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Links 04/09/2023: Distro Watch Examines Debian GNU/Hurd 2023 and LibreArts Weekly is Ready



  • GNU/Linux

    • 9to5Linux9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: September 3rd, 2023

      This week was a bit slow in news and releases, but we got a new stable Firefox update, new major Nitrux, Emmabuntüs Debian Edition, and Armbian releases, as well as a new GNU Linux-libre release for software freedom lovers.

      On top of that, I show you how to install the latest Linux 6.5 kernel on Ubuntu and how to enable thumbnails for AVIF images in Nautilus. Below, you can read this week’s hottest news and access all the distro and package downloads in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for September 3rd, 2023.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • JupiterMediaCanonical Wins by Default | LINUX Unplugged 526

        While chaos is brewing in SUSE and Red Hat land, Canonical stays the course and doubles down on the Linux desktop. Plus, our thoughts on the kernel team GPL-blocking NVIDIA.

      • GNU World Order (Audio Show)GNU World Order 528

        **harfbuzz** , **hicolor-icon-theme** , **hunspell** , **hyphen** from the

        **l** software series of Slackware.

        shasum -a256=ca1910a612e77798c323df8ee64aed22dd2179d92a71ea65d8c00511c59b203c

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Own HowToHow to install Steam on Ubuntu 23.04 Desktop

        If you've switched to Linux, and you are wondering if you can run Steam and play Steam games on your Linux machine..yes you can!

        All you have to do is Install Steam, download the game you like, and play it.

      • Ubuntu HandbookWine Dev 8.15 Released, How to Install it in Ubuntu

        Wine, the popular software library to running Windows apps on Linux and macOS, announced a new development release one day ago.

      • RoseHostingHow to Install RPM Packages On Ubuntu 22.04

        RPM or Red Hat Package Manager is a free, open-source package management system.

        The RPM package management system is written in C and Perl programming languages for Linux operating systems.

        It is used in many other distributions, such as Fedora, AlmaLinux, CentOS, and OracleLinux. The Red Hat distributions are Debian and Ubuntu.

        Installing RPM packages on Ubuntu 22.04 can be done in two different ways. It is a very easy process that may take a couple of minutes. Let’s get started!

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • It's FOSSLinux Users Beware! GNOME 45 is Bad News for Extensions
          With every GNOME upgrade, some extensions break; that's not new. But, with GNOME 45, every extension will break

          And why is that? Let me tell you more about it.

          With every upgrade, there is always a technical improvement or change.

          And, GNOME 45 comes with pretty exciting changes, except this one.

        • Alan PopeUpdated 'Must-Have' GNOME extensions list

          Back in December 2020 I wrote up my personal Must-Have GNOME extensions. It’s been nearly three years, two job changes, and a few Ubuntu upgrades, so I thought I’d take another look.

          This used to crash a lot for me, to the point I’d go and look for it in the panel and it was missing. I figured if I don’t realise it’s gone, I probably don’t need it that much. Also, GNOME shell volume control has changed a bit over the last few years. It’s pretty easy to switch device now in the menu.

        • GNOMEJonathan Blandford: Crosswords 0.3.11: Acrostic Panels

          Long time, no release.

          When I last blogged about GNOME Crosswords, I had a design plan to improve the editing API. It’s been a busy summer since then. The crosswords team rewrote large chunks of code to implement and use this new API: [...]

        • Andy Holmes: Mentoring in Open Source

          This year, I was invited by Sonny Piers to be a co-mentor for the GNOME Foundation, working on platform demos for Workbench. I already contribute a lot of entry-level documentation and help a lot of contributors, so this felt like a good step in a direction I've been heading for a while.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • Reviews

      • Distro WatchReview: Debian GNU/Hurd 2023 and PCLinuxOS 2023.07 "KDE"

        While many rolling release distributions constantly chase after the latest technologies, themes, and cutting edge packages, PCLinuxOS is unusual in that it has a strongly conservative approach. The distribution does provide up to date packages, but it feels like a lot of effort has been put into keeping the distribution stable and running smoothly via older approaches. PCLinuxOS doesn't move with the latest trends. This is a project which doesn't enable a lot of visual effects, doesn't leap on newer technologies, doesn't attempt to package every new desktop that comes along. It's still running SysV init (instead of systemd), it's still using an X11 session for Plasma instead of Wayland, it still offers MATE over GNOME, and it is still using the Synaptic package manager over more modern software centres like Discover.

        In short, despite the regular flow of updated packages flowing into the distribution's repositories, not much seems to be changing with PCLinuxOS. It's reluctant to adopt new ways of doing things, like portable packages and welcome windows, and advanced filesystems. Most of the tools, approaches, and system administration modules still look and behave the same way they did ten years ago.

        This might appeal to a lot of users, particularly ones who were getting started with Linux around the time PCLinuxOS reached the top of the DistroWatch page hit ranking charts, nearly 20 years ago. People who have been comfortable with Linux for a long time and don't feel the urge to roll with the times will probably enjoy this distribution a lot. There is a strong sense when using PCLinuxOS that if something isn't broke, then they don't fix it.

        However, on the other side of that coin, there are some tools and approaches which have become so commonplace these days that it feels odd to not see them included in this distribution. It feels odd to be missing so many manual pages (though not all of them), it feels a bit strange to be manually adding and troubleshooting Flatpak at this point, it feels a bit alien to not have access to sudo (or doas) on a modern Linux distribution. PCLinuxOS is unusually static for a rolling release, to the point I was able to copy/paste some of the paragraphs in this review from a previous article I wrote about the distribution over four years ago.

        Basically, for the past decade, PCLinuxOS has been upgrading its packages to keep up with upstream, but it doesn't appear to have tried anything new or introduced any custom tools. This probably appeals to existing PCLinuxOS users as they can continue to feel comfortable, but it is a project unlikely to draw new users who expect to have access to certain modern tools or resources.

    • New Releases

      • DebugPointantiX 23: Debian 12-Powered Linux Distro for Aging Hardware

        antiX, renowned for being a lightweight, systemd-free desktop Linux distribution tailored for aging hardware, has just unveiled antiX 23, the latest iteration of its impressive distro.

        The key highlight? It's now based on Debian 12 "Bookworm".

    • BSD

      • DebugPointNetBSD's Endurance: A Decade-Long Server Uptime Record

        Software upgrades have become the norm today for all desktops and servers. Updates to consumer operating systems (Linux or Windows or Mac) are very frequent due to ever-evolving CVEs and fixes. Thus, it's rare to find a server that has been running continuously for a decade.

        Yet, such a remarkable feat has recently come to light, and it involves an unexpected champion: NetBSD.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Tom's HardwareRaspberry Pi Uses AI for Virtual Painting

        The team at the Sparklers: We Are The Makers YouTube channel uses a Raspberry Pi for their virtual painting program.

      • Daniel LemireLocating ‘identifiers’ quickly (ARM NEON edition)

        A common problem in parsing is that you want to find all identifiers (e.g., variable names, function names) in a document quickly. There are typically some fixed rules. For example, it is common to allow ASCII letters and digits as well as characters like ‘_’ in the identifier, but to forbid some characters at the beginning of the identifier (such as digits). E.g., ab123 is an identifier but 123ab might not be.

      • Old VCRRefurb weekend: PowerBook Duo 2300c

        With the Dock, your little, relatively underpowered laptop was hoovered up into a beige plastic maw to make it into an average-sized, somewhat less underpowered desktop. But you got slots and ports and the ability to use it like a desktop computer — two computers in one! — and that was crucial because without any Dock, even the smaller Mini and MicroDocks, you had hardly any ports at all (MacBook Air has entered the chat). Docking was so important that Apple even intentionally gimped the 2300 by keeping the 100MHz 603e on a 32-bit bus to maintain Dock compatibility. Yet because Duos were irrepressibly cute, they turned up in many other TV shows and even movies, most notoriously Hackers: [...]

      • Linux GizmosGOWIN & Andes Technologies collaborate and reveal 22nm SoC FPGA
      • HackadayGrowing Oxides On Silicon On The Road To DIY Semiconductors

        Doing anything that requires measurements in nanometers is pretty difficult, and seems like it would require some pretty sophisticated equipment. But when the task at hand is growing oxide layers on silicon chips in preparation for making your own integrated circuits, it turns out that the old Mark 1 eyeball is all you need.

      • HackadayBare PCB Makes A Decent Homemade Smart Watch

        These days, we live in a post-Dick Tracy world, where you can make a phone call with your fancy wristwatch, and lots more besides. [akashv44] has gone a simpler route, designing their own from scratch with a bare PCB design.

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Libre ArtsLibreArts Weekly recap — 3 September 2023

      This is a comparatively short recap, because there haven’t been all that many changes and releases. Highlights: new features in Inkscape and FreeCAD, new releases of BlenderBIM and libwacom, cool new stuff in Ardour.

      The Swatches dock UI has been recently updated by Mike Kowalski.

    • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

      • OMG UbuntuPapirus Icon Pack Updated with New-Look LibreOffice Icons

        A major update to the phenomenally popular Paprius icon set for Linux desktops is now available. Papirus’ September 2023 update adds a bunch of new and updated glyphs, including redesigned icons for LibreOffice that riff on the suite’s own recent icon revamp. Among the newly added apps supported in Paprius v20230901: Additional file/document types are catered for as of this update, with .hwp, .Julia, and .vue among them.

    • Programming/Development

      • 10 years of rio

        rio was the first R package I uploaded to CRAN. And actually, I had my first experience with the back then not-so-friendly CRAN team. I was accused by a CRAN team member for wasting his time 1. But after many back-and-forth e-mails and uploads, the first version of rio, v0.1.1, was released on CRAN on 2013-08-28 at 14:02 CEST. That’s right: that was exactly ten years ago today.

        I used rio in my own PhD research for quickly save and load data. But I did not find rio to be widely used in 2013-2014. There was no development for almost a year (as there was no need, rio worked well enough for my research), until I received an e-mail from Dr Thomas J. Leeper (now research scientist at Facebook Meta) in 2015 saying he updated the package to support more formats (excel, json, etc.) and asking how should he proceed with contributing to the package. At the time, I was busy with my own PhD research (plus million other research projects and services). He even offered to me to uptake the maintainership of rio. I agreed and then the rest is history.



Recent Techrights' Posts

US Government: 6.1% of Site Visitors Use GNU/Linux
GNU/Linux has a considerable share and it is growing
Why the FSF No Longer Recommends Debian, as Explained by Richard Stallman This Month
some weeks ago
 
Psychiatrist confession: Germanwings crash & Debian toxic culture recognized before suicides
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 19/10/2025: Scentjacking 101, Slop Hype Boosters, and Steam Next Fest
Links for the day
Slopwatch: The Serial Slopper, LinuxSecurity, and Google News
Let's hope slopfarms die as soon as possible
Links 19/10/2025: Cambodia Scam Centres, Slop Hurting Wikipedia Traffic
Links for the day
As Economies Crumble Free as in Beer Will Matter, Not Just Free as in Freedom/Libre (Libertad)
French regions choosing to embrace Software Freedom
25 Years Ago, an Explanation of How Reducing Free Software to 'Apps' Would Interfere With Freedom Goals
there's nothing unreasonable about it
A List of 63 Known Gemini Clients (Software to Browse Geminispace Content With Gemini Protocol)
Not counting browser plugins for Web browsers
Gemini Links 19/10/2025: "Firma Odin Is Transforming" and Bot Attacks While "AFK"
Links for the day
LLM Slop Could Not Rise to Prominence Without Media Complicity and Artificial Hype
Inane garbage disguised as "journalism"
All the Latest Half Dozen Articles by Mehedi Hasan (UbuntuPIT) Only Admit at the End That He's Using LLM Slop
Disclosure is OK, but the practice of using slop is not
The 'Modern' Web of Fake Security and Easy Censorship of Whole Domains
Each year it gets worse
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, October 18, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, October 18, 2025
The Term "AI" is Not New and What Today's Media Calls "AI" Isn't Even AI
Only the hype was new... and totally artificial
Gemini Links 18/10/2025: "Planetary Rings", Steam, and PSU Replacement
Links for the day
Defeating LLM Abuse (State-of-the-Art Plagiarism) in the Area of Linux and GNU, Free Software, BSD, Security and So On
The aim is to get them to stop using LLMs to rip off other people's work
Links 18/10/2025: Russell Vought in Charge, US Government Leans to Russia Again
Links for the day
Credit Where It's Due: LinuxConfig.org Quit Doing LLM Slop, Back to Original and Real Articles
We waited for a while to say this, now it seems conclusive
Of Note: UbuntuPIT Aware of Critics of Slop, Adds Disclosure of Use of LLMs
We appreciate the honesty
Links 18/10/2025: Madagascar's President Flees and ICE Arrests Protest Comedian Robby Roadsteamer
Links for the day
Richard Stallman Near the European Patent Office (EPO) in 3 Days From Now
It'll be a good opportunity for patent examiners to listen, ask questions, and maybe greet him in person
From Scholar to Booster of Slop (and Even Slop in His Own Blog)
We're going to keep an eye on future posts of his
End of Vista 10 Also Good News for the BSDs
There are many news sites that recommend trying GNU/Linux this month
What's Wrong With Liking Parrots or Birds as Pets?
They'd demonise people for speaking about freedom, no matter what they say or do
Digital Sanitation Good Practices
leave behind Microsoftism
10 Days Ago Richard Stallman Gave a Long Interview in French (linuxfr.org)
English translation
Science, Not Fast Food/Junk Food
The commercial exploitation of users won't stop until users exercise full control over their software or - more broadly - their computing (including data)
The Free Software Foundation, Which Has Appointed a 43-Year-Old President, is Looking to Add Another Board Member (or Treasurer)
expect the FSF to add more people
Richard Stallman Confirms Next Week's Talk at Technical University of Munich, We Urge EPO Staff to Attend
That's probably late enough for EPO staff to attend after work
Gemini Links 18/10/2025: Notifications and Geminaut
Links for the day
Many Red Hat People Are Leaving, But It'll Be Framed Publicly as Leaving IBM
Similarly, IBM layoffs (or "RAs" as they're called) include Red Hat layoffs
Expect More Waves of Microsoft Layoffs This Month (at Least Two Rounds Confirmed Already)
From what we can gather, assuming the recent rumours about XBox are true, there will be at least 3 waves of Microsoft layoffs this month alone
Security Issues in Cisco and Jenkins Passed Off as "Linux" Problems
Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD) tactics
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 17, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, October 17, 2025
[Video] Dr. Richard Stallman at Technické Univerzitě v Liberci
New/via libre-liberec.cz
Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, Linux Journal (Slashdot Media), UbuntuPIT, and Google News (Noise)
egregious plagiarism
Links 17/10/2025: Better Answers Sought After Air Crashes, "China Fans Patriotic Sentiment as Trade War With U.S. Heats Up"
Links for the day
Security is Desirable, But Not When the Term Security is Misused to Imply Centralisation of "Trust" (Whose?)
'Security' is not an excuse for vendor lock-in
Links 17/10/2025: Fentanylware (CheeTok) Causing Problems, Japanese Government Blasts Slop
Links for the day
The Linux Foundation Seems to Have Turned Linux.com Not Only Into a Spamfarm But Also LLM Slopfarm
it's polluting the Web, even important domains like Linux.com, with spam and LLM slop
Links 17/10/2025: UK’s Largest Breach Penalty and Windows TCO Examples
Links for the day
Go Watch Video About Librephone, Get Microsoft Ads
Very ethical company...
Campaign of Defamation Against the People Who Built NixOS (and Are Now Pushed Out From Their Own Project)
We've already grown familiar with - and resistant to - such tactics
Links 17/10/2025: Nestlé Crisis, Canada Post Versus 'Gig Economy' [sic] and Vista 11 Breaks Itself
Links for the day
Tux Machines Has Helped Separate Opinions/Analysis From News
In September 2023 we decided to split things apart and not repeat links in both sites
Tux Machines Has Improved Navigation of GNU/Linux and BSD News
Some more 'wiring' work
What a World Would Look Like If Everyone Used Free Software Only
Freedom is what matters, not "Open".
The Media Helps Microsoft, Amazon and Others (GAFAM and Beyond) Lie About Mass Layoffs Amid Valuation Bubble
The media, instead of saying that there's an "AI bubble" crashing the economy might instead choose the narrative of "jobs replaced by AI"
Bad Tempered? You Might Have Just Given Away That You're Losing the Argument
Brett Wilson LLP is fully aware that it is being investigated
Richard Stallman (RMS) is a Target of Defamation Campaigns Because of His Views on Software (But Politics Are the Excuse for Defaming Him)
Here in this site we try to refrain from politics, except in Daily Links
End of Vista 10 and Rise of GNU/Linux as Client Side Operating System
It seems certain GNU/Linux will grow in popularity over time
Taking Stock of a Week's Worth of EPO Leaks
We remain committed to exposing EPO corruption as long as it keeps happening
Mathieu Parreaux claims FINMA knew since day one
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Calumny, Libel, Joerg Jaspert & debian-private untouchable cyberbullies
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 16, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, October 16, 2025
Techrights Turns 19 in 3 Weeks
coverage of suppressed topics and protecting all sources/whistleblowers
International E-Waste Day Same Day as End of Vista 10
message from Akira Urushibata
The EPO's Central Staff Committee Presents Evidence That Staff Compensation Lowered While the Office Increases Income by Illegally Granting Invalid Patents
These people become millionaires by doing illegal things
Second or Third Wave of Microsoft Mass Layoffs in October 2025, This Time Portugal
Those are just the ones we know about, there may be several more
'Help Net Security' (helpnetsecurity.com) May Have Become a Slopfarm as Well
Zeljka Zorz, Editor-in-Chief at Help Net Security, was reported to us
Gemini Links 17/10/2025: Rant About Network Solutions, Strange Anomaly on Lagrange
Links for the day