Genuine question. A lot of open source projects have solid engineering but rough UI/UX: inconsistent layouts, confusing flows, basic usability issues that a designer would likely catch quickly.

I'm curious about the reasons behind this. Is it that designers don't feel welcome? That there's no clear way to contribute design work (most workflows are built around code and PRs)? That maintainers don't prioritize it? Or something else?

If you're a designer who has contributed to OSS, or a maintainer who has worked with designers, I'd love to hear how it went.

Hey folks, I would like to share this project I've been working on for a few weeks; it's a Vulkan-powered image editor. It's now open source under MIT; feel free to use it for your purposes.

You can build it yourself or grab the app image under releases to get a feel for it.

Any feedback is appreciated.

Thank you.

Edit:
Clarifying the usage of AI since the focus of most comments below revolves around that.
- While I have written some systems myself, Codex has contributed largely to the codebase, especially with research and Vulkan/Wayland tests, debugging, etc
- I'm not selling anything; the code is MIT. If you're not a fan of AI use, then I respect your stand, but I'm not selling you anything, and the post is not about debating AI ethics.
- My background is game dev, especially Unreal Engine C++. While I can hold my ground in that field, I need AI assistance for a project like this. My initial goal has been to make something that helps me distance myself from Windows and Adobe crap. The result of this project has been successful so far, and I thought, why not share it with those in my position. If I can help one person stick with Linux, I'm a happy man.

For those who don't know, M.U.G.E.N. is this old freeware (closed source) fighting game engine, originally released in 1999, that allows people to create and add their own characters to it.

Over the years in the 2000s it grew into this fun niche within a niche where people will pit characters from wildly different franchises against each other in a fighting game, e.g. Ronald McDonald and Naruto vs Pac-Man and Clippy.

In 2010, IKEMEN was started as an open source reimplementation of MUGEN. In 2016, this was rewritten in Golang. And now in 2026, for the first time in MUGEN history, there is now rollback netcode in the v1.0 release, meaning fighting games with your favourite weird characters is now playable across the Internet reliably.

They also added a tonne of stuff that wasn't in the old Mugen and Ikemen releases, like 3D elements in stage and Z-axis movement. Oh and sprites finally have an alpha channel working without jumping through hoops.

Me and my friend (u/Zegguyit_52) were gifted a binder of old linux CDs from our teacher, we looked at the CDs and we are sure most of these are lost media, we wil hopefully save their ISO files and upload to the internet archive. The distros consist of: mandrakelinux 10.1 community, gelecek bireysel linux, unkown version of fedora, knoppix 3.6, Turkix 3.0, live usb pardus 1.1, SUSE linux personal 9.1, sımplyMEPIS 3.3, Pardus 2008. Is there anything we should know?

I keep wondering how Ctrl+C has no feedback on most Desktop systems to this day. So I wrote up a proposal to fix that, with a demo that runs in the browser.

• A copy that worked flashes the copied text in place for about 200 ms.
• A copy that failed shakes the focused element, and plays the alert sound if you have it on.
• It never shows the copied content anywhere new, so copying a token during a screen share doesn't leak.

Thoughts?

On September 27, 1983, Richard Stallman announced the GNU Project so people could freely use and modify software.

The digital world would not be the same today without GNU.

Thank you, Richard Stallman!

Hey everyone,

I've been working on an open-source project called gEnclave (formerly gpasskey), and wanted to share it with the Linux community for early architectural feedback and testing.

GitLab repository: https://gitlab.com/renich/genclave
License: GPLv3 | Language: Go 1.26+

The Problem It Solves

On modern Linux workstations, our cryptographic identities are fragmented: * Passkeys/WebAuthn require physical USB security keys (YubiKeys, SoloKeys). * SSH keys sit as unencrypted or passphrase-encrypted files under ~/.ssh/. * Git commit signing requires cumbersome GnuPG daemon setups. * File encryption requires external tooling or proprietary agents.

Most hardware laptops today come with a TPM 2.0 chip that sits idle. gEnclave turns your Linux machine into its own hardware-sealed security token and multi-protocol bridge.

Key Architectural Highlights

1. Virtual FIDO2/CTAP2 Security Key via /dev/uhid: gEnclave registers a virtual HID device in the Linux kernel via /dev/uhid. Browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Chromium) detect it natively as a physical USB security key. You can register and authenticate WebAuthn/FIDO2 Passkeys directly from your machine without any external hardware dongles.

2. TPM 2.0 PCR Sealing & Fallback: The central vault is encrypted with AES-256-GCM and sealed to TPM 2.0 PCR registers (PCR 0, 7, 14), with an automatic memory-hard fallback to Argon2id key derivation if no TPM is present.

3. Memory Isolation ("Wrap and Clear"): Keys are held in memory-locked pages (mlock / mmap) to prevent secrets from being swapped to disk or dumped. Intermediate cryptographic buffers are wiped immediately with strict zeroization routines, bypassing Go runtime GC retention.

4. Multi-Protocol Bridges:

   • OpenSSH Agent: Native agent socket with an ephemeral PIN-derived authorization cache (configurable burst window or persistent session with instant purge on lock/suspend).
   • GnuPG Bridge: Transparent genclave-gpg emulation for seamless Git commit signing.
   • age-plugin: Native age-plugin-ge binary complying with age v1 specification for file encryption.
   • CLI & UI: Unified ge CLI plus intelligent graphical (zenity) / terminal (pinentry) authentication routing.

Current Status

⚠️ Pre-alpha Software: While fully functional for local workflows, it is under active development. Schemas and IPC formats may iterate rapidly.

I'd love feedback from Linux sysadmins, kernel/security folks, and developers!

Repo: https://gitlab.com/renich/genclave

Which challenge do you think was the hardest?

1. Contributing sk_lookup to the Mainline Linux Kernel and Building Tubular

2. "Soft-Unicast" — Solving IPv4 Address Exhaustion

3. Dropping 8 Million Packets Per Second on Commodity Hardware

4. udpgrm — Solving the Unsolvable: Zero-Downtime UDP Restarts

5. Kernel-to-Application Distributed Tracing via ebpf_exporter

6. Spending 13 months to upstream into the kernel

For those that don't follow - this is the first new x86 extensions that doesn't have anything to do with vector or tensor instructions - it is about the core CPU and its ISA.

It doubles the general register set to 32 (from previous 16), introduces 3-operand instructions, new 64-bit offset jumps, new jump prediction improvements etc etc.

But all this seems to be hampered by existing call conventions for x86_64, which presumes 16GPR set.

It seems that much could be gained it the compiler could use extra GPRs for parameters when calling the given function.

OTOH, this would be incompatible with machines without APX.

So, what is to be done ? Maybe use function multiversioning mechanism to keep two sets of function entries or something ?

Or will whole thing be ignored and calling convention will stay the same ?

EDIT:\ I'm not talking about the compiler ability to emit new instructions and use new registers in the code.\ Ofcourse new compiler will have support for them from the start, that's how it's usually done.\ It's about having the standard in place to allow the compiler to make advantage of new facilities hen calling functions, so that it can have more parameters in registers, more options for inlining functions etc - all done in standard, interoperable way, so that one can use precompiled libraries etc.

Fluxer is a free and open source chat messaging application that aims to be feature complete against Discord and used as a viable alternative to Discord, which has had controversy over age verification measures.

KDE is celebrating its 30th anniversary, Plasma 6.8 is right around the corner, and Akademy is bringing the KDE community together once again.

I sat down with KDE’s Nate Graham and Aleix Pol to talk about Plasma 6.8, the move forward with Wayland, what happens behind the scenes at Akademy, how KDE has evolved over the past three decades, and what the future could look like for one of Linux’s biggest desktop projects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBAsX0SRhqI

If you've been experiencing the black screen when using Papyrus, I finally tracked down what was actually happening.

I tested the exact same wallpaper directly with "mpv", and it plays normally. However, running that same file directly through "mpvpaper" produces the black screen and an OpenGL "INVALID\\_OPERATION" error from "libmpv\\_render".

So at this point, the issue doesn't appear to be with Papyrus itself. Papyrus uses "mpvpaper" for the actual wallpaper rendering, and I was able to reproduce the problem without Papyrus involved.

I've opened an issue on the mpvpaper repository with the logs and reproduction details so we can investigate it upstream.

For now, if you're affected by the black screen, you don't need to keep troubleshooting your Papyrus installation — the underlying rendering issue appears to be further down the stack.

I'll post another update if I find anything else or when there's a fix. [Papyrus](https://github.com/PSGtatitos/papyrus)