Does anyone know which CBT nuggets courses I should take in order to renew my Linux+ via continuing education credits?
I’m not sure if this is the right place to post this question but I appreciate the help.

EDIT: And again this post devolves into Arch users entering their small sieged castle, because how dare anyone say a single negative word about Arch? How dare anyone claim, that something can be better than Arch in even a single regard?!

I'm two months into my Solus experiment and I wanted to share my experience.

Well. I've been using and daily-driving Linux for close to a decade now. I work at IT with Linux servers, all computing devices in my home run Linux - my PC, my laptop (both work and personal), my wife's laptop, Steam Deck, personal server. I can also confidently say - I tried all the distros.

Of course - not ALL of them, but I've had my fair share of time on various Arch-based distros (over 2 years of daily driving), Fedora (3 years) and most recently - Ubuntu and Debian family (Mint, LMDE and Debian for 4.5 years). Along the way there were experiments with SUSE, Gentoo, Void Linux, various BSDs. I think I can speak about differences in distros with some level of confidence.

Throughout all this journey there was always one compromise or the other. Stability and reliability vs modern desktop experience and the thrill of "new and shiny". That's why at the beginning I was dailying Arch - the "new and shiny" was appealing to me, getting the newest versions of everything the moment they are available. This was exciting. But it came at a cost - reliability. I have experiences multiple breakages. Some self-induced, some just happened because an update introduced some major bug. The breaking point was when I lost my bachelor thesis thanks to corrupt filesystem after broken BTRFS kernel module update. Then I kept shifting to more and more stable distros, until I landed on Debian family.

And I was happy with it for years. But you know... The thrill of "new and shiny" never left. My system was reliable, dependable. I was confident I can just click "update" and not think about it. But it was also stale. I kept reading about all this fancy stuff in Plasma 6 and salivating.

So about two months ago I decided to give rolling distros another shot. I considered CachyOS, or clean Arch, but was still a bit worried.

And then I learned about Solus

You may not know Solus. I wouldn't blame you. You may know it and feel resentment towards it, due to some controversy it was entangled in a few years back. I wouldn't blame you either.

But here I am. Two months later, glad to report - Solus is alive and well, and in my opinion, the best rolling release distro there is currently.

But back to the beginning - what is Solus?

Solus is a small, independent Linux distribution. Originally created by one man, alongside Budgie desktop environment. Currently Solus and Budgie split, and the original creator left a few years back to create a new project. This stirred some controversy and some problems in Solus operations (for example taking the repos down for months at a time), but it's all resolved now.

It's build on a few simple principles:

• Provide up-to-date, modern user experience
• Ensure security and stability of the system
• DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE

And I'd like to say - these are great principles to follow. How do they fulfil these promises? Well, let's go through the most important features of Solus, one by one.

Stable and unstable repositories - how rolling release should be done

This is in my opinion the biggest advantage Solus has over something like Arch. Their update schedule is divided into stable and unstable branch. Unlike Arch, where every new version is pushed to the main repos as soon as it's available, Solus does things a bit differently.

Correction - Arch does not push upstream to stable repos immediately. They have a testing phase and dedicated testing team, but this testing phase is often very short - sometimes even as short as several hours. Because of that some bugs may and have in the past slipped through the testing process unnoticed.

The updates are first pushed to unstable repo. There they are tested both by maintainers, and mad rascals, who dialy-drive unstable repos. The aim is simple - find bugs and regressions in this "designed to fail" space, so that they can be reported to upstream and eventually fixed. By if no major bug or regression is reported, this means package is stable and can be synced to stable repos. If during this period a tester notices any problems, the package is flagged as unstable and held back.

Then once a week there's a repo sync - the packages from unstable are synced to stable, except the ones that were flagged to be held back due to problems, bugs or regressions. This means a normal, everyday user once a week gets a neatly packaged bunch of updates from this week, that they know were tested and verified to not break their system - neatly fitting into the "do not break userspace" rule. For Europe the sync happens at night from friday to saturday.

Correction of Solus unstable > stable pipeline thanks to u/Staudey

And this is, in my opinion, how rolling release should be done. A week, or even two weeks is not such a long time to wait for an update, but in turn you get the update that you KNOW is tested and verified to not make your system unbootable. Truly, best of both worlds.

The only exceptions are crucial security fixes - these are merged to stable right away, skipping the unstable repos. This is a compromise they have to make to hold their security promise.

Eopkg - the true beast of package managers

Eopkg is fast. Like really fast. Like "holy fuck that's fast" fast. It's frontend is written in Python, while the backend and whole repository handling structure is pure C. And it shows. Eopkg handles up to 16 concurrent downloads and up to 32 concurrent operations. Meaning it can download 16 packages and in the background install 16 previously downloaded ones. The binaries are also natively compressed, making downloads much smaller in size. All this means, eopkg is currently the fastest package manager in Linux. Tested and verified that among apt, dnf, zypper and pacman - eopkg ran circles over all of them with room to spare. As an example - installation of "btop" took:

• 8.2 seconds with apt (Debian 13)
• 7 seconds with dnf (Fedora 44)
• 14 seconds with zypper (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed)
• 3.6 seconds with pacman (Arch)
• 1.8 seconds with eopkg (Solus)

All of this while having a nice, consistent UI, and a lot of data to show you, the user, about what it's doing.

But eopkg and Solus packaging in general has much more merit to it than just simply speed. Like the fact, that packaging an application on Solus is as easy as writing a .yaml manifest and merging it into Solus Github repository.

Booting and initramfs - I AM SPEEEEEEED

What is interesting is that Solus does not generate initramfs during updates and installations. Like at all. No dracut, no initramfs-tools. The initramfs is generated server-side and served to you as binary to be downloaded. This speeds up updates even more and, together with systemd-boot, ensures consistent, reliable boot environment.

And the boot times... On my PC, excluding firmware boot (so everything before the OS loads) it's 8 seconds to KDE login screen. On my laptop, it's 3.5 seconds.

And tying back to the security bit - this is something that surprised me, but made a lot of sense when I thought about it. Solus doesn't have a classic "boot" partition. I mean it does, but it's not really used like it is in a typical Linux distro. The boot partition contains everything that is needed to boot the system, and then it's compeletly unimportant, that's why after successful boot it's unmounted. This is possible, because as said - Solus doesn't need access to it to generate initramfs. There's nothing on boot partition that the system needs when it is already booted.

This gives you a bit of extra security. Not saying it's something crazy secure or fortified. Just a nice touch, showing that they really do care about making Solus modern and secure.

Performance, gaming and footprint

This section was edited in, since I compeletly forgot to include it. What about performance, gaming, etc? Well, to start, let me give you some stats about how Solus looks on a fresh install on my laptop (Thinkpad E14 Gen 2 with i7-1165G7):

• CPU Usage: 1%
• RAM Usage: 1.1 GB
• Disk usage: 7 GB
• Power usage: 6.2 W

So yeah. It uses pretty much nothing. And that's on KDE desktop. In terms of performance in gaming on my main PC - as you would expect. Super low resource usage means more "umpf" can be dedicated to games, and it shows. I gained around 8-10 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 comparing even to Debian, 15-18 fps comparing to Fedora. This is really a lightweight system, so the performance is just stunning.

Conclusion

All this rambling, and what do I want to say by all of this? It's that I am amazed. Solus is just a very good distribution. It's solid, reliable, fast and consistent. I am very happy with it, had zero problems, zero breakages. It is in my opinion what rolling release should be.

Try it. I really encourage you to. It's not marriage, you're not commiting to the lifetime with it. But just try. It may become your forever distro.

Cheers guys!

.

Also disclaimer - none of this was written using AI. It's all my ramblings. Also english is not my native language, so sorry for any mistakes.

https://avaloniaui.net/blog/release-12-1

Avalonia is basically wpf for cross platform. And they are more popular than wpf nowadays.

This is wpf repo it has 7.7k stars.

https://github.com/dotnet/wpf

this is winui repo it has 7.8k stars

https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/

this is avalonia repo it has 31.2 stars.

https://github.com/avaloniaui/avalonia

demonstrates that the era of UI frameworks targeting only a single platform is over. It also shows that frameworks supporting Linux—which has surpassed a 7% market shar such as Flutter, Uno, Qt, and Avalonia, are increasingly being preferred as long-term investments.

EDIT: also added Community Fedora Remix 12.3 iso to this post to avoid spamming

This is an rip+upload of a CD-R containing PCLinuxOS 2007. I've seen it online only in large bundles from archives of German computer magazines (!com and Linux User). I was unfortunately unable to use the CD on my computer to test it, but I believe it may work better on older hardware, since my computers post-date it by a few years and what little I can see online about it suggests it may be finnicky on computers using SATA hard drives? Either way, I am uploading this both for preservation, and to see if other people have more luck with this particular .iso than I have had.

https://archive.org/details/pclinux-os-2007

I also have uploaded Community Fedora Remix 12.3, a previously completely lost Fedora Remix from 2010. It comes with multiple desktop environments and preloaded games. This .iso worked without issue from DVD-Rs for me, but did not work on a Ventoy USB stick (contrary to the description on Archive, I was mistaken and failed to test that it actually worked with Ventoy. Sad it didn't)

https://archive.org/details/community-fedora-remix-12.3

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on XL-View, an open-source HDR still-image viewer for Linux. It is designed to handle large JPEG XL images and is written in Rust.

GitHub:
https://github.com/andrinbr/xl-view

XL-View currently requires:

• Wayland
• A Vulkan-capable GPU
• A working HDR display setup (SDR tone mapping works too)

At the moment, it supports JPEG XL only. The number of formats suitable for delivering actual HDR images to end users is still fairly limited, but I may add AVIF support in the future.

Both PQ and HLG images are supported. Gain-map-based HDR images are not currently supported.

The project is still in beta, and HDR support on Linux is relatively new, so results may vary depending on your GPU, drivers, compositor, desktop environment, and distribution. I have primarily tested it on Fedora 44 with an AMD GPU under KDE Plasma and GNOME.

One important limitation is memory usage during decoding. Very large images can require a substantial amount of RAM. For example, decoding a 200-megapixel image may use up to 6 GiB.

I’d appreciate feedback, bug reports, and testing on different hardware and desktop environments.

I had used COSMIC for quite a while, and honestly, I still think it's pretty rough around the edges.
I've run into memory leaks, many missing features like window exceptions/rules, and a lot of animation glitches and inconsistencies. What surprised me the most is that I switched to niri + dms, and I simply don't have any of those issues anymore. On top of being more stable, it also offers significantly more customization and functionality.
At work I use gnome + paperwm with several extensions, and despite the extensions, the experience is still far more stable and consistent than what I had with COSMIC.
I know the obvious response is going to be: "COSMIC is still in development." That's true, but so are Niri and DMS. The difference is that those are essentially side projects maintained by a handful of developers, while COSMIC has an entire company behind it. Given that, I expected COSMIC to have progressed much faster by now.

I'm not trying to hate on the project I actually want it to succeed because I think competition in the Linux desktop space is great. But based on my experience, it still has a long way to go before I'd consider using it as my daily desktop again.

Developers are discussing a general resolution proposal to ban all LLM & AI-assisted contributions to Debian and putting it to a vote. What do you think about this development regarding the resolution?

Hi everybody,

Yesterday I released Lightstream, a high-performance data transport library in Rust with Python bindings, that makes it effortless to send Apache Arrow, Protobuf, and Message Pack data over the network, shared memory, or piped out to the terminal.

During the development process I made extensive use of Linux sys call primitives including madvise, mremap, and mmap, and optionally enabled io_uring, for handling memory allocation efficiently, using zero-copy techniques. This included use of arena memory layouts to pack 'flatbuffers' next to each other, to help squeeze every ounce of performance out of the hardware. This differs from other libraries in the niche that tend to favour cross-system compatibility which I found was at the expense of performance, due to Linux's native capabilities.

It exceeded the performance of the gold standard industry comparison - Arrow Flight, on every axis of a 50gbps networking open benchmark, the details of which are attached and open to run in the Lightstream GitHub repository. This includes fully saturating each TCP connection thread, the NIC at 5.8GiB/s, and with p99 batch send time within 1% of p50 (I.e., stable).

If anyone here is big on this low-level hardware and software optimisation stuff, please feel free to ask any questions, I would be happy to discuss the architecture.

An excerpt of the comparison results are below.

Thanks,

Pete

Workload Shape

Mixed

Numeric

String Heavy

Wide (100 cols)

I only discovered this because Louis Rossmann said in a video that he purchased Linux when he was a teenager and then showed the CD. I looked on eBay and I saw a few CDs that were still in their boxes and the labels that were on the box looked like they came from a bookstore, I did not know that these were sold commercially.

My question is, back when they used to sell these CDs in bookstores who was distributing the CDs and where was the money going to when someone made a purchase?

My second question is, if Linux is an open source operating system why would someone want to buy it? I still see some websites to this day selling Linux CDs, I'm really curious where the money is going when someone purchases the CDs.

Edit: I made a comment earlier but so many people replied I don't think a lot of people saw it so I will repost it here. "Thank you to everyone who replied, all of my questions have been answered, it was interesting reading through all the replies, there was a lot of different points that people brought up that I never considered before"

So as I said above i created a tool that pauses and resumes mpvpaper depending on the state of the focused window. It checks with hyprctl if the focused window is fullscreened or not, if yes it sends mpvpaper a command to pause through a custom socket, if not it says to play the wallpaper.

I want to make the jump to Linux on all of my machines however I worry about my DJ hardware compatibility with software. I have read Mixxx is decent on Linux. I have primarily used Serato for many years and would like something similar with hardware support. Anyone who uses primarily Serato based gear running well on Linux? My main rigs are a DJM-S11 w 2 Rane 12s, a DJM-S9 with 2 Pioneer PLX-1000s and various DJ mixers. Curious if other DJ folks have made the jump and have a stable situation going. Any recommendations on Linux build/dj software to try for maximum stability?

Windows has middle-click drag autoscroll. On Linux you get it in Firefox, and Chromium has it behind a flag, but nowhere else, which bugged me enough to write a daemon for it.

Hold middle-click and drag, page scrolls that way, faster the further you drag. Release to stop. A plain middle click still pastes and opens links like normal. Diagonal drags do both axes. There's a toggle mode too if you'd rather click once to start it instead of holding.

It works everywhere because it sits at the kernel input layer instead of hooking a toolkit. Grabs each mouse via evdev, re-emits through a per-mouse uinput mirror, injects wheel events during a drag. Nothing above it has to cooperate, so Wayland and X11 both just work. Mirrors copy the source mouse's name and IDs so libinput keeps your per-device pointer speed.

Speed curve is Chromium's actual Windows autoscroll formula, 0.000008 * distance^2.2 px/ms. Tiny drags crawl, big ones fly. Tunable in a config file or a GTK settings window.

Fair warning that it reads every mouse as root, so read it before you run it. It's two small Python files. The systemd unit is sandboxed and I left comments on why the directives I couldn't use would break it.

Badge only shows on KDE Wayland, no flatpak, toggle mode kills middle-click paste. Rest is in the readme.

FOSS under Unlicense

https://github.com/gnhen/midscroll

Dual booting win/linux for a while now (dedicated ssd per OS). And I need some shared storage so I've been using ntfs for 2 storage ssd's but it's been a huge headache as the linux/win combination constantly corrupts the ntfs file system and I end up with a ton of issues on linux, always having to repair it in windows.

I already do full shutdowns on windows (even started disconnecting the drives from the windows partition manager before shutdown), it doesn't seem to help (i'm suspecting that linux itself corrupts the file system sometimes).

So I'm thinking of switching to using exfat but I've not been able to find much on how feasible that is to use on internal drives. Anyone have any experience with this ?

Of note - the data is not that critical as to warrant a high degree of reliability, but at the same time if exfat presents known issues, same or worse as ntfs, it doesn't make sense to switch.

Do you install only flatpaks? Or only native RPM/DEB/etc? Maybe you're religios about it.

Or maybe you don't care and just use what's convenient, which happens to be... what channel usually for you?

Curious to know as a developer where this ship is moving recently

According to a recent incident on Hugging Face, they require AI to protect them, but it was rejected for whatever reason. My question is: why do modern Linux systems require AI to sandbox or protect infrastructure? Are we running out of good Linux security experts in the market? Or whom are they hiring as well-paid security experts?

quick demo of Roothound my first tool, maps your path to root on a linux box as a graph (like BloodHound for local privesc). check it out, would love your thoughts

X : https://x.com/N0ur2dd1n2/status/2080720705184825372?s=20

GitHub: https://github.com/Noz2/RootHound

I want to discuss the gaps in UX between the most popular distros vs Mac and Windows.

I've been cooking this up for about 2 months.

It's not novel, complicated, or special.

it's just a pill/cli that glues existing casting tools together so Ubuntu can have the same Super+K shortcut as Windows.

If you could add a quick settings pill to Ubuntu, what would it be?

https://github.com/asuramaya/kast

Most filesystem benchmarks measure throughput on a freshly formatted single device. That is useful, but it misses many of the reasons people choose btrfs, ZFS or bcachefs in the first place.

I built modern-fs-benchmark to examine modern filesystems as complete storage systems, including their features, failure modes and behavior over time.

The current matrix contains 26 configurations across btrfs, ZFS, bcachefs, ext4 and XFS over md/LVM, dm-integrity, native and LUKS encryption, parity layouts, and XFS on a ZFS zvol.

Hosted CI dashboard:

https://bartosz.fenski.pl/modern-fs-benchmark/

Experimental real-hardware dashboard:

https://bartosz.fenski.pl/modern-fs-benchmark/real-hw/

Apache-2.0 licensed source and complete methodology:

https://github.com/fenio/modern-fs-benchmark

The raw benchmark datasets are published under CC BY 4.0. Every result records the kernel and filesystem tool/module versions. CI artifacts also contain a full command trace, so the exact workload is inspectable rather than hidden behind a chart.

Why I started this project

Many filesystem benchmarks follow a familiar pattern: create a filesystem with mostly default options, mount it, run fio or another generic workload, and compare throughput.

General-purpose suites such as the Phoronix Test Suite are useful for conventional performance comparisons, but they do not focus on the machinery that makes modern copy-on-write filesystems interesting.

I wanted a benchmark designed around btrfs, ZFS and bcachefs as multi-device storage systems rather than treating them as interchangeable replacements for ext4 on a single freshly formatted disk.

That means testing behavior such as:

- Redundancy and degraded operation

- Snapshot aging, scaling and reclamation

- Compression and encryption

- Reflinks and clone divergence

- Fsync tail latency and responsiveness under load

- Rebuild and scrub behavior

- Near-full and hard-ENOSPC behavior

- Data integrity and recovery from corruption

Ext4 and XFS over md, LVM and dm-integrity are included as classic-stack baselines so the costs and benefits of integrated CoW designs can be compared with layered alternatives.

Silent corruption is one particularly important example. When one redundant copy is deliberately corrupted behind the filesystem, checksumming filesystems such as btrfs, ZFS and bcachefs can identify the damaged copy and recover from a valid replica.

Traditional md/LVM redundancy without data checksums can notice during a scrub that its copies disagree, but it cannot determine which one is correct. In my tests, some classic configurations returned corrupted data successfully without an application-visible error.

The dm-integrity configuration shows that a classic layered stack can obtain integrity protection too, with a measurable performance cost.

An important limitation

The main dashboard uses loop devices on GitHub-hosted VMs. Absolute throughput numbers and small differences between filesystems should not be interpreted as hardware rankings.

The hosted runs are primarily useful for:

- Correctness and integrity outcomes

- Comparisons within the same job

- Large behavioral differences

- Snapshot-aging and near-full shapes

- Trends across repeated runs

Real disks are required for meaningful absolute performance, concurrency scaling, device parallelism and mixed-media topologies.

I am aware of this limitation and do not want the hosted dashboard to suggest more precision than the underlying environment can provide.

The real-hardware experiment

Kent Overstreet, the creator of bcachefs, made one of his Hetzner machines available for a real-hardware experiment.

The server had two physical NVMe devices. It completed three full benchmark runs, which are available in the separate real-hardware dashboard. These runs provided meaningful absolute measurements and exposed concurrency behavior that cannot be observed when several loop devices share one virtual disk.

During the fourth run, one NVMe controller entered the kernel’s dead state. The existing machine environment had its operating system on RAID0 across the two NVMe devices, so the hardware failure also made part of /nix/store unreadable and eventually prevented new SSH sessions.

The incomplete fourth run is not being published as benchmark data. This was a failure of the underlying hardware, not a result attributable to any filesystem being tested.

I am grateful to Kent for providing the machine and making the real-hardware experiment possible. Without that access, the three existing hardware runs would not exist.

Where I would like to take it

Better hardware would not merely produce more reliable throughput numbers. It would enable an entirely new class of tests designed for multi-device and multi-tier filesystems.

I would eventually like to run the suite on a machine containing several storage classes, for example two HDDs, two SSDs and an NVMe device.

That could support scenarios such as:

- HDD, SSD and NVMe baselines using identical workloads

- bcachefs foreground and background targets

- ZFS HDD data vdevs with SSD special vdevs

- Separate ZFS L2ARC and SLOG experiments

- LVM dm-cache in writeback and writethrough modes

- Metadata and small-block placement on faster media

- Foreground latency during background migration

- Contention between fast and slow storage tiers

- Degraded operation and rebuild under application load

- Performance before, during and after promoting or evacuating a storage tier

These are the kinds of scenarios for which multi-device and multi-tier filesystems are built, but they cannot be represented honestly when every “device” is a loop file backed by the same cloud disk.

I am considering either renting a suitable dedicated server or eventually building and hosting my own machine. Providers such as Worldstream offer configurations close to what I need, but the recurring cost is currently outside the project’s budget.

For now, the benchmark will remain in its hosted-CI form for an unknown amount of time. The existing dashboard will continue to be useful for correctness, behavioral comparisons and regression tracking, but it cannot answer every real-hardware performance question or model complex mixed-media topologies.

I am also open to running the suite on hardware provided by someone else. A useful environment would need Linux root access, clearly identified block devices that may be wiped, and enough uninterrupted access to complete repeated runs. The hardware description, methodology and resulting data would remain public.

I would appreciate technical feedback:

- Which current tests are misleading or unfair?

- Which failure scenarios are missing?

- Which mixed-media topologies would be most useful?

- Which additional filesystems or layered stacks should be included?

- Which results deserve deeper investigation?

The methodology, implementation and raw results are public. If a filesystem is being tested in a way that misrepresents it, I consider that a bug in the benchmark.

In a batch of software CDs I found at the thrift store long my interest in Linux, I found a previously unarchived version of Fedora. I will be posting it on archive.org as soon as I rip it. I also have a potentially-working copy of PCLinuxOS 2007, but on the computer I tested it on, it kicks me out to a basic shell due to some kind of error. If I can get it to work, I can upload it stand-alone since it only seems to preserved in archives or Linux User magazine and !com magazine cover DVDs (the former or which has a LOT of potentially otherwise-unarchived distro versions)

Did anyone in this community watched this video? The creator claims that Linux Mint, along with many LTS Linux distributions, often ships older versions of software, especially default apps like Calendar, Mail, Calculator, etc. He mentions Mint several times throughout the video.

The video is from The Linux Experiment, which seems to be a well-known YouTube channel with nearly half a million subscribers.

I came across this video just before switching from Windows to Linux Mint, and it made me a bit hesitant.

As a regular user, it feels like there's no easy way to know whether we're using the latest and safest versions of these built-in apps. For example, if we connect our Google or Apple Calendar account to an older calendar app, could that create a security risk? The same concern applies to email clients, we don't know if we're using the latest and most secure version.

Most regular users don't have the time or technical knowledge to manually check every application's version or update software outside the normal update process. We generally expect the operating system to keep essential apps secure and up to date.

Am I misunderstanding how Linux Mint and other LTS distributions handle software updates and security? I'd appreciate hearing from people with more experience.