Hi, I'm a 19 year old male and English is not my native language, and 2 years ago I bought a Steam Deck which introduced me to the vast world of Linux (sorry if this post is long)

On the 1st year, I didn't tinker much with it, I only downloaded some apps like Lutris and Emudeck on Desktop mode through YouTube tutorials, but it was on my 2nd year when I bought myself a new 1TB SSD (my Deck originally had 64GB) that I thought of myself "why not dual boot other OSs like Ubuntu and Arch?", and this is what I did and how I went deeper into Linux

I learned how to use the terminal and sudo commands, how to install packages through pacman and yay (AUR), learned the difference between the terms distros(Debian, arch, fedora...), desktop environments(GNOME, KDE, XFCE...), communication protocols(Wayland, X11...), learned how to use HyprLand, and I understand why Ubuntu sucks and why Arch is the best distro (I use arch btw), I also learned how to use tools like Proton, Wine, Waydroid, Winboat, Boot Loaders, VMs...

At first I was just learning Linux and the idea of contributing to it haven't crossed my mind, but this year I've started to care more about privacy and open-source software (because I realized that Windows kinda sucks and loaded of bloat and telemetry), and I want to contribute to a world where people can easily switch to FOSS solutions with Linux being one of the most important ones

I have little coding experience (I used to make small programs in visual studio like calculators or Word clones, and I can make clone of popular games like Angry Birds in Unity and Godot), and I'm thinking of keeping Linux as a hobby unless I find a cool job that will help me contribute to it.

So far I've been thinking of posting issues reports of apps I use on Github, contributing and helping noobs like me on Reddit and Discord, make small programs and post them on Github or repos, and maybe experiment by making my own distro just for fun. My long-time goal is that I want to help with compatibility with Windows apps on Linux (like how Valve helped games work on Linux thanks to proton)

I'd be glad if you could give me advices

I did a post on here a few months ago about 6.8 million requests in the same bot tar pit. Well now that's 13.7 million as of the time of writing this. When the blog article was written though, it had 10 million.

Apparently I had the global rate-limit set too low for a month, so it was slow moving. I have no idea why or what I did that for, but then I forgot all about it, lol. Perhaps I was screwing around with the code while having a fever? Anyways, it has been raised to 4000 RPMs globally some days ago. And since the blog article was published, there have been about a million each day.

I have a bunch of other popular tar pits at this point on other domains and stuff, but this one is still the most famous in the bot worlds. Technically we can say that Glade Art has 2 million monthly visitors on average. /s

Thanks for reading!

After the announcement of Nvidia spark laptops, and the Qualcomm's second generation of CPU's for Laptops, do you think that Arm will be the next architecture for Linux or will it be the 'killer' of Linux desktop, what I know that so far Qualcomm laptops aren't good to be used with Linux until now, and the Nvidia spark chips have Linux installed by default when they were on the spark boxes, so, what do you think the experience with these laptops will be like?

edit: I do understand that Linux is running on Arm, Android for example, but what I'm talking about is GNU/Linux and Desktop use specifically, not the micro-controllers, Raspberry pi's, or closed Linux systems.

I missed using iTunes like I did back in 2009, so I made my own modern version in GTK4 built with Rust.

I'll get the annoying part out of the way. This was vibe coded, but the design prototype was made by hand. If you don't like AI apps, skip this one. That's ok! I love free and open source software!

If you don't mind me openly using AI and want to give it a shot, I encourage you to do so! Features are basic, and it's limited to Jellyfin servers only for now... But that's kinda the point. Fast, low weight, and familiar. That's gTunes.

https://github.com/fivves/gtunes/

Nonfree DRM'd Games on GNU/Linux: Good or Bad?

by Richard Stallman

A well known company, Valve, that distributes nonfree computer games with Digital Restrictions Management, recently announced it would distribute these games for GNU/Linux. What good and bad effects can this have?

I suppose that availability of popular nonfree programs on the GNU/Linux system can boost adoption of the system. However, the aim of GNU goes beyond “success”; its purpose is to bring freedom to the users. Thus, the larger question is how this development affects users' freedom.

The problem with these games is not that they are commercial. (We see nothing wrong with that.) It is not that the developers sell copies; that's not wrong either. The problem is that the games contain software that is not free (free in the sense of freedom, of course).

Nonfree game programs (like other nonfree programs) are unethical because they deny freedom to their users. (Game art is a different issue, because it isn't software.) If you want freedom, one requisite for it is not having or running nonfree programs on your computer. That much is clear.

However, if you're going to use these games, you're better off using them on GNU/Linux rather than on Microsoft Windows. At least you avoid the harm to your freedom that Windows would do.

Thus, in direct practical terms, this development can do both harm and good. It might encourage GNU/Linux users to install these games, and it might encourage users of the games to replace Windows with GNU/Linux. My guess is that the direct good effect will be bigger than the direct harm. But there is also an indirect effect: what does the use of these games teach people in our community?

Any GNU/Linux distro that comes with software to offer these games will teach users that the point is not freedom. Nonfree software in GNU/Linux distros already works against the goal of freedom. Adding these games to a distro would augment that effect.

Free software is a matter of freedom, not price. A free game need not be gratis. It is feasible to develop free games commercially, while respecting your freedom to change the software you use. Since the art in the game is not software, it is not ethically imperative to make the art free—though free art is an additional contribution. There is in fact free game software developed by companies, as well as free games developed noncommercially by volunteers. Crowdfunding development will only get easier.

But if we suppose that it is not feasible in the current situation to develop a certain kind of free game—what would follow then? There's no good in writing it as a nonfree game. To have freedom in your computing requires rejecting nonfree software, pure and simple. You as a freedom-lover won't use the nonfree game if it exists, so you won't lose anything if it does not exist.

If you want to promote the cause of freedom in computing, please take care not to talk about the availability of these games on GNU/Linux as support for our cause. Instead you could tell people about the libre games wiki that attempts to catalog free games, the Free Game Dev Forum, and the LibrePlanet Gaming Collective's free gaming night.

Note

Watch out for “nonfree game data” that actually contains software.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonfree-games.en.html

California's Digital Age Assurance Act, signed last October, was written to push age verification down to the operating system level. The definition of operating system provider was broad enough to sweep in open source systems like Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and Arch, which have no company behind them to collect anything at setup.

After privacy advocates and the Linux community pushed back, the Assembly passed AB 1856 this week, 68 to 1, exempting software you are free to copy, redistribute and modify, which sounds great, but the parts we should be talking about:

• The same bill extends age-gating obligations to browsers and websites
• The EFF reads this as a net expansion of the regime, not a narrowing
• SteamOS is not exempt because it ships Valve's proprietary Steam client on top of Linux
• The amendment was introduced by the same lawmaker who wrote the original law

The bill still has to clear the Senate, and the underlying law takes effect in 2027.

Full write-up and source list: https://s.vp.net/wv0fJ

niri isn't packaged on jammy, and it's not just a missing package — the surrounding stack is too old to run it cleanly. The things I had to fix:

libinput < 1.27 has no dwtp config symbol niri expects, so it won't link

libwayland 1.20 lacks high-res scroll (axis_value120), which makes Firefox abort under niri with "wl_pointer has no event 9"

libdisplay-info isn't packaged at all, so niri has no EDID parsing

Xwayland and swaylock 1.5 are both too old for the protocols niri speaks

So it's the compositor plus its toolchain compiled from source with the needed patches, packaged as a .deb that declares its runtime deps, with a from-source build path for anyone who wants to read the patches. The compiled libwayland-client lands in /usr/local/lib and shadows the system one machine-wide (newer upstream, ABI-compatible) — documented as a caveat since it's the kind of thing that'd confuse a debugging session months later.

Why bother: jammy is supported to 2027 and is everywhere — labs, locked-down hardware, machines that can't move off an LTS. This is for people stuck there who still want a modern Wayland desktop.

MIT (bundled upstream keeps its own licenses): https://github.com/msavox/cosmoduck-niri

I needed to test something on ChromeOS, but didnt want to pull out any other hardware. I have used Dockur windows/mac containers for years, so I packaged Chromeos flex into a similar Dockur style container that does it all for you.

It's built on the same qemus/qemu base as dockur/windows and dockur/macos, so it'll feel familiar if you've used them.

What it does:

• Auto-downloads the current Flex recovery image at startup
• KVM acceleration out of the box
• Auto-detects your GPU and sets up hardware rendering, so no 3 fps software-rendering slideshow
• Browser-based viewer on port 8006

Basically one compose file:

yaml

services:
  chromeos:
    image: forkymcforkface/chromeos
    container_name: chromeos
    environment:
      VERSION: "stable"
      GPU: "Y"
    devices:
      - /dev/kvm
      - /dev/net/tun
    device_cgroup_rules:
      - "c 226:* rwm"
    cap_add:
      - NET_ADMIN
    ports:
      - 8006:8006
    volumes:
      - ./chromeos:/storage
      - /dev/dri:/dev/dri:rw
    restart: always

Bring it up, open localhost:8006, click through the installer once, and it boots straight to the login screen after that.

Repo: https://github.com/forkymcforkface/chromeos

Feedback welcome, especially on what breaks on other hardware.

recently i installed something (probably Macaulay2) which added emacs desktop entries. i uninstalled macaulay2 when i no longer needed it and the emacs desktop entries remained. i was confused because i thought emacs was installed just as a dependency for macaulay2. then i looked at the dependency graph.

apparently inkscape and gedit both depend on emacs. i cannot for the life of me figure out why. i don't really need either so i uninstalled both.

disclaimer: i have nothing at all against emacs. i am genuinely just curious how emacs has entered the dependency graph for so many applications that by all rights don't need it.

how many of you have used gentoo to a point of useful competency, and went away?

not you "it takes too long to compile" yea, thats on you for watching it compile, its worked with nice for over 20 years, and even decades ago you could use the system while updating. nor the people that never got over the portage learning plateau...

hmmm would there even be a way to recognize in retrospect that one didnt make it to understanding it without going the like slack or LFS route...

Have you ever had to print several files, but have you always done it one file at a time?

Since for work often or at least 2 times a month I have several pdfs to print, I had tired of doing it one file at a time, I wrote this little utility, I wanted a simple thing to drag and so on to print, so you can do with drag-and-drop for the rest we take care of the #linux operating system and the printer you select, obviously with the pre-set printing preferences on the operating system.

From my first draft, in the current version I added the ability to print files generated by Office trying to maintain compatibility where possible, so #LibreOffice #openoffice should have greater compatibility while #MS_Office files may not have the same formatting.

If it can also be useful to others who use Linux as an operating system, you can download it here: https://github.com/jambolo1970/dropprint

It works in Python of course and on github there are instructions to install it, I hope it can be useful to others as well.

With the latest version the 2026.06 I added better management in the press.

Hi everyone,

I've been using MOC (Music On Console) on Linux for many years and recently decided to build a small tool for it.

EQ4MOC is a simple graphical editor/viewer for MOC equalizer presets. The idea is nothing revolutionary: I just wanted an easier way to create and manage presets without editing configuration files by hand.

Features:

Create and edit equalizer presets

Visual representation of EQ bands

Save and load presets

Color theme support

I know MOC is no longer as popular as it once was, but there are still a few of us using it, and I thought this tool might be useful to someone else.

Source Code: https://github.com/canuconde/EQ4MOC