In 2025, the package manager and frequency of updates are the only real differences between most distributions. I’ve been enjoying Flatpak for years now and hope it continues to build momentum. It offers the possibility of shared effort between distributions who depend on legions of volunteers constantly updating debs/rpms/whatever.
It feels like one of the last hurdles to eliminate so much of the duplicated effort associated with all these distributions.
I really don’t agree with choosing to release with the UEFI bug they found. They describe it as cosmetic but those entries can last the lifetime of your computer, even if you wipe your hard drive. It’s bound to cause some confusion for years to come for Linux tinkerers.
The research paper looks well written but I couldn’t find any information on if this paper is going to be published in a reputable journal and peer reviewed. I have little faith in private businesses who profit from AI providing an unbiased view of how AI works. I think the first question I’d like answered is did Anthropic’s marketing department review the paper and did they offer any corrections or feedback? We’ve all heard the stories about the tobacco industry paying for papers to be written about the benefits of smoking and refuting health concerns.
I have hobbies that are considered masculine and more popular amongst folks who lean to the right politically. It makes it hard to form any friends group. Hobbies are firearms, amateur radio, and cars.
I avoid getting political news from social media, including Lemmy. I don’t subscribe to any political communities. Once in a while I’ll scroll through all active posts to find new communities. But when I do that I know I’m going to run into political stuff and skip over it.
While most of the political posts on both Reddit and Lemmy lean the same way politically as I do, they can often be sensationalized so I have a general distrust of those stories. If something does happen to grab my attention I try to look it up from a reputable news source.
I use Apple News to track current events. I even pay out money for their “News+”. It aggregates many news sources. I can block sources I don’t want to see, and more importantly I can add a list of favorites news sources for quick viewing and to encourage those sources to take priority in my feed. As for my sources I try to pick the most boring and bland news organizations available. Think PBS, NPR, Reuters, etc.
Nothings perfect but this has been working for me for over a year now. I feel reasonably well informed without a lot of the drama.
Apple News isn’t perfect. I still get pushed a lot of celebrity gossip news no matter how many times I click “suggest less”.
I do this with my home network using FastMail. You can create App specific passwords for each service you add email notification support for. This means you don’t risk compromising your full accounts passwords. You can also put constraints on each app password, such as limiting it only to sending emails but not reading email or looking at your contacts and files. This is nice in case any of my passwords are leaked.
You mean like Wacom tablets? I’m curious to know what’s missing. I’ve been using one of those XP Pen tablets on GNOME and Wayland without much issue. I’m using it for writing more than drawing though.
Email, as a suite of protocols, was designed long before we thought deeply about encryption. In 2025, you can count on email encryption in transit and encryption at rest from providers, although try to verify it. E2EE like Proton and Tuta offer is severely limited. I was recently looking up if Proton and Tuta were even compatible with each other in terms of PGP encryption. I could find no confirmation that they are.
If you use Proton and you email another Proton user it’ll be encrypted with PGP. Otherwise your email is sent unencrypted, and email you receive is unencrypted, then Proton stores it on their server encrypted. All of this paragraph applies to Tuta as well.
You can get most of the same benefits from other providers by downloading your email locally and deleting off the mail servers. The benefit of regular email servers is open standards and compatibility with your preferred mail and calendar applications.
I use Fastmail and love it. I know many people mention using burner addressed with a custom domain, but I prefer generating a burner email with a FastMail domain for signing up to websites. Using my own domain would make it easier to identify me.
From what I recall the completely fair scheduler (CFS) used by default on most Linux systems has a lower average latency than the RT kernel. The RT kernel just gives you more consistency, hence the CFS having lower latency “on average”
So honestly for opening Firefox it’ll probably depends more on your SSD data rate, but in theory it’ll open faster on a “regular” distribution most of the time.
Real time is good for things like audio processing where having better guarantees that a process will get its share of the CPU is a benefit.
Hey man, I don’t want to discourage you, but this is one of those things where if you have to ask how to do something you’re probably not experienced enough to do it. That being said, as a learning opportunity even if you don’t make it far you’ll still learn a lot about how GPUs work.
I’d start by looking at any existing drivers you can find and see if you can document or find documentation for the commands fed to the GPU. From there you can look at the Mesa project for examples of converting Vulkan to instructions for specific processors and see if you can get it to all fit together for your project.
For newer APIs the kernels documentation is good:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
As for getting help, the #kernelnewbies channel on the OFTC IRC network is a good place to ask questions.
Have fun learning!
I’ve done some kernel development. I’d suggest using a modern system. Most of the basic stuff in the book is still accurate and there’s great documentation available to help find newer APIs. The kernel is always refactoring so learning to find newer info is part of the skills you’ll need to develop anyway.
Patience. Same things will work differently than you’re used to, and that can be frustrating.
Also be really sure to help true beginners understand software centers and package managers. I’ve been helping a lot of young people use Linux for the first time this year. Even though I mentioned it the first day and remind them frequently, if for example I ask them to install Java, half of them will download installers from Oracle’s website or wherever.