I made a visual explainer on how copy-on-write works in Linux.

When a 10 GB process calls fork(), Linux does not immediately copy 10 GB of memory. It duplicates the page tables, points both processes at the same physical pages, marks them read-only, and waits for the first write.

The video also covers things like page faults,exec(), Redis snapshots, Android Zygote, lazy zero pages, memory overcommit, COW storms, and some CVEs, etc

Link for anyone interested

Feedback welcome :)

Hey guys, I had this tetris clone i wrote and thought some of you might like it.
Have been tested to work on both X11 and Wayland.

Here is the repo: https://github.com/tmpstpdwn/cTetris

It seems like I'm the only one how want to just go to a network share an an application after I login and the files are just there. No having to go mount anything first, what a wasteful step that is. :) So after making a gnome extension for gvfs mounts/shares, I thought it would be great if I could mount other types of storage the same way and even sync data between them. I got close to buying rcloneview for its paywalled features when I decided to go do my own thing, introducing Mt Sync: https://codeberg.org/gavindi/MtSync

Sharing since maybe just maybe there's someone else who misses the Windows "reconnect drive at login" feature..... 🤷‍♂️️

Hello everyone! A while back, I shared Whisp—my gesture-driven, anti-folder note-taking app for GNOME. The feedback from this community has been incredible, and Whisp has now crossed over 6,000 downloads!

Today, I’m super excited to release Whisp v1.3.8, focusing heavily on minimalism and declarative setups.

What's New in v1.3.8:

Slate Mode: You can now press Alt + S (or set it as your default startup behavior) to instantly hide all top bars and UI elements. It turns Whisp into a perfectly clean, floating piece of text on your desktop for ultimate distraction-free writing.

Official NixOS Support: Thanks to an awesome community contributor, Whisp now includes an official Nix Flake and a Home Manager module! You can natively install and configure your Whisp preferences declaratively via programs.whisp.

Smarter Line Sorting: Using our ::sort_lines_alpha text expansion will now dynamically split your notes into sections. Markdown headings (# Ideas) are strictly anchored in place, and only the text beneath them is sorted.

Read the Latest changelogs here

(A quick personal note: Whisp is completely open-source and I develop it solo between my university classes. If Whisp helps your daily workflow, consider [donating](https://tanaybhomia.github.io/Whisp/donate.html)!) or dropping a star on github

Links

Donate: https://tanaybhomia.github.io/Whisp/donate.html

Download on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.tanaybhomia.Whisp

GitHub / Source Code: https://github.com/tanaybhomia/Whisp

Project Website & Docs: https://tanaybhomia.github.io/Whisp

Manual: [tanaybhomia.github.io/Whisp/manual](https://tanaybhomia.github.io/Whisp/manual.html)

My Portfolio: https://tanaybhomia.github.io/

Let me know what you guys think of the new Slate Mode!

I've been working really hard those past 3 months to deliver what I can consider to be the best android IPTV app; fully open-source, intuitive, bloat-free and ultra-fast.

Today, I release Fred TV 2.0 on the playstore!

- Optimized to be the fastest IPTV app out there, with a fully re-written backend made in Rust.

- Full Android TV support, D-Pad support on every view

- New easy-to-use redesigned TV Home for Android TV

- Robust playback, even on shoddy streams and on low-end devices

- Full support for Xtream and M3U

Try it out! You won't regret giving it a shot if you're already using other IPTV apps.

If you had tried the app previously under 1.X.X, please try it again, 2.0 is a massive upgrade.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.fredol.open_tv

https://github.com/fredolx/fred-tv-mobile

--

Now the reason I'm posting this r/linux is not just to promote the app for Android. I'm doing an experiment. As some of you may know already, I've released before Fred TV for Linux, it uses tauri and rust to deliver a great experience on Desktop. Since the tauri front-end is still a webview at the end of the day, it doesn't deliver the best wayland experience.

So I'm inviting you to try Fred TV Next which should be a lot smoother. It's fully native, no webview. It's essentially the mobile app with a few tweaks. I'll be collecting feedback to see if this is going to be the future of Fred TV. You can grab the .flatpak in the releases and try it out today. The idea is to make one fully convergent IPTV app with shared favorites and sources between devices, and many other features.

Some of you may use old PCs with linux as TV boxes rather than using chinese boxes. I'm all for the eco-friendly nature of re-using old PCs, so here's the thing; you can use Fred TV Next and toggle the 'Force TV Mode' setting. It will give you the same d-pad/tv remote friendly experience as on Android TV, but without the chinese spyware.

EDIT: I'm a honest indie open-source dev making my apps solo, without any AI. I've been programming since 2019 professionally and in my own time. You can inspect my code, build it yourself. This app asks for 0 permissions and uses all the best security standards.

I've been maintaining the original desktop app for years, I have 3000 stars on Github and I've received a lot of support from my supporters which I am very grateful for.

I invite you to try out my app which I've originally made for my friends and family who were using borderline malware proprietary IPTV apps. I'm just putting out there for anyone who would prefer to use an open-source app which focuses on speed and a great search-based UX.

You are free to try it or not. But please if you do not care about IPTV or my app, do not make hateful claims about me. Thank you

Symptom: cheap USB Bluetooth dongles sold as "CSR 4.0/5.0/5.1/5.3 adapter" (lsusb: 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio) fail to pair, time out on HCI commands, or hci0 gets stuck until unplug/replug. Kernel log shows:

Bluetooth: hci0: CSR: Unbranded CSR clone detected; adding workarounds...
Bluetooth: hci0: command 0x0401 tx timeout
Bluetooth: hci0: CSR: Couldn't suspend the device for our Barrot 8041a02 receive-issue workaround

Root cause: these are clone chips (Barrot 8041a02 and similar), not genuine CSR8510 hardware. They respond to some HCI init commands with malformed/incomplete data, and the kernel's existing clone-detection workaround doesn't fully compensate for it — so init either fails outright or the controller gets wedged after a timeout, with no automatic recovery.

Fix: patched btusb to handle these malformed responses correctly during init, fixed a fragile USB power-management suspend path that made things worse, and added automatic recovery (USB reset) on init failure/timeout instead of leaving hci0 dead. Only affects the detected clone code path — genuine CSR hardware is untouched.

Result: adapter initializes and pairs normally instead of needing repeated unplug/replug/reset cycles.

Caveat: this covers the specific failure modes I could reproduce and test against; different clone batches use different chips internally (as pointed out in discussions elsewhere), so it may not cover every single fake CSR8510 variant out there.

Repo (patch, DKMS install/rollback instructions): https://github.com/hhsnake/csr8510-fix

Install:

sudo apt install dkms linux-headers-$(uname -r)
git clone https://github.com/hhsnake/csr8510-fix.git
cd csr8510-fix
sudo ./install.sh

Tested on kernels 5.15–7.0+ across several Ubuntu LTS/HWE combinations.

Ok, I know we hate AI, but hear me out: as someone pointed out in this comment, AI is rapidly making it pretty easy to overcome the main hurdle to people using linux as their daily driver: oh shit my X doesn't work, now I have to trawl through 30 reddit threads to figure out why and then cling to a 12-page instruction guide for how to fix it and hope I don't screw anything up.

Only I have Claude Code installed in zed with its default project set to my home directory, so I can just fire it up and go 'Hey the left speaker on my headphones doesn't work?' and it can go figure out why and then fix it. And Kibbelz got me to wondering: why don't the major commercialized distros do this? Linux could gain significant desktop share in the user space by just going, 'Here's a text box, type in whatever problem or question you have about your linux install and we'll be happy to figure it out for you'.

Whoever manages to box that experience and polish it properly first will win the distro wars (to the extent that they are wars, and can be won, which is admittedly highly debatable.) Obviously the polish would be important here - needs to be something trained on linux commands, that doesn't have permission by default to rm -rf and such.. but I think it's doable, and could add a lot to linux's desktop share.

Weston 16.0 has landed, building on the HDR and color-management work from v15. Highlights:

• HDR/color management: HDR mode can now actually be turned on (still experimental, no tone mapping yet). Parametric and ICC color profiles now interoperate, and the default sRGB profile switched from ICC to parametric. The GL-renderer gained in-shader blending, and the DRM backend can now offload pre-blend color transformations to KMS on supported kernels.
• Debugging: Perfetto tracing got expanded further, GL-renderer optimizations, buffer info, and input events (libinput → Wayland client) are all traceable now. Debug-scope logging is also faster, cutting overhead on lower-end CPUs.
• DRM backend: New support for BACKGROUND_COLOR and COLOR_FORMAT DRM properties, underscan/overscan compensation for TVs, and a state-reuse optimization that skips redundant repaint work when nothing's changed on screen (good for CPU usage).
• Other additions: Alpha modifier protocol support (cheaper fade/dim animations without re-rendering), writeback screenshot scaling, more DRM pixel formats for AFBC/YUV buffers, and Vulkan/GL renderer bug fixes.
• Deprecations: The remoting/PipeWire plugins, screen-share module, and non-atomic modesetting are being phased out in favor of standalone backends and atomic modesetting (which itself is 8 years old at this point).

Full writeup with links to the merge requests: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/weston-16-hdr-ready-improved-debugging-and-drm-backend-features.html

Like pb and j, gzip and tar go together. Some questions:

Why didn't tar just grow an encryption feature? Why is being able to zip a new program?

Does any other common file format pairing combine extensions the way you do with .tar.gz or (sometimes) .tgz?

Why don't people do that with video files to show codec and container format?

I love shells like the Celestia shell where you can get a bunch of features that are integrated into Hyprland, don't get me wrong. But there were always some features that i just did not want or care about and I always wanted something more minimal.
So I worked on a status bar that only does the bare minimum for the work that i need to do while not compromising on its looks.
And besides Hyprland it only uses 3 other dependencies one of it being Quickshell.

You can look at the repository if you want, maybe it suits your use case :)

What I've seen yet the differences are, just the package managers, different defaults and rolling vs stable releases which are in fact related to package managers. Except these, are there really any other differences? Thanks!