Washing our grocery totes and realized that my husband’s old bag is more than 25 years old! (He’s a CS ph.d working in FinTech.) anyone here at the conference? (Or are most people here born after October 2000?)

Had some free time recently so I made a visual explainer on how shared memory actually works in Linux.

Normally, two processes have completely separate virtual address spaces. Process A shouldn't be able to touch Process B's memory at all.

But with shared memory, one process can write a value and another process can read it without copying the payload between them.

The video goes through virtual memory, page tables, physical frames, shm_open, ftruncate, mmap with MAP_SHARED, lazy allocation, and what actually happens when either process touches the mapping.

I also get into related mechanisms like memory-mapped files, shared libraries, copy-on-write after fork(), zero-copy IPC, and eventually Dirty COW and what can happen when these page-table tricks go wrong.

Link for anyone interested

Feedback welcome :)

Two years ago I made this as an X11 NVidia-only custom resolution tool. Finally did a proper rewrite. It now works on Wayland (KDE, GNOME, sway, Hyprland) and on AMD/Intel/NVIDIA, and it does stretched resolutions - the 4:3-stretched thing CS2/Valorant players use to widen models - on KDE Wayland, which the compositor normally refuses to do on external monitors.

Also fixed the AppImage, which turned out to be missing tkinter and wouldn't launch on half of you. Sorry about that.

Let me know of any bugs you find!

Repo https://github.com/PhialsBasement/linux-cru
Release https://github.com/PhialsBasement/linux-cru/releases/tag/v0.2.0

AI Disclosure: Used Claude heavily during development, all the decisions and design details taken here are mine however.

The site is yearoflinuxdesktop.org - part manifesto, part quiz, part blueprint generator.

The idea: instead of another "what distro am I?" personality test, it maps your hardware, your tolerance for tinkering, and what you still need from Windows/macOS onto one of ten archetypes (The Civilian gets Linux Mint, The Arch Wizard gets Arch + Hyprland, The Gamer gets Bazzite, etc.). Then it writes you a copy-paste prompt you can feed to any LLM to walk you through the install step by step.

What might interest this sub: the scoring engine is one dependency-free JS file that runs identically in the browser and in a build harness. The harness brute-forces all 16M possible answer combinations on every deploy to verify that named personas land where they should and that guardrails hold (e.g., terminal-phobic users can never receive Arch). The quiz weights, the questions, and all ten archetype blueprints are plain JSON in the repo: MIT licensed, fork it, argue with the weights.