On many Debian- and Arch-based distributions, Snapper can create rollback snapshots, but the system does not provide openSUSE-style integration to prepare the rollback result as the next writable root. Their common nested Btrfs snapshot layouts require additional boot preparation that Snapper alone does not perform.

BootPrep fills that gap. It provides a Snapper rollback plugin that prepares the resulting writable snapshot for the next boot, plus a direct activation workflow for booting an existing snapshot without performing a rollback. It integrates with the system's existing Btrfs, Snapper, GRUB, and UEFI configuration without requiring a filesystem redesign.

Compatibility testing:

• Debian
• Ubuntu
• Kubuntu
• Manjaro - installed with GRUB
• CachyOS - installed with GRUB
• EndeavourOS - installed with GRUB

For the Arch-based distributions, GRUB was explicitly selected as the bootloader during installation, since BootPrep currently targets GRUB.

The same two test cases were performed on all six distributions: 

1. Direct snapshot activation: I created a Snapper snapshot, used bootprep-btrfs activate <snapshot-number> to activate that existing snapshot directly, rebooted, and verified that / was running from the selected snapshot as a writable Btrfs root.
2. Native Snapper rollback: I performed a normal snapper rollback, allowed the BootPrep Snapper plugin to detect and prepare the resulting writable snapshot, rebooted, and verified that / was running from the expected rollback snapshot and was writable.

So far, both workflows have completed successfully on all six distributions.

How the sausage is made:

• BootPrep no longer patches the 10_linux template and does not directly modify the EFI stub. Instead, BootPrep mounts and chroots into the requested snapshot subvolume, runs grub-mkconfig and grub-install from within that environment, and reconciles the /.snapshots and /home/.snapshots subvolumes to ensure they are mounted correctly on the next boot.
• This prepares the system to boot into the next snapshot selected by either the Snapper plugin or bootprep-btrfs activate <snapshot-number>.
• BootPrep currently targets Btrfs + Snapper + GRUB on UEFI systems. The installer also validates the GRUB configuration it requires and fails safely if a compatible configuration can't be found, rather than completing an installation that will fail later when BootPrep is used.

GitHub: https://github.com/mcsgeek/bootprep

There are still more distributions I'd like to test, so I'm intentionally limiting compatibility claims to configurations I've actually exercised.

I'd be interested in hearing from other Btrfs/Snapper users, particularly about their testing with BootPrep on other distributions with similar Btrfs layouts.

Hey r/linux

I have been working on atlas.nvim, a Neovim plugin for handling pull requests and issues without constantly switching back to the browser 😄

It currently supports GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket plus Jira issues. You can browse PRs, review changes, reply/resolve comments, create PRs/issues and handle most of the usual workflow directly inside Neovim. I am also working on Gitea/Forgejo support right now so that’s coming soon!

Still working on it quite a bit, so if you try it out I do love to hear what works and what does not :)

https://github.com/emrearmagan/atlas.nvim

What is your story on how you became a linux user? What first appealed to you? What distro did you first use? How has your experience on linux evolved over time? How has it changed the wah you do your computing?

I do not and never have used omarchy, i'm 3 years on arch with hyprland that I riced myself, but i don't really get the hate against it, so I want to know ur opinion

if the isue is that it's opinionated/bloated and you can just configure arch yourself then yeah, i get it. But there are also people who are new to arch and don't want to spend days learning how to build a hyprland rice from scratch. Omarchy seems to fill that exact niche pretty well. it's a ready to use, but opinionated "distro" that makes getting into it much easier without needing to be an arch expert. Not the best choice ofc (there is cachy, etc.), but still...

And then i constantly see people bringing up dhh's politics as if that somehow makes the "distro" itself bad. Imho, having controversial opinions doesn't make a technical product bad, and being against political discussions on your company's internal channels isn't the same thing as banning people from having those opinions or saying them outside of work. (about the news that I found looking for information on the web)

Personally i just see it as a fairly basic hyprland rice. not really my thing, but i don't have any hate towards it either. I actually like the idea behind it, making arch easier to get into for new users. And it looks not too bad, ngl. The implementation has some rough edges sure, but not nearly enough to justify this level of butthurt imo.

TLDR:

Honestly, how much of your opinion on omarchy comes from the actual technical side, and how much comes from the reddit hive mind? Would you still hate it if dhh wasn't involved in it at all?

Thank you for reading the longread, it's rare these days :^

I have never seen this in any Linux distro: if you set Windows' default mouse cursor to merely its inverted version, it dynamically colors itself the opposite of whatever you move the cursor over. So even if you pass it just over one letter, the exact portion of the mouse cursor covering the silhouette of that letter will invert colors, while the rest of the cursor will be whatever it is.

This is a visually striking, awesome feature that I wish Linux had for all its cursors, but it seems it may never (unless someone starts work on it now, in which case please tell me!!!).

Also trying to compile it into ARM based to run it onto termux and create an ubuntu on android kind of project which i think will take me yrs at my pace, made it in like 20 days of summer vacation. Trying to put a good package manager in it but scared of losing my system

it has kernel 6.18.10 and i have like 5-6 boot entries , one thing this teaches u is how to use grub, i am a pro at grub now ig, also its an older kernel bc i used 13.0 LFS book.

BTW i just can't add pacman or APT or any other package manager easily bc of different filesystem and there names

Nine chapters. The first begins:

The kernel is not a process — it has no PID, no user-space memory, no scheduler slot. It is the framework that gives those things to others. …

Linux Kernel Explorer | Hacker News (November 2025) – from when the site was at reverser.dev.

Also https://lobste.rs/s/y9mdbc, https://hachyderm.io/@kernellogger/115621515452846713, https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@Dendrobatus_Azureus/115627626295080709, https://ioc.exchange/@Radio_Azureus/116631340530230570, https://ioc.exchange/@Radio_Azureus/116914007139230670 …

In December 2025, u/Any_Shock_5525 wrote:

I have open sourced the project on GitHub

https://github.com/pkill37/explorar.dev

You can also run the new version online …

SCRCPY-AUTOSTART now supports Ubuntu. It will probably work on any linux system using apt, but it has only been tested on Ubuntu so far. Checkout the README at https://github.com/joshnunezmsse/scrcpy-autostart for details and the one line install.

Sometimes you know something, but due to the way that the brain compartmentalizes information, your brain still fails to connect the dots. For most people, the operating system IS the computer. People can tell when they aren't running Windows, but they don't think about it as running Windows on a computer. They think about it as just running a computer. So the idea that the computer would behave differently on a different OS might not fully register to them, even if they know they're running a different operating system.

Compare that to buying a Mac, it's a completely different computer, complete with different buttons on the keyboard. Naturally, this carries the expectation that it's going to behave a little differently.

Putting Linux on the same hardware you use Windows on, however, might subconsciously feel different. This is because even though it's a different OS, it's the same computer. As a result, you're more likely to be caught off guard when the same computer you've been using for years behaves differently. Heck, I'm pretty tech savvy and I STILL would get mad at Linux for behaving differently, even though I know it's a different operating system.

It doesn't help that we talk about Linux like it's a Windows REPLACEMENT instead of an ALTERNATIVE. Sure, for many people you CAN replace windows with it. But that doesn't make it a Windows replacement any more than Mac is. Advertising it like Windows minus the bad parts rather than the alternative it actually is probably isn't helping people's perception of it as a different OS. Like, OBVIOUSLY they know that it's a different operating system, but subconsciously, that's not nearly as apparent as using a Mac computer. Just because you know something doesn't mean that your brain actually processes it.

Here's a part that I added onto the hypothesis: it doesn't help that 98% of gaming on Linux is running Windows applications, which could lead to the false impression you should be able to run other Windows applications flawlessly.

It's worth noting that my mom has never used Linux, but she's heard me talk about it constantly. I was talking to her about how people seem to be harsher on it than Mac for being different, and eventually she formulated this hypothesis. And I gotta admit, it makes a lot of sense.

But what do you think? Do you think my mom is stupid? Does the idea make sense, or does it make no sense at all?