BSD and GNU/Linux Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 19, 2026

• TechRadar ☛ France has ditched Windows 11 for Linux on 2.5 million government PCs — here's why Microsoft should worry that millions more could follow by the end of 2026

  If you follow the latest desktop operating system news, and stories around Windows 11 in particular, you can't have failed to notice a trend: everybody hates it.

  Well, that's not quite true, but if you hang out on some forums or subreddits, the posts you scroll through will very much give you this impression and convince you that the hate is very real. And you don't exactly see many folks rushing to Microsoft's defense, either, in the main.

  Of course, it's always been 'cool' to hate 'authority' (and use 'quote marks'), and Microsoft is very much the dominant monarch when it comes to desktop platforms. And lately, it's become a growing trend to declare that you're heading to Linux, or macOS, and that [insert whatever Microsoft just did here] is the final, camel-destroying straw for you and Windows 11.

• Server

  • The Register UK ☛ CISA tells feds to patch 13-year-old Apache ActiveMQ bug

    The US cybersecurity agency added the bug, tracked as CVE-2026-34197, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog on Thursday, triggering a Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01 deadline that gives Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies until April 30 to fix their systems or get ready to explain why not.

    The bug sits in Apache ActiveMQ, an open source message broker used to shuttle data between applications and services, and allows an authenticated user to execute arbitrary code via the broker's Jolokia management API – effectively turning a messaging workhorse into a remote command runner.

• Applications

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Type with your voice on GNU/Linux using this Whisper-based app

    Your mouth can say things faster than your hands can type them, yet voice typing is rarely used as a primary input method on desktop (most of us think nothing of it on mobile). That’s despite speech-to-text being available on desktop OSes for decades, natively and through dedicated apps. It never caught on because it was inaccurate and slow (and because what you do at a keyboard is less efficient to speak, but that’s a separate point).

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

  • Matthias Klumpp: Hello old new “Projects” directory!

    If you have recently installed a very up-to-date GNU/Linux distribution with a desktop environment, or upgraded your system on a rolling-release distribution, you might have noticed that your home directory has a new folder: “Projects”

    Why?

    With the recent 0.20 release of xdg-user-dirs we enabled the “Projects” directory by default. Support for this has already existed since 2007, but was never formally enabled. This closes a more than 11 year old bug report that asked for this feature.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • BSD

    • Distro Watch ☛ BSD Release: GhostBSD 26.1

      GhostBSD is a desktop operating system based on FreeBSD. The project's latest release, version 26.1, is the first of the GhostBSD series to be based on FreeBSD 15.0. [...]

    • NetBSD ☛ The History of the NetBSD Project

      NetBSD took its roots from the original UCB 4.3BSD via the Net/2 release and 386BSD. The NetBSD project was founded by Chris Demetriou, Theo de Raadt, Adam Glass and Charles M. Hannum.

      Frustration with the quality of patches in the wild and the inability to get patches included in 386BSD led to the founding of the NetBSD project in 1993. NetBSD's original focus was quality and architecture independence. FreeBSD was formed later with a focus on the i386 PC platform.

  • Slackware Family

    • Slackware Cloud Server Series, Episode 12: Local AI

      The world is on fire, thanks to the orange clown who wages war for personal gain. Or is it because data centers are super-heated running all these Hey Hi (AI) models 24/7 ?

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Kevin Fenzi: misc fedora bits mid april 2026

      Another frozen week before the Fedora 44 release, just a few notable things: [...]

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • FOSSLinux ☛ Ubuntu 26.04 LTS “Resolute Raccoon”: Every Major Change Explained

      I break down every architectural change in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS: sudo-rs, Wayland-only, GNOME 50, Ptyxis terminal, post-quantum cryptography, x86-64-v3 optimization, and TPM full-disk encryption management.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Bhaskar English ☛ Criminals Hack Home Devices, Disable Car Brakes | Expert Warning

      Now crime needs neither land nor many fighters; it just needs 'data' and 'technology'. Wanda Brown, an expert in international security and conflict affairs at the Brookings Institution's Strobe Talbott Center, explains, 'Previously, growing opium or cocaine required miles of land, but now synthetic drugs can be made in a small basement. Criminals don't need to go anywhere for extortion. Through AI-scams, ransomware, and cryptocurrency, they are earning trillions of dollars from home. The center of 'power' is no longer a geographical map, but a digital server.'