Linux

I decided to try out Bluefin, and it worked pretty well for 6 months. Then an update broke both the ostree branches somehow. Just black screens instead of finding/mounting root. It seems like something that could be fixed with the grub config, but I thought the point of an atomic distro was that an update wouldn't break it.

So I reinstalled debian instead of figuring out what happened with bluefin. I also hated having to restart after every update.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

00:48 Sponsor: Proton VPN

01:59 Criteria for ranking

03:42 Chrome

05:56 Ungoogled Chromium

07:17 Microsoft Edge

08:26 Brave

10:17 Vivaldi

11:50 Opera

12:31 Firefox

15:22 Floorp

16:29 Librewolf and Waterfox

18:05 Zen Browser

19:43 GNOME Web

21:03 Orion

21:36 Falkon

22:29 Conclusion

23:44 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers

Links:

Report on Opera and their owner:

https://hindenburgresearch.com/opera-phantom-of-the-turnaround/

Opera bought by Chinese consortium:

https://www.engadget.com/2016-07-18-opera-browser-sold-to-a-chinese-consortium-for-600-million.html

Brave's attempt at replacing ads:

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1694797/brave-browser-begins-controversial-ad-repeal-and-replace-tests.html

Brave replacing affiliate links: https://www.sophos.com/en-us/blog/brave-ceo-apologises-for-adding-affiliate-links-to-urls

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

00:38 Sponsor: Internxt

02:12 Entire Adobe Suite supported with custom Wine now

03:53 Open source clean room implementations of the entire Adobe Suite

07:35 Flathub now accepts apps that used Al, with disclosure

10:18 Cosmic will reject LLM generated submissions

11:35 Steam Frame now has 200 verified games

13:03 More Kernel and AMD performance improvements

15:43 Digital Ocean stops hosting credits for FOSS as they donate to Omacom

17:50 Gentoo asking for help for hosting after sponsors dried up

19:14 Orion stops development of its Linux browser

20:45 EU Commission doesn't seem pleased with their Teams replacement

22:31 Googlebooks don't look like they'll help Linux much

24:23 Mesa looking at a more formal governance model

26:53 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers

Links

Entire Adobe Suite supported with custom Wine now

https://neutronproject.org/

Open source clean room implementations of the entire Adobe Suite

https://github.com/storytold/photocraft

Flathub now accepts apps that used Al, with disclosure

https://linuxiac.com/flathub-reverses-ai-generated-app-ban-now-requires-disclosure/

Cosmic will reject LLM generated submissions

https://linuxiac.com/cosmic-stops-accepting-Ilm-generated-content-in-pull-requests/

https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-epoch/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md

Steam Frame now has 200 verified games

https://store.steampowered.com/greatonframe?tab=1

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/10/theres-now-over-200-steam-frame-verified-games/

More Kernel and AMD performance improvements

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Better-Zswap-Performance

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Boost-Recently-Busy-CPUs

Digital Ocean stops hosting credits for FOSS as they donate to Omacom

https://itsfoss.com/news/digitalocean-open-source-credits-end/

Gentoo asking for help for hosting after sponsors dried up

https://itsfoss.com/news/gentoo-infrastructure-sponsors-call/

Orion stops development of its Linux browser

https://blog.kagi.com/update-orion-linux-windows

EU Commission doesn't seem pleased with their Teams replacement

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-microsoft-teams-alternative-bad-reviews-element-pro/

Googlebooks don't look like they'll help Linux much

https://www.androidauthority.com/linux-apps-on-googlebook-3719936/

Mesa looking at a more formal governance model

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Governance-Model

So for a long time pretty much every computer used the traditional like windows layout with moveable windows that minimized or maximized and had a taskbar and start menu and whatnot. You had some minor changes with Mac and stuff, but now you can really have some radically different ways to use a computer.

Personally I have differing preferences if I'm using a laptop or a desktop.

On my desktop I prefer a dock and to use the mouse to click around. More of the windows style. Then on a laptop (which I use most often) I use a heavily gesture based navigation.

Currently I have Gnome modified so that when I am in a program, like the web browser I'm in typing this, it is full screen. The top bar is hidden, and there's no dock of any kind. Not even one that pops up when I move the mouse to the edge of the screen. Instead I have everything for navigation hidden inside the task view. I swipe up on the trackpad with 3 fingers to bring it up. That's how I see time, battery life, and the other topbar stuff too. If switching quickly between two things I put one of them in a 2nd desktop and use a 3 finger side swipe to move back and forth.

I'm curious to know what other unique or highly custom navigation methods people are using on Linux. I know tiling window managers are pretty popular. Is there a general consensus on what's best these days? Or is everyone doing slightly different things?

I have been using Linux for over 8 months now, and my primary distribution of choice was Debian.

Debian recently conducted a community vote on allowing AI contributions, and it ended up allowing responsible AI contributions.

What is this responsible? How can AI commits be responsible? There are thousands of reasons to not use AI, and the primary reason is AI is a thief.

How did you react to Debian's decision? Did you switch distros? Which one was your option, and why?

Also, when the Linux kernel itself allows AI commits, is there any practicality in a Linux distribution strictly limiting or restricting AI commits?

I have no serious usability issue with Debian now but am concerned about the use of AI even in my Linux distribution. Should I keep going with Debian or consider any other distribution, as I only have 8+ months of experience as a daily Linux user? I tried almost all Linux distros and am comfortable with everything except Void Linux and highly complex ones like Gentoo.

Specifically, SteamOS for the Steam Frame. I have so many questions. The Frame runs "SteamOS". Only SteamOS is based on Arch/x86, and the Frame runs ARM/Qualcomm, so surely this is a sort of "SteamOS for ARM"? I understand FEX (ish), are they just running the entire OS through FEX? Arch doesn't seem to have an ARM version I can find so did Valve do the work of porting Arch to ARM? And if so, where is the source code?

Ubuntu maker Canonical announced today the general availability of Ubuntu Desktop images for the RISC-V architecture, along with unofficial and unsupported Xubuntu Minimal images for RISC-V.

As I reported back in June, when the first daily build images for Ubuntu 26.10 were made available to download, there was a new RISC-V desktop image available too, but now Canonical is making everything official: Ubuntu 26.10 (Stonking Stingray) brings desktop images to RISC-V computers.

That’s right, if you have a RISC-V computer and want to use Ubuntu on it, you will be able to do so with the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release, due out next week on October 15th, 2026. Even better, it looks like there will also be a RISC-V image for the Xubuntu flavor featuring the lightweight Xfce desktop environment.

“The Xubuntu variant exists for a practical reason: the Xfce-based minimal image is far more manageable under emulation,” said Canonical. “The images are experimental: they carry no official support yet, and there are still known issues that we are addressing for the release. Bug reports on Launchpad are very welcome.”

Canonical recommends testing the Ubuntu Desktop RISC-V images on SpacemiT K3 hardware since official support for this platform is coming with Ubuntu 26.10, and they even have a guide on how to install Ubuntu on the SpacemiT K3 Pico-ITX. On the other hand, the Xubuntu Minimal images are recommended for testing in virtual machines.

Testing the Ubuntu 26.10 RISC-V desktop images will require you to copy your own first-stage bootloader, such as U-boot, as well as the relevant Device Tree Blobs (DTBs), onto the ISO before booting it on real hardware like the SiFive HiFive Unmatched, which is supported by Canonical.

Canonical promises to deliver a complete desktop experience on RISC-V computers with the Stonking Stingray release, especially on RVA23-compliant hardware like Milk-V Jupiter 2 Mini-ITX, DeepComputing DC-ROMA, and SpacemiT K3 Pico-ITX.

Ubuntu 26.10 is expected to ship with the upcoming GNOME 51 desktop environment by default, which will be released on September 16th, 2026, and the soon-to-be-released Linux 7.3 kernel series, which should be out later this month. I’m hoping that more Ubuntu flavors will pick up RISC-V support in the long run.

Without further ado, you can download the latest Ubuntu 26.10 RISC-V desktop images from here and the Xubuntu Minimal RISC-V image from here. Once again, please keep in mind that these images are considered experimental, so don’t use them for any production work.

Flathub has replaced its blanket ban on AI-generated applications with a disclosure requirement. Reviewers can still reject submissions, and manifests remain off-limits for AI-generated content.

It took my old laptop dying on me for me to finally ask my geeky neighbor to install Mint on another laptop I had around.
It's been a few hours and Omigod. Why did I waste so much time? It works. It's easy and intuitive. It makes sense. There's no bullshit.
I still have to make Antidote talk to Libre Office, but whatever. The rest feels good and natural.
So please whoever is here because you're contemplating switching: do it yesterday.

I've been using tiling WMs for some years now (mostly sway, but also tested cosmic a bit). I really love them: you theme workspaces and organize everything into them, and no window is ever hidden, which makes finding them trivial. But the cost of having every window displayed in that workspace is that they start getting way too small when you have a lot of them. This is usually not a big deal, since you can create tabs or just open new generic workspaces.

But what has been bugging me are windows that need to be big, otherwise they are unusable (like gimp, kdenlive, libreoffice, sometimes firefox). Tabbing them in fullscreen messes with the workspace layout, and if you dedicate an entire generic workspace for them, you surely will lose it.

That's where scrollable WMs enter the scene. They respect window sizes at the cost of their visibility.

niri.gif

NGL, this is not a good idea. It's easy to lose windows that are off-screen. But what if you only use it sometimes? Think of it as a regular tiling WM, but when you need it, it creates more space off-screen.

To achieve this, I've been using Niri with the tilemod script. It helps make Niri behave more like a regular tiling.

tilemod.gif

It's been a good experience over the last week. My workflow is mostly unchanged, but when I need to work with a window in fullscreen, it's always a relief that I'm using Niri.

Has anyone else here tried scrollables? I'm in this excitement phase so I want to read more about it (even from people who tried and didn't like them) :)

Plenty of open source projects keep going on goodwill alone, with contributors putting in the hours and expecting nothing back. While others lean on outside support like cash, donated hardware, or someone else covering the hosting bill.

This kind of support rarely gets much attention, but these needs are some of the most foundational aspects of any project that's serious about growing.

Gentoo falls in the second group. The source-based Linux distribution, built around the Portage package manager, runs largely on sponsored infrastructure, as it can only manage to maintain a few vital machines.

Sadly, many sponsors that had backed Gentoo all these years have decided to stop making contributions. The project is now looking for replacements and has put out a call for infrastructure sponsors.

Currently, its sponsors page lists names such as Oregon State University's Open Source Lab, CDN77, HP, and Hetzner, but it may not yet reflect the dropouts.

There are five ways to help, as laid out on the sponsorship page of Gentoo's wiki, with preference being given to supporters who share the project's vision of software that respects choice and stays open to user-driven changes.

The first way is to accept donated machines for the project's hosting locations in the US. They are not asking for much; anything good enough to handle server-focused tasks in today's time is a good offering for them to use.

Next is Colocation, a type of physical hosting. The sponsor would provide rack space, power, and connectivity, while Gentoo finds the hardware to put in it. Capacity outside the US is their most urgent need at the moment, though offers from the US are welcome too.

Third are virtual machines, with a minimum of 2 vCPUs, 4GB of RAM, and 25GB of storage. The project says that it is leaning more on the cloud wherever it can, but many of its services are monolithic, and that Kubernetes would suit them poorly.

The fourth way is full-package hosted physical servers. The wiki gives two examples: a root server like the ones Hetzner offers, or a sponsor's older or unused servers with Gentoo getting full remote access.

In that second case, the sponsor would still own and manage the hardware, whereas Gentoo would take care of the operating system and remote management, only asking for advance notice before any migration events.

The last is plain old money. Any donated funds would go toward paying for colocation and hosting.

A call to act

Gentoo is far from the only project that needs this kind of backing.

Take LVFS, the firmware update service for Linux. It leaned heavily on the Linux Foundation and Red Hat, with Framework and the Open Source Firmware Foundation pitching in $10,000 a year.

Then Lenovo and Dell joined at the Premier tier, at $100,000 a year each, along with HP and NVIDIA, who followed soon after. I would call that a win for LVFS and a sign that sponsors are out there for projects that go looking.

Maybe your organization has spare rack space, or you have money lying around and want it to do some good. Either way, someone has to host the servers behind projects like this, and Gentoo's infrastructure team is available at infra@gentoo.org for any infrastructure sponsorship-related queries.

Those trying to access the Ubuntu website, ISO downloads, and similar Ubuntu resources today are finding the site inoperable amid what's now confirmed as an ongoing distributed denial of service attack.

Unfortunately, Ubuntu is once again facing a distributed denial of service "DDoS" attack against its web infrastructure. This isn't the first time they have experienced this issue and Canonical's IT team is currently working to mitigate the attack.

Ubuntu down

The Canonical status page is currently tracking the incident. Confirmation of the Ubuntu DDoS attack was also posted to the Ubuntu Discourse.

So I made a community called c/learninglinux I wanted to name it learningLinuxtogether but the server didn't accept so anyways this community will be where experts send guides or help beginners and where Beginners ask for help so lemme know your opinion in the comments Edit: I'm sorry for problems in my English it's not my native language

Klassik brings the KDE 3 desktop to Plasma 6: reimplemented panel applets, the KDE 2/3 application style, ports of the KWin window decorations, and the original color schemes and wallpapers, with Wayland support.

The EXT4 file-system today deprecated its journaled mode of the "data=journal" mount option. Following its deprecation, this mode is planned for removal in the year 2028.

The data=journal mode for EXT4 is where all file data and metadata is written to the file-system's journal before being committed to the main file-system. In the event of a crash or power loss, the journal can then be replayed to recover the data.

The EXT4 data=journal mode is great for those very concerned about data integrity and safety but comes with significant hits to the write performance compared to the default ordered (data=ordered) mode or data=writeback. Using the journaled mode also disables delayed allocation and Direct I/O support.

EXT4 journal deprecated

Per today's Git merge for Linux 7.3, the EXT4 data=journal feature is deprecated and support for it will be removed in early 2028 following the 2027 Linux LTS kernel version.

Linux developers are once again considering the removal of the Linux x32 ABI.

Not to be confused with the i386 ABI, the Linux x32 ABI is the little adopted model of using 32-bit integers, long, and pointers on Intel/AMD CPUs but making use of the larger set of CPU registers and other benefits of x86_64. Linux x32 came too late and hasn't seen much industry interest or adoption. With Linux x86_64 going comfortably, Linux kernel developers have been retiring the x32 ABI.

Sebastian Andrzej Siewior has been leading the efforts this year for proposing the x32 ABI retirement. With the end of 2026 approaching and Linux 7.3 or 7.4 being this year's LTS kernel version, the topic of retiring x32 has once again reignited on the Linux kernel mailing list.

start removing x32

The Linutronix engineer sent out a new set of patches today to begin removing the x32 ABI. Sebastian argued in the patch to initially block x32 behind the "BROKEN" Kconfig option:

"The x32 ABI was introduced in v3.4 to leverage the additional registers which were available on x86_64 but not on i386 while keeping the smaller 32bit pointers.

This did not take off. The memory usage usually knows no limit and the better performance did not reach a point where certain workloads widely move to x32 and use it exclusively. In the meantime Debian introduced a patch to disable x32 by default (so it has to be enabled at boot time on the command line) because they are afraid of the increased attack surface. Fedora as far as I tell has X32 disabled (looking at 7.0-rc5 rpm in rawhide).

The syscall range >512 used by x32 can not be reused because on earlier kernels (before v5.4 with x32 enabled, see commit 6365b842aae4 ("x86/syscalls: Split the x32 syscalls into their own table") it is not obvious if the syscall is for x86-64 and not implemented or meant for x32.

What can be removed are the special compat cases due to different alignment.

Since there is practically no real use for x32, start removing it by marking the symbol as BROKEN so it is not possible to enable by default. It will remain around in the last LTS kernel of this year and then it will be removed."

We'll see if the patches begin to land initially marking x32 as "BROKEN" and then eventual removal, following the declaration of the Linux 2026 LTS kernel version.

Linux hardware vendor System76 released COSMIC 1.10 today as the latest stable version of this Rust-based desktop environment for modern GNU/Linux distributions.

COSMIC 1.10 comes two weeks after COSMIC 1.9 with support for mapping drawing tablets to specific displays, support for setting environment variables in ~/.config/environment.d, support for using custom SSH agents, and support for remembering sort options in file open/save dialogs.

The COSMIC Term terminal emulator received keyboard shortcuts for moving tabs left (Ctrl+Shift+Left) and right (Ctrl+Shift+Right), COSMIC Store now adds a gallery mode after clicking screenshots and caches screenshots locally, and the cosmic-settings-daemon is now in charge of setting the interface font when syncing font settings with GTK/GNOME.

COSMIC Player has been updated as well with support for keeping the controls visible when hovered, COSMIC OSD no longer shows volume OSD when started, COSMIC Monitor now features separate app and process searches, and COSMIC Launcher now uses WGPU for rendering in order to improve performance.

COSMIC Greeter display manager was improved as well in this release with kmscon support to systemd service on Fedora Linux, a fix for a panic when the keyboard layouts are empty, and support for cancelling the PAM session when the wrong password is used to ensure that pam_faillock remains functional.

On top of that, COSMIC Compositor received fixes for issues with window context menu items being selected when clicking outside the menu, focusing windows on touchscreen events, screen capture using an inefficient pixel format, resizing not working in some cases while tiling, and focus not being removed from unfocused windows.

Last but not least, COSMIC Files now ellipsizes the full path in search results to keep it from being truncated and includes trailing ... to menu items that open a context drawer, cosmic-idle can now handle system suspending on AC correctly, and COSMIC Initial Setup now only shows the Wi-Fi page if a Wi-Fi device exists.

Various smaller issues were fixed as well, so check out the release notes on the project’s GitHub page for more details. Meanwhile, keep an eye on the stable software repositories of your favorite Linux distro for the COSMIC 1.10 update and install it as soon as possible for a more reliable, stable, and bug-free COSMIC desktop experience.

I have seen many scan entries on nginx while sharing links on Teams recently. At first I thought its some type of brute force. Even abuseipdb reports categorize it as web attack.

Just wondering as ive been told many os's online and then told to not use certain one aswell, i feel confused on what linux os to try someday. i come from windows 10 and i always find i need windows on atleast 1 device, and put linux on the "outdated" devices, but i keep hoping around, i cant seem to make up my mind.

The Q4OS team announced today the release and general availability of Q4OS 6.10 as the tenth update to the Q4OS 6 “Andromeda” series of this Debian-based Linux distro featuring KDE Plasma and Trinity Desktop Environment.

Based on Debian 13.7 “Trixie” and powered by Linux kernel 6.12.111 LTS, Q4OS 6.10 ships with the KDE Plasma 6.3.6 desktop environment for the flagship edition, which is accompanied by the KDE Gear 25.04.3 and KDE Frameworks 6.13 software suites, all compiled against Qt 6.8.2, as well as the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) 14.1.5 desktop environment on the TDE edition.

Q4OS 6.10 updates the KDE Plasma edition to no longer include any packages from the Trinity Desktop Environment by default on the live media or when installing the distribution, as the Q4OS tools now come with their own Qt 5 frontends. Of course, the Trinity Desktop Environment remains installable side by side.

The live Q4OS media now comes with the basic desktop profile and the live-session extras, which include the installer, web browser, Q4OS Imager, CJK fonts, VirtualBox guest additions, and language packs. The devs removed the old KDE Frameworks libraries on the TDE edition, as well as the QtCurve and old window styles.

Q4OS 6.10 introduces a new Q4OS Wi-Fi connect tool that will be displayed during the first login on both KDE Plasma and TDE editions, replacing the old Trinity-only dialog, to make connecting to a Wi-Fi network easier. Also, NumLock is now enabled at first boot on desktops and laptops with a numeric keypad, while it stays disabled on laptops without a numeric keypad.

On top of that, this release splits the Q4OS Setup application installer into a Trinity and a Qt 5 frontends, so each Q4OS edition gets the native one, and the fail-safe entry of the live boot menu now starts the graphics in nomodeset mode for machines whose graphics driver fails to start.

Among other noteworthy changes, the Q4OS Software Centre no longer offers the Mozilla Firefox web browser on 32-bit (i386) systems, since it’s no longer supported upstream, while Q4OS 5 i386 users are offered Debian’s Firefox ESR instead. Check out the release announcement for more details.

Q4OS 6.10 is available for download as KDE Plasma and TDE (Trinity Desktop Environment) editions for 64-bit systems from the official website. Existing Q4OS users can update their installations by running the sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade commands in a terminal emulator.