Getting productive with your #Linux computer can be a challenge if you don't know what software is available to you. I find useful Linux apps every week, so here are three free and #OpenSource options for those who want to do more.
newinlinux.com/3-more-handy-li…
This week I'm exploring an MKV file editor, a kanban-style productivity app, and an in-terminal file manager.Jordan Gloor (New In Linux)
Oh my, I didn't realise the state of develop-for-Wayland was this bad. As a sometimes hobbyist developer I can feel the pain.
It really does feel like one of the Linux non-profits could usefully somehow "take ownership" of the protocol level to at least standardise on one way to do things like virtual keyboard input. You'd think at least Gnome and KDE could have saved both their selves some time by co-operating on these things.
I'll continue with Xorg-based X11 until there's good reason not to. Yes, I know about recent security issues, lack of maintainer-ship, and the shit show that has been the forks/alternatives...
... but my current X11+fvwm3 setup *works for me*.
"Supporting Wayland isn't a one-off feature. Every compositor update, every new distribution release, every configuration change adds to the testing matrix. The thousands of permutations we described aren't a historical problem; they're an ongoing reality that demands permanent engineering commitment."Avalonia did the math on Wayland support and the numbers weren't good, lol... best of luck to us all. <3
avaloniaui.net/blog/bringing-w…
Same math I did 8 months ago and with the same conclusion: semicomplete.com/blog/xdotool-…
Bringing Wayland Support to Avalonia - Avalonia UI Blog
A Pragmatic Approach to Linux's Display Server FutureNikita Tsukanov (Avalonia UI)
Ok, I think I've got this display card under control - or so it seems. It hasn't crashed since Wednesday.
I guess this is a combo AMD RDNA3 Navi23 and KDE Plasma (+ Wayland?) bug...
I backed out all my Linux kernel command line switches for AMD GPUs and it crashed to green screen in less than a half hour. So, re-adding them stopped that from happening.
... amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x410 amdgpu.tmz=0 amdgpu.gpu_recovery=1 amdgpu.sg_display=0 ...
And then the cursor thing is fixed <?!> by adding
KWIN_FORCE_SW_CURSOR=1
Currently this is what is set:
`cat /proc/$(pidof kwin_wayland)/environ | tr '\0' '\n' | grep KWIN` :
KWIN_DRM_NO_AMS=1
KWIN_DRM_NO_DIRECT_SCANOUT=1
KWIN_FORCE_SW_CURSOR=1
From a user experience point of view I don't see any difference with that software cursor setting.
There's another wrinkle to this that might be a factor but I can't really test around it currently. This is a multi-head machine and one screen is connected via HDMI and one is DP.
Perhaps this wouldn't be a problem if both screens were connected via the same type of connector.
Both screens are set to the same refresh frequency. But, in the display control app one reads back at 60.00 Hz while the other is 60.000 Hz. Minor thing right? But in trying to make this work I've seen references to AMD GPU weirdness in multi-head configurations where the refresh rates were different between screens. Red herring perhaps.
Anyway, don't know if there are (or will be) any people trying to make a RX 5800 XT GPU behave under Linux but this seems to be what worked for me and my dual head setup. I'll update if anything changes.
#Linux #AMD #AMDGPU #KDE #KDEPlasma #Plasma #AlpineLinux #kwin #Wayland
Nice mouse cursor ya got there... be a shame if something happ....
shazbot!
Back at testing whether my RDNA3 card (7800 XT) will behave itself on this system.
I'm running kernel 7.1.4 (Alpine linux-stable) so supposedly there are a bunch of fixes since 6.19 -> 7.0 -> 7.1.x.
We'll see. Last hour has been solid. No screen artifacts or horizontal aberrations on terminal or web browser windows.
When it did occasionally work adequately before it would hard crash to a green screen on one of the monitors after about 24 hours or so. Didn't matter what kernel parameters I put on the kernel cmd line.
It's kind of weird as I've been running this card in a different system (same OS, different gen CPU/mobo) successfully but it is a single head system so maybe that's the difference. Some combinations of cobbled together junk just don't work in the PC space.
Fingers crossed.
#Linux #AMD #amdgpu #RDNA3 #AlpineLinux
Hm, honest Linux question because I honestly don't know any better...
I've heard that there are (at least) two types of distros / releases: Rolling Release and Standard Release.
And, as far as I know, Arch (and those that are based on Arch) are the rolling type. Rolling was for faster updates, if I remember correctly?
Now, what I've heard is that if you don't update your rolling release somewhat regularly, then you will get your OS fucked after waiting too long. (Meaning you can't easily update anymore.)
Is that actually (still) true?
The best time to learn a new Linux tool is when nothing is on fire.
Pick one command you use often and go one level deeper this week.
Already use grep? Try grep -r, grep -v, grep -E.
Already use find? Add -exec to actually do something with the results.
Already use systemctl? Try systemctl list-dependencies.
You don't need a course. You need 20 minutes and a test machine. man is still the best documentation that exists.
After applying all recommendations from the article it still doesn't work, but I have found one setting different in my system than on every doc/article I found
XDG_DESKTOP_PORTAL is "sway:wlroots" in mine while everyone talks about "sway" value.
Could it be the reason?
I still didn't found where is set or how I can overwrite it.
River is a Wayland compositor written in Zig that defines a window manager protocol so that, like with X11, write your own window management software. As with X11, the protocol is language-agnostic, so you can define your window manager using any programming language at all.
I have been gradually becoming more interested in Zig as a potential replacement for C in systems programming. Rust is another interesting potential replacement.
#tech #software #Zig #ZigLang #Linux #Wayland #WindowManager #WaylandCompositor #RiverCompositor #UnixPorn
At this week's GUADEC conference in the city of A Coruña, Spain, director of the GNOME foundation Cassidy James Blaede spoke on the future of #Flathub . That future, according to the presentation, involves replacing Flathub's development on #GitHub with a #Forgejo instance.
newinlinux.com/flathub-itself-…
#OpenSource #Linux
In a GUADEC presentation about Flathub, a transition to a Forgejo instance gets mentioned and is met with applause.Jordan Gloor (New In Linux)
I built a device to measure end-to-end input latency, then used it to find out what actually moves the needle.Marco Nett
Fuck me, I'm so tired. I'm so damn tired.
"Often graphic tablets have a touch strip or ring, but in Wayland, there is no way to assign shortcuts to touch rings. Changing touch ring "mode" - including switching from one set of shortcuts to another - is unsupported as well."
I guess I'll relegate this account into my solutions dump, like a scratch paper, so uhh starting now, I've found that sometimes the "portal" for selecting a window for screen sharing doesn't pop up on KDE sometimes when I'm using OBS
Running "systemctl --user restart pipewire.socket xdg-desktop-portal.service" fixes it. I use Arch, btw.
I might investigate this problem when it pops up again cos it happens randomly...
I just realized after I woke up from my 3rd long sleep that I really can't delete this social media cos I've bookmarked some actual helpful linux tricks I found here on Mastodon and I've posted my solutions to strange linux problems I've encountered over the past 2 years, lol.
Well, my image might be tarnished now but underneath all of this, there's actual treasure in my account, just bookmarked in case I or somebody encounters a problem.
Made a blog post sharing useful settings for making pixel art in Krita.
pixelglade.net.au/blog/posts/2…
#pixelart #ドット絵 #krita #FOSS #linux #illustration #indieweb #blog #blogging #smallweb #rss
CalyxOS is back
lwn.net/Articles/1081038/ #LWN #Linux #Android
In August 2025, the CalyxOS privacy-focused Android distribution announced that it was pausing [...]LWN.net
哇靠！所有人，起床！！！！
出大事了：Linux Kernel官網疑似出現故障 所有公開發佈的核心和存檔均被刪除
Linux Kernel 官網或後端伺服器疑似出現某種故障，目前官網及託管核心安裝包的所有目錄都已經被刪除，而下游鏡像站如果從上游同步則當前也可能變成 HTTP 404 狀態，簡而言之目前已經沒有官方管道可以下載最新版核心或存檔核心版本，截至本文發佈時核心尚未恢復下載。
landian.news/archives/113781.h…
#网站应用 出大事了！Linux Kernel 官网疑似出现故障，所有公开发布的内核和存档均被删除，下游同步的镜像站目前也都删除了内…山外的鸭子哥 (蓝点网)
I have replaced Xlibre on Devuan, and I had an impressive performance boost! Luanti is working at par of Freebsd port, still with some gap in some circumstances.
I used X11 also on FreeBSD and luanti, and the gap I think is tackled on the Kernel. I should put Xlibre also on Freebsd and check how performs.
Also finally I don't perceive microstruttering anymore.
Xlibre is not hot air, no matter what have you heard.
#linux #freebsd #luanti #pcgaming #minecraft #FOSS #videogame #videogames #xlibre
At Opera we built, IMHO, the best browser engine, Presto. It was built from scratch. It aced all the tests. It was lean and fast and could run on just about any hardware. It could even run on hardware where there was not enough memory to keep a full web page in memory, which is how it was able to run on things like mobile phones, game consoles, such as the Nintendo DS and Wii, and TVs. We even made it run effectively on servers, which is how we made Opera Mini. We did that with a relatively small team. It had grown to 100 by the time I left and needed to keep growing by about 10% pr year, at my estimate.
After I left, the idiots running Opera at that time decided to kill Presto and go for Webkit and Chromium. Microsoft made the same move.
When we founded @Vivaldi , we knew that building a browser from scratch is not trivial and we had to do the same as Apple, Google and Microsoft and build on available source. We choose the best one available to us.
We know how to build a browser. Likely better than most as we have been doing this for more than 30 years.
A strong Vivaldi can and will influence the Web in a positive way, like we did with Opera. If you want a better Web, supporting Vivaldi is one of the best ways to achieve that.
vivaldi.com/blog/how-can-a-dug…
#Windows #Macos #Linux #Technology #BigTech #Vivaldi
At Vivaldi we believe that the web is one of humanity’s greatest inventions: open to everyone, built for exploration and expression. But the feeling you get being online these days doesn’t necessarily…André Skjeggestad (Vivaldi Browser)
One of the special functions we have in @Vivaldi is single key keyboard shortcuts. Off by default, this allows you to bind just about any key to a function. My personal favorites are Z and X for going back and forth in history and 9 and 0 to zoom.
Why we have it? It is all about speed of operation and accessibility.
We had this in Opera as well. I think I even implemented the first version myself.
We got great feedback from users that used this extensively, including users using this for accessibility.
#Windows #Macos #Linux #Computer #Technology
help.vivaldi.com/desktop/short…
Improve the efficiency of your browsing by trying out Single Key Shortcuts. Learn about theme here!Tony is helping (Vivaldi Browser Help)
We at @Vivaldi are different from most other companies. We are a Icelandic-Norwegian company. We host our servers in Iceland. We have no external investors.
I am lucky enough to work with some really wonderful people, including @brucelawson who has made this video that I hope you enjoy!
#Vivaldi #Technology #Windows #Macos #Linux #Android #IOS #Browser
youtube.com/watch?v=1r9eJv2J7W…
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.Bruce Lawson (YouTube)
The current version of #KDE on my machine (6.7) seems to be very buggy in terms of what happens when I try to add extra monitor(s) in the #Wayland version, whether it’s via #HDMI or #USB with #Displaylink. The screens go haywire and I can even get a terminal open. I’ve had to revert back to the #X11 version just as I’d got used to Wayland. I’m no fanboy of Wayland or X11 but when such a major breaking of the system happens, it forces my hand. Not good at all.
19 June 1984.
Bob Scheifler announces the first release of the X Window System:
"I stole a fair amount of code from W ... and called it X."
Forty-two years later, I'm still running X11 daily on Slackware.
Happy Birthday, X.
Source: talisman.org/x-debut.shtml
Shot in the dark...
Anyone else having a terrible time with the AMD 7800 XT under Linux/Wayland?
Were you able to tame it?
Share your kernel params?
I've gotten no joy with various combo's and permu's of "amdgpu.tmz=0 amdgpu.sg_display=0 amdgpu.gfx_off=0 amdgpu.runpm=0 amdgpu.gpu_recovery=1 amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x10 iommu=soft"
😵💫
#Ubuntu Touch OTA 2.0 Promises Support for the Nothing Phone and Device Notches, Beta Out Now 9to5linux.com/ubuntu-touch-ota…
Here's to 14 years of serving Penguin-related content. 🥂 🐧
Oops, I mean Linux and open source. 🤧
Asahi Linux warns users not to upgrade to macOS 27 beta
lwn.net/Articles/1077209/ #LWN #Linux
The Asahi Linux project, which brings Linux support to Apple Arm-based Macs, has warned its use [...]LWN.net
Yes, a lot of work, but something that the likes of #debian could do over a couple of full releases (circa 4 years).
It would require things like the metadata of the app to include the necessary information to automate this, a bit like the proposed PURL - see phoronix.com/news/Fedora-45-Co…
For me, we are coming to a crunch point in #linux. Someone needs to decide if they want to continue with #systemd or move to something less commercially backed, someone needs to decide about #AI slop, someone needs to decide about enforced #wayland and enforced #pipewire (although the latter is not so bad).
We're at a crossroads, and if #linux is to continue to be a truly open platform, some things may need to change or fork, such that end users can have confidence that they're installing true open source software with little to no commercial interests being served, whilst protecting privacy etc.
Perhaps this is where the likes of #antix or #devuan can take up the mantle and improve their offering just a little to take it to the next logical step.
One of the Fedora 45 change proposals under consideration at the moment is making adding PURL 'Package-URL' to Fedora's package metadata for simplifying the mapping between upstream projects and Fedora packages.www.phoronix.com
My Accessibility Stack and the future on Wayland
uutils coreutils 0.9.0 is out!
This release brings, once more, GNU compatibility fixes, performance improvements, platform support enhancements, and continued progress toward a fully Rust-powered coreutils implementation.
A huge thanks to all contributors who helped make this release happen. ❤️
Release notes: github.com/uutils/coreutils/re…
Security advisories: github.com/uutils/coreutils/se… for the previous releases!
#RustLang #Linux #OpenSource #coreutils
Rust Coreutils 0.9.0 Release: We are excited to announce the release of Rust Coreutils 0.9.0 - a release focused on safety and security. This cycle was shaped by a third-party security audit, drivi...GitHub
This morning, the background wallpaper on my desktop was changed on my Apple MacBook Pro. All by itself.
After I download a video to an external HD, I notice it is still working. It's exchanging information. With whom?
I can't stand Apple and Windows. #Linux
We live in the worst time where real people ask real questions in forums like stackexchange and nobody bothers to write an answer anymore, because it is so much easier to ask AI.
askubuntu.com/questions/154037…
While AI (Mistral) just hallucinated that there is an "advanced tab" in the KDE settings, where you can set the layout per device with a maximum of four keyboards.
Spoiler: there is no such thing.
#AI #kde #linux #Wayland #keyboard
How can we connect two physical keyboards to our computer and have two different layouts for each? The accepted answer for this 11 year old question will apparently not work for Wayland. When I runAsk Ubuntu
Great #wayland is forcing me to buy a new keyboard as there's no support for custom shortcuts any more, and hasn't been for years under it, so unlikely to suddenly get sorted...
Canonical has announced a new tool that lets developers quickly create reproducible isolated dev environments made from SDKs and defined by a YAML.
Using unprivileged LXD system containers with their own kernel and a host resource access system inspired by snapd, they company say they'll even allow agentic tools to run in a 'harmless' way.
More details ⤵
omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/05/canoni…
Canonical has released Workshop, a new open-source tool to create reproducible development environments with a single command. Using YAML files, the sameJoey Sneddon (OMG! Ubuntu)
My current desktop.
Devuan GNU/Linux 6, OpenRC, XLibre and XFCE4. Nothing particularly modern or flashy, but stable, light and made to my liking.
#Linux #Devuan #OpenRC #Xlibre #XFCE #FOSS #OpenSource #DesktopScreenshot #FreeSoftware #Screenshots
