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  • KDE Plasma 6.3 brings drawing tablet improvements

    Tue 11:31am By Thom Holwerda
    Speaking of KDE, Plasma 6.3 has been released. It brings with it a ton of improvements aimed at digital artists, such as much improved management and configuration of drawing tablets. You can now map an area of the tablet’s surface to a part of the screen,…
  • Moving KDE’s styling into the future

    Tue 11:10am By Thom Holwerda
    One of the major issues with KDE’s styling system is the fact that over the year, it has accumulated four ways of styling applications – which makes themeing and changing aspects of the default theme far more cumbersome than it should be. In fact, with the…
  • Oasis: a small, statically-linked Linux system

    Mon 6:28pm By Thom Holwerda
    You might think the world of Linux distributions is a rather boring, settled affair, but there’s actually a ton of interesting experimentation going on in the Linux world. From things like NixOS with its unique packaging framework, to the various immutable…
  • Redox’ relibc becomes a stable ABI

    Mon 5:41pm By Thom Holwerda
    The Redox project has posted its usual monthly update, and this time, we’ve got a major milestone creeping within reach. Thanks to Anhad Singh for his amazing work on Dynamic Linking! In this southern-hemisphere-Redox-Summer-of-Code project, Anhad has…
  • Rediscovering Plan 9 from Bell Labs

    Mon 3:00pm By Thom Holwerda
    During a weekend of tidying up – you know, the kind of chore where you’re knee-deep in old boxes before you realize it. Digging through the dusty cables and old, outdated user manuals, I found something that I had long forgotten: an old Plan…
  • FreeBSD and hi-fi audio setup: bit-perfect, equalizer, real-time

    Mon 11:36am By Thom Holwerda
    A complete guide to configuring FreeBSD as an audiophile audio server: setting up system and audio subsystem parameters, real-time operation, bit-perfect signal processing, and the best methods for enabling and parameterising the system graphic equalizer…
  • Three years of ephemeral NixOS: my experience resetting root on every boot

    Mon 11:04am By Thom Holwerda
    We had a bit of a bug caused by changes we made to make quotes look better, but we’ve fixed it now, so we’re back on track (you may need to do a force-reload in your browser). Sorry for the disruption – and if you want to stay up-to-date on such issues…
  • Cassette: a POSIX application framework featuring a retro-futurist GUI toolkit

    Fri 6:17pm By Thom Holwerda
    Cassette is a GUI application framework written in C11, with a UI inspired by the cassette-futurism aesthetic. Built for modern POSIX systems, it’s made out of three libraries: CGUI, CCFG and COBJ. Cassette is free and open-source software, licensed under…
  • UnixWare in 2025: still actively developed and maintained

    Feb 5, 2025, 10:06 am By Thom Holwerda
    It kind of goes by under the radar, but aside from HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX, there’s another traditional classic UNIX still in active development today: UnixWare (and its sibling, OpenServer). Owned and developed by Xinuos, UnixWare and other related code and…
  • MaXX Interactive Desktop 2.2.0 released

    Feb 5, 2025, 9:43 am By Thom Holwerda
    Late last year, the MaXX Interactive Desktop, the Linux (and BSD) version of the IRIX desktop, sprung back to life with a new release and a detailed roadmap. Thanks to a unique licensing agreement with SGI, MaXX’ developer, Eric Masson, has been able to…
  • Why Upstart from Ubuntu failed

    Feb 4, 2025, 8:39 am By Thom Holwerda
    Upstart was an event-based replacement for the traditional System V init (sysvinit) system on Ubuntu, introduced to bring a modern and more flexible way of handling system startup and service management. It emerged in the mid-2000s, during a period when…
  • The dumb reason why flag emojis aren’t working on your site in Chrome on Windows

    Feb 4, 2025, 7:36 am By Thom Holwerda
    After doing more digging than I feel like I should have needed to, I found my answer: it appears that due to concerns about the fact that acknowledging the existence of certain countries can be perceived as a nominally political stance, Microsoft has opted to…
  • TuxTape: a kernel livepatching solution

    Feb 4, 2025, 5:39 am By Thom Holwerda
    Geico, an American insurance company, is building a live-patching solution for the Linux kernel, called TuxTape. TuxTape is an in-development kernel livepatching ecosystem that aims to aid in the production and distribution of kpatch patches to…
  • GTK announces X11 deprecation, new Android backend, and much more

    Feb 3, 2025, 6:16 am By Thom Holwerda
    Since a number of GTK developer came together at FOSDEM, the project figured now was as good a time as any to give an update on what’s coming in GTK. First, GTK is implementing some hard cut-offs for old platforms – Windows 10 and macOS 10.15 are now the…
  • Run Linux inside a PDF file via a RISC-V emulator

    Feb 3, 2025, 5:49 am By Thom Holwerda
    You might expect PDF files to only be comprised of static documents, but surprisingly, the PDF file format supports Javascript with its own separate standard library. Modern browsers (Chromium, Firefox) implement this as part of their PDF engines. However, the…
  • The GNU Guix System

    Feb 3, 2025, 5:42 am By Thom Holwerda
    GNU Guix is a package manager for GNU/Linux systems. It is designed to give users more control over their general-purpose and specialized computing environments, and make these easier to reproduce over time and deploy to one or many devices. ↫ GNU Guix…