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https://archive.ph/2KJDu

Katie Wilson, who narrowly defeated the incumbent, Bruce Harrell, emerged from the city’s left-wing activist class and brings with her little experience in governing.

In a state without an income tax, the mayor-elect has promised to pursue what she calls “progressive” new sources of revenue to pay for housing and other basic services, including potential local taxes on capital gains, digital advertising and buildings purposely left vacant. She has pledged to push a $1 billion bond to build more homes and new protections for renters, who make up 56 percent of the city.

“There was a time when we saw Seattle as kind of a laboratory for progressive policy,” Ms. Wilson said in an interview this fall. “And that time’s not now anymore. But why can’t it be?”

The EROFS read-only file-system started by Huawei and now maintained by a growing number of contributors continues attracting even more interest. EROFS has exhibited much potential for mobile devices as well as container use-cases while proving itself to be quite robust since its mainlining back in 2019.

Merged today as part of the EROFS fixes for Linux 6.18 kernel ahead of this weekend's Linux 6.18-rc6 is adding another EROFS code reviewer.

I got fed up with spending weekends redoing themes, fixing package breakage, and hunting lost dotfiles whenever I swapped laptops. If you care about uptime and reproducibility more than distro-faith, stop treating your desktop like an altar and treat it like infrastructure: encrypt the disk, snapshot the root, manage dotfiles as code, and back up everything that matters. Do that and a dead SSD or a new laptop becomes a 30-minute restore, not a week-long grief spiral.

Do this in order: 1) Install with LUKS full-disk encryption and Btrfs subvolumes for @ and @home so snaps are atomic. 2) Enable automatic snapshots with Timeshift or snapper. 3) Export your package lists: Debian/Ubuntu: dpkg --get-selections > packages.txt; Arch: pacman -Qqe > pkglist.txt; also flatpak list --app > flatpaks.txt. 4) Put your dotfiles under version control and manage them with chezmoi or GNU Stow. 5) Use Flatpak for GUI apps, containerized toolchains (podman) for dev environments, and keep only system-critical packages in the distro manager. 6) Back up with Borg: borg init --encryption=repokey /path/to/repo ; borg create repo::$(date +%F) /home /etc --stats ; borg prune --keep-daily=7 --keep-weekly=4 --keep-monthly=6. 7) Keep a small, bootable USB with the exact kernel/tools you use so you can unlock LUKS and mount Btrfs snapshots. 8) Test restores quarterly: restore a snapshot to a spare partition and boot it. Do that for a year and tell me reinstalling is fun again.

Yes, it takes a few hours up front, but imagine swapping a motherboard or recovering from ransomware and having a known-good snapshot plus a package list and borg repo waiting. Stops the doomscrolling and gets you back to actually using Linux.

OC by @Bagel@lemmings.world

I was sick of reinstalling after every experiment, so I built a desktop that survives distro hopping, dumb package upgrades and the occasional X11/Wayland meltdown. The trick is simple: encrypted LUKS root, Btrfs subvolumes with aggressive zstd compression and snapshotting, plus borg backups mirrored offsite with rclone. I can break everything and be back to a working system in 10 minutes.

Quick recipe you can follow (NVMe primary, small EFI, LUKS encrypted root):

• Partition: EFI 512M, root as LUKS. Cryptsetup and create Btrfs inside the LUKS container: cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/nvme0n1p2; cryptsetup open /dev/nvme0n1p2 cryptroot; mkfs.btrfs -f /dev/mapper/cryptroot
• Create subvolumes: mount /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt; btrfs subvolume create /mnt/@; btrfs subvolume create /mnt/@home; umount /mnt
• Mount for install: mount -o subvol=@,noatime,compress=zstd:15,space_cache=v2,ssd /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt; mkdir -p /mnt/home; mount -o subvol=@home,compress=zstd:15 /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt/home
• Install your distro onto /mnt normally, put /boot or EFI on the unencrypted partition if your distro needs it.

Make snapshots and backups part of the routine:

• Local snapshots: use Timeshift (GUI) or snapper for automatic pre/post package snapshots. Snapper is great for root snapshots on Btrfs.
• Offsite backups: borg init --encryption=repokey-blake2 /path/to/repo; borg create --stats /path/to/repo::'{now:%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M}' /home /etc; borg prune --keep-daily=7 --keep-weekly=4 --keep-monthly=6. Mirror the borg repo to cloud with rclone or an inexpensive S3/backblaze bucket.

How to recover when you inevitably mess up:

1. Boot a live USB, open the LUKS container with cryptsetup open /dev/nvme0n1p2 cryptroot.
2. Mount the Btrfs and list snapshots: btrfs subvolume list -s /mnt.
3. Make the snapshot the default root with btrfs subvolume set-default /mnt and reboot.

Hardware notes: buy a second NVMe or a small external SSD for local borg archives and cold snapshots. Avoid weird consumer RAID features on laptops and get a wifi card known to have mainline driver support. This setup saved my butt more than once when a kernel update nuked my X11 config or when I wanted to try a new distro without grief.

If you want, I can post a ready-to-run install script for Ubuntu/Arch with these exact commands and a sample snapper config. Stop treating your root filesystem like a fragile snowflake and start building resilience.

OC by @Bagel@lemmings.world

Valve released Proton 10.0-3, the latest main stable version of the compatibility layer to run Windows games on Linux / SteamOS machines like Steam Deck. And now the Steam Machine and Steam Frame too of course whenever they arrive sometime in 2026.

The secret sauce that makes Linux gaming so amazing now, enabling tens of thousands of games to run well, just not those with certain types of anti-cheat which is a continuing problem. It's been a long road to get here, with Proton 10 being in some form of Beta since April. But it's here now!

Back in early September we reported on a Linux hardware enablement leader planning to leave Red Hat. Hans de Goede has been a longtime contributor to improving Intel/AMD Linux desktop/laptop hardware support and in fact an x86 platform drivers subsystem maintainer. We now found out where this lead Linux x86 driver developer ended up: Qualcomm.

Hans de Goede during his 17 year tenure at Red Hat worked on improving the Intel web camera support in recent years, improving x86 tablet support with the mainline kernel, occasionally dabbling with the open-source graphics drivers, improving VirtualBox driver support, and countless other Intel/AMD Linux laptop improvements and various other kernel enhancements to benefit hardware support on Linux. A quick search shows 124 articles on Phoronix news articles where I've brought up Hans de Goede's contributions by name.

lightdm-kde-greeter is a KDE-themed greeter application for the lightdm display manager. At the beginning of September one of our community packagers asked us to review a D-Bus service contained in lightdm-kde-greeter for addition to openSUSE Tumbleweed.

In the course of the review we found a potential privilege escalation from the lightdm service user to root which is facilitated by this D-Bus service, among some other shortcomings in its implementation.

If you use Arch Linux, you’ve probably noticed that after a while, and especially after system updates, files with the .pacnew extension start showing up on your system. And since you’re reading this, that’s likely what brought you here: to figure out what these files are, why they appear, and what you’re supposed to do with them.

Well, you’ve come to the right place. In the lines below, I’ll try to explain everything clearly and straightforwardly. So, let’s start with the main question.

For those making use of the out-of-tree Bcachefs file-system driver, rolling out to the snapshot/nightly testing channel is the long-in-development "rebalance_v2" functionality now known as the "bcachefs_metadata_version_reconcile" feature.

The bcachefs_metadata_version_reconcile feature is a major step forward to the file-system's rebalance code path. Kent Overstreet explained in a post today announcing its snapshot/nightly state:

"Previously, rebalance only handled the target and compression options. Now, all io path options are handled: replicas, checksum type, erasure coding.

Extents are checked for consistency with the options configured: if it doesn't match (and it wasn't because of an option change or device change), it's flagged as an error, and repaired.

Reconcile now reacts to device state changes: changing the durability setting will cause extent replication level to be adjusted accordingly, and devices will automatically have data evacuated when marked as failed.

Degraded data (for any reason) will be rereplicated automatically.

Degraded data is now always reported as degraded in 'bcachefs fs usage' output.

Reconcile now handles metadata, not just user data."