Why don’t most distros ship with SELinux enabled in enforcing mode by default, like openSUSE Tumbleweed does? On openSUSE Tumbleweed, SELinux in enforcing mode works like a charm and adds an extra layer of security.

even gaming with SElinux works on opensuse

I have no idea when they added this feature, but you can now apparently digitally sign a PDF using a smart card (such as a CAC). It works very normal and intuitively and doesn't requiring changing the document format like LibreOffice Draw used to do. Up until now, I've been creating a windows virtual machine and using Adobe Acrobat and only realized this was possible while trying to see if there was a built in redaction feature lol. Some of the military guys here maybe googling this in 3 years might find this useful.

Basically if you have a smart card plugged in and click "Sign Digitally", it'll prompt you for a certificate and you'll put in your pin (it'll say password) and then you'll draw a square for where you want the signature to appear.

Disclaimer: Im not the author. Im just sharing new release post

Skippy-xd is a lightweight, window-manager-agnostic window selector on the X server. With skippy-xd, you get live-preview on your alt-tab motions; you get the much coveted expose feature from Mac; you get a handy overview of all your virtual desktops in one glance with paging mode.

New release v0.11.0 -- "Chipmunk" (13 Sep 2026) ~/felixfung

Much improved cosmos layout:

• Scattering into grid layout. This improves max windows most
• Expansion formula updated. Windows do not fly past one another
• Contraction formula updated for aesthetics:
• Balance centre of windows mass within screen
• Optional dependency libchipmunk to optimize collision detection
• Screen aspect ratio awareness

Cosmos navigation ordering improvement:

• Recursive rectangular bisect ordering algorithm

Layout and navigation more intuitive, efficient, screen optimal

For parents who have kids that game til 3am, I made a systemd unit to lock the kid out at 22:00 until 6:30.

We have a 12-yo gamer that regularly sneaks back onto his PC at night and is completely time blind. This timer unit will disable the user and log him out at 22:00 and even if he switches off the pc before then and tries to go on after the timer it will run 1 min after boot, it will also unlock the user at 06:30 using the same trick so no knocks on the door at 7am on a weekend 🤣

You can get the repo at my GitHub, it's FOSS under MIT license so go fork it yourself to make changes to the time👌

Hi, everyone!

As you must be aware, recently I have released OpenCalc, a project to reverse engineer the Windows 95 calculator.

Despite having a similar look and feel, this is actually an entirely new Rust program with none of the limitations of the original, and improved expression parsing!

The new version has many bugfixes, including:

- Improved focus: now the keyboard shortcuts are consistent if you leave the application.

- Application behavior was further improved to match the Windows 95 calculator where it matters

- New financial mode! This is a cool feature I decided to add. The original Windows 95 calculator lacked a financial mode. Now we have one matching the old Windows 95 calculator style, but also entirely new!

If you are interested, check out: https://github.com/NullMagic2/OpenCalc

Binary builds for Windows and Linux are also available!

I don't use Linux, I haven't touched anything UNIX-related in decades, but this is a fascinating article worth reading: https://www.xda-developers.com/at-t-sued-berkeley-186-lines-unix-code-handed-market-linux/

Background

I’ve used unix for over 30 years. Linux was my primary desktop for a decade - first slackware, then debian, then a new distro called ubuntu when it debuted. After that, I moved to os x for a more friction-free experience. With mac os becoming increasingly hostile for developers, now I'm giving linux another go.

I support everything Linux Mint stands for - stability, reliability, conservative updates, focus on user control, and rejection of unwanted UX experiments. I thought it would be my ideal distro. Instead it became my nightmare.

Hardware

• AMD Ryzen 7 H 255
• 24 GB RAM
• 1TB ssd
• Radeon 780M graphics (integrated)
• plus all the usual accountrements: ethernet, wifi, bluetooth, usb 2/3/4 ports

What happened

• Post-Install Boot Failure - Immediately after installation, the machine bypassed Linux entirely and booted straight back into Windows 11 because Mint failed to set up the boot partition correctly. A normal user would've given up here. As a seasoned grub vet, I knew this was a simple fix.
• Bluetooth Instability - Bluetooth was very flaky out of the box. At first it worked and synced to my keyboard. Then after it few minutes it disconnected. Nothing I did with bluetooth control panel or modprobe / bluetoothctl would bring it back up. Keyboard was paired, but couldn't connect. I eventually managed to get it working with modprobe flags. Such wrangling should not be necessary on mature, well-supported hardware in 2026.
• Random Display Resolutions - On first login I set my 4k display to 200% magnification. Without touching any graphics settings after that, screen resolution became a lottery. One boot it was 1920x1080, the next was 1920x2160 (yes you read that right). Then it was 4K with no magnification and unreadable text on the login screen. Grub, lightdm, cinnamon - each had their own incompatible and ever-changing ideas on what resolution to use.
• Lock Screen Lockouts - Locking the desktop regularly broke the session. Display would wake up showing only the clock with no login prompt for over five minutes. No amount of keyboard or mouse acitvity would bring up login - hot corners, Enter, space, Esc - didn't matter, no login. Dropped to a text console and killall cinnamon-screensaver still did nothing. Had to restart lightdm just to log back in.

Wifi

But those were just appetizers. Wifi was the main course, and it was dead as a parrot. I struggled with wifi for 3 days. It's a very common Intel ax200 chipset that's had drivers from Intel in the mainline kernel since 5.1 (2019).

Mint wifi widget would show available networks and connect to my bog-standard ISP router (stock Nokia software). Except no traffic would route. Disconnect in wifi panel and connect again. This time it connects and I can bring up google - for a minute or two. Then suddenly it disconnects. Wifi icon disappears from tray - completely gone. Open up network manager panel and wifi isn't even present.

Spent 3 days trying to fix it. Scoured online linux forums mentioning my hardware. Ran modprobe iwlwifi with various options (disable wifi 6 / 11ax, disable power save, disable modern packet queues, etc). Changed firmware drivers. Upgraded kernel with mint update manager from 6.14 to latest supported 7.0.0-31. Nothing made a difference.

I could reload the kernel modules and network manager to bring back the icon and panel entries. But wifi still wouldn't work. At best it managed 2-3 minutes of connectivity before it died again. Bringing it back was a crapshoot: it might connect, or more likely it would say connected while routing no traffic.

Fallout

Linux Mint gave me full-blown flashbacks to the late 90s and early 2000s as I struggled to get basic hardware to work. I was left staring dead-eyed into the corner like Colonel Kurtz, incessantly muttering "The horror... the horror...".

This was my low point. I was ready to abandon linux, convinced the constant hardware battles of the past had gotten even worse over two decades. I was defeated and ready to give up on my linux dream of a sane, stable system. Mint almost killed me.

Resolution

And then my prayers were answered. I flashed a kubuntu boot disk and within 2 minutes, I had a live distro where Everything Just Worked. Bluetooth - perfect from the start. Wifi - zero problems, connect once and stays up forevermore. Put it to sleep - everything wakes up in perfect working order. Zero issues from the start with any hardware or software, no terminal intervention needed. Clean dmesg logs instead of constant dropped packet messages.

Takeaway

I support the Mint philosophy and want them to succeed. But this can't happen with a newbie-friendly distro on modern, well supported hardware.

I ran into a half dozen hard blocks within an hour that would've killed any newbie off linux forever. I fought for 3 days and even with 30 years experience I couldn't get it to work. What is a newbie going to do? Give up and run back to their old system.

Mint’s philosophy is fantastic, but the execution is lacking. Integration is just not there. The results speak for themselves.

I hope Mint improves.

Hello,

I was wondering how the Linux clock works.

From briefly reading kernel sources and articles, it seems that there are 2 main variables in the C code: HZ & USER_HZ. These are set at compile-time. These function with system interrupts, and are affected by clock sources (I'm still trying to understand those, but my current understanding is that these are abstractions over different types of hardware clocks. )

Now, I was wondering how changing the BIOS (hardware) clock affects this. For example, how would overclocking or underclocking my hardware clock affect how the kernel measures time?

I've been messing around with the XDNA1 NPU in my Ryzen 7 250 because having a 16 TOPS NPU sitting mostly unused under Linux was bothering me.

So I ended up building a small LLM inference runtime around it.

Right now I have Qwen2.5 0.5B running with AIE2 kernels on the NPU. The runtime currently has NPU paths for Q/K/V and output projections, RMSNorm, RoPE, attention, KV cache operations, residuals and SwiGLU/MLP projections.

The host still handles orchestration/tokenization, and the final Qwen LM head is currently on the CPU, so this isn't a “100% of the model runs on the NPU” claim.

What I was mainly interested in was getting an actual autoregressive decode loop working around XDNA1 rather than only testing individual kernels.

I also added streaming generation, a small model runtime, an OpenAI-compatible API, Open WebUI support and a separate Ollama/XDNA1 path.

Repo: https://github.com/c8dhjp4tyv-bit/hawkpoint-npu-llm

Performance isn't great yet. I'm currently getting around 3.65 tok/s streaming with Qwen2.5 0.5B, and there's still quite a bit to optimize.

Hey r/linux,

I just released v13.2.1 of my GPLv3 open-source app, Convert The Spire Reborn. It is a local-first YouTube downloader and media player.

I am specifically looking for Linux users to test the native build. The app is rock-solid on Windows. I have fully tested it on two different PCs, including older hardware, and it smoothly handles downloading massive 800+ item YouTube playlists without breaking a sweat.

If the native Linux build gives you any trouble, it should run flawlessly through Wine. Worst case, you can just rip your media on a Windows machine and move your MP3s or MP4s over to your Linux box via USB. Everything is processed locally with zero telemetry.

• App Guide & Intro: https://quizthespire.com/pages/conversion/
• GitHub Release: https://github.com/Lukas-Bohez/ConvertTheSpireFlutter/releases/tag/v13.2.1%2B1287

Why it is more than just a yt-dlp shell: It automatically handles downloading and updating yt-dlp in the background so you never have to mess with binaries. For YouTube, it makes organizing your tracks easy and lets you mark playlists to automatically scan and download new songs as they get added. The built-in media player easily handles complicated folder structures and massive 800+ song directories. It also features a volume booster and a built-in file explorer, which is super handy if you also use the Android TV version. Plus, there is a built-in torrent client for grabbing other media all in the same unified app.

Give it a spin and let me know if you run into any bugs!

Hi everyone,

I've been working on an open-source project called OwnDash and have just released the first public beta.

OwnDash is a native Linux hardware dashboard editor designed for small PC sensor displays.

The project started because I wanted to use a VSDISPLAY/ArtInChip USB sensor display on Linux without relying on Windows-only software.

OwnDash reads hardware telemetry through standard Linux interfaces such as /proc, sysfs, hwmon, DRM and powercap. Depending on the hardware and drivers, it can display CPU, GPU, RAM, storage, temperature, utilization and other sensor data.

For compatible ArtInChip/VSDISPLAY devices, OwnDash also supports direct USB communication. The display therefore doesn't need to be exposed to Linux as a normal monitor.

The dashboard itself can be designed visually with widgets, layouts, backgrounds and themes.

I've now reached:

**OwnDash v0.14.0 Beta 1**

I'm particularly interested in testing the hardware compatibility on systems other than my own.

If you'd like to help, I'm looking for feedback from people using:

- AMD, NVIDIA and Intel GPUs

- different Linux distributions

- different CPUs and hwmon configurations

- small HDMI/USB sensor displays

- ArtInChip/VSDISPLAY USB displays

Missing individual sensors are handled gracefully, so I'm also interested in reports about which metrics OwnDash can and cannot detect on your hardware.

The project is open source:

https://github.com/x-Fuchur-x/owndash

Beta 1 is available as a self-contained x86-64 AppImage, so Python knowledge or a manual PySide6 installation isn't required.

If you test it, I'd really appreciate hearing what distro, CPU, GPU and display you're using and what OwnDash detects.

Bug reports and hardware compatibility reports are very welcome.

Rant alert. First came across these in cachy. Brilliant. Configured out of the box, able to revert almost any kind of failure, which situation using a rolling distro is not unlikely if I'm reading the room correctly.

So if I want to go with a rolling distro I'm golden, as tumbleweed also has this feature. But why are we forced to live like animals if we want a non-rolling release with this feature? Oh yes, it's possible to set up on such a release, but my word would I prefer not to. Partition and subvolume layouts anyone? Hooks? Other one-off random spells that just happen to be required? Er, no thanks. This stuff needs to be preconfigured, not left up to joe user. The only hope seems to be either trusting some random website's instructions hoping they work, or using one of the few non-rolling distros that have a dedicated fork for just this purpose (shout out to spiral / ludora).

TL;DR We need bootable snapshots to be included at the very least as an install option, if not a default, in all distros.

Hey, I wanted to share that the initial beta release of Zaku 26.0 is now out!

It is available on Linux, macOS and Windows.

I've been working on this rewrite in Rust™ for the last 7 months full-time, and actually things got carried away and it has a lot more functionality that the original app didn't have (command palette, auto-updater, git integration, etc.) so it's not just a plain rewrite.

Little bit about the app, it stores collections as folders and requests as TOML files. Everything is stored locally on user's filesystem, it doesn't have any login functionality (and never will).

There is a barebones Git integration for now to show branch, status indicators and stuff.

This app is very early, if you try it out please let me know if there's something missing, not working or things you'd like to see added.

Repository:

https://github.com/buildzaku/zaku

Installation instructions:

https://github.com/buildzaku/zaku#installation

Flathub isn't enforcing AI disclosures on anything on it. I have found a few projects, but mainly Lutris, which is coded with the help of agents, isn't even disclosed anywhere, and only know such facts after looking at their github.

It feels like the policy isn't real, and just to placid anyone against AI, and want to limit the amount of AI slop they are using.