correction

      I’ve been trying out contact lenses for the first time. Multi-focal lenses provide different focal lengths to the eye at once, and you can have different prescription lenses in each eye (as long as they don’t differ by too much).

      This means the brain is getting signals from the eyes, each providing potentially multiple focal lengths, and learns to combine them to reduce blur. It’s interesting and I wanted to be able to visualise how that works, so I made this interactive simulator. It shows a heatmap (green is sharp, red is blurry) over distance, comparing uncorrected vision with modern multi-focal lenses. Try it out! All the calculations happen locally within your browser.

    • Kevin Fenzi: misc fedora bits last week of march 2026 [Ed: Fedora at the Mercy of Microsoft Because of Back-Doored Kick-Switch Boot]

      Last week we finally got the new secure boot setup fully switched over. We are now signing aarch64 grub2/kernel/fwupd as we are the x86_64 versions. The aarch64 signed artifacts are in rawhide now, but will move to stable releases as testing permits.

      Sadly my Lenovo slim7x doesn't boot correctly with the signed artifacts, I think due to needing a firmware update or manually enrolling the microsoft certs. I'll try and test more with it when I can, but many other folks are seeing it work fine.

      It's been a 7 year journey to get this done. Why so long? A few of the reasons in no particular order: [..]

  • Debian Family

    • Russell Coker ☛ Russell Coker: Ebook Readers in Debian

      For a while I’ve been using Calibre 8.5.0+ds-1+deb13u1 in Debian/Trixie running KDE for reading ebooks on my laptop, it generally works well and has a large font size. The only downsides of it for that use are taking more RAM than I would prefer (about 780M RSS which seems a lot for a relatively simple task) and having separate windows for the list of books and reading an actual book without any options to just open the last book and not delay me.

    • Astrid Yu ☛ Swap out the root before boot

      This is part 1 of a four-part article series about how to reimage disks in-place. Part 0 is located here.

      Did you know that when Linux boots, it doesn’t actually mount your root disk at first? It actually runs a mini-me OS that finds the real root disk and becomes it.

      The official name for this mini-me is the initramfs (Initial RAM File System), which some people still call the initrd (Initial RAM Disk). I’ll be using both terms interchangeably to mean the same thing. As the name suggests, it’s a filesystem that lives purely in RAM.

      If this all seems very abstract, that’s because it is. Let’s look inside a Debian VM and see how it fits together in practice!

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Beta is Available to Download

      Ubuntu 26.04, code-name “Resolute Raccoon”, is available for Beta testing! The developer team announced the Beta release for Ubuntu 26.04 Desktop, Server, WSL, and Cloud, as well as the official flavors.