The inability to use Adobe Creative Cloud on Linux is often cited as a major barrier for many users considering a switch to the platform. But perhaps, just perhaps, there has already been a breakthrough in that direction.

A community developer says they have resolved long-standing Wine compatibility issues that prevented Adobe Creative Cloud installers from completing on Linux, publishing a patchset and prebuilt binaries that they claim enable installation of Photoshop 2021 and Photoshop 2025.

Synex is a Linux distribution that's been around for some months as a Debian-based, minimalistic Linux distribution out of Argentina focused on the needs of small and medium businesses. Making it a bit more intriguing for some now is that with their new release based on Debian 13 is a server edition and they have added native OpenZFS file-system support for new installations.

Synex got its start last year and has been tracking Debian 13. To this point it featured MATE, KDE, IceWM, LXDE, Xfce, and GNOME desktop editions. But now there is Synex Server 13 R1 and with this server edition comes the ability to carry out installs making use of the OpenZFS file-system support.

As part of the GNOME Foundation funded Digital Wellbeing project, the GNOME Shell for GNOME 50 has merged options to prevent unlocking the desktop session past their bed time. The intent here is on rounding out GNOME's parental controls functionality.

As highlighted in This Week in GNOME, the GNOME Shell has landed the functionality to prevent unlocking your desktop when it's past your scheduled bedtime. Plus parents or others with control can extend their screen time via new options added.

In an interview with PC Gamer, Kiciński and managing director Maciej Gołębiewski were asked whether GOG had plans to focus more on Linux going forward, given a growth in pro-Linux and anti-Windows sentiment among some PC players.

“Yes, we are,” Gołębiewski replied, stating that Linux was “one of the things that we’ve put in our strategy for this year to look closer at”.

“I don’t want to commit to any specifics, but certainly you will see this trend, and we also see that Linux is close to the hearts of our users, so we probably could do better on that front, and that’s something that we’ll be looking at,” he added.

Kiciński then addressed the current state of Windows, saying he was “really surprised” that it continues to hold such a large market share despite its issues.

“It’s such poor-quality software and product, and I’m so surprised that it’s [spent] so many years on the market,” he said. “I can’t believe it.”

(GOG founded 22 February 2008)

Although the Plasma 6.6 desktop has not yet been released (scheduled for February 17), KDE developers have already begun work on version 6.7, as some early details about its planned features are emerging.

One of the most visible additions is a new switch in the Brightness and Color widget that lets users toggle between light and dark modes instantly. Additionally, KDE developers note that a smooth cross-fade transition may be added later, but the current work focuses on functionality.

A patch for the open-source exFAT file-system driver for Linux can boost the sequential read performance by about 10% in preliminary tests.

There is a patch queued up into the exFAT driver's "dev" branch to support multi-cluster for the exfat_get_cluster code. Developer Chi Zhiling of China's Kylin OS worked on the patch and explained in the commit:

"This patch introduces a count parameter to exfat_get_cluster, which serves as an input parameter for the caller to specify the desired number of clusters, and as an output parameter to store the length of consecutive clusters.

This patch can improve read performance by reducing the number of get_block calls in sequential read scenarios. speacially in small cluster size.

According to my test data, the performance improvement is approximately 10% when read FAT_CHAIN file with 512 bytes of cluster size.

454 MB/s -> 511 MB/s"

With the patch now part of exFAT's dev branch, it's possible we will see this exFAT read performance improvement merged for the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 merge window. This is just one of several great performance optimizations observed in recent times for this exFAT adaptation for Linux.

If we combine these two sets of data^1 we obtain a fascinating result^2.

• 46% of all code out there, in every app, is maintained by hobbyists
• 13,8% is maintained by “I sometimes get a bit of pocket money for my code”
• 40% of all code out there is maintained by an industry-paid person

So, nearly 60% of all code being actively shipped in an app or product in the wild is hobbyist-maintained open-source.

See also this discussion on lobste.rs on the economics of the average (as in median) open source project:

https://lobste.rs/s/ftwkvo/hobbyist_maintainer_economic_gravity

To sum up, apparently most open source projects are small, and aren't funded as paid work. And they matter because of their number, which has the effect that they make up a large part of all software in use.

In an effort to get away from using Google services, I finally set up a Baïkal server. I've got everything on my phone working well, but when it comes to desktop I'm a little baffled at the lack of more "special dates" support for contacts in my address book. The three I've tried so far are Thunderbird, Betterbird, and Evolution.

In all three cases, creating/editing a contact on the client and navigating to special dates only has a birthday and anniversary option. And if I create/edit a contact on my android apps and give them special dates of death anniversary, name day, or other, those dates will simply not appear on the linux clients I have tries so far.

Does anyone know of a CardDAV client for linux with that support?

Running Linux-based operating systems on smartphones has come a long way. We now have several Linux-powered smartphones on the market that cater to different use cases. Some pack in flagship-level performance, while others try to be a value-for-money proposition.

Sadly, these devices are out of reach for most people around the world due to excessive taxation from their countries and shipping charges. Of course, many do have an older spare Android smartphone laying around.

Why not make good use of it? In this article, we will be taking a look at a very cool project that turns an Android smartphone into a Linux machine with a simple APK file and no root access.

So I was researching different distros, and I stumbled upon one called Poseidon (based on Ubuntu) which was intended primarily for scientific modeling. However, it hasn't been active since 2018; also, after Poseidon 4, they shifted to focus primarily on oceanography.

So my question is, firstly, is there an active distro that has a similar intended purpose, and comes with all the relevant software? Barring that, is it easy enough to replicate just by downloading the relevant packages?

If the answer to both is no, my question is, how could one best go about resurrecting it as a fork? Would it be better to start from either Poseidon 9 (the latest) or Poseidon 4 (before they shifted direction), and then try to update all the core components? Or to start with the latest Ubuntu (or better yet Debian), and then simply install all the software needed to make it functionally identical to Poseidon?

Bonus question: if you start with an OS, and gradually replace one component at a time until all components have been replaced, is it still the same OS? (Theseus was a son of Poseidon, but unfortunately the name is already taken)

The EndeavourOS team announced today the general availability for download of EndeavourOS Ganymede Neo as the latest stable snapshot of this Arch Linux-based distro featuring the KDE Plasma desktop environment.

Powered by the latest and greatest Linux 6.18 LTS kernel series, EndeavourOS Ganymede Neo is a small update to the EndeavourOS Ganymede release, published back in November 2025, featuring the KDE Plasma 6.5.4 desktop environment, which is accompanied by KDE Frameworks 6.22 and KDE Gear 25.12.1.

Under the hood, this release comes with updated components, such as the Mesa 25.3.3 graphics stack, NVIDIA 590.48.01 graphics driver, Calamares 26.01.1.5 graphical installer for a smoother installation experience, Mozilla Firefox 146 web browser, and XOrg Server 21.1.21.

Hi everyone! I'm happy to share that my first first-author paper has been accepted to a conference recently about side-channel attacks on the Linux page cache.

Side-channel attacks on the page cache (first shown in 2019 by my PhD advisor et al.) were thought to have been mitigated since 2019 or thought to be impractical for a long time. Work that I (+my co-authors) did over the past year showed that such attacks were very possible, but also way more severe than initially thought.

It started out with me randomly encountering the cachestat syscall, introduced in kernel 6.5 (2022) to query the state of OS pages in the page cache. After a bit of investigation, we found that it leaks whether pages are in the page cache, including of globally-readable files not owned by that user.

I have a few examples of what attacks are possible on the linked blog post, but the tl;dr is you can detect whether binaries are run (like pkexec, which is the GUI that pops up for password prompts), infer which websites a different local-user visits on Firefox (via the libxul shared library), infer user and system behavior across docker containers, and a few more.

We also found a few more interesting stuff, like the posix_fadvise syscall with the POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED can deterministically remove pages from cache. The other fine grained details are available in the paper: https://snee.la/pdf/pubs/eviction-notice.pdf, but a general write up is in the blog post.

The cachestat vulnerability was assigned CVE-2025-21691 and was fixed by Linus Torvalds himself (first time interacting with him!)

Since I know Lemmy loves Linux (as much as I do, or even more), I thought I'd share it here :D. Feel free to ask any questions if you have any!

There's also a Github repository of our code which has been peer-reviewed to be reproducible here: https://github.com/isec-tugraz/Eviction-Notice

Author @ABasilPlant@lemmy.world

The Linux kernel patches talked about at the start of the year for more easily changing the boot logo of Tux are now queued into a "for-next" branch and thus expected to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle. Those wanting to replace the Tux icon with an alternative logo during the Linux kernel boot process could already patch the file manually but this new code allows for an easy replacement via Kconfig options.

Those wanting to customize their console boot experience for Linux will be able to more easily do so with the next version of the Linux kernel. Rather than patching the source code and Makefile, via the Kconfig an alternative boot logo file can be specified. The patches add LOGO_LINUX_MONO_FILE for allowing a monochrome boot logo in PBM file format. Or there is also LOGO_LINUX_VGA16_FILE for a 16 color PPM boot logo file or LOGO_LINUX_CLUT224_FILE for a 224 color PPM logo.

The Fedora Project announced plans to migrate the Fedora Games Lab spin to the KDE Plasma desktop environment with the upcoming Fedora Linux 44 release, due out in April 2026.

For those not in the know, Fedora Games Lab is an official spin of the Fedora Linux distribution that aims to provide users with a showcase of the best games available in Fedora. Fedora Games Lab includes several genres, from first-person shooters to real-time and turn-based strategy games to puzzle games.

Until now, Fedora Games Lab used the lightweight Xfce desktop environment by default, but due to the lack of maintainers and to leverage the latest and greatest Wayland stack for gaming, the Fedora Project decided to replace Xfce with the more modern and powerful KDE Plasma.

The GNOME Project announced today the alpha version of the upcoming GNOME 50 desktop environment series for public testing to give the community a first taste of the new features and enhancements.

The biggest change of the upcoming GNOME 50 desktop environment series is the removal of X11 support in various core components, which was initially planned for the GNOME 49 release, as GNOME is going Wayland-only from here on, except for the ability to launch other X11 desktop sessions with a per-user X server.

The GNOME 50 release also promises initial support for a session save/restore functionality, a new gnome-headless-session@.service that makes it easier to start a headless graphical session (i.e. for RDP purposes), and support for the new “boot_display” sysfs attribute from Linux kernel 6.18 LTS in GDM.

Collabora shares with us today a new project that lets you install and run the Debian GNU/Linux operating system on the open-source OpenWrt One router.

Collabora’s Sjoerd Simons has developed openwrt-one-debian, a set of scripts and tools that make it easier for one to install a full Debian GNU/Linux operating system on the OpenWrt One device, leveraging its NVMe storage and giving you the freedom to enable custom services, support for containers, development tools, and more.

“This project provides a Rust-based flasher to install Debian on the OpenWrt One, opening the door to standard Debian tooling, packages, and workflows. For developers and power users, it transforms the OpenWrt One from a network appliance into a compact, general-purpose Linux system,” said Sjoerd Simons.

Note: I added more info in the OP

geteilt von: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/52934409

geteilt von: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/52933193 (OP)

A few days ago I noticed, that my system disc (~120gb) is almost maxed out. Since almost everything that takes up considerable disc space resides on my 2 discs, I started investigating, supported by ChatGPT. Turns out I've been running on a writable snapshot that keeps growing with each update. Again, important stuff is on my other discs, so reinstalling Linux allover would be a inconvenience, but no problem. Yet, I'd like to try repairing current installation, if only for the lessons learned.

I let ChatGPT summarize everything as a post so you don't have to deal with my half-educated gibberish:

du -xh --max-depth=1 / only shows ~16 GB used, but df -h reports ~113 GB used. Root, /var, /usr, /home, etc. are all on the same Btrfs filesystem. Snapper is enabled.

I confirmed that Btrfs snapshots are consuming the space, but I’m stuck with a writable snapshot (#835) that is currently mounted, so I can’t delete it from the running system.

To make things worse:

GRUB menu does not appear (Shift/Esc does nothing)

The system still boots into Linux, but I can’t select older snapshots

I tried repairing from an Ubuntu live USB, but:

NVMe device names differ from the installed system

Chroot fails with /bin/bash or /usr/bin/env not found

Likely because /usr is a separate Btrfs subvolume and not mounted

At this point I’m trying to:

Properly mount all Btrfs subvolumes from a live system

Chroot into the installed system

Delete old Snapper snapshots

Reinstall GRUB so the menu works again

If anyone has step-by-step guidance for recovering openSUSE Tumbleweed with Btrfs snapshots and broken GRUB access, I’d really appreciate it. I’m comfortable with the command line but want to avoid making things worse.

Hope someone can make something of it and help me fix my system.

Just some coverage of a few systems from Jesse at distrowatch. Sadly, neither MenuetOS nor Sparky CDE go anywhere due to issues.

More than two years after the release of GRUB 2.12, GRUB 2.14 shipped today as the newest feature release of this widely-used bootloader on Linux systems and elsewhere.

GRUB 2.14 adds support for the EROFS read-only file-system, LVM support enhancements, NX support for EFI platforms, shim loader protocol support, Argon2 KDF support, supporting dates beyond Year 2038, Zstdio decompression support, EFI improvements, and more. GRUB 2.14 is yet another heavy release in incorporating more than two years worth of improvements.

There are two kinds of people today; those who see AI as a threat to craftsmanship, and those who see it as a tool to get work done faster. The debate is loud, ideological, often emotional, and certainly inconclusive.

The coding world is seeing a paradigm shift as AI is steadily slipping into the development workflow, not by force, but by usefulness. It writes boilerplate, spots bugs, suggests patterns, and frees human minds for harder problems.

And this is not only for Gen Z, even the aging developers have started embracing it. The latest example being Linus Torvalds, who worked on a fun side project during the holidays and took help of AI for the Python-based visualizer.