In 2025, the package manager and frequency of updates are the only real differences between most distributions. I’ve been enjoying Flatpak for years now and hope it continues to build momentum. It offers the possibility of shared effort between distributions who depend on legions of volunteers constantly updating debs/rpms/whatever.

It feels like one of the last hurdles to eliminate so much of the duplicated effort associated with all these distributions.

I started using Linux right in the late 90’s. The small things I recall that might be amusing.

1. The installation process was easier than installing Arch (before Arch got an installer)
2. I don’t recall doing any regular updates after things were working except for when a new major release came out.
3. You needed to buy a modem to get online since none of the “winmodems” ever worked.
4. Dependency hell was real. When you were trying to install an RPM from Fresh Meat and then it would fail with all the missing libraries.
5. GNOME and KDE felt sincerely bloated. They seemed to always run painfully slow on modern computers. Moving a lot of people to Window Managers.
6. it was hard to have a good web browser. Before Firefox came out you struggled along with Netscape. I recall having to use a statically compiled ancient (even for the time) version of Netscape as that was the only thing available at the time for OpenBSD.
7. Configuring XFree86 (pre-cursor to X.org) was excruciating. I think I still have an old book that cautioned if you configured your refresh rates and monitor settings incorrectly your monitor could catch on fire.
8. As a follow on to the last statement. I once went about 6 months without any sort of GUI because I couldn’t get X working correctly.
9. Before PulseAudio you’d have to go into every application that used sound and pick from a giant drop down list of your current sound card drivers (ALSA and OSS) combined with whatever mixer you were using. You’d hope the combo you were using was supported.
10. Everyone cheered when you no longer had to fight to get flash working to get a decent web browsing experience.

I really don’t agree with choosing to release with the UEFI bug they found. They describe it as cosmetic but those entries can last the lifetime of your computer, even if you wipe your hard drive. It’s bound to cause some confusion for years to come for Linux tinkerers.

The research paper looks well written but I couldn’t find any information on if this paper is going to be published in a reputable journal and peer reviewed. I have little faith in private businesses who profit from AI providing an unbiased view of how AI works. I think the first question I’d like answered is did Anthropic’s marketing department review the paper and did they offer any corrections or feedback? We’ve all heard the stories about the tobacco industry paying for papers to be written about the benefits of smoking and refuting health concerns.

I do this with my home network using FastMail. You can create App specific passwords for each service you add email notification support for. This means you don’t risk compromising your full accounts passwords. You can also put constraints on each app password, such as limiting it only to sending emails but not reading email or looking at your contacts and files. This is nice in case any of my passwords are leaked.

This feels a lot like the common “millennials can’t do X anymore” that we used to see all the time.

I switched careers recently from software engineering to teaching. Young people are fine.

Some things have changed. Those with no previous experience need a little help understanding file systems and moving files around, something they didn’t really have to do on iPads and Chromebooks.

Besides that students pick things up quickly. Find it as interesting and exciting as we did and often impress me by using more advanced features than we discuss in class.

Yes, they try to use AI. I usually explain to them that AI can likely do all their assignments in our classes not because AI is a good programmer but because these are introductory classes where the assignments are simple.

So far AI still can’t produce a perfect assignment for the students. And an easy way to tell they’re using AI is to see if their code is formatted too well. Most beginners will screw up indention somewhere in their programs. So what do I do if they use AI and then ask me for help (because AI didn’t do exactly what they wanted)? I tell them to let AI fix it. They end up having to rewrite so much before I help them that asking AI isn’t worth it to begin with.

Anyway, to summarize kids are still learning to code, still improving, and there’s going to be a lot of talented junior engineers graduating.

Yeah! I’ve been doing the same. I actually find myself thinking “I haven’t participated in a conversation in over a week. I better find something to comment on.”

Same, the builtin sync between devices using WebDAV was the critical feature for me choosing Joplin over Obsidian.

You mean like Wacom tablets? I’m curious to know what’s missing. I’ve been using one of those XP Pen tablets on GNOME and Wayland without much issue. I’m using it for writing more than drawing though.

Email, as a suite of protocols, was designed long before we thought deeply about encryption. In 2025, you can count on email encryption in transit and encryption at rest from providers, although try to verify it. E2EE like Proton and Tuta offer is severely limited. I was recently looking up if Proton and Tuta were even compatible with each other in terms of PGP encryption. I could find no confirmation that they are.

If you use Proton and you email another Proton user it’ll be encrypted with PGP. Otherwise your email is sent unencrypted, and email you receive is unencrypted, then Proton stores it on their server encrypted. All of this paragraph applies to Tuta as well.

You can get most of the same benefits from other providers by downloading your email locally and deleting off the mail servers. The benefit of regular email servers is open standards and compatibility with your preferred mail and calendar applications.

I use Fastmail and love it. I know many people mention using burner addressed with a custom domain, but I prefer generating a burner email with a FastMail domain for signing up to websites. Using my own domain would make it easier to identify me.

I use FastMail as well. I actually went from FastMail to Proton, and then back to FastMail.

I configure a lot of my home networking equipment and servers to send me emails for things like installing software updates, reboots, and any possible security issues. I couldn’t make that work with Proton not supporting any standard mail protocols (I know about Bridge, but it requires a GUI, and I didn’t want to use a third party program).

I’ve been really enjoying Cockpit as well.

From what I recall the completely fair scheduler (CFS) used by default on most Linux systems has a lower average latency than the RT kernel. The RT kernel just gives you more consistency, hence the CFS having lower latency “on average”

So honestly for opening Firefox it’ll probably depends more on your SSD data rate, but in theory it’ll open faster on a “regular” distribution most of the time.

Real time is good for things like audio processing where having better guarantees that a process will get its share of the CPU is a benefit.

Hey man, I don’t want to discourage you, but this is one of those things where if you have to ask how to do something you’re probably not experienced enough to do it. That being said, as a learning opportunity even if you don’t make it far you’ll still learn a lot about how GPUs work.

I’d start by looking at any existing drivers you can find and see if you can document or find documentation for the commands fed to the GPU. From there you can look at the Mesa project for examples of converting Vulkan to instructions for specific processors and see if you can get it to all fit together for your project.

For newer APIs the kernels documentation is good:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

As for getting help, the #kernelnewbies channel on the OFTC IRC network is a good place to ask questions.

Have fun learning!

I’ve done some kernel development. I’d suggest using a modern system. Most of the basic stuff in the book is still accurate and there’s great documentation available to help find newer APIs. The kernel is always refactoring so learning to find newer info is part of the skills you’ll need to develop anyway.

I hope there’s pushback on this. They mention prices can change as often as 10 seconds. Meaning you can add something to your cart and by the time you check out the price has gone up. That seems like false advertising. Will the store associates have a way to override the cost if we make a fuss and ask them to price match the items to the cost when we added them to our carts?

It feels like this is another area where technology is advancing faster than our consumer protection laws. I suppose another thing to write your local representatives about. I’d hope legislation protecting a family grocery shopping would be an easy win for politicians and bipartisan.

I don’t think you really do anymore. I’d consider myself an experienced Linux user. I’ve been using it as a my desktop OS for over 20 years. I’ve also used Linux heavily through my career and am completely comfortable with the command line.

With recent installs of Fedora the only thing I use the command line for is the initial setup of the multimedia codecs. After that I haven’t been required to touch it.

I used to consider a terminal required to keep your desktop Linux system running. Now I look at is as an optional install for programmers.

That was a good read. I’d not really been sure of the differences between libadawaita and GTK were. It sounds like this frees up GTK to focus on being a cross platform GUI library, perhaps competing more directly with Qt. Meanwhile, libadawaita allows GNOME developers to keep leveraging GTK and tune it to their design guidelines.

I’ve only seen positive things come out of recent GNOME apps, but I wonder if the downside of GTK no longer embedding GNOME’s design language would be apps choosing to use GTK directly instead of libadawaita for better cross platform support. Will we end up with a less cohesive GNOME environment in the future?

Using Napster was one of those defining childhood memories for me. I was in junior high when it came out and I remember hearing about it through rumors at school. It was one of my early memories, realizing that computers could be used for interesting things and not just office work.

Those were the days, spending 20 minutes downloading a 3 minute song over dialup.