GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 21, 2026

• TechHQ ☛ France’s Linux bet is bigger than a Windows replacement–it has proof it works

  Switching a government’s entire computer fleet away from Microsoft Windows sounds straightforward on paper. In practice, it rarely is. Agencies announce the move, spend years wrestling with software, staff who won’t adapt, and commercial vendors who lobby hard – then quietly walk it back. Munich did exactly that.

• Japan ☛ Tokyo IT firm chief arrested for allegedly abandoning body

  Tokyo police have arrested the president of Linux Japan, an information technology service provider in the capital, on suspicion of abandoning a body.

  The suspect, Katsuya Mizuguchi, 49, has denied the allegations.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Late Night Linux – Episode 382

    The French government makes a start on moving to the GNU/Linux Desktop, the EU has a terrible but open source age verification app, some clarity on one of the exciting office suite dramas, the media swallows Anthropic’s nonsense about their new magically powerful model, a quick KDE Korner, and more.

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

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • GNOME ☛ Juan Pablo Ugarte: Casilda 1.2.4 Released!

      I am very happy to announce a new version of Casilda!

      A simple Wayland compositor widget for Gtk 4.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD ☛ Cleaning Up Critical Infrastructure in FreeBSD

      FreeBSD’s base system includes a wide range of third-party components. Over time, keeping track of what is included, who maintains it, how exposed it is, and what action should be taken becomes more difficult. That challenge is not unique to FreeBSD. It is one shared by many mature open source projects.

      The Beach Cleaning Project tackled that challenge directly.

      The result was not just a review of what exists today. It produced practical tooling, machine-readable data, security assessments, and implementation plans that will continue to support FreeBSD development well beyond the life of the project.

  • IBM

    • Mark J. Wielaard: Anticipating Valgrind 3.27.0

      We’ll release Valgrind 3.27.0 later today. While making sure the NEWS file was up to date I wrote about all the contributions made this release.

      Thanks all, and apologies if I missed something or someone.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Ubuntu ☛ Hybrid search and reranking: a deeper look at RAG [Ed: Canonical peddling slop]

      At a high level, the flow for RAG is fairly clear – the user’s prompt is augmented with some relevant contextual information from a knowledge base, and the large language model (LLM) provides the user with a response on the basis of the information provided, instead of from the “baked in” information that it was originally trained on.