Their resignation is already being discussed in another post here from yesterday: One Of The Rust Linux Kernel Maintainers Steps Down - Cites "Nontechnical Nonsense"

...but I think this LWN reporting (from back in June) deserves its own post as it makes it easier for those of us who are not kernel hackers to follow what is going on.

I recently learned about nsjail, a utility to sandbox applications or provide workload isolation.

It seems to be lighter weight than firejail and possibly better suited for server applications.

Has anyone used this? What's your experience with it? I'm curious about using it for my web server applications as an additional layer of Dr hotty.

In practice, the Linux community is the wild wild west, and sweeping changes are infamously difficult to achieve consensus on, and this is by far the broadest sweeping change ever proposed for the project. Every subsystem is a private fiefdom, subject to the whims of each one of Linux’s 1,700+ maintainers, almost all of whom have a dog in this race. It’s herding cats: introducing Rust effectively is one part coding work and ninety-nine parts political work – and it’s a lot of coding work. Every subsystem has its own unique culture and its own strongly held beliefs and values.

The consequences of these factors is that Rust-for-Linux has become a burnout machine. My heart goes out to the developers who have been burned in this project. It’s not fair. Free software is about putting in the work, it’s a classical do-ocracy… until it isn’t, and people get hurt. In spite of my critiques of the project, I recognize the talent and humanity of everyone involved, and wouldn’t have wished these outcomes on them. I also have sympathy for many of the established Linux developers who didn’t exactly want this on their plate… but that’s neither here nor there for the purpose of this post, and any of those developers and their fiefdoms who went out of their way to make life difficult for the Rust developers above and beyond what was needed to ensure technical excellence are accountable for these shitty outcomes.

...

Here’s the pitch: a motivated group of talented Rust OS developers could build a Linux-compatible kernel, from scratch, very quickly, with no need to engage in LKML politics. You would be astonished by how quickly you can make meaningful gains in this kind of environment; I think if the amount of effort being put into Rust-for-Linux were applied to a new Linux-compatible OS we could have something production ready for some use-cases within a few years.

...

Having a clear, well-proven goal in mind can also help to attract the same people who want to make an impact in a way that a speculative research project might not. Freeing yourselves of the LKML political battles would probably be a big win for the ambitions of bringing Rust into kernel space. Such an effort would also be a great way to mentor a new generation of kernel hackers who are comfortable with Rust in kernel space and ready to deploy their skillset to the research projects that will build a next-generation OS like Redox. The labor pool of serious OS developers badly needs a project like this to make that happen.

Follow up to: One Of The Rust Linux Kernel Maintainers Steps Down - Cites "Nontechnical Nonsense", On Rust, Linux, developers, maintainers, and Asahi Lina's experience about working on Rust code in the kernel

I've been happily Windows-free for about 5 years, but lately I need some Win-only software including a few games that don't work at all on Linux. My main questions:

• How to avoid Windows messing with my Linux install? Having a separate PC is not possible for me right now. I'm considering uninstalling grub and instead selecting the boot device I want from UEFI, idk if this is advisable though.

• I'm also interested in how to get a Windows install that's as minimal as possible: I don't want to log in to a Microsoft account, I don't want telemetry etc, I only want whatever is strictly required to make my system functional. The one thing I do want is Windows Defender cause ain't no way I'm dealing with an antivirus.

• Should I go for Win 11 or stick to 10?

Any tips or experiences are welcome!

Ps: I know this information is probably all out there, but I thought a post in this community about it would be useful for others as well.

UPDATE: I ended up going with a regular old dual boot using Windows 10 iot LTSC - there's a few games I wanted to run and a driver as well so I chose to install directly on hardware as opposed to a VM. I created the install media using Ventoy, and UNPLUGGED EVERY OTHER DRIVE during installation except the one Windows was supposed to come on. Afterwards I had to boot in with a live Linux USB (the nice thing about Ventoy is that you can write multiple ISOs to your USB so it came in handy) to manually install rEFInd onto the original EFI partition that my Linux install uses, then I just had to set up the correct boot order in UEFI and everything is working. I also had to fuck around on the boot partition and with efibootmgr to remove all traces of grub so things don't get tangled up which was a bit scary but things are working perfectly now.

There's been a couple of mentions of Rust4Linux in the past week or two, one from Linus on the speed of engagement and one about Wedson departing the project due to non-technical concerns. This got me thinking about project phases and developer types.

Few days ago I did the weekly system update which included latest NVIDIA drivers. Everything went smoothly, no error messages, systems works as usual. Today I wanted to play some game and I noticed that the performance was horrible. This is what I found

lspci -k | grep -A 2 -E "(VGA|3D)"
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-P GT2 [Iris Xe Graphics] (rev 0c)
        Subsystem: Dell Device 0aff
        Kernel driver in use: i915
--
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GA106M [GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile / Max-Q] (rev a1)
        Subsystem: Dell Device 0aff
        Kernel driver in use: nvidia

 
xrandr --listproviders            
Providers: number : 0

I've tried to reinstall drivers, and ran some fixes I found online but still no luck. Any ideas how to fix it?

update

Just remembered. After last drivers update I wasn't able to run any Steam game. I always got some directx error. Before I had no issues.

update 2

I'm on Fedora 40, currently I'm using drivers downloaded directly from NVIDIA website. Before that I was using whatever drivers from these repositories

dnf repolist
repo id                                                                repo name
fedora                                                                 Fedora 40 - x86_64
fedora-cisco-openh264                                                  Fedora 40 openh264 (From Cisco) - x86_64
nvidia-container-toolkit                                               nvidia-container-toolkit
protonvpn-fedora-stable                                                ProtonVPN Fedora Stable repository
rpmfusion-free                                                         RPM Fusion for Fedora 40 - Free
rpmfusion-free-updates                                                 RPM Fusion for Fedora 40 - Free - Updates
rpmfusion-nonfree                                                      RPM Fusion for Fedora 40 - Nonfree
rpmfusion-nonfree-updates                                              RPM Fusion for Fedora 40 - Nonfree - Updates
updates  

The only thing I remember related to messing with drivers was playing with podman containers accessing my gpu (nvidia-container-toolkit).

Currently I'm using driver version 550.107.02

Even before the Bcachefs file-system driver was accepted into the mainline kernel, Debian for the past five years has offered a "bcachefs-tools" package to provide the user-space programs to this copy-on-write file-system. It was simple at first when it was simple C code but since the Bcachefs tools transitioned to Rust, it's become an unmaintainable mess for stable-minded distribution vendors. As such the bcachefs-tools package has now been orphaned by Debian.

From John Carter's blog, Orphaning bcachefs-tools in Debian:

"So, back in April the Rust dependencies for bcachefs-tools in Debian didn’t at all match the build requirements. I got some help from the Rust team who says that the common practice is to relax the dependencies of Rust software so that it builds in Debian. So errno, which needed the exact version 0.2, was relaxed so that it could build with version 0.4 in Debian, udev 0.7 was relaxed for 0.8 in Debian, memoffset from 0.8.5 to 0.6.5, paste from 1.0.11 to 1.08 and bindgen from 0.69.9 to 0.66.

I found this a bit disturbing, but it seems that some Rust people have lots of confidence that if something builds, it will run fine. And at least it did build, and the resulting binaries did work, although I’m personally still not very comfortable or confident about this approach (perhaps that might change as I learn more about Rust).

With that in mind, at this point you may wonder how any distribution could sanely package this. The problem is that they can’t. Fedora and other distributions with stable releases take a similar approach to what we’ve done in Debian, while distributions with much more relaxed policies (like Arch) include all the dependencies as they are vendored upstream."

...

With this in mind (not even considering some hostile emails that I recently received from the upstream developer or his public rants on lkml and reddit), I decided to remove bcachefs-tools from Debian completely. Although after discussing this with another DD, I was convinced to orphan it instead, which I have now done.

Fairly recently, I saw an app that served the same purpose as Barrier or Input-leap, allowing you use one computer to control the keyboard and cursor of multiple. I'm fairly certain it was designed with GTK 4, or maybe 3, and it had Wayland support. I've had no luck getting input-leap working well on my devices, so if anyone knows what app this was (or any other options) I would really appreciate it.

Update: Despite searching for 15 minutes before posting, I found it seconds later, thanks to DDGs reddit bang. It is lan-mouse. Will leave this up in case this software comes in handy for others.

As a beginner I mainly focused on Cinnamon, XFCE and GNOME but want to try out a windowing DE on a VM to get a feel for things.

What window manager DE would you recommend to a first timer that doesn't use tiling DEs?

There seems to be pretty popular ones like i3 and hyprland.

I was also hoping if some wm's still have a task bar as I am comfortable using that to keep a traditional style as I come from a long line use of Windows as well (starting from the XP era)

Thank you if you have any recommendations, it is good to branch your horizons a bit!

Hello, I'm beginner to QubeOS and I don't know really how to use it properly. I'm not really an absolute beginner in Linux (running it since 2 years), but I've never tried it and these I wanna try so installed it 2 days ago. At first it's very good, not laggy, etc.. It's what I want! But today I want to really set this thing up for every day use, but it's not really convenient to use for some of my use cases. So I need your help for global tips to use the system and for my use cases :

• Never really liked use the default Firefox ESR + hardening, used the flatpak app of Mullvad, basically I want to know the way of installing apps

• Want to set up "hacking" lab, mainly Kali or Parrot and other to use with the networking to "hack" them, basically I want to run multiples VMs

Thank you guys 😁

This is related to this post: https://lemmy.world/post/19184514

I'm incredibly close to pulling the trigger to make WattOS my new distro for my netbook. I've been using antiX for a while and it's really great overall but the lack of systemd has worn me down I feel. A few programs I want to use just don't work properly without systemd and I don't have the patience to fill in the gaps myself.

My only real concern with WattOS is the fact it seems so mysterious. There's very little info on their site and NO LICENSE OR SOURCE CODE OR REPOSITORY! I highly doubt Russia or China are trying to weasel their way into old AF computers to create a botnet but I've never seen a Linux project be so secretive.

Anyone else have some light to shed on this project?

Retargeted triple buffering to GNOME 48 instead of trying to upstream it in 47 at the last minute. Actually upstream wants it in 47 more than we do. But recent code reviews are both too numerous to resolve quickly and too destabilizing if implemented fully. So I’m not going to do that so close to release. There are still no known bugs to worry about and the distro patch for 24.10 only needs to be supported until EOL in July 2025.

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/desktop-team-integration-squad-updates-monday-2nd-september-2024/47587/2

Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells.

The 5.0.0 release includes the following changes to the previous release 4.9.1:

• Rewritten authentication mechanism
• Add escape %T to show current tty for window
• Add escape %O to show number of currently open windows
• Use wcwdith() instead of UTF-8 hard-coded tables
• New commands:
  • auth [on|off] Provides password protection
  • status [top|up|down|bottom] [left|right] The status window by default is in bottom-left corner. This command can move status messages to any corner of the screen.
  • truecolor [on|off]
  • multiinput Input to multiple windows at the same time
• Removed commands:
  • time
  • debug
  • password
  • maxwin
  • nethack
• Fixes:
  • Screen buffers ESC keypresses indefinitely
  • Crashes after passing through a zmodem transfer
  • Fix double -U issue

Wedson Almeida Filho is a Microsoft engineer who has been prolific in his contributions to the Rust for the Linux kernel code over the past several years. Wedson has worked on many Rust Linux kernel features and even did a experimental EXT2 file-system driver port to Rust. But he's had enough and is now stepping away from the Rust for Linux efforts.

From Wedon's post on the kernel mailing list:

I am retiring from the project. After almost 4 years, I find myself lacking the energy and enthusiasm I once had to respond to some of the nontechnical nonsense, so it's best to leave it up to those who still have it in them.

...

I truly believe the future of kernels is with memory-safe languages. I am no visionary but if Linux doesn't internalize this, I'm afraid some other kernel will do to it what it did to Unix.

Lastly, I'll leave a small, 3min 30s, sample for context here: https://youtu.be/WiPp9YEBV0Q?t=1529 -- and to reiterate, no one is trying force anyone else to learn Rust nor prevent refactorings of C code."

As part of a massive migration campaign, LinkedIn has successfully moved their operations to Microsoft's Azure Linux as of April 2024, ditching CentOS 7 in the process and taking advantage of a more modern compute platform.

As many of you might already know, back on June 30, 2024, CentOS 7 reached the end-of-life status, resulting in no new future updates for it, including fixes for critical security vulnerabilities.

...

The developers have gone with the high-performing XFS filesystem, which was made to work with Azure Linux to fit LinkedIn's use case. In their testing, they found that XFS was performing well for most of their applications, except Hadoop, which is used for their analytics workloads.

When they compared the issues that cropped up, XFS came out as a more stable and reliable choice than the other candidate, Ext4.

...

Additionally, LinkedIn's MaaS (Metal-as-a-Service) team has developed a new Azure Linux Image Customizer tool for automating image generation, that takes an existing generic Azure Linux image, and modifies it to use with a given scenario. In this case, a tailored image for LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Engineering Blog: Navigating the transition: adopting Azure Linux as LinkedIn’s operating system

I recently installed chromium, created a new user and logged into a website. After my work was done, I removed chromium with "sudo dnf remove chromium".

A few days later I installed chromium again through dnf. My user account was still there and I was logged into the same site.

Is there a way to avoid this and uninstall an app along with all its user data?

As the title says, my bootable usb is not showing up in the boot menu for my ThinkPad e14 AMD ryzen 5 7530u , gen 5 I think. I have disabled secure boot in the uefi and disabled fast startup in windows. Am I missing anything ? Note: this is my first time using a uefi bios so I don't know if there are any other kinks to mess with .

Edit : I contacted lenovo support for the above issue but even they couldn't find the answer so I guess won't be using linux for this laptop. But since it's for uni I guess it's fine. I will just use WSL

Edit 2: Reinstalled the bios , the usb boots now . Finally slapped opensuse on it and now running it

I am running Fedora KDE 40 alongside Windows 11 23H2, (the PC in question is also sometimes used by a few other family members, which is the reason I still have Windows) When I tried restarting into Fedora today, everything appeared fine, I selected the normal boot fedora option in GRUB, and the normal loading screen showed up. to be then followed by the cursor appearing for a while before it simply disappears, the screen goes black & turns back on stuck on a screen which is completely black with a terminal-like cursor in the very top left, It will then stay stuck thet way until you forcibly turn off the power. This hasn't happened before. I tried a live boot and checked the partition... It dosen't seem any different than normal. One thing I did notice is that yesterday on the login screen the sleep and restart option where bugged out, but I wouldn't think that's relevant? Can anyone help. I'm not sure what could be happening.

EDIT: here are some pics of the logs, I still dont know why this happened or really what to do, I'm still fairly new to this

Okay, Wayland is the future, blah blah.

Would it be possible/make sense to make a Wayland compositor that would emulate a X11 server so a X11 WM could talk to it and be used to manage windows?

I'm just thinking about how we could make sure that the tons of obscure but cool WMs survive the waypocalypse.