A fascinating look at the state of packaging apps for the Linux desktop:

The stability of the Linux desktop has dramatically improved in recent years. Core library developers are finally seeing the benefits of maintaining compatibility. Despite this, many developers are not interested in depending on a stable base of libraries for binary software. Instead, they have decided to ignore and override almost all libraries pre-installed on the user’s system.

And why the author thinks Flatpak (which some believe is the future) is not the way to go.

I am not a fan. I’m going to outline here some of the technical, security and usability problems with Flatpak and others. I’ll try to avoid addressing “fixable” problems (like theming) and instead focus on fundamental problems inherent in their design. I aim to convince you that these are not the future of desktop Linux apps.

eBPF (7 years old) is a sandbox that can run code inside the linux kernel. It started as a technology to build firewalls, and has evolved over time to include a range of new features.

The panel discuss the origins of eBPF and how it works, as well as dig into some real-world use cases. While eBPF programs themselves aren’t written in Go (more like C), we will hear about how you can communicate with eBPF programs from your Go code.

Jim Salter writing for Ars Technica:

In our main Windows 11 review posted earlier this week, we covered the majority of new features and design decisions in Microsoft’s newest consumer OS—and it feels reasonable to characterize the overall impression given there as “lukewarm.” The good news is that we still hadn’t covered the best part of Windows 11: Linux.

If you could travel back in time and read this headline to college-me… I would’ve laughed you out of the room. Also, why didn’t you tell me about Bitcoin, ya jerk?! 😆

This is a continuation of bashtop and bpytop only in C++. Linux today, but macOS & BSD are planned.

I’ve never gone full mouseless (nor do I necessarily recommend it), but there’s extreme productivity wins to be mined by keeping your hands on the home row as much as possible.

Building a development environment with the shell as a keystone offers multiple benefits. You can use tools that fit nicely with each other, you can customize everything depending on your own needs, and the biggest of all, you can control your entire development environment with your keyboard. This can save a lot of cognitive energy as well as deliver a pleasant user experience.

This is an excellent walk-through on Smashing Mag for those ready to level up their terminal game:

Today, I’d like to share with you these tools so that you too can increase your efficiency and your comfort in your daily job. They work well together — shaping what I call my Mouseless Development Environment. More precisely, we’ll discuss:

• Why using the Linux shell can be very powerful when working with plain text (including code);
• Why using the dreaded Arch Linux;
• The advantage of a tiling window manager;
• How to have a great terminal experience with URxvt, tmux, and tmuxp;
• Why Vim can become your best friend.

This isn’t merely a speech-to-text thing. It also provides intent recognition, which makes it great for doing voice commands. For example, when trained with this template, the following command:

$ voice2json transcribe-wav \
      < turn-on-the-light.wav | \
      voice2json recognize-intent | \
      jq .

Produces this JSON event:

{
    "text": "turn on the light",
    "intent": {
        "name": "LightState"
    },
    "slots": {
        "state": "on"
    }
}

And it can be retrained quickly enough to do it at runtime. Cool stuff!

WireGuard Easy uses Docker to set up WireGuard VPN along with a web UI for easy management. While this may be the easiest way to get up and running, I’d still advise checking out Algo VPN as well since it’s also pretty easy and has been designed/configured with maximum security in mind. Still, this looks cool and the web admin UI makes it quite approachable as well.

Lima launches Linux VMs on your Intel or ARM-based Mac with automatic file sharing, port forwarding, and containerd. That means you can easily do cool stuff like:

$ echo "files under /Users on macOS filesystem are readable from Linux" > some-file

$ lima cat some-file
files under /Users on macOS filesystem are readable from Linux

$ lima sh -c 'echo "/tmp/lima is writable from both macOS and Linux" > /tmp/lima/another-file'

$ cat /tmp/lima/another-file
/tmp/lima is writable from both macOS and Linux"

WSLg provides an integrated experience for developers, scientists or enthusiasts that prefer or need to run Windows on their PC but also need the ability to run tools or applications which works best, or exclusively, in a Linux environment. While users can accomplish this today using a multiple system setup, with individual PC dedicated to Windows and Linux, virtual machine hosting either Windows or Linux, or an XServer running on Windows and projected into WSL, WSLg provides a more integrated, user friendly and productive alternative.

WSLg strives to make Linux GUI applications feel native and natural to use on Windows. From integration into the Start Menu for launch to appearing in the task bar, alt-tab experience to enabling cut/paste across Windows and Linux applications, WSLg enables a seamless desktop experience and workflow leveraging Windows and Linux applications.

Microsoft’s engineers just keep crankin’ out the hits.

The goal of this project is to add support for the Rust language to the Linux kernel. This repository contains the work that will be eventually submitted for review to the LKML.

Probably the most exciting fork of torvalds/linux in the ’Verse, but what are the odds that this effort eventually makes it back upstream?

We’ve linked to exa in the past, but this post may convince you to give it a try by detailing its many virtues.

I believe exa is one of the easiest, most adaptable tools. It helps me track a lot of Git and Maven files. Its color-coding makes it easier for me to search through multiple subdirectories, and it helps me to understand the current xattrs.

• No need to first install the command on the other machine.
• Reference local files and paths like you would normally.
• Works across wildly different Linux distributions, like Ubuntu and Alpine.

The examples are showing ffmpeg use (which is a great one), but how about docker? 🤔

Sylvestre Ledru:

Rust/coreutils is now available in Debian, good enough to boot a Debian with GNOME, install the top 1000 packages, build Firefox, the Linux Kernel and LLVM/Clang. Even if I wrote more than 100 patches to achieve that, it will probably be a bumpy ride for many other use cases.

Seth Kenlon:

It turns out that Linux is an excellent platform for programmers, both new and experienced. It’s not that you need Linux to program. There are successful developers on all different kinds of platforms. However, Linux has much to offer developers. Here are a few things I’ve found useful.

I switched from Linux to OS X macOS 15 years(ish) ago and I hadn’t looked back until the last year or two. It might be getting time to give Linux another shot. But which distro to choose?🤔

Carl Riis:

How do you advance your Linux skills when you are already comfortable with the basics? My solution was to come up with 10 subjects to learn and create an accompanying mini-project.

I learned Linux the slow/hard way: by fumbling around in the dark for months/years. This intentional approach will probably serve you much better than mine did.

This week we’re talking with Gregory Kurtzer about Rocky Linux. Greg is the founder of the CentOS project, which recently shifted its strategy and has the Linux community scrambling. Rocky Linux aims to continue where the CentOS project left off — to provide a free and open source community-driven enterprise grade Linux operating system. We discuss the history of the CentOS project, how it fell under Red Hat’s control, the recent shift in Red Hat’s strategy with CentOS, and how Rocky Linux is designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

About 18 months ago I started a project which had to develop directly against containerd with a full Linux system.

This presented a problem which I’d not really encountered before - Docker and Kubernetes on my Mac were no longer enough, I needed a full Linux environment, and so did the community.

This is how it went and what we learned along the way.

This post to the BusyBox mailing list from back in 2010 was a fun read to get the backstory on bin, sbin, usr/bin, and usr/sbin.

You know how Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created Unix on a PDP-7 in 1969?
Well around 1971 they upgraded to a PDP-11 with a pair of RK05 disk packs (1.5
megabytes each) for storage.

When the operating system grew too big to fit on the first RK05 disk pack (their
root filesystem) they let it leak into the second one, which is where all the
user home directories lived (which is why the mount was called /usr). They
replicated all the OS directories under there (/bin, /sbin, /lib, /tmp…) and
wrote files to those new directories because their original disk was out of
space. When they got a third disk, they mounted it on /home and relocated all
the user directories to there so the OS could consume all the space on both
disks and grow to THREE WHOLE MEGABYTES (ooooh!).

Around the same time I started using Ubuntu I found Tomboy and it was a note-taking system unlike anything else I’d ever used. To me it was the great differentiator for the Linux desktop for a bit. It is a desktop-wiki that provides some incredibly interesting concept. I thought it had quietly passed away but it turns out it has been ported to a new stack and lives a good life with support for Mac and Windows under the Tomboy NG name.

Kevin Backhouse:

I am a fan of Ubuntu, so I would like to help make it as secure as possible. I have recently spent quite a bit of time looking for security vulnerabilities in Ubuntu’s system services, and it has mostly been an exercise in frustration…

This blog post is about an astonishingly straightforward way to escalate privileges on Ubuntu. With a few simple commands in the terminal, and a few mouse clicks, a standard user can create an administrator account for themselves. I have made a short demo video, to show how easy it is.

This particular vulnerability is regarding the GUI, so your Ubuntu servers are unaffected. Still, 👀

Hayden Barnes explains how Windows and Linux exist in a “cosmic duality” and whether or not Microsoft will ever “shift the core of the Windows operating system to the Linux kernel.”

I have a unique perspective on Microsoft’s Linux involvement. I help deliver Ubuntu on Windows Subsystem for Linux in my job at Canonical. … I have become somewhat of an intermediary between the Microsoft and Linux communities. It is something I am glad to do. There are creative, kind, and fascinating people in both communities. Interesting things happen when the lines between them blur. Fostering cross-pollination will make computing better for everyone.

Darling is a lot like Wine only for macOS.

It implements a complete Darwin environment, runs macOS software directly without requiring a hardware emulator, and aims to integrate apps into the Linux desktop experience.

The only downside is they haven’t quite gotten GUI apps working yet:

This took us a lot of time and effort, but we finally have basic experimental support for running simple graphical applications. It requires some special setup for now though, so do not expect it to work out of the box just yet. We’re working on this; stay tuned!

A WSL alternative for users who prefer an MS-DOS environment. DOS Subsystem for Linux integrates a real Linux environment into MS-DOS systems, allowing users to make use of both DOS and Linux applications from the DOS command prompt

Is it time to migrate away from cron?

Like cron jobs, systemd timers can trigger events—shell scripts and programs—at specified time intervals, such as once a day, on a specific day of the month (perhaps only if it is a Monday), or every 15 minutes during business hours from 8am to 6pm. Timers can also do some things that cron jobs cannot. For example, a timer can trigger a script or program to run a specific amount of time after an event such as boot, startup, completion of a previous task, or even the previous completion of the service unit called by the timer.

To say KISS isn’t for everybody would be a massive understatement. After all, it only targets x86-64 architecture and the English language. To say KISS is the first unique take on Linux I’ve seen in a long time would be 💯 on target.

Here are a few of my favorites from its “feature” list:

• Every installation of the distribution contains the full sources (of the distribution) with git history attached.
• Is simple and small enough to be maintainable in its entirety by a single person with little effort.
• There is no “backend”. This distribution is merely a few git repositories.

And it looks rad too.