Tux Machines

GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 09, 2025

Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization

Linuxiac ☛ Bcachefs 1.33 Delivers Its Biggest Upgrade Yet With Full Reconcile Support

Bcachefs 1.33 GNU/Linux filesystem introduces a new reconcile engine that unifies data and metadata handling while simplifying replication and recovery tasks.

Graphics Stack

Jakub Steiner ☛ Dithering

One of the new additions to the GNOME 49 wallpaper set is Dithered Sun by Tobias. It uses dithering not as a technical workaround for color banding, but as an artistic device.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Gábor Nyéki ☛ One too many words on AT&T's $2,000 Korn shell and other Usenet topics

Unix has been enormously successful over the past 55 years.

It started out as a small experiment to develop a time-sharing system (i.e., a multi-user operating system) at AT&T Bell Labs.1 The goal was to take a few core principles to their logical conclusion.2 The OS bundled many small tools that were easy to combine, as it was illustrated by a famous exchange between Donald Knuth and Douglas McIlroy in 1986. Today, Unix lives on mostly as a spiritual predecessor to Linux, Net/Free/OpenBSD, macOS,3 and arguably, ChromeOS and Android.

Usenet tells us about the height of its early popularity.

ZDNet ☛ I rediscovered my longtime Linux favorite - thanks to a spin I didn't see coming

Back in the early 2000s, Enlightenment was my desktop of choice. To this day, Enlightenment is still an option, and it's one that remains just as fun and unique to use.

Back in those days, I had to install Enlightenment manually, because there were no distributions that offered it as a default. At one point, a new Linux distribution came into being that made use of Enlightenment as its only desktop environment -- Bodhi Linux. After some time with Enlightenment, the primary developer decided to fork the DE and created Moksha. Moksha is still in the vein of Enlightenment, only with a dash more user friendliness. It offers a vast amount of configurations and a menu that can be accessed from anywhere on the desktop with a left mouse click.

The developers of MX Linux have decided to create a new spin, MX Moksha, and it's delightful.

I downloaded and installed MX Moksha to see how it fared, and here are my thoughts.

BSD

[Old] Mailing list ARChives ☛ 'Re: where to start with new arch'

I wrote the following document in 2008 as a guide for other developers. It's quite dated as there was no llvm in the base system and there are probably quite a few things which need updating, but this should be a good starting point.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

OpenSUSE ☛ Planet News Roundup

The below featured highlights listed on the community’s blog feed aggregator are from Nov. 29 to Dec. 6.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

Ubuntu ☛ How telco companies can reduce 5G infrastructure costs with modern open source cloud-native technologies

This blog outlines today’s primary 5G infrastructure challenges and highlights how modern open source cloud technologies from Canonical help operators address them.