Linux

Rusticl as a modern OpenCL implementation for Mesa Gallium3D drivers has turned out remarkably well. Rusticl performance has evolved quite well for this Rust-based OpenCL driver and it continues tacking on new features / OpenCL extensions as well as working gracefully with more Mesa drivers. Rusticl lead developer Karol Herbst presented on some of the recent accomplishments for this driver back at XDC2025.

At the X.Org Developers Conference in Vienna, Karol Herbst of Red Hat presented on some of the milestones achieved this year for this driver that has worked out much better than the former Mesa "Clover" OpenCL driver. A lot has happened in the past number of months for Rusticl from Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) finally getting into place, SPIR-V 1.6 features, async and parallel program compilation, and supporting a wide variety of additional OpenCL extensions.

The team behind vkd3d has announced the release of version 1.18. Developed and maintained by the Wine project, it’s an open-source library that translates Microsoft’s Direct3D graphics calls to Vulkan, thus allowing Windows applications and games that use Direct3D 12 to run on systems where only Vulkan is available.

One highlight is the addition of CreateCommandList1() from the ID3D12Device4 interface, extending coverage of newer D3D12 features used by modern Windows titles.

The shader compiler sees the biggest set of changes. vkd3d 1.18 improves HLSL handling by performing more constant folding, simplifying math expressions, and flattening if/else branches when older shader models require it. Plus, it also expands support for older Shader Model 1–3 code, adds StructuredBuffer loads, and implements several widely used HLSL intrinsics.

A set of Linux kernel patches posted back in October for rewriting the kernel's memory-mapped concurrency ID code for some nice performance wins looks like it will land for Linux 6.19. This is the code that prominent Intel engineer Thomas Gleixner found to yield up to an 18% improvement for the PostgreSQL database. My testing of this "mm/cid" code has also shown some nice performance wins too.

Intel Fellow Thomas Gleixner overhauled the CID management code after finding the existing complex code introduced significant overhead into the kernel scheduler's hot code paths. This new code is simpler and lower-overhead.

As per FSF only these linux distributions are 100% free:

Dragora
Dyne
Guix
Hyperbola
Parabola
PureOS
Trisquel
Ututo
libreCMC
ProteanOS

Do you agree or not?

I see a lot of people that want to switch from windows to a linux distro or a open os. But from what i see they tend to migrate to another black boxed/closed os.

What is a trully free os that doesnt included any closed code/binary blobs/closed drivers etc.

Just 100% free open code, no traps.

What are the options and what should one go with if they want fully free os that rejects any closed code?

OQB @pie@piefed.social

"If you ask me, Microsoft has been one of the biggest driving forces behind Linux adoption in recent years. The way they've been handling Windows, with its forced updates, aggressive telemetry, and questionable AI features, has sent more people to Linux than any marketing campaign ever could. And they are at it again with a new AI feature that could be tricked into installing malware on your system. ... Microsoft admits that features like Copilot Actions introduce "novel security risks." They warn about cross-prompt injection (XPIA), where malicious content in documents or UI elements can override the AI's instructions. ..."

Windows is getting worse, while gaming on Linux is getting better. I’m gonna move my desktop to CachyOS. Wish me luck.

Sent out today was likely the last batch of HID subsystem fixes ahead of the Linux 6.18 kernel releasing as stable around the end of the month. With it are some new device-specific quirks for fixing hardware support for a mouse and keyboard.

The ELECOM M-XT3URBK as a wired trackball mouse with six programmable buttons should see all the buttons now working under Linux. This ~$40 USD mouse should be playing nicely with Linux 6.18.

Linux hardware vendor Slimbook announced today the launch of the KDE Slimbook VII laptop to celebrate 8 years of collaboration with the KDE project in creating the best Plasma-powered Linux notebooks.

Designed for KDE Plasma users and optimized for the Linux ecosystem, the KDE Slimbook VII laptop features a premium aluminum chassis in a sophisticated slate-blue color, an AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 processor with integrated AMD Radeon 880M graphics, up to 128 GB DDR5 RAM, and up to 8 TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD storage.

The KDE Slimbook VII Linux laptop also features a 16-inch WQXGA display with 2560×1600 resolution, 100% sRGB, 16:10 aspect ratio, 400 nits brightness, and 165 Hz refresh rate, a multi-language backlit keyboard, and a cooling system with dual fans and dedicated keys to switch between power modes.

Xen 4.21 is out today as the newest feature release for this open-source hypervisor backed by AMD, Arm, AWS, and other organizations. Plus with Xen's use within automotive environments, Ford and Honda too.

Xen 4.21 ships with formally supporting the qemu-xen device models inside a Linux stub domain, which is a win for the likes of QubesOS.

For those using Xen on AMD hardware, there is now AMD CPU driver support for ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) for better power efficiency on Zen 3 and newer EPYC/Ryzen systems.

Xen also now supports Resizable BARs (ReBAR) for PVH Dom0 for exposing larger memory regions and better I/O efficiency. Xen logo

Xen 4.21 also brings a new PDX compression algorithm for lowering the hypervisor memory footprint. Xen 4.21 also brings various improvements to the Arm and RISC-V CPU support.

More details on today's Xen 4.21 release via the Linux Foundation press release and XenProject.org.

You can find all of these videos as written articles, plus some extra content, at https://thelibre.news/

In mid-October, the Xubuntu download site was compromised and had directed users to a malicious zip file instead of the Torrent file that users expected. Elizabeth K. Joseph has published a postmortem of the incident, along with plans to avoid such a breach in the future:

To be perfectly clear: this only impacted our website, and the torrent links provided there.

If you downloaded or opened a file named "Xubuntu-Safe-Download.zip" from the Xubuntu downloads page during this period, you should assume it was malicious. We strongly recommend scanning your computer with a trusted antivirus or anti-malware solution and deleting the file immediately.

Nothing on cdimages.ubuntu.com or any of the other official Ubuntu repositories was impacted, and our mirrors remained safe as long as they were also mirroring from official resources.

None of the build systems, packages, or other components of Xubuntu itself were impacted.

Linux and Git inventor Linus Torvalds discussed AI in software development in an interview earlier this month, describing himself as "fairly positive" about vibe coding, but as a way into computing, not for production coding where it would likely be horrible to maintain.

Torvalds was interviewed by Dirk Hohndel, head of open source at Verizon, at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit in Seoul, South Korea, earlier this month.

Torvalds is technical lead and maintainer of the Linux kernel, but said that "for the last almost 20 years, I've not been a programmer." As for Git, which he invented, "I really just look at it from the side."

Systemd 259 is just around the corner, and the recently released RC1 gives us a clear look at what to expect in the final version of this Linux’s most widely used init system and service manager.

One of the most significant steps is the final deprecation of System V init script support. The SysV generators, rc-local generator, and sysv-install helpers are all marked for removal in the next 260 version, with maintainers urging distributions and software authors to provide native unit files.

A notable behavioral change appears in the default journal configuration. Systemd now defaults to persistent storage rather than switching automatically based on the presence of /var/log/journal.

Right, so Racknerd doesn't offer Arch image:

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As for custom ISO installers, that requires opening a ticket with tech support, giving them a link to the ISO, and asking them to mount it.
Well, I am not doing all that.

So, there's also this outdated (will become important later) "rescue environment":

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Linux Kernel 4.x is Debian 9 and 3.x is Debian 8. I don't know why they couldn't just say that.

So, the recovery environment has some RAM (but seems to be less than the VPS), and some storage (around 1GiB). The free storage is around 350MiB.
The recovery environment can be accessed over SSH. OpenSSH 1:6.7p1-5+deb8u4, on that older thing, if someone is curious. Modern OpenSSH client just complains about old key exchange (quantum-resistance), but connects.

Welp, Arch Linux bootstrap is 138MiB compressed, so let's go.
But not so quickly.
There's no wget, nor curl. So let's install them.
Well, apt no longer works. Old minimal environment without package installer. Cool.
I found some trick for HTTP on stackexchange using telnet. No telnet.
No lynx either.
So I downloaded it onto my PC. I first got the idea of unpacking it directly from different server, but yeah, right, no sshfs. That would have been useful for directly dd-ing images.
So I try to use rsync. Of course there's no rsync. scp saves the day.
Let's unpack the bootstrap now, shall we? We shall not, there's no zstd to decompress the archive.
The bootstrap won't fit uncompressed, and anyway, I am uploading over mobile data.
LET'S FUCKING GO! Gzip is installed.
I created a temporary 1.5GiB partition for the bootstrap, this later becomes swap space. And then I can more or less follow installation with Arch Wiki. There's also this wiki page, but it's mostly just regular Arch Install.

---

That's a very healthy memory usage. RAM nearly full when something else is running, swap typically above half. But their RAID-10 SSD setup seems to be doing well for that.
Speedtest, or really anything is mostly limited by that single virtual core.
I don't know what their shutdown, reboot, change root password, and reconfigure networking would do or screw up in this case. I haven't tried them yet.
The VNC cuts out with Cloudflare captcha every so often, by the way.

As Snowden told us, video and audio recording capabilities of your devices are NSA spying vectors. OSS/Linux is a safeguard against such capabilities. The massive datacenter investments in US will be used to classify us all into a patriotic (for Israel)/Oligarchist social credit score, and every mega tech company can increase profits through NSA cooperation, and are legally obligated to cooperate with all government orders.

Speech to text and speech automation are useful tech, though always listening state sponsored terrorists is a non-NSA targeted path for sweeping future social credit classifications of your past life.

Some small LLMs that can be used for speech to text: https://modal.com/blog/open-source-stt

Just wondering what's out there other than LibAdwaita/LibAdapta and Kirigami for creating GUIs which would work on small screens too.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/53280903

This won't be a post for people that already have dedicated server hardware, unless they find something theyd like to run off an android phone specifically.

But anyways, more people than ever have and old spare, but relatively powerful, android phone laying about. I'm talking 2-4+ gb of ram and 32gb+ of storage. Usually these devices end up in a drawer, but in an age of dystopian tracking and company overreach, such a device can be an extremely useful and low power draw tool that can improve your security and experience on the web. And it also has its own battery to boot lol.

If you're wanting to do something like this you should definitely consider finding a custom android rom with more care for security and you will need to root your device. But with a rooted device you then get access to a range of tools. You will want to install magisk through the bootloader as well as termux and termux boot from within fdroid (its important you get the two of them from the same source).

USES/SERVICES With all of these theres now a few options that I can confirm all work on android armv8 devices.

0: To set up most of these services to boot on launch you can either use magisk boot scripts in /data/adb/service.d/ iirc, or you can use termuxboot scripts placed in /data/data/com.termux/files/home/.termux/boot/

1: You can run an instance of Adguard Home on your network that will have enough resources to handle quite heavy lists. You will need to import ssl certificates to properly get it working but otherwise the armv8 binary works well. Adguard home can then be set as your network's dns address. Adguard home has lists for threat protection, to malware, to ads etc.

2: Adguard is good for security but you can experience even less tracking and control by pairing it with an instance of Unbound dnsrunning on the same device. Depending on storage you can store larger dns caches which will stop dns providers from tracking every dns lookup you do.

3: This one is more optional dependent on the person but i use and love it. Searxng is a privacy focused metasearch engine that can aggregate a bunch of data from tons of sources, depending on which sources you enable. It can be used to replace your current search engine such as duckduckgo and can gather anything from torrents and apks, to music, videos and pictures, and my favourite which is its equivalent to google scholar. All in one search engine. Its recommended to disabled certain sources for speed and I would recommend disabling brave search as a source for example because they're scummy. For Searxng it will be required to create a virtual environment with the correct python dependencies and I've had to run it through termux rather than the other two which can run even through an adb shell.

4: Memos is a nice note taking webapp and its my personal choice to use but other similar calender or note apps are a good option if you wanna self host something like that. Can be ran through an adb shell or magisk boot script.

5: Others things you wanna try!!! An android phone is just a Linux computer and if theres services you've wanted a pi to run or a server in general then theres a pretty good chance you can get it running on your power efficient android phone thats just already laying around!! Heres some more ideas ive planned to try but not gotten to yet/haven't finished: -Samba drive to sync and back up your boot drive -Aur build server to pre compile different large packages to be installed to my pc without building them on the computer itself -openvpn proxy to run downloads through a protonvpn account for download managers that dont support password authentication (a surprising amount of them tbh) -Invidious instance, a youtube frontend that doesn't count as actual page views. This allows you to boycott YouTube in regards to data they can show advertisers, while still allowing you to privately subscribe and watch creators you like. It also keeps you from being tracked by your YouTube account while giving you access to better/more consistent resolution tools as well as automatically removed ads. Youtube sponsorblock extensions can also be set up to work with invidious so you don't lose much at all switching.

Instead YouTube gives me literally nothing but AI spam. :/

I scrolled down a bit more and got this: https://i.postimg.cc/fJcPhG45/Screenshot-20251118-150802.png

Scrolled down some more and this: https://i.postimg.cc/v1khnhRp/Screenshot-20251118-151325.png

I kept scrolling until I ran out of relevant results. Not a single video was legit. I don't think I've ever seen so much AI slop in one search term and by the gods there is a lot of crap on YouTube.

Anyone have a good comparison video? I'm just wanting a decent comparison of Actual, Firefly III and possibly HomeBank. Feel free to also give me your 2 cents on whatever you use :)

OQB @Thorned_Rose@sh.itjust.works

Following OpenZFS 2.4-rc3 from nearly one month ago is now a fourth release candidate for the upcoming OpenZFS 2.4. A few more features and improvements have been squeezed into this release in nearing the stable milestone.

There is now support for default user/group/project quotas including object quotas, support in the Direct IO mode to fallback to lightweight uncached IO when dealing with unaligned writes (wiring O_DIRECT also to Uncached I/O), unified allocation throttling as a new means to reduce vdev fragmentation, and better encryption performance when using AVX2 for AES-GCM. The AVX2 implementation of AES-GCM is being adopted from BoringSSL to help the performance on AMD Zen 3 and similar CPUs for up to an 80% speed-up reported.

The Budgie desktop developers released today the first Developer Preview of the upcoming and highly anticipated Budgie 10.10 desktop environment, which will only work on Wayland systems.

Work on Budgie 10.10 kicked off more than a year ago, and many of Budgie’s components have already been ported to Wayland. Expected next year, Budgie 10.10 aims to be the first release of this modern desktop environment to be Wayland-only, which means that it won’t support X11 sessions.

Ryan Finnie announced today the release and general availability of Finnix 251 as the latest stable version of this Debian-based live GNU/Linux distribution for sysadmins.

Coming almost eight months after Finnix 250, the Finnix 251 release bumps the kernel from the long-term supported Linux 6.12 LTS to Linux 6.16 to provide users with better hardware support on newer systems when running Finnix from a USB flash drive.

Finnix 251 is the first release to distribute official OCI container images, which incorporate the same packages as the ISO image. The official Finnix container image can be launched from Podman, Docker, Kubernetes, and similar container management tools. Here’s an example: