Fair Warning: Long Linux nerd rambling ahead.

I actually was responding to another post where someone revealed to another that Linux is not free of corporate influence. I started to write out this spiraling drawl and realized it had nothing to do with the OP, but thought maybe someone else might find it interesting here.

Feel free to correct me should I have some details wrong, I wrote this off the cuff.

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The history of Linux is inreresting, but just remember, Linux "won" in some senses just like how Windows, Apple, Intel, etc. "won" their respective domains. Microsoft "won" corporate desktop and office tooling ecosystems. Apple "won" the consumer computing and personal devices (tablet/phone) ecosystems. Linux "won" the servers ecosystem. And the history of how that happened is just as interesting as the fabled stories as to how Microsoft or Apple came to prominence today.

The only reason new Linux users are sometimes caught off guard by the fact that Linux is highly influenced by corporate entities is because they haven't looked into the tumultuous and messy, but very interesting, history of UNIX, Linux, GNU, BSD, and others.

What follows is not entirely related, but take this example of how Linux ended up, perhaps by sheer luck, to have ended up as one of the dominant surviving UNIX-like OSes today:

Take the 1992 lawsuit by UNIX System Laboratories vs BSD. One might say, okay, but what does this have to do with Linux? Well Linus Torvalds created Linux in 1991. BSD had been around since 1978, and had been gaining considerable popularity during the 1980s. BSD has its own messy history, but the short of the long of it is that Bell Labs allowed UNIX to be utilized, researched, and modified by Universities, which resulted in an explosion of UNIX derivative OSes (distributions), including one Berkeley School Distribution, or BSD. During this time period, the attempts to standardize UNIX by vendors resulted in what came to be known as The UNIX wars. It was in the culmination of these "wars" that aforementioned lawsuit occurred, during which BSD development was ground to a halt (eventually forks of BSD like the ones you see today are the sole inheritors of the BSD family of OSes). This was during the same time the Linux Kernel and the GNU OS would come onto the scene and essentially eat BSD's cake.

In essence, were it not for the timing of this lawsuit (which you can view as unfortunate or serendipitous depending on your views of BSD vs Linux), we might all be talking about BSD the way we talk about Linux today. Maybe, even then that's highly speculative.

OC by @z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml

It's been a while!

Konform Browser version 140.12.0-100 was recently released and if you aren't aware it's time to upgrade! ^1^

Konform Browser is a free/libre and open-source (FLOSS) fork of Firefox ESR with the primary goals of security, privacy, and user freedom. Shows by example how these three goals don’t have to be at odds but support each other and work in harmony. Runs lean and light with lights off out of the box, while making it convenient to toggle on the features you want. All telemetry removed, none added. Fingerprinting and tracking extras with base defaults on par with (or exceeding) Tor Browser, still keeping common-sense tweaks like dark mode and installation of self-built addons available without making a fuss about it. Graceful degradation for private networks and more granular control for those who want a browser that really conforms.

"ESR" means there's a major upgrade coming up soon with the expected jump from Firefox ESR version 140 to 153 next month. Work has already been ongoing for a while to prepare Konform Browser v153 to be the most secure Firefox build at release. Early alpha builds based on FF153beta are available for anyone who wants to do early testing or help out with any other contribution.

Current Konform Browser 140.x is production-ready and expected to keep receiving security updates and bugfixes for at least a couple of release cycles after initial v153 release so users can upgrade at their leisure.

If you try it, would love to hear your feedback on the browser - and if you like it, tell your friends!

FAQ

Installation instructions provided for most Linux distros

New: Artix Linux package, Gentoo ebuild

Releases

Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@konform

^1^ or install 😘

(No provocation)

I see these reasons:

• newbie
• lazy (don't wanna edit config files etc.)
• unique features (like assistant/toolbox, some optimizations like in cachyos)
• wanna check how different systems are set up (that's rather distrohopping)

Personally, I used manjaro i3 when I was beigginer and wanted to see how tiling WM should be configured (check out ranger config, for example). But after some time, I don't see reasons why not to just customize pure arch (same with debian and debian-based distros).

Linux-based phone still ‘runs 99% of Android apps’ so you can do more with it, if you wish

Years ago it was really hard to run digital signage on Linux. No real free drivers, old kernels, tons of reverse engineering.

That's largely over now.

RK3588 is the go-to platform, Mali finally has open drivers (Panfrost/Panthor), and hardware video decode landed in mainline in early 2026.

I'm the dev behind the GarlicSignage stack and dug into the current state:

https://garlic-signage.com/resources/technology/linux-digital-signage/

#DigitalSignage #Linux #FOSS #opensource @linux

KDE Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile too) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. In addition to other hardware, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.7.

This new major release brings back the Oxygen and Air themes from the KDE 4 era, including the Horos wallpaper. The ability to switch virtual desktops independently for each output/display was added. It is now easier to toggle between light and dark mode directly from the Brightness & Color widget. You can now test microphones from the audio settings, and assign a custom global keyboard shortcut for "push-to-talk" microphone un-mute. If you have Plasma keyboard enabled and a physical keyboard key is long-pressed a selection of related special characters is presented to choose from. When it comes to printing it is now much easier to connect to shared printers on Windows networks, and a new print queue management tool offers more power than ever before. Vietnamese lunar calendar was added, and you can now select the default system calendar application. It is now possible to set mouse and tablet stylus pointers to be synced. ICC color profile can now be applied when HDR mode is active. Graphical performance has been improved and power usage lowered for CPU-rendered applications, some full-screen applications and on Intel graphics hardware. This release also features an experimental preview of the Union theming engine, which is based on web-like CSS definitions and will make creating and using new themes easier in the future.

For complete list of new features and changes check out the KDE Plasma 6.7 release announcement and the complete changelog.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/23120439

Here, my summary of key features and decisions of Guix:

1. Guix is a package manager that can (optionally) run on top of Linux distributions or other POSIX systems, like cargo, pip, conda or Conan. In difference to the pip and cargo package managers, it is language-agnostic, supports many different build systems and languages, and features around 29000 packages now.
2. Guix allows to define a fully reproducible system. This works by using a declarative language for immutable version-controlled package descriptions, and by deriving any software from package definitions and a fixed version (commit hash) of the source code. In that, it is similar but much stricter than Nix and NixOS. The key point is that any software built, and all its dependencies, go back to unambigously, immutable versions of source code and build recipes - and all inputs to the system are open source and can be reviewed.
3. Important for programming, this can also define isolated build and development environments, like Python's venv, but also Docker containers. This means that Guix can be used to develop, build, package, and deploy software, very much like Snap packages. And that's independent from the distribution you work in, very much like pip or cargo are independent from the system you work in. (And yes, it supports Rust!).
4. This allows it, and also makes it technically possible, that any software package can be re-built and run years later. To make this legally possible, the official distribution of Guix also demands all components to be open source (FOSS). This is also a key difference to NixOS and non-free forks of Guix, which allow non-free binary packages, but sacrifice reproducibility. (To illustrate: If you have a binary, proprietary scanner driver in NixOS, and the owning company practices planned obselescence and decides that you should buy their new hardware, and pulls that driver, you are out of luck. In Guix, this can't happen.) (Note that as your own private conponents, you can define any package you like, you can also distribute your definitions as a complement to GNU Guix. Non-free packages for Guix do exist, in the same way as you can buy and run Steam Games software for Linux. Such non-free software just can't become part of the official Guix distribution, just like Amazon or Apple can't sell their non-free software via Debian or the Linux kernel project (or, for that matter, Apple has no obligation to market and distribute, say, Oracle products).
5. All inputs being open source also means that any software component can be reviewed, that mis-features such as privacy-invasive behaviour can be removed, and that it is hardly possible to hide malware in the system. Because this also applies recursively to all compilers and build tools, this solves also Thompson's "Trusting Trust" problem. In fact, the whole system can be build from a 512 byte binary root (called MER). (Interestingly, that level of user control gets a lot of hate online -- certain companies don't seem to like it).
6. Because it would take too long to build every user package from source every time, the produced packages are normally cached (while their correct binary content can be easily verified).
7. The declarative description language for the packages is a well-defined, established, minimalist language called Scheme. This is a member of the Lisp family of languages. That Lisp is very well suited for declaratively building and configuring large systems has been proven with GNU Emacs, whose software, but more importantly, whole user configuration, is written in Emacs Lisp.
8. The Scheme implementation used is called Guile. It has especially good support for the POSIX environment and has also much better-than-average interactive debugging capabilities compared to other Scheme implementations.
9. Also worth noting is that the Guix project has superb online documentation. This is a practical advantage compared to Nix.

As example: you are on Debian stable and quickly want to try a recent version of the kakoune editor (as kakoune is in ongoing development): They are available under the Guix package manager. Just

guix install kakoune

and bang you have it!

How it works:

https://codeberg.org/guix/guix#headline-4

Manual:

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Installation.html

Also informative for using Guix just as a package manager:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Guix

Hannah Montana Linux v26.0 is a modern remaster of the original Hannah Montana Linux. It uses Debian's live-build and the Calamares installer.

Much of this project is just a re-skin of KDE Plasma. Many of the Plasma components are direct modifications of Plasma's default theme, Breeze. As such, this project is licensed under GPLv3+.

This project was made as the focus of a video on my YouTube channel. You can watch the video here .