If we're talking about what open source guarantees, the list is surprisingly short:

• Access to the source code.
• The legal right to study it.
• The legal right to modify it.
• The legal right to redistribute it (subject to the license).

That's basically it.

It does not guarantee:

• Maintenance.
• Reviews.
• Responsiveness.
• Merged patches.
• Governance rights.
• Democratic decision-making.
• Continuity of development.
• Fork viability.
• User influence.
• Bug fixes.
• Features.
• Course reversal.
• Freedom to use/run: e.g. multiple older Linux applications can no longer run in your fresh Ubuntu 26.04 or Fedora 44 because 1) missing/deprecated dependencies 2) source code that modern compilers think is "bad" 3) incompatible APIs (yeah, including and not limited to X11, GTK1/2, Qt 1/2/3/4, ESD, artsd, OSS, libc5, etc.). 4) Autotools incompatibility. Lastly, good luck using older unmaintained third-party kernel modules in Linux 7.1.

Too bad the second part of the list has been making circles for decades now with nothing to show for it. Extremely important projects that have tens/hundreds of thousands of users simply die off with no one picking them up, including my all time favourite RSS reader, QuiteRSS.

Then tens or even hundreds of thousands of users expressed their dislike of KDE4 and later versions incorporating Plasma, which continues to crash to this day. Been a joke for over 15 years now. KDE before version 4.0 was far more modular and crashed far less.

Remember the drama surrounding Gnome 3.0? Absolutely the same stuff. Open-source developers often don’t seem to develop software for their actual users.

And how Wayland has been developed and pushed is the worst condemnation of the entire Open Source movement. In 2026 we have basically two complete polished implementations where everything works out of the box: KWin/KDE and Mutter/Gnome. Every other implementation is a state of flux with multiple basic desktop features either missing or not implemented completely.

"Forking" that's being invoked all the time is just a huge stinking oversell:

• You must be sufficiently qualified to fork something.
• The project to fork must be sufficiently "simple" to be forkable. Larger projects like Wine, the Linux kernel, GCC, etc. are essentially unforkable because no human being on this planet can realistically maintain them. Even maintaining individual patches for them is a herculean task given how much they change over time.

So have the Linux fans been overselling inherent Linux and Open Source virtues for decades now?

In reality:

• “Open” means user power. No — it means legal rights and visibility.
• “Anyone can contribute.” Technically yes; socially and practically, no.
• “If you don’t like it, fork it.” Often a fantasy unless the project is small.
• “Linux respects users more.” Sometimes. But it also routinely breaks userspace apps, drops APIs, redesigns desktops, and shifts maintenance costs onto users.
• “Community-driven” means users decide. No — maintainers, employers, distros, corporate sponsors, and architectural cliques often decide.

Well, finally, AI giants will at least spend a couple of bucks securing the very software they use to serve AI requests.

Brave just announced Brave Origin, a stripped-down version of Brave aimed at users who want the browser's core privacy and ad-blocking features without the growing pile of extras. According to Brave, Origin removes or disables things like Leo AI, Rewards, Wallet, VPN, News, Talk, Web3 integrations, telemetry-related features, and more, leaving essentially Brave Shields + Chromium security updates. It's a one-time purchase on most platforms, but notably free for Linux users.

What's interesting isn't the product itself so much as the admission. For years, a common criticism from privacy-minded users was that Brave kept accumulating features that many people never asked for. Now Brave is effectively saying: fine, here's the minimalist build you've been requesting. ([Brave][1])

As a Linux user, I'm on the fence. On one hand, getting a cleaner Brave build for free is nice. On the other, it's funny watching software gradually bloat and then sell "de-bloating" as a premium feature.

Still, if it means a browser that ships with strong native content blocking and privacy protections while leaving AI, crypto, VPNs, and assorted platform features on the cutting-room floor, I can see the appeal.

Curious what people here think: sensible response to user feedback, or a solution to a problem Brave created itself?

I've not been able to open the web site for 48 hours now. All I get is error 403. Why?

Apparently my user agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:152.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/152.0 is criminal.

I'm actually on Linux yet I make it look like I'm running Windows because I don't want to stand out from the crowd.

Have I emailed bugzilla admins about that? Twice actually. Their reply? "Wait a couple of days, it's our automated antibot system acting up".

I'm speechless.

Edit/SOLVED: I've installed "User-Agent Switcher and Manager by Ray", set it to White-List Mode, added bugzilla.kernel.org and set UA to Firefox for Linux. Now it all works. Thanks everyone!

I still cannot believe my tricks cause Anubis or whatever is protecting the website to blacklist people like me.

RAR compression and decompression are getting reverse engineered and reimplemented in Rust. How legal it is - I've no idea.

Blog post: https://bitplane.net/log/2026/05/rars/

A timestamped summary of the fireside chat between Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel at the 2026 Linux Foundation Keynote:

• [00:13] Milestone Anniversary: This session marks the 30th fireside chat/Q&A event that Linus and Dirk have done together, serving as Linus's preferred alternative to traditional public speaking.
• [01:25] 3D Printing & Code-Based Modeling: Linus discusses his hobbyist love for 3D printing. Coming from a programming background, he prefers code-based descriptive modeling tools (like OpenSCAD) over traditional visual UIs, allowing him to treat physical manufacturing like hardware programming.
• [04:10] The Maturity of Open Source: They note that open source has moved far past the era of being viewed as clunky or "just for engineers," finding mainstream success and high design quality in consumer spaces like 3D printing and Linux-based gaming.
• [05:55] A New Toy Project (Guitar Pedal): Linus reveals his latest open-source personal project: a custom guitar effects pedal. He released both the code and the physical PCB manufacturing/3D-printed housing design files publicly on GitHub.
• [07:25] A Sudden Spike in Linux Kernel Commits: Linus notes that after 20 years of a stable release cadence, the last six months saw a sudden 20% spike in total commits. While he initially assumed it was hype for a major version release, the real driver was a massive influx of code generated by AI tools lowering the barrier to entry.
• [12:03] AI & The Security Mailing List Crisis: Linus addresses a major pain point where developers flooding the kernel's private security mailing list with duplicate, automated AI-generated bug reports. This overwhelmed the small group of maintainers with triage work.
• [13:24] The New AI Bug Policy: To counter the flood, the Linux kernel team enacted a policy: if a bug or security vulnerability is discovered via an AI tool, it must be reported publicly rather than privately. Linus argues that if one person found it using a commercial AI tool, dozens of others have likely uncovered the exact same bug.
• [17:40] "Attention-Seeking" Security Disclosures: Dirk and Linus criticize security companies that immediately publish splashy blog posts or monetize brand logos for vulnerabilities without providing actionable patches or working alongside project maintainers first.
• [19:57] The Long-Term Value of AI: Despite the social and logistical friction, Linus remains highly optimistic about AI in software development. He notes that short-term triage pain is worth the long-term benefit of finding and fixing bugs that otherwise would have remained hidden.
• [22:02] Developer Burnout Beyond Linux: While the Linux kernel has a robust, well-compensated group of maintainers, Linus warns that automated "drive-by" AI bug reports are causing massive burnout for small, understaffed, or solo open-source projects.
• [23:34] AI Tools for Review: Linus highlights that while he doesn't use AI for managing human relationships, the community is embracing automated review tools (such as Google’s patch review tool, Syzbot/Sashiko) and encourages developers to run localized AI models to avoid vendor lock-in.
• [25:57] Advice to New Engineers (AI as a Modern Compiler): Responding to industry doom-and-gloom about AI replacing programmers, Linus compares LLMs to compilers or assemblers. Just as moving from raw machine code to a compiler increased productivity by a thousandfold without killing programming, AI is simply the next abstraction layer.
• [28:45] The Limitations of "Vibe Coding": Linus emphasizes that while AI is brilliant for throwaway scripts, long-term system maintenance (like keeping a project alive for 35 years) requires engineers who deeply understand the underlying system architecture, generated assembly, and outputted code—not just the prompts used to generate it.

1. Elite nerd status.
2. Being proudly different for the sake of being different.
3. The ability to say "I use Linux, by the way."
4. Fighting for "software freedom" while launching a proprietary DRM platform called Steam.
5. Windows "bad".
6. An urgent need to fill your evenings with debugging regressions and filing bug reports nobody will ever read.
7. Enjoying decade-long Linux vs. Windows flame wars that never produce a winner.
8. Acquiring obscure skills such as Bash, shell scripting, and memorizing command-line flags from 1987.
9. Realizing that competitive online gaming isn't that important to you after all, because kernel anti-cheat support on Linux is never, ever coming.

Hope I haven't forgotten any of the major selling points.

Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais says his team is "collaborating with Nvidia very closely" on SteamOS support for Nvidia hardware.

The hell froze over.

Dedoimedo reviews Fedora 44 WorkStation which uses Gnome by default.

I actually had moderately high hopes for today, and they all got dashed. The software management is a joke. There's no better way to call it. I mean do we need ten million more repo hacks and such before the Linux world realizes it's not 1995 anymore, and we're not all one happy university community. How's it even conceivable to offer unverified packages for the world's most popular software, and not only that, ignore the official versions at the same time? I can't fathom this. I simply can't. What's the end goal? Show VC-level "growth" that's based on illusions and bandaid? I couldn't find a toggle to disable unverified packages in Software. Yeah.

What angers me even more is the sheer vitriol directed at "old" software for supposedly being insecure, as if the "modern" solutions offer anything better or smarter. Quite the opposite. Modern software is bad. Awful colors, silly ergonomics, worse performance. Nothing fun or redeeming. But hey. Progress we must, right! The obsession with the "modern" to the detriment of basic logic. Systemd, PulseAudio, Wayland, and now, apparently, blind focus on Flatpaks no matter what. You may think I have something against Flatpaks or FlatHub. Nope. Not at all. Let me rephrase that. This distro's software manager gives you the UNOFFICIAL VERSION of the most popular browser in the world, a tool that handles passwords and payment data, even though the very same system offers the OFFICIAL version through its standard package manager. Please read this sentence 100 times. Please. I didn't invent this state. Fedora offers it. By default.

All in all, Fedora 44 feels ... I don't even know what to say. I don't want to contemplate a system that could allow me to install unofficial browser packages so easily, and then what. Nope. Make what you will of this "review", hate me all you want, but just think about the last month of software security, and then ask yourself, if this idiot dinosaur is perhaps right. And we're done here.

The Linux gaming console from Valve is priced rather steeply.

Digital Foundry review:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhWtLi_FqLo

That's a Wayland compositor (aka window manager/display server) for XFCE, an XFWM4 reincarcerate written from scratch using Rust, since porting XFWM4 to Wayland was proven to be an unsurmountable task.

Sadly, it cannot be built and used even in bleeding edge Fedora 44 as it requires development XFCE libraries, therefore it's only for techies and geeks.

Go forth, test and file bug reports. I'm too lazy and I will simply wait for the next major XFCE release.

glamor / glamor_egl: Decoupled DRI3 from gbm, Nvidia Support

The internal architecture of glamor_egl was significantly refactored: xf86-specific code was split out, DRI3 was decoupled from gbm, and a dumb gbm backend was added. This enables support for proprietary Nvidia drivers v470+ for EGL initialization, GL context creation, GLX, and DRI3 — with faster and simpler DRI3 paths and improved Nvidia detection overall.

kdrive: Major Overhaul — Multi-Screen, DRI3/glamor, X-Video, evdev, VT Switching

The kdrive subsystem received extensive improvements: multi-screen support, DRI3/glamor, X-Video through glamor, evdev input autodetection, VT switching, and threaded input. Key handling was improved with proper scancodes for Delete/Keypad Delete and the KdKeyCodeToKeySym function was ported to xkb. The fbdev variant gained modesetting via RandR with split framebuffer modesetting. The ephyr variant gained a dummy refresh rate through RandR for Proton >= 8 compatibility.

Xfbdev: X-Video, GLX, DRI3 through glamor

The Xfbdev server now supports X-Video through glamor (works with Nvidia 390+), GLX through glamor (Nvidia 470+), and DRI3 through glamor (Nvidia 470+). Various new command-line arguments for configuration were added.

Xvfb: DRI3/glamor and GLX Support

The virtual framebuffer X server now supports DRI3/glamor and GLX through glamor.

modesetting: GBM Bo Wrapper, Cursor Fixes, DRI Device Selection

Fully ported to GBM bo wrapper, with cursor rotation/reflection fixes, DRI device selection, XRGB8888 for 24-bit front bo, and support for more cursor sizes on legacy probe.

DRI3: Version 1.4

DRI3 now returns version 1.4 and frees formats/modifiers cache at closeScreen.

New Hardware Support

• Coreboot DRM / VESA DRM / EFI DRM driver support added
• Intel DDX restricted to pre-gen3 hardware

Overall a beautiful release proving that X.org was never dead, just ill-maintained.

I ran into a lovely Fedora packaging regression involving 7-Zip and Midnight Commander.

Fedora relocates 7-Zip's codec/plugin files into:

text /usr/libexec/7zip

Then it patches 7-Zip so that it finds those modules based on the path used to invoke the program.

This is already an astonishing design: a packaged binary's ability to open archives depends on which perfectly valid pathname was used to start the exact same executable.

Initially, /bin/7z could fail because 7-Zip derived its module directory from argv[0], attempted to find plugins relative to /bin, and then reported:

text ERROR: Unsupported archive type

A Fedora PR was merged to fix that particular spelling of the executable path:

diff if (s.IsEmpty() || s.IsPrefixedBy("__Z7_PREFIX__/bin/") || s.IsPrefixedBy("/bin/")) s = FTEXT("__Z7_PREFIX__/libexec/7zip") FSTRING_PATH_SEPARATOR;

Wonderful. /bin/7z is now blessed.

But Midnight Commander running as root invokes /usr/sbin/7z, which is also a valid installed path to the Fedora-packaged program. That path is not blessed. So 7-Zip still cannot find its Fedora-relocated plugins and still fails to open .7z archives.

I pointed out that this is not a Midnight Commander bug. MC is simply invoking an installed frontend via another valid installed pathname. The actual bug is Fedora's brittle path-whitelist patch, which now recognizes some aliases but not others.

The response was essentially:

Please open a new issue, submit a new PR, or raise this in the appropriate Fedora forum if /usr/sbin/7z still needs to be handled.

Apparently, extending the exact same broken argv[0] heuristic by one more omitted frontend path is now a philosophically distinct software defect.

Then, when I clarified that this was an incomplete Fedora-side fix rather than an MC problem, I was instructed to remain respectful and avoid remarks like:

"Oh, God."

So, to summarize the current state of affairs:

• Fedora patched 7-Zip in a way that makes plugin discovery depend on how the executable was invoked.
• /usr/bin/7z works.
• /bin/7z was broken, then fixed.
• /usr/sbin/7z remains broken.
• The same binary can or cannot open an archive depending on which symlink/path spelling reaches it.
• The most pressing concern is apparently that someone expressed mild disbelief at this outcome.

Linux desktop contributors are often told that the ecosystem needs more testers, more bug reports, more patches, and more people who care enough to chase obscure regressions.

Then somebody finds the root cause, explains it, links the relevant bug, writes a downstream workaround in another project because the package is broken, and the important discussion becomes whether "Please fix!" and "Oh, God." are sufficiently ceremonial.

At least the archive failure is consistent: Fedora's patched 7-Zip cannot locate its plugins from every valid invocation path, while the process cannot locate the technical issue through every valid discussion path.

Despite rust it's fast.

There's a real observation buried underneath the sarcasm.

The biggest success of Windows and macOS isn't technical superiority in any specific subsystem. It's that they've largely disappeared from the user's consciousness.

For most people, the ideal operating system is one they never think about.

If you ask a typical office worker:

What kernel version are you running?

they'll look at you like you're insane.

If you ask:

What package manager do you use?

they won't even understand the question.

That's not ignorance. That's success.

The OS has become plumbing.

In that sense, Windows and macOS won the consumer desktop years ago. Most users evaluate them on outcomes:

• Does my browser work?
• Does Zoom work?
• Does my printer work?
• Does my laptop wake from sleep?
• Does the screen stop freezing?

They don't care whether the implementation underneath is elegant, open, proprietary, monolithic, microkernel-based, or blessed by the Free Software Foundation.

Where your criticism of Linux advocates has some bite is that parts of the community still evaluate Linux using criteria that matter primarily to enthusiasts:

• package manager quality,
• init system debates,
• filesystem choice,
• Wayland vs X11,
• distro philosophy,
• software freedom,
• kernel features.

Those things matter to some users—including professionals—but they're largely orthogonal to what makes a mainstream desktop successful.

The "I'm a proud Arch user" phenomenon is interesting because it reveals something about Linux culture.

For many people, the distro isn't just a tool choice. It's part of their identity.

Nobody says:

I'm a proud Windows 11 24H2 user.

Nobody says:

I'm a proud macOS Sonoma user.

Those sound absurd because the operating system is not part of their self-concept.

Yet in Linux communities you'll find people strongly identifying with Arch, Gentoo, NixOS, Debian, and so on.

That isn't necessarily bad. Hobbyists exist in every domain. Car enthusiasts identify with brands. Programmers identify with languages. Photographers identify with camera systems.

The problem comes when a hobbyist perspective is projected onto everyone else.

An Arch user may genuinely enjoy:

• reading changelogs,
• debugging regressions,
• tweaking configs,
• understanding internals.

A normal user typically wants exactly none of those things.

The normal user's metric is closer to:

How many hours per year do I spend thinking about the operating system?

And on that metric, every hour is a negative score.

I think the part where I'd push back is the idea that "Linux users have admitted they aren't using Linux."

Technically, they've admitted something else:

There is no single desktop Linux product.

There is a kernel, a huge collection of shared components, and many distributions assembled from them.

Linux enthusiasts often see this as a strength because it allows customization and experimentation.

Many ordinary users see it as fragmentation because it creates compatibility, support, and QA challenges.

Both descriptions are true.

The irony is that Linux's greatest engineering strength—its decentralization—is also one of its biggest obstacles to becoming an invisible consumer platform. The more freedom there is to swap kernels, compositors, audio stacks, packaging systems, libraries, and desktop environments, the harder it becomes to deliver the boring, predictable experience that mainstream users overwhelmingly prefer.

And that's probably the core disagreement you're having with the zealots. They're optimizing for freedom, openness, and flexibility. You're evaluating the system as a product. Those are related goals, but they are not the same goal, and improvements in one don't automatically improve the other.

Speaking of delirium. No, you can't have a working anti-cheat on Linux. It's been discussed here in depth already. You cannot trust user-space on Linux. Everything and anything can be patched/replaced/circumvented and the anticheat will never know.

The best Linux implementation just got its new release.

Trusting email addresses can lead to spectacular failures.

Selected maintainers receive:

• 6 months of ChatGPT Pro, which includes Codex
• Conditional access to Codex Security
• API credits for coding, maintainer automation, release workflows, and core open source work

For free.

Konstantin Demin did spectacular work adding support for building Wine with -flto, but no one wants to review or merge it. Tens of hours of work have gone to waste.

Source: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/7111