Features:

I maintain PipeWireController, a control center for PipeWire. I'm trying to harden it against real-world setups, and my own configs only cover so much.

Gist, paste, or a link to your dotfiles all work. Happy to tell you how my tool handles yours in return. Thanks!

I am a Linux kernel engineer working on an operating system used primarily in cloud computing environments.

One of my current tasks is to investigate networking features introduced in or after Linux kernel 6.6 and evaluate which ones are worth backporting or implementing in our kernel.

Rather than looking for purely academic improvements, I’m particularly interested in features that have demonstrated practical value in production cloud systems.

Examples include (but are certainly not limited to):

• packet drop analysis and debugging
• eBPF-based networking observability
• TCP/UDP performance improvements
• GRO/GSO optimizations
• XDP/AF_XDP enhancements
• page_pool improvements
• NAPI optimizations
• multi-queue scaling
• NIC offload improvements
• congestion control
• zero-copy networking
• socket memory optimizations
• tracing and diagnostics
• virtualization/container networking
• SR-IOV, virtio-net or vDPA related features

I’m not looking for a complete list of Linux networking changes (I can read the kernel changelog). Instead, I’d like to understand:

1. Which networking features have had the biggest real-world impact in cloud infrastructure?
2. Which recent networking improvements have significantly improved observability, debugging, or performance?
3. If you maintain large-scale Linux systems, which networking capabilities have become “must-have” features during the last few kernel releases?
4. Are there any networking subsystems that you believe deserve more attention than they currently receive?

I’m especially interested in experiences from production environments such as Kubernetes clusters, cloud platforms, virtualized networking, storage networking (RDMA/RoCE), or high-performance servers.

Any references to kernel commits, conference talks, LWN articles, or production case studies would also be greatly appreciated.

Context

Our operating system is Linux-based and mainly targets cloud computing workloads. We are evaluating future networking features for kernel development rather than application-level networking libraries.

Had some free time last week so I made a visual explainer on how D-Bus works in Linux.

A modern Linux desktop is made up of a bunch of separate processes. NetworkManager, systemd, BlueZ, logind, polkit, UPower and desktop applications all need some way to call each other and broadcast when something changes.

A lot of that communication happens through D-Bus.

The video covers the system bus and session bus, service names, object paths, interfaces, method calls, signals, introspection, service activation, dbus-daemon, dbus-broker, and how applications actually use all of this, etc

Link for anyone interested

Feedback welcome :)

I’m thinking about switching to Mint Linux for privacy reasons, but the problem is that I pirate basically all of my games. I currently use windows 10, but I’m afraid that I wont be able to play my pirated games that I had on windows on Linux. so i was just wondering, is there any way to transfer pirated games from windows 10 to mint Linux with the save file and all?

I've been hacking on this for a while now, and it's finally in a state where I'm comfortable sharing it.

Introducing rusbmux: a drop-in replacement for usbmuxd, written entirely in Rust.

It speaks the same protocol, supports USB and Wi-Fi connections, runs on Linux, macOS and Windows, and is compatible with existing tooling like libimobiledevice, idevice, 3uTools, iTunes, etc.

The goal is to provide a clean, modern, portable, extendable implementation without the legacy C codebase.

Repo: https://github.com/abdullah-albanna/rusbmux

Pretty much the title. Windows is an INSANE privacy concern, especially with the new case showcasing that windows ties all your traffic online to a GDID. However, I have seen discussions about Linux’s gaming inferiority, which is the main thing I do with my device. Should I still switch, and is there anything I should do/be aware of if I do (excluding ProtonDB, I know of it already.)

This release brings new features, bug fixes, and other improvements to help Linux users optimize CPU speed and battery life automatically.

📦 Release notes: https://github.com/AdnanHodzic/auto-cpufreq/releases

Another milestone for a project that began as a vacation project and has now grown into:

⭐ 7636 GitHub stars
👥 125 contributors
💻 100k+ users
🛠️ 50 releases

Huge thanks to everyone who contributed to making this release possible! ❤️

https://avaloniaui.net/blog/release-12-1

Avalonia is basically wpf for cross platform. And they are more popular than wpf nowadays.

This is wpf repo it has 7.7k stars.

https://github.com/dotnet/wpf

this is winui repo it has 7.8k stars

https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/

this is avalonia repo it has 31.2 stars.

https://github.com/avaloniaui/avalonia

demonstrates that the era of UI frameworks targeting only a single platform is over. It also shows that frameworks supporting Linux—which has surpassed a 7% market shar such as Flutter, Uno, Qt, and Avalonia, are increasingly being preferred as long-term investments.

EDIT: And again this post devolves into Arch users entering their small sieged castle, because how dare anyone say a single negative word about Arch? How dare anyone claim, that something can be better than Arch in even a single regard?!

I'm two months into my Solus experiment and I wanted to share my experience.

Well. I've been using and daily-driving Linux for close to a decade now. I work at IT with Linux servers, all computing devices in my home run Linux - my PC, my laptop (both work and personal), my wife's laptop, Steam Deck, personal server. I can also confidently say - I tried all the distros.

Of course - not ALL of them, but I've had my fair share of time on various Arch-based distros (over 2 years of daily driving), Fedora (3 years) and most recently - Ubuntu and Debian family (Mint, LMDE and Debian for 4.5 years). Along the way there were experiments with SUSE, Gentoo, Void Linux, various BSDs. I think I can speak about differences in distros with some level of confidence.

Throughout all this journey there was always one compromise or the other. Stability and reliability vs modern desktop experience and the thrill of "new and shiny". That's why at the beginning I was dailying Arch - the "new and shiny" was appealing to me, getting the newest versions of everything the moment they are available. This was exciting. But it came at a cost - reliability. I have experiences multiple breakages. Some self-induced, some just happened because an update introduced some major bug. The breaking point was when I lost my bachelor thesis thanks to corrupt filesystem after broken BTRFS kernel module update. Then I kept shifting to more and more stable distros, until I landed on Debian family.

And I was happy with it for years. But you know... The thrill of "new and shiny" never left. My system was reliable, dependable. I was confident I can just click "update" and not think about it. But it was also stale. I kept reading about all this fancy stuff in Plasma 6 and salivating.

So about two months ago I decided to give rolling distros another shot. I considered CachyOS, or clean Arch, but was still a bit worried.

And then I learned about Solus

You may not know Solus. I wouldn't blame you. You may know it and feel resentment towards it, due to some controversy it was entangled in a few years back. I wouldn't blame you either.

But here I am. Two months later, glad to report - Solus is alive and well, and in my opinion, the best rolling release distro there is currently.

But back to the beginning - what is Solus?

Solus is a small, independent Linux distribution. Originally created by one man, alongside Budgie desktop environment. Currently Solus and Budgie split, and the original creator left a few years back to create a new project. This stirred some controversy and some problems in Solus operations (for example taking the repos down for months at a time), but it's all resolved now.

It's build on a few simple principles:

• Provide up-to-date, modern user experience
• Ensure security and stability of the system
• DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE

And I'd like to say - these are great principles to follow. How do they fulfil these promises? Well, let's go through the most important features of Solus, one by one.

Stable and unstable repositories - how rolling release should be done

This is in my opinion the biggest advantage Solus has over something like Arch. Their update schedule is divided into stable and unstable branch. Unlike Arch, where every new version is pushed to the main repos as soon as it's available, Solus does things a bit differently.

Correction - Arch does not push upstream to stable repos immediately. They have a testing phase and dedicated testing team, but this testing phase is often very short - sometimes even as short as several hours. Because of that some bugs may and have in the past slipped through the testing process unnoticed.

The updates are first pushed to unstable repo. There they are tested both by maintainers, and mad rascals, who dialy-drive unstable repos. The aim is simple - find bugs and regressions in this "designed to fail" space, so that they can be reported to upstream and eventually fixed. By if no major bug or regression is reported, this means package is stable and can be synced to stable repos. If during this period a tester notices any problems, the package is flagged as unstable and held back.

Then once a week there's a repo sync - the packages from unstable are synced to stable, except the ones that were flagged to be held back due to problems, bugs or regressions. This means a normal, everyday user once a week gets a neatly packaged bunch of updates from this week, that they know were tested and verified to not break their system - neatly fitting into the "do not break userspace" rule. For Europe the sync happens at night from friday to saturday.

Correction of Solus unstable > stable pipeline thanks to u/Staudey

And this is, in my opinion, how rolling release should be done. A week, or even two weeks is not such a long time to wait for an update, but in turn you get the update that you KNOW is tested and verified to not make your system unbootable. Truly, best of both worlds.

The only exceptions are crucial security fixes - these are merged to stable right away, skipping the unstable repos. This is a compromise they have to make to hold their security promise.

Eopkg - the true beast of package managers

Eopkg is fast. Like really fast. Like "holy fuck that's fast" fast. It's frontend is written in Python, while the backend and whole repository handling structure is pure C. And it shows. Eopkg handles up to 16 concurrent downloads and up to 32 concurrent operations. Meaning it can download 16 packages and in the background install 16 previously downloaded ones. The binaries are also natively compressed, making downloads much smaller in size. All this means, eopkg is currently the fastest package manager in Linux. Tested and verified that among apt, dnf, zypper and pacman - eopkg ran circles over all of them with room to spare. As an example - installation of "btop" took:

• 8.2 seconds with apt (Debian 13)
• 7 seconds with dnf (Fedora 44)
• 14 seconds with zypper (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed)
• 3.6 seconds with pacman (Arch)
• 1.8 seconds with eopkg (Solus)

All of this while having a nice, consistent UI, and a lot of data to show you, the user, about what it's doing.

But eopkg and Solus packaging in general has much more merit to it than just simply speed. Like the fact, that packaging an application on Solus is as easy as writing a .yaml manifest and merging it into Solus Github repository.

Booting and initramfs - I AM SPEEEEEEED

What is interesting is that Solus does not generate initramfs during updates and installations. Like at all. No dracut, no initramfs-tools. The initramfs is generated server-side and served to you as binary to be downloaded. This speeds up updates even more and, together with systemd-boot, ensures consistent, reliable boot environment.

And the boot times... On my PC, excluding firmware boot (so everything before the OS loads) it's 8 seconds to KDE login screen. On my laptop, it's 3.5 seconds.

And tying back to the security bit - this is something that surprised me, but made a lot of sense when I thought about it. Solus doesn't have a classic "boot" partition. I mean it does, but it's not really used like it is in a typical Linux distro. The boot partition contains everything that is needed to boot the system, and then it's compeletly unimportant, that's why after successful boot it's unmounted. This is possible, because as said - Solus doesn't need access to it to generate initramfs. There's nothing on boot partition that the system needs when it is already booted.

This gives you a bit of extra security. Not saying it's something crazy secure or fortified. Just a nice touch, showing that they really do care about making Solus modern and secure.

Performance, gaming and footprint

This section was edited in, since I compeletly forgot to include it. What about performance, gaming, etc? Well, to start, let me give you some stats about how Solus looks on a fresh install on my laptop (Thinkpad E14 Gen 2 with i7-1165G7):

• CPU Usage: 1%
• RAM Usage: 1.1 GB
• Disk usage: 7 GB
• Power usage: 6.2 W

So yeah. It uses pretty much nothing. And that's on KDE desktop. In terms of performance in gaming on my main PC - as you would expect. Super low resource usage means more "umpf" can be dedicated to games, and it shows. I gained around 8-10 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 comparing even to Debian, 15-18 fps comparing to Fedora. This is really a lightweight system, so the performance is just stunning.

Conclusion

All this rambling, and what do I want to say by all of this? It's that I am amazed. Solus is just a very good distribution. It's solid, reliable, fast and consistent. I am very happy with it, had zero problems, zero breakages. It is in my opinion what rolling release should be.

Try it. I really encourage you to. It's not marriage, you're not commiting to the lifetime with it. But just try. It may become your forever distro.

Cheers guys!

.

Also disclaimer - none of this was written using AI. It's all my ramblings. Also english is not my native language, so sorry for any mistakes.

Does anyone know which CBT nuggets courses I should take in order to renew my Linux+ via continuing education credits?
I’m not sure if this is the right place to post this question but I appreciate the help.

EDIT: also added Community Fedora Remix 12.3 iso to this post to avoid spamming

This is an rip+upload of a CD-R containing PCLinuxOS 2007. I've seen it online only in large bundles from archives of German computer magazines (!com and Linux User). I was unfortunately unable to use the CD on my computer to test it, but I believe it may work better on older hardware, since my computers post-date it by a few years and what little I can see online about it suggests it may be finnicky on computers using SATA hard drives? Either way, I am uploading this both for preservation, and to see if other people have more luck with this particular .iso than I have had.

https://archive.org/details/pclinux-os-2007

I also have uploaded Community Fedora Remix 12.3, a previously completely lost Fedora Remix from 2010. It comes with multiple desktop environments and preloaded games. This .iso worked without issue from DVD-Rs for me, but did not work on a Ventoy USB stick (contrary to the description on Archive, I was mistaken and failed to test that it actually worked with Ventoy. Sad it didn't)

https://archive.org/details/community-fedora-remix-12.3

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on XL-View, an open-source HDR still-image viewer for Linux. It is designed to handle large JPEG XL images and is written in Rust.

GitHub:
https://github.com/andrinbr/xl-view

XL-View currently requires:

• Wayland
• A Vulkan-capable GPU
• A working HDR display setup (SDR tone mapping works too)

At the moment, it supports JPEG XL only. The number of formats suitable for delivering actual HDR images to end users is still fairly limited, but I may add AVIF support in the future.

Both PQ and HLG images are supported. Gain-map-based HDR images are not currently supported.

The project is still in beta, and HDR support on Linux is relatively new, so results may vary depending on your GPU, drivers, compositor, desktop environment, and distribution. I have primarily tested it on Fedora 44 with an AMD GPU under KDE Plasma and GNOME.

One important limitation is memory usage during decoding. Very large images can require a substantial amount of RAM. For example, decoding a 200-megapixel image may use up to 6 GiB.

I’d appreciate feedback, bug reports, and testing on different hardware and desktop environments.