Noctalia is a desktop shell for window managers. Tiling and scrolling window managers (such as i3, MangoWM, Niri, etc.) are only window managers. They don’t have any kind of graphical way to launch applications, there’s no dock, bars or widgets of any kind. They only manage the windows, and you need to provide the rest by installing a number of different applications. Noctalia is a shell that provides a full desktop experience with all the bells and whistles you might expect from full desktop environments like KDE and Gnome.
If you don’t know what Omarchy is here’s the short summary. David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of RubyOnRails, owner of a software business and millionaire, decided a few months ago to go all in on Linux and – because that’s just his MO – thought that turning his setup into a project made sense. Omarchy is just that: A pretty standard Arch Linux distribution with a handful of configuration files, that Heinemeier Hansson (or DHH as he is often called) wrote, or vibed or whatever. There is nothing wrong with this, custom, opinionated special purpose distributions have been part of the Linux culture for a long time and provide a lot of value and experimentation that sometimes even flows back to the original project. In a way Ubuntu Linux is just that to the basis Debian.
With the 2026.08 ISO release, Artix switched back to Xorg. The switch had been decided soon after the 2026.04 release, due to the unusually high amount of XLibre-related bug reports on our forum and started with our weekly ISO images. This resulted in backlash from XLibre and a veteran Artix developer, Artist, was targeted and harassed, which led to his resignation.
Mirko Brombin, the creator of Bottles, has got Microsoft 365 running on Linux. His posts on X showcase an installation that completes on a Windows 10 or 11 Wine prefix, signs in with his existing license, and launches at least one editor.
Been a long time Debian user but with the recent AI decision I am planning on moving on so anyone have an anti-AI recommendations? I understand its being used in the kernel as well but are there any distros taking a full anti-AI approach to the parts of the code they control?
Finally have a fantastic setup for my surface to act as a tablet. the extension Touchup is doing some heavy lifting for usability. apps are: files, Riff, Librewolf, Voyager. Heres more screenshots.
This is just for discovering new software. I created mine so I don’t forget the programs I use when setting up a new machine. You can skip the obvious ones.
Here, I’ll start:
It’s the same design as last year, the main changes are the new chips (Wildcat Lake), so better performance and power efficiency, the backlit keyboard (which happens to use open-source ZMK firmware), and a fingerprint reader that will work OOTB on Linux!
So last year my wife decided that she was sick of her 2017 MacBook Air being out of support. Mainly it was that her browser wasn’t updated and she was increasingly unable to access websites she used frequently. I grabbed a bunch of different liveUSB imgs, and ElementaryOS was the only one that would even boot. So that’s what we installed. Some minor early issues that I’d anticipated with the webcam. And everything was fine, just worked.
As part of the collaboration between Canonical and the University of Bristol, the project will target AppArmor and snap-confine as industrial case studies. Both are critical to Ubuntu’s security posture, and provide a substantially harder test than isolated translation examples. They will help us evaluate whether the techniques can cope with the structure and constraints of mature production software.
I have a laptop with 4 GB of RAM that I’d like to use for occasional comic book reading. (It’s a touch screen 2-in-1 laptop that folds over into a tablet configuration.) I use Bazzite on my main PC and I love how low maintenance it is. Are there any immutable/atomic distros that featue XFCE, LXDE, or some other low RAM friendly desktop? Or, should I just layer XFCE or LXDE on top of UBlue Core or make my own image or something? Thanks!
Ikey Doherty, the creator of Solus and AerynOS, is back with Barney, a Rust tool that builds Linux distros from source. So that you can easily create your own Omarchy.
Before I go off an write something myself, many things we open from our apps are HTTP/S URLs and they go straight to the browser. On Android, it’s possible to assign apps to certain domains. I know I could write a script to do the same in linux, but my question is if there is a solution that already does this.
An exciting development for this Linux app sandboxing and distribution tech. This would also help improve Google Chrome/Chromium support outside the likes of RPM and Debian based distributions with a cleaner packaging experience.
I’ve been running Fedora on an XPS 15 7590 for several years now, but just recently the ssd started being not found at boot. While I’m trying to get it working again I just don’t trust it any more so I’m currently looking over my options. I’ll add some more details of the situation in the spoiler below.
Almost a year after the Multikernel project shared its Linux kernel code and submitted its first patches for review, the team has now made its Multikernel Linux tree publicly available for the first time. This release is built on Linux 7.0 and is labeled v7.0-mk2 in the project’s kernel tree. Currently, only x86_64 is officially supported.
The motivation of the development is using GCC code generation by rustc for architectures not supported by LLVM but are supported by GCC. There are a number of CPU architectures supported by the Linux kernel and GCC but not supported by LLVM like m68k, Alpha, and other embedded/micro-controller ISAs.. This also allows employing GCC’s compiler optimizations. The latest rustc_codegen_gcc code can be found via rustc_codegen_gcc on GitHub. This isn’t to be confused with gccrs as the GCC front-end for Rust
This is what computer programming means for me. You can build your own tools. You can share them with others. When you build and share such tools, you meet other people that perceive and interact with the world in the same way as you do. You make new friends. I guess this is what I’ve been trying to do in my life. Get people to understand this process. With computers, you can make your own tools, and so you can augment yourself, and others, to accomplish more things. This is something special about computer and especially open source tools. It costs no money at all to try this.
I’m on Manjaro, and accidentally upgraded my D compilers to those that have the AI slop contributions. I uninstalled them from Pacman, I wonder if I can do it via Pacman, or have to do it manually (LDC has a (very) temporary install script, meaning it tricks the terminal session into believing it’s the reference compiler DMD, which is not ideal, want a permanent solution, as this one conflicts with GUI editors and the package manager).
PieFed
ProdigalFrog
not_IO
Nemeski
Classy Hatter
Sunshine
e8d79
sbird
inari
woelkchen
Alphenex53
kbal
new_otters_raft
ruffsl
MediumGray
baronvonj
