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 .

Maybe younger people won't appreciate this as much, having grown up when this weren't so rare, but nothing quite illustrates to me how far Linux has come than browsing Amazon and seeing "Linux" listed as a first-class citizen on product images. Not buried in the details, not answered in a FAQ, but right there on the product image at the top of the listing. Many of you will remember having to dig through wikis and forums to uncover whether a product was compatible with Linux; and sometimes you still do.

This is only a USB device; it'd be more surprising if it weren't Linux compatible... but that's not the point; the point is that "Linux" is advertised at the top right there after Windows and before Mac OS or Android. That's what still grabs me. Metrics and guestimates are great; in a capitalist world, it's often what advertisements say that indicate a truer story.

OC by @Sxan@piefed.zip

The "Atomic Arch" campaign compromised over 1,500 AUR packages between June 10-12, targeting SSH keys and API tokens. If you updated via yay or paru during that window, you need to audit your local system.

I’ve built a client-side tool to help with this.

Local Processing: Your package list never leaves your browser. All comparisons are done client-side.

Live Data: It fetches the verified malicious list directly from the official Arch servers (md.archlinux.org) to ensure it's always current. Zero Bloat: No trackers, no ads, no cookies. How to use:

1. Run pacman -Qm
2. Paste the output into the tool

By Developer @TheIPW@lemmy.ml