Introducing Pi-hole v6
https://pi-hole.net/blog/2025/02/18/introducing-pi-hole-v6/

https://redd.it/1iswyw5
@r_linux

How many people actually use Gnome 3?

I've been a Linux user since 2014, my first experience in Linux was with Unity on Ubuntu 12.10 a few years before but I went back to XP since it ran very slowly and was completely alien. lol After that I used MATE pretty steadily on Fedora Linux (and then Ubuntu when I got sick of fighting Fedora to get printer drivers to work and other annoyances) until January of this year. I briefly tried Gnome 3, Cinnamon, KDE and some others but I found that MATE worked best for me. In January I switched to Mint since it's been a long time since I tried it last and I'm actually loving it so far. But it's made me think, Gnome is supposedly the most popular and it's offered on a lot of distros as the default but I've never seen anyone actually use it as their daily. lol

(Side question but multiple work space switching was a thing I also heard people using years ago, Commodore OS even made a showy 3D cube animation for switching work spaces. Does anyone use this feature still? I've never used it and when I got a second monitor it seemed kind of redundant.)

https://redd.it/1iszciq
@r_linux

Qualys TRU Discovers Two Vulnerabilities in OpenSSH: CVE-2025-26465 & CVE-2025-26466
https://blog.qualys.com/vulnerabilities-threat-research/2025/02/18/qualys-tru-discovers-two-vulnerabilities-in-openssh-cve-2025-26465-cve-2025-26466

https://redd.it/1it18vs
@r_linux

Accessing an NPU on Linux

With 6.14 coming in March, I'm wondering how we can take advantage of NPUs on Linux. Anyone have examples?

The new Ryzen AI Max+ 395 is coming out that has MASSIVE performance improvements for an APU. A real contendor for portable llm workflows at the client level. As someone that travels a lot I'm considering that new asus laptop for that power and massive chip. It's not exactly an M1, but the ability to add ram to the gpu is really cool.

According to AMD's site, only windows is supported:
https://ryzenai.docs.amd.com/en/latest/inst.html

So what use is an NPU (for which we have a driver in the 6.14 kernel) if there's no api and software to utilize it?

I'm VERY new to this, and so please understand of it sounds like I'm coming from a very ignorant place, lol.

P.S. I'm against the use of all this close-sourced "ai" stuff and also the training without permission of creators. As an engineer I'm primarily interested in a lightweight code-buddy and nothing more. Thanks!

https://redd.it/1isx272
@r_linux

Greg KH: But for new code / drivers, writing them in Rust where these types of bugs just can't happen (or happen much much less) is a win for all of us, why wouldn't we do this?
https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/2025021954-flaccid-pucker-f7d9@gregkh/

https://redd.it/1it3owc
@r_linux

OpenSSH Vulnerabilities Exposed Millions to Multi-Year Risks
https://cyberinsider.com/openssh-vulnerabilities-exposed-millions-to-multi-year-risks/

https://redd.it/1it4cx8
@r_linux

KDE Plasma 6.3.1, Bugfix Release for February
https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.3.1/

https://redd.it/1it5af8
@r_linux

So we have a few computers in the house including functional snappy daily drivers that don't meet the windows 11 CPU requirement... Got my non tech savvy partner on the Linux train (Kubuntu).

So me and my partner have 3 computers that work perfectly fine that are daily drivers. Nothing wrong with them whatsoever and they run fast and snappy for office tasks and light gaming. They run fast and snappy with SSDs.

We found that even with a TPM 2.0, they don't meet the CPU requirements. My partner is not tech savvy at all but usually plays older games and some steam indie games, most of which run on his laptop and if not that, our desktop.

This is where we finally decided to be the change regarding big corporations that really don't care. From cars that won't start without an update to trying to force decommissioning of good hardware seeing as moores law has long since ended. 3 working computers don't go into landfill even if a single capacitor pops in this house, as why waste money and ruin the environment more? The most we do is replace the batteries. I prefer older business grade hardware when I get it as that stuff doesn't seem to break. A surface laptop got all of 3 years before it's screen began to fail.

So I realised Linux would be our only option. I've been away years (was on Ubuntu for a while, then windows 7 came out and I immensely liked the OS), until I tried Kubuntu. Fast, stable and so snappy. Like everything just opens instantly. Light footprint. Even has an 'app store' kind of thing, good for a layman.

With wine all my partner's games run, and steam with proton makes gaming on Linux a reality. I used the terminal to set things up for us, as I'm the one with the tech knowledge in the house.

And my partner said it looks and feels almost identical to windows. He's not tech savvy at all, I set it up, but once running he can install windows apps as he normally would and use native ones.

We both have the view the windows 11 requirements were probably one last grab to get everyone to buy new PCs with their distribution partners and finally got rid of Microsoft. Currently windows 10 is still on our NAS box but that will change when it reaches end of support. I swapped paying for cloud storage to occasionally rotating HDDs at friends houses and keeping a small free one to upload encrypted small rapidly changing data sets.

Shocked that Kubuntu even came with a working office suite that didn't have to be installed, absolutely free. A hidden gem for the layman.

I do wish they still did .deb files though, makes it easy to keep offline setup files. I just fished them out of the cache.

https://redd.it/1it60ce
@r_linux

The reality of long-term software maintenance from the maintainer's perspective
https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/ashleys-blog-2/reality-long-term-software-1892

https://redd.it/1it6r32
@r_linux

Linux Server Setup - Part 2: What’s Next After Installation
https://linuxblog.io/linux-server-after-installation/

https://redd.it/1it5yx8
@r_linux

Linux really made using a computer fun again

Seriously, I came mostly for privacy reasons and will now stay because Linux made using a PC fun again. In a way using Linux is like back then when PCs where new and, for the most part, something creative. Where Windows kept evolving and everything was new and exciting. Linux, probably due to its open source nature, still feels exactly like that. Tons of ways to use it, tons of distros, you can tinker with it however you want to. It obviously has flaws when all you know is Windows where most things work out of the box but the gained freedom is just worth SO much more. In a way the same applies to everything FOSS. If there is one thing I grew tired of in todays digital world its how utterly corporate and sanitized everything is. Everything needs to be as foolproof as possible, everything needs to be as inoffensive as possible and because of that you get told what youre allowed to do. Linux and the whole FOSS community is the exact opposite. You actually need to do your research, You need to tinker but in return youre the one who tells your software what its allowed to do and what not. All kinds of DEs, everyone uses Linux different. Its really nostalgic and still has the magic from the past. Depending on your usecase and hardware using Linux is rough at times, frustrating even, but I honestly wouldnt want it any different.

https://redd.it/1itc0aw
@r_linux

Simple TUI SQLite Browser

JDbrowser is small and simple application to browse an SQLite database with a Text User Interface. Written in rust.

Uses vim style key binds, keep the fingers on the home row where they belong.

Feel free to try it out and let me know what you think!

Binaries, building, code and installing available Here

Arch users: AUR package available for simple install

yay -S jdbrowser-git

All instructions are Here





https://redd.it/1itbtzn
@r_linux

Fedora OBS Drama Resolved
https://gitlab.com/fedora/sigs/flatpak/fedora-flatpaks/-/issues/39#note_2354562186

https://redd.it/1itf9nn
@r_linux

How I solved short audio interruptions while playing music from the external USB 3.0 HDD

Firstly: the external USB 3.0 HDD is a TOSHIBA MQ04UBD200, 2,0 TB.

I'm just using it, at 99%, for playing music in Strawberry music player.

OS: Manjaro Linux, 16 GB RAM, Samsung EVO 870 SSD (but doesn't matter, since as I've said, I play the music from the external HDD), audio server: PipeWire, (on which I increased the quantum value), audio HW: simple Intel HDA.

What was happening since some days ago: occasionally, during the day, but not often, I was annoyed by short audio interruptions: this occurs independently to what i was doing: I can also compile programs without hiccups; these short audio interruptions also happened while doing nothing.
Since I have a large quantum value for pipewire (2048) the issue had to be elsewhere. I also defragmented the disk on Windows.
Long story short: the culprit was the I/O scheduler bfq (despite the fact that I also had set read_ahead_kb value to 4096).
I changed the I/O scheduler, for the mentioned USB HDD, to kyber. Since then, the audio problem is totally gone.

The UDEV rule (just the section for the HDD):
/etc/udev/rules.d/01-scheduler.rules

ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="sdc", ATTR{queue/rotational}=="1", ATTR{queue/scheduler}="kyber"

ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="sdc", ATTR{queue/rotational}=="1", ATTR{queue/readaheadkb}="4096"

To apply this rule, just disconnect and reconnect the disk.

Obviously, if you wanna try this, you have to change sdc to reflect your disk.

https://redd.it/1it9y4x
@r_linux

A noscript for you :)
https://redd.it/1ithywe
@r_linux

Void Linux Package for the Linux Zen Kernel

Hey everybody, This is a Void Linux package for the Linux Zen kernel, optimized for gaming and desktop use. It allows Void Linux users to easily install and run this kernel on their systems. Following the mainline kernel, it has just been updated to version 6.13.3 today. Thought I'd share it here, please feel free to comment with any questions or concerns!

https://gitlab.com/isognomy-inc/linux-zen-void

https://redd.it/1itj3af
@r_linux

Mesa 25.0.0 Release Notes / 2025-02-19 — The Mesa 3D Graphics Library latest documentation
https://docs.mesa3d.org/relnotes/25.0.0.html

https://redd.it/1itv8kk
@r_linux

New Patches Would Make All Kernel Encryption/Decryption Faster On x86/x86_64 Hardware
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-x86-Crypt-Drop-Fallback

https://redd.it/1itwuu5
@r_linux

Greg Kroah-Hartman Makes A Compelling Case For New Linux Kernel Drivers To Be Written In Rust
http://phoronix.com/news/Greg-KH-On-New-Rust-Code

https://redd.it/1itxh4g
@r_linux

The Fedora Project Leader is willfully ignorant about Flathub
https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/02/19/the-fedora-project-leader-is-willfully-ignorant-about-flathub/

https://redd.it/1ity5zp
@r_linux

Chromium Ozone/Wayland: The Last Mile Stretch
https://nickdiego.dev/blog/chromium-ozone-wayland-the-last-mile-stretch/

https://redd.it/1itygay
@r_linux