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1 • Opinion Poll (by Guido on 2021-03-22 01:39:22 GMT from Philippines)
I miss an option: I don't use any remote running service or remote machines! This is for me the case. The easier option is probably the laptop or netbook, that you can bring to work and take home.
2 • SHELLS. Closed source, commercial version of ?? (by Greg Zeng on 2021-03-22 01:40:49 GMT from Australia)
> "Access Windows From Any Device"
> "Turn Your Ipad or Chromebook into a Windows PC"
> "Any web-enabled device, ... can connect to Shells."
No mention of Apple, Raspberry Pi, etc. Distrowatch lists 50 "shells", excluding many web browser & VPS products. Seems to me that this commercial product is another version of the standard CLI, VPS, desktop environments, etc.
All products, both commercial & open source, have bugs, versions, limitations, etc. As end-users, we expect these parameters to be explained to us.
3 • Shells - fast setup (by Andy Prough on 2021-03-22 02:20:17 GMT from United States)
@Jesse wrote: "For instance, setting up a new operating system in Shells is faster than doing it locally, either on bare metal or in a virtual machine. There is no need to do the initial configuration and the new operating system is ready within two minutes."
A personalized snapshot of antiX can usually be installed in 2-4 minutes in my experience. A personalized snapshot of MX might take a couple minutes longer, but not much. At least with respect to antiX and MX, there would be no real noticeable advantage in terms of time savings.
4 • Entropy Piano Tuner (by mmphosis on 2021-03-22 03:14:27 GMT from Canada)
The most unusual thing I've done with Linux is use the Entropy Piano Tuner to tune a piano.
5 • Shells - spare Me! (by Bobbie Sellers on 2021-03-22 03:18:52 GMT from United States)
I have not bothered with distributed computing of any sort in the 45 years or so I have
been using personal/home computers. I find the suggestion of moving personal sensitive
material to and from the Shells system is a big security hole and begs for the need to
back up everything that you do there.
I prefer my own choice of OS running on my own computer where the mistakes can
all be blamed on my administrator namely myself.
bliss - “Nearly any fool can use a Linux computer. Many do.” After all here I am...
6 • Strange, unusual and fun (by Gary W on 2021-03-22 03:44:42 GMT from Australia)
...I think so, anyway :-)
I record free-to-air TV with Kaffeine (on a dedicated computer in the "box room"), play back with mpv, and manage with mc. Kodi didn't work for me, when I last tried it. I don't watch it live, I have regular TV hardware for that. Still missing me-tv :-|
As for Shells, yes I can see the benefits, but as a lifetime geek, I'm with @5, I prefer the freedom to mix and match my own choices of hardware and software.
7 • Dumbest Things (by Wedge009 on 2021-03-22 05:10:07 GMT from Australia)
Thanks for being brave enough to share that 'dumbest thing' story. I had a similar experience with DOS, on my dad's computer when I was in early high school or late primary school. USB flash drives were still several years off and portable storage was most commonly 3.5" diskettes, usually mounted as 'A-drive' in DOS.
I wanted to clean up my disk when I was done with my work for the evening, so I wrote 'del *.*'. To my horror, I realised the prompt was at C: instead of A:. Thankfully when my father returned we were able to recover the OS but I learned my lesson. Not quite as dumb as 'rm -rf /*' but pretty close.
I also like the story about replacing the expensive proprietary back-up software. Always fun to show how *NIX can replace Windows. There may be a time and place for Windows software, but a lot of the time it's just a case of being comfortable only with what they are familiar with.
---
Like some others who have commented before me, I'm also don't have any need or want for remote computing so abstained from the poll.
8 • dumbest or possibly weirdest (by Matt on 2021-03-22 05:35:45 GMT from United States)
I uninstalled a running kernel once on a machine that only had one kernel installed. That was probably the dumbest thing I did when learning Linux.
The most painful lesson I learned was not specific to linux:
Years ago, my main desktop computer at work went dead. I assumed that the power supply failed. When the power button was pressed, nothing happened. I hadn't backed up data in two weeks. Rather than trouble shoot anything, I took the hard drive home with me to get the data off it. I opened up my desktop computer at home and installed my work hard drive as an additional drive. When I pressed the power button, nothing happened. My home computer was now dead too.
Somehow the hard drive failed. The failing hard drive somehow caused the motherboard to fail. Now I had two dead computers, and neither one had been backup up recently.
I got prices on forensic data recovery from the broken drive. You'd be amazed at how expensive that is. I decided I'd just lose two weeks of work instead of paying the extreme cost of trying to get the data off the disks.
Ever since then, my work machine uses RAID 1 and I back up regularly.
9 • Shells (by Any on 2021-03-22 05:49:24 GMT from Spain)
Shells - another step to the cloud computing.
No, thank you.
10 • Shells, 5 & 9 (by Someguy on 2021-03-22 07:49:06 GMT from United Kingdom)
Agreed. Nil response in Poll this week. Running several machines with interchangeable drives, swapped, backed-up and cloned regularly - none ever leave my control. Just how difficult is it to carry an SSD on your person if necessary?! 'Cloud' is just a by-word for your data on someone else's server. Don't do it , sooner or later they'll want $$$ or worse...
11 • Shells Remote service. Trust no way. (by Hank on 2021-03-22 08:26:39 GMT from Germany)
For the price of giving my data to a more or less unknown company, having a crappy browser dictated and the monthly bill no way way I would ever use this kind of disservice.
12 • The most crazy task on Linux (by Alexandru on 2021-03-22 09:54:47 GMT from Austria)
It was a time when BTRFS was not available in Linux, but it was era of ReiserFS. Mainstream kernel supported it and I never had any problem with it. At that time much hope was put in Reiser4 filesystem. It never arrive to mainstream Linux, so I downloaded kernel source, Reiser4 patch, applied it and compiled the kernel. But than no Linus installer offered an option to install Linux onto Reiser4 formatted disk.
So I start playing. I divided the hard disk into 2 large partitions and installed Linux on ReiserFS on the 2nd one. Then I put freshly compiled kernel with Reiser4 support, installed reiser4progs and formatted the first partition as Reiser4. I then mounted that partition and copied the whole Linux installation to the 1st partition.
The next problem was no Linux bootloader was able to read Linux kernel from Reiser4 partition. So I formatted small swap partition to ReiserFS, copied kernel and grub configuration to it and configured /etc/fstab to use this partition as /boot. I reinstalled GRUB and viola, it worked!
When I finally could boot into Linux on Reiser4 partition, I deleted large Reiserfs partition where the Linux was firstly installed, created one more small partition for swap and one large partition for /home.
I enjoyed that experience. However I had many other issues with that kernel, so I ended up using mainstream kernel and supported filesystems.
13 • Shells review (by Otis on 2021-03-22 14:46:49 GMT from United States)
After reading all that, and "There are limitations to Shells, such as requiring a quick, stable Internet connection to access it" I truly LMAO.
But, hey, maybe it'll get big like AOL did. For. A. While.
14 • BAD DAY (by Bob on 2021-03-22 14:48:58 GMT from United States)
I accidentally deleted my storage partition with all my docs, music, videos, etc.
PANIC-MODE!
I got on another computer and searched for a solution. I found a way to recover it from the command-line by installing testdisk on a live-linux disk. Worked perfectly. Everything was BACK!
https://www.simplified.guide/linux/disk-recover-partition-table
15 • SSH Tunneling (by Luke on 2021-03-22 14:49:20 GMT from United States)
Great story in the Q&A. I consider myself pretty handy with SSH, but SSH Tunneling is still a bit like black magic to me. I don't use it often, so when I do I have to look up how to use it, whether to use -L or -R, where to start the tunneling process, etc.
Not sure I have any cool stories, except I went through a phase where I put Linux on everything I could. My PS3, a PogoPlug, my router, etc. I ran a super custom version of Arch on my laptop where I ran plain OpenBox and wrote a couple of the GUI tools myself using Python. I still have a couple of those $9 CHIP computers that I've used to set up webservers, openVPN servers, etc.
One of my laptops, on which I was dual-booting Linux and Windows, received almost 32 oz of strawberry lemonade directly to the keyboard about 8 years ago now. It obviously shut itself down, I called it a loss, bought a new computer, installed Linux on the new one, and moved on. But then, on a whim, I tried to turn it on. It worked. The keys were sticky (and a few like Esc don't work), the fans whined, the hinges were a little rough, but it actually worked. But only my main Linux install did. Windows wouldn't boot, my distro-hopping partition wouldn't boot, but miraculously, the laptop worked. It still runs to this day, in fact, and I boot it up once or twice a year, on the rare occasion when I need to use the CD/DVD drive. I think there are probably bad sectors on the RAM and HDD, so it's probably just happenstance that Linux works and not Windows, but it's still kind of a fun story.
16 • Shells... a Linux DaaS solution (by Scott Dowdle on 2021-03-22 17:11:57 GMT from United States)
I was curious as to which remoting protocol (or variant) Shells might be using. Scouring their website revealed nothing... but I did use their contact form to ask. Maybe they'll send me a reply.
I did download their client and run the strings command on it. Nothing really stood out.
I have setup desktop environments on cloud-based systems several times. x2go would be my preferred remoting protocol but it is getting long in the tooth and is lacking in good client support these days. VNC is so close to be usable... especially the noVNC javascript client that runs in a browser... but copy and paste doesn't work, multi-media doesn't work... and neither does remote device access (USB drives, for example). VNC is fine for simple stuff though.
SPICE has been deprecated in RHEL and was mostly only for KVM VMs. I really like NoMachine's products but I wish there were an FLOSS option for commercial use.
17 • Shells... a Linux DaaS solution (by Scott Dowdle on 2021-03-22 17:17:33 GMT from United States)
I heard back from the Shells folks and they say they are using SPICE. So I guess they use the javascript SPICE client as well as a rebranded SPICE client of some sort. Multi-media via SPICE on a LAN is generally fairly good if you have reasonable PC to run it on... but over WAN, it is one of the more bandwidth intensive remoting protocols comparatively.
18 • Remote Computing (by Simon Plaistowe on 2021-03-22 19:54:34 GMT from New Zealand)
I have no need for such, but the poll has no option for that. I prefer to keep my data and backups on local machines. Unless you count MegaSync, which should allow me to retrieve my most important documents in the event of theft, fire, nuclear holocaust or zombie apocalypse :o)
19 • Shells 16 &17. (by Clicktician on 2021-03-22 23:15:03 GMT from United States)
My experience ditto... even down to pouring a 16oz soda on the keyboard of a Thinkpad x230. Yup. Still works. Those things are tanks.
I'm taking baby steps. Have a fast, headless box running VMware I access with AnyDesk ( a NoMachine protocol derivative). It's just, "ok." I'm exploring options for when I'm older and won't be able to own and house whatever machine I want for a variety of physical security and facility policy reasons. I may only have an internet connection and a throw-away device. And in my experience with people older than I am, that is highly likely. Better to acclimate to a solution now, than to be without options later, as most of them are.
20 • Shells (by R. ain on 2021-03-23 03:23:42 GMT from United States)
Yes, I read Jesse Smith's thorough, very-well-done (as usual) review.
Some here have been, rightly or wrongly, less than complimentary.
I will confine my comments to one simple subject: I simply don't see a compelling reason for the existence of this.
What does it "bring to the party". What compelling reason is there to pay for a "service" (or "services") which any fairly knowledgeable user can create / generate for him-/ herself at no cost; have GREATER flexibility (much!); and not continually be worrying about (a) how often this service will be upgraded to provide state-of-the-art capability, and (b) how long this company is going to be in business providing this "service"--the number of 'big names' which have provided hardware and dedicated software, and then--ignominiously--abruptly decided to go out of that particular business, to not support their grandiose "You Can't Live Without This Whatsis" is now legendary. And have, unfortunately, made the lives of people who develop capabilities such as SHELLS much more difficult.
TL;DR--This is a solution looking for a problem. Can't get past that.
21 • No personal use - maybe business (by M.Z. on 2021-03-23 03:44:32 GMT from United States)
So the Shells thing looks a fair bit like the Citrix remote Desktop I use all the time for work. I open up a remote connection to Windows 10 via a corporate VPN & load up all the specialty software needed to do my job. If the Shells website had desktop preset & ready to tweak for specific corporate tasks I can certainly see the utility. Got Geodata to map & do QA on? Start with a preset Shell package that has QGIS & other essentials pre-loaded & allow the client to add other custom software as needed, so they can quickly bring on remote workers as needed. Got a graphic design project? There could be a Shell package with GIMP & other essentials ready to go, with the option to customize a profile that loads other licensed software & deploy to a team at scale, with as many remote Desktop Shells as needed.
All that is to say I could see great utility in this with some modifications & tweaking to meet possible business needs. That being said the personal use cases seem like they would be far fewer & further between.
22 • Shells (by Alessandro di Roma on 2021-03-23 10:13:38 GMT from Italy)
In order to feed my small Internet site with daily data I don't use a remote machine but a dedicated Raspberry Pi in my home, acting as a H24 microserver. By the way, I see the Shells machine have a public-facing IP address, so I wonder if it can run a public web server.
23 • #22 Web Server (by Shane on 2021-03-23 15:58:53 GMT from United States)
Sure can! By default the Shells share an IP address much like how a VPN does, this way it can't be seen whos running what/doing what and there's no logging. For $1 a public facing IP address can be purchased and then utilized and you can run the desktop as a server a well!
24 • Shells... newest incarnation of an old pipe dream (by Sitwon on 2021-03-23 16:45:47 GMT from United States)
Shells seems like just the latest stab at a very old pipe dream: a ubiquitous computing environment that follows you wherever you go and is available from whatever device you have available.
The appeal of this is simple, rather than managing multiple desktop environments, each with it's own interface/quirks, and trying to keep them all in sync... just have one single desktop environment that you can "bring with you" and doesn't need syncing because the state is persistent regardless of how you're accessing it.
OQO tried to offer this way back with their pocketable computing device.
A few other manufacturers tried to offer this with wallet-sized compute modules that would plug into laptop-like and desktop-like docks.
I've personally worked on a few lazy approaches that combined a live computing environment with some portable USB storage.
Ubuntu/MaruOS are working on this in different ways by allowing your phone to be plugged into a larger display and keyboard to become your desktop.
This is what the "convergence" movement in desktop interface design is all about.
Shells is just the latest stab at this, adding in the factor of "the cloud". And it's a perfectly reasonable and natural evolution. We can see the lineage of this in:
1) Streaming gaming demonstrating that the bandwidth for remote computing exists.
2) The legacy of thin-clients and remote computing from corporate environments of old.
3) The very name "Shells" evokes (for those us old enough to remember) the concept of Unix Shells which used to be the way that students and hobbyists would get access to a slice of resources on a Unix-ish computer allowing us to run long-running Internet tasks/scripts (like servers) without tying up the phone line indefinitely (remember dial-up?). Hacker movies from the 90s still referenced "hacking shells", even as actual *nix shells were dying out online in favor of running Linux locally.
This isn't intended to be a solution for everyone, or even most people. Most of us are probably not the likely audience for Shells. But I do think an audience exists for which Shells (or a very similar offering) would absolutely provide value.
A Chromebook user that needs to occasionally run some Windows software, for instance. A developer or team that wants to test their software on a variety of popular platforms without the hassle of setting up, hosting, and maintaining each target environment themselves. Especially for a distributed team, it allows multiple members of the team to share access to the actual environment in which a bug has been reproduced. Or malware researchers who want to execute untrusted software in an inspectable environment with less risk of leaking their identity to the malware author(s).
25 • cloudy shells (by null recruit on 2021-03-24 04:56:07 GMT from France)
old proverb: "shells can be shucked by skilled phishermen."
no thankyou.
26 • PC in the cloud instead of cloud in a PC (by fonz on 2021-03-24 09:07:10 GMT from Indonesia)
awesome weekly, going for something unique and unorthodox. sure some of the more conservative people may judge it harshly, but there are some good uses BTW. theres always an option to not put more private data on it. wonder when some of the bigger thugs might try this...
im still an active beta tester for both gulag stadia and nvidia (cant think of any new name) now, although both arent available in my country. ive got a special pass for a special person. the ETA for a fully global release is like in, around a lifetime i guesstimate. ive also tried and still use steam (also no new name) link and thought it was nice, and wondered if the next evolution was this.
distrotest was awesome where we could try out live distros before putting any effort to install it to our machines. wonder when theyll spice things up and move from using VNCs.
ive always hated the cloud in a PC approach as many things tend to be bult in to the system. like for example trying to remove all those stuff from KDE and numb might bork everything else. luckily smaller DEs like XFCE and LXQT arent too evil. havent tried mate and cinnamon for a long time, but from what ive remembered they too were nicer. wandows OTOH is just pure insanity, with 9000% chance of more insanity with 11...
27 • Ssh tunnels (by Wally on 2021-03-24 20:16:23 GMT from United States)
In a production environment I supported once, we had our appliances dial home to our admin server on-prem. That way, our support personnel could connect to the appliance boxes for maintenance, upgrades, etc. It was required in the contract to our customers that the devices had ssh access to our admin systems back at the mothership.
I used to need tar z mydir/ | ssh servername "(cd /dest/path/ ; tar x )" or whatever the exact syntax would be. It was amusing. An interesting link, but mostly unrelated, about compression speeds/times: https://www.rootusers.com/gzip-vs-bzip2-vs-xz-performance-comparison/. It mattered what compression format I used because of the compute power versus network throughput to the destination.
28 • Shells — Recycled Idea (by missTell on 2021-03-25 06:42:18 GMT from Switzerland)
I forgot what was the exact name of the Magix's “Cloud OS” some 15 years ago, but I remember that it didn't last for long — as well as some dozen of others.
I can imagine a couple of use cases for such operating systems, but because of their price and limitations, they aren't interesting for a wider audience.
In my opinion, that'll not change any time soon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_OS
https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/01/hands-on-with-xios-the-cloud-os-that-runs-in-a-browser/
29 • Ah, memories (by CS on 2021-03-25 20:12:52 GMT from United States)
I did something similar to that, way back in the days of Slackware 4 I think?
cp /lib/libc.so.upgrade /lib/libc.so.oldversion
Learned a thing or 2 that day.
30 • Weird things (by Cheker on 2021-03-25 22:35:44 GMT from Portugal)
Probably the most peculiar thing I've done was live boot into Kali and use dd to make a compressed image of a very old Windows 95 installation that I want to preserve. That PC is probably gonna die any day now. That machine doesn't even have USB ports, I had to connect that HDD to another PC, that's also old but not as much as the 95.
Number of Comments: 30
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| Archives |
| • Issue 1159 (2026-02-09): Sharing files on a network, isolating processes on Linux, LFS to focus on systemd, openSUSE polishes atomic updates, NetBSD not likely to adopt Rust code, COSMIC roadmap |
| • Issue 1158 (2026-02-02): Manjaro 26.0, fastest filesystem, postmarketOS progress report, Xfce begins developing its own Wayland window manager, Bazzite founder interviewed |
| • Issue 1157 (2026-01-26): Setting up a home server, what happened to convergence, malicious software entering the Snap store, postmarketOS automates hardware tests, KDE's login manager works with systemd only |
| • Issue 1156 (2026-01-19): Chimera Linux's new installer, using the DistroWatch Torrent Corner, new package tools for Arch, Haiku improves EFI support, Redcore streamlines branches, Synex introduces install-time ZFS options |
| • Issue 1155 (2026-01-12): MenuetOS, CDE on Sparky, iDeal OS 2025.12.07, recommended flavour of BSD, Debian seeks new Data Protection Team, Ubuntu 25.04 nears its end of life, Google limits Android source code releases, Fedora plans to replace SDDM, Budgie migrates to Wayland |
| • Issue 1154 (2026-01-05): postmarketOS 25.06/25.12, switching to Linux and educational resources, FreeBSD improving laptop support, Unix v4 available for download, new X11 server in development, CachyOS team plans server edtion |
| • Issue 1153 (2025-12-22): Best projects of 2025, is software ever truly finished?, Firefox to adopt AI components, Asahi works on improving the install experience, Mageia presents plans for version 10 |
| • Issue 1152 (2025-12-15): OpenBSD 7.8, filtering websites, Jolla working on a Linux phone, Germany saves money with Linux, Ubuntu to package AMD tools, Fedora demonstrates AI troubleshooting, Haiku packages Go language |
| • Issue 1151 (2025-12-08): FreeBSD 15.0, fun command line tricks, Canonical presents plans for Ubutnu 26.04, SparkyLinux updates CDE packages, Redox OS gets modesetting driver |
| • Issue 1150 (2025-12-01): Gnoppix 25_10, exploring if distributions matter, openSUSE updates tumbleweed's boot loader, Fedora plans better handling of broken packages, Plasma to become Wayland-only, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 1149 (2025-11-24): MX Linux 25, why are video drivers special, systemd experiments with musl, Debian Libre Live publishes new media, Xubuntu reviews website hack |
| • Issue 1148 (2025-11-17): Zorin OS 18, deleting a file with an unusual name, NetBSD experiments with sandboxing, postmarketOS unifies its documentation, OpenBSD refines upgrades, Canonical offers 15 years of support for Ubuntu |
| • Issue 1147 (2025-11-10): Fedora 43, the size and stability of the Linux kernel, Debian introducing Rust to APT, Redox ports web engine, Kubuntu website off-line, Mint creates new troubleshooting tools, FreeBSD improves reproducible builds, Flatpak development resumes |
| • Issue 1146 (2025-11-03): StartOS 0.4.0, testing piped commands, Ubuntu Unity seeks help, Canonical offers Ubuntu credentials, Red Hat partners with NVIDIA, SUSE to bundle AI agent with SLE 16 |
| • Issue 1145 (2025-10-27): Linux Mint 7 "LMDE", advice for new Linux users, AlmaLinux to offer Btrfs, KDE launches Plasma 6.5, Fedora accepts contributions written by AI, Ubuntu 25.10 fails to install automatic updates |
| • Issue 1144 (2025-10-20): Kubuntu 25.10, creating and restoring encrypted backups, Fedora team debates AI, FSF plans free software for phones, ReactOS addresses newer drivers, Xubuntu reacts to website attack |
| • Issue 1143 (2025-10-13): openSUSE 16.0 Leap, safest source for new applications, Redox introduces performance improvements, TrueNAS Connect available for testing, Flatpaks do not work on Ubuntu 25.10, Kamarada plans to switch its base, Solus enters new epoch, Frugalware discontinued |
| • Issue 1142 (2025-10-06): Linux Kamarada 15.6, managing ZIP files with SQLite, F-Droid warns of impact of Android lockdown, Alpine moves ahead with merged /usr, Cinnamon gets a redesigned application menu |
| • Issue 1141 (2025-09-29): KDE Linux and GNOME OS, finding mobile flavours of Linux, Murena to offer phones with kill switches, Redox OS running on a smartphone, Artix drops GNOME |
| • Issue 1140 (2025-09-22): NetBSD 10.1, avoiding AI services, AlmaLinux enables CRB repository, Haiku improves disk access performance, Mageia addresses service outage, GNOME 49 released, Linux introduces multikernel support |
| • Issue 1139 (2025-09-15): EasyOS 7.0, Linux and central authority, FreeBSD running Plasma 6 on Wayland, GNOME restores X11 support temporarily, openSUSE dropping BCacheFS in new kernels |
| • Issue 1138 (2025-09-08): Shebang 25.8, LibreELEC 12.2.0, Debian GNU/Hurd 2025, the importance of software updates, AerynOS introduces package sets, postmarketOS encourages patching upstream, openSUSE extends Leap support, Debian refreshes Trixie media |
| • Issue 1137 (2025-09-01): Tribblix 0m37, malware scanners flagging Linux ISO files, KDE introduces first-run setup wizard, CalyxOS plans update prior to infrastructure overhaul, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 1136 (2025-08-25): CalyxOS 6.8.20, distros for running containers, Arch Linux website under attack,illumos Cafe launched, CachyOS creates web dashboard for repositories |
| • Issue 1135 (2025-08-18): Debian 13, Proton, WINE, Wayland, and Wayback, Debian GNU/Hurd 2025, KDE gets advanced Liquid Glass, Haiku improves authentication tools |
| • Issue 1134 (2025-08-11): Rhino Linux 2025.3, thoughts on malware in the AUR, Fedora brings hammered websites back on-line, NetBSD reveals features for version 11, Ubuntu swaps some command line tools for 25.10, AlmaLinux improves NVIDIA support |
| • Issue 1133 (2025-08-04): Expirion Linux 6.0, running Plasma on Linux Mint, finding distros which support X11, Debian addresses 22 year old bug, FreeBSD discusses potential issues with pkgbase, CDE ported to OpenBSD, Btrfs corruption bug hitting Fedora users, more malware found in Arch User Repository |
| • Issue 1132 (2025-07-28): deepin 25, wars in the open source community, proposal to have Fedora enable Flathub repository, FreeBSD plans desktop install option, Wayback gets its first release |
| • Issue 1131 (2025-07-21): HeliumOS 10.0, settling on one distro, Mint plans new releases, Arch discovers malware in AUR, Plasma Bigscreen returns, Clear Linux discontinued |
| • Issue 1130 (2025-07-14): openSUSE MicroOS and RefreshOS, sharing aliases between computers, Bazzite makes Bazaar its default Flatpak store, Alpine plans Wayback release, Wayland and X11 benchmarked, Red Hat offers additional developer licenses, openSUSE seeks feedback from ARM users, Ubuntu 24.10 reaches the end of its life |
| • Issue 1129 (2025-07-07): GLF OS Omnislash, the worst Linux distro, Alpine introduces Wayback, Fedora drops plans to stop i686 support, AlmaLinux builds EPEL repository for older CPUs, Ubuntu dropping existing RISC-V device support, Rhino partners with UBports, PCLinuxOS recovering from website outage |
| • Issue 1128 (2025-06-30): AxOS 25.06, AlmaLinux OS 10.0, transferring Flaptak bundles to off-line computers, Ubuntu to boost Intel graphics performance, Fedora considers dropping i686 packages, SDesk switches from SELinux to AppArmor |
| • Issue 1127 (2025-06-23): LastOSLinux 2025-05-25, most unique Linux distro, Haiku stabilises, KDE publishes Plasma 6.4, Arch splits Plasma packages, Slackware infrastructure migrating |
| • Issue 1126 (2025-06-16): SDesk 2025.05.06, renewed interest in Ubuntu Touch, a BASIC device running NetBSD, Ubuntu dropping X11 GNOME session, GNOME increases dependency on systemd, Google holding back Pixel source code, Nitrux changing its desktop, EFF turns 35 |
| • Issue 1125 (2025-06-09): RHEL 10, distributions likely to survive a decade, Murena partners with more hardware makers, GNOME tests its own distro on real hardware, Redox ports GTK and X11, Mint provides fingerprint authentication |
| • Issue 1124 (2025-06-02): Picking up a Pico, tips for protecting privacy, Rhino tests Plasma desktop, Arch installer supports snapshots, new features from UBports, Ubuntu tests monthly snapshots |
| • Issue 1123 (2025-05-26): CRUX 3.8, preventing a laptop from sleeping, FreeBSD improves laptop support, Fedora confirms GNOME X11 session being dropped, HardenedBSD introduces Rust in userland build, KDE developing a virtual machine manager |
| • Issue 1122 (2025-05-19): GoboLinux 017.01, RHEL 10.0 and Debian 12 updates, openSUSE retires YaST, running X11 apps on Wayland |
| • Issue 1121 (2025-05-12): Bluefin 41, custom file manager actions, openSUSE joins End of 10 while dropping Deepin desktop, Fedora offers tips for building atomic distros, Ubuntu considers replacing sudo with sudo-rs |
| • Issue 1120 (2025-05-05): CachyOS 250330, what it means when a distro breaks, Kali updates repository key, Trinity receives an update, UBports tests directory encryption, Gentoo faces losing key infrastructure |
| • Issue 1119 (2025-04-28): Ubuntu MATE 25.04, what is missing from Linux, CachyOS ships OCCT, Debian enters soft freeze, Fedora discusses removing X11 session from GNOME, Murena plans business services, NetBSD on a Wii |
| • Issue 1118 (2025-04-21): Fedora 42, strange characters in Vim, Nitrux introduces new package tools, Fedora extends reproducibility efforts, PINE64 updates multiple devices running Debian |
| • Issue 1117 (2025-04-14): Shebang 25.0, EndeavourOS 2025.03.19, running applications from other distros on the desktop, Debian gets APT upgrade, Mint introduces OEM options for LMDE, postmarketOS packages GNOME 48 and COSMIC, Redox testing USB support |
| • Issue 1116 (2025-04-07): The Sense HAT, Android and mobile operating systems, FreeBSD improves on laptops, openSUSE publishes many new updates, Fedora appoints new Project Leader, UBports testing VoLTE |
| • Issue 1115 (2025-03-31): GrapheneOS 2025, the rise of portable package formats, MidnightBSD and openSUSE experiment with new package management features, Plank dock reborn, key infrastructure projects lose funding, postmarketOS to focus on reliability |
| • Issue 1114 (2025-03-24): Bazzite 41, checking which processes are writing to disk, Rocky unveils new Hardened branch, GNOME 48 released, generating images for the Raspberry Pi |
| • Issue 1113 (2025-03-17): MocaccinoOS 1.8.1, how to contribute to open source, Murena extends on-line installer, Garuda tests COSMIC edition, Ubuntu to replace coreutils with Rust alternatives, Chimera Linux drops RISC-V builds |
| • Issue 1112 (2025-03-10): Solus 4.7, distros which work with Secure Boot, UBports publishes bug fix, postmarketOS considers a new name, Debian running on Android |
| • Issue 1111 (2025-03-03): Orbitiny 0.01, the effect of Ubuntu Core Desktop, Gentoo offers disk images, elementary OS invites feature ideas, FreeBSD starts PinePhone Pro port, Mint warns of upcoming Firefox issue |
| • Issue 1110 (2025-02-24): iodeOS 6.0, learning to program, Arch retiring old repositories, openSUSE makes progress on reproducible builds, Fedora is getting more serious about open hardware, Tails changes its install instructions to offer better privacy, Murena's de-Googled tablet goes on sale |
| • Issue 1109 (2025-02-17): Rhino Linux 2025.1, MX Linux 23.5 with Xfce 4.20, replacing X.Org tools with Wayland tools, GhostBSD moving its base to FreeBSD -RELEASE, Redox stabilizes its ABI, UBports testing 24.04, Asahi changing its leadership, OBS in dispute with Fedora |
| • Issue 1108 (2025-02-10): Serpent OS 0.24.6, Aurora, sharing swap between distros, Peppermint tries Void base, GTK removinglegacy technologies, Red Hat plans more AI tools for Fedora, TrueNAS merges its editions |
| • Full list of all issues |
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| Random Distribution | 
Klax Live-CD
Klax Live-CD was a Linux live CD based on Slackware Linux and SLAX. Its primary goal was to showcase the latest KDE desktop environment and related applications, such as KOffice, on a live CD for demonstration purposes.
Status: Discontinued
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| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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