Linuxiac
linuxiac.com · Group blog · on HN since 2021
Linuxiac is a news site covering Linux distributions, open source software, and desktop and server developments.
What HN saysHN links it for Linux news, such as libxml2 becoming unmaintained and Fedora and openSUSE dropping some video codecs.
97HN people shared it
27linked it in comments
104stories submitted
1.1Kstory points
2 months agolast shared
2021people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Ubuntu once again angered users by placing ads5 people · first shared 2024
- 2XLibre Xserver: Banned by Red Hat Developer Plans Revival of X113 people · 39 points · first shared 2025 · 17 comments on HN
- 3SUSE Requests OpenSUSE to Rebrand3 people · 20 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
- 4TrueNAS Deprecates Public Build Repository and Raises Transparency Concerns3 people · 6 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 5Linux Crosses 4% Market Share Worldwide2 people · 198 points · first shared 2024 · 179 comments on HN
- 6France Launches Government Linux Desktop Plan as Windows Exit Begins2 people · 10 points · first shared 2026 · 1 comments on HN
- 7Debian Unveiled: The Gold Standard of Linux Stability2 people · 9 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 8Debian Urgently Seeks Volunteers After Data Protection Team Resigns2 people · 9 points · first shared 2026 · 1 comments on HN
- 9Install Firefox as a Deb App on Ubuntu 22.04: The Proper Way2 people · 4 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 10Zorin OS 18 Downloads Skyrocket in the Last 48 Hours2 people · 4 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 11Devuan Users Are at Risk, Take Action to Protect Your System2 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 12Libxml2 becomes officially unmaintained2 people · first shared 2026
- 13GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code1 people · 107 points · first shared 2025 · 185 comments on HN
- 14Native Exchange Support is coming to Thunderbird1 people · 107 points · first shared 2024 · 56 comments on HN
- 15Cosmic Desktop Is Slated to Debut with Pop _OS 24.04 LTS1 people · 87 points · first shared 2024 · 46 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
paulryanrogers · 2025-09-08
According to this other article [0] they still aim for 1:1 compatibility with RHEL, and not Stream. I also don't see any mention of Stream in the Rocky 9 release notes.
EDIT: I wonder if Rocky is still following their original plans to leverage rented VMs [1]?
[0] https://linuxiac.com/rocky-linux-confirmed-to-remain-fully-compatible-…
[1] https://rockylinux.org/news/keeping-open-source-open
WhereIsTheTruth · 2024-02-29
> Gnome is following Mac trends
I disagree, macOS has both a system tray and a global menu, a totally foreign concept for Gnome
Gnome wants to be a touch-screen/tablet OS, and it shows with their design choices
Unity 7.0 from canonical was closer to macOS
Apple has 4 distinct OS and UX for their different form factors (watch, phone, tablet, desktop)
Gnome's future looks even more Phone/Tablet oriented: https://linuxiac.com/gnome-background-apps/
I quit the gnome ecosystem when Canonical announced killing Unity, that was my perfect Desktop Environment, it was perfect, it's sad..
anoopelias · 2024-02-03
Seems Cloudflare is not happy with me, I'm getting
"Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access linuxiac.com"
The same error even if I hit simply https://linuxiac.com/
Is it only me?
flgggd · 2026-08-17
> much more tooling available
Most of which is barely maintained and low quality.
For example, just recently:
https://linuxiac.com/libxml2-becomes-officially-unmaintained/
But even before it became officially unmaintained, it was already quite unloved, and it's one of the most used xml library.
We are not in the peak Java/J2EE era anymore. Pretty much nobody is going to willingly work on the foundations unless they're getting paid because the majority absolutely loathes XML and would not see maintaining XML libs as fun, and guess what, they're not? xslt also got removed from web browsers because nobody wants to maintain those libraries. And corporations like Google don't want to pay a dev for those either.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/deprecating-xslt
Meanwhile the tooling around JSON is as healthy as it's ever been, with very efficient implementations in most common programming languages and multiple SIMD impls in C, C++, Rust etc. People actually want to work on this.
ho_schi · 2022-12-15
https://linuxiac.com/fedora-and-opensuse-are-dropping-support-for-some…
It is only affecting Fedora and openSuse. Not affected are Arch, Gentoo, Ubuntu and Debian.
* The hardware-acceleration is within the hardware and not in software - that is why it is named *hardware acceleration*. Fedoras decision doesn't make sense.
* In Europe you cannot patent software - because you cannot patent logic. Sometimes software-patents are granted because the patent system is dysfunctional but these patents get revoked when challenged.
* I doubt you can even defend a "software-patent" in America if challenged.
* RedHat is weakening its position of Fedora (and of Linux) historically by similar decisions. Fedora is working well on desktops and laptops. But it is not acceptable for end-users to add extra repositories from RPMFUSION to get basic features working. The success of Canonicals Ubuntu is building up on this.
* They're not removing it for Fedora 36. Removing features is evil. But if Fedora is certain about their point-of-view they had to remove it, too.
And now Qualcomm tries to attack AV1:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33638975
I think someone within the AOM needs to tell Qualcomm in polite words that another decade of missing hardware-acceleration and patent-trolling is not acceptable.
If you're worried about software-patents. I recommend moving the legal domicile and hosting servers to Europe. I'm sorry America but your mistake.…
tapoxi · 2026-06-16
Its their reluctance to support a system tray and hide background application info behind a "control center"-esque widget and then a picture of a ghost that boggles my mind.
https://linuxiac.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/gnome44-background-app…
minetest2048 · 2026-05-28
You can have ads in a terminal / CLI, for example Ubuntu put an ad for their Ubuntu Pro service when you run sudo apt upgrade: https://linuxiac.com/ubuntu-once-again-angered-users-by-placing-ads/ . But the worst thing they can do is to show a plain text
hedora · 2026-04-15
I'm worried that Poettering's new startup is designed to ban unapproved Linux, BSDs, etc.
https://linuxiac.com/systemd-creator-lennart-poettering-joins-new-linu…
The cynic in me says the Win 11 "you must have a TPM" push (along with passkey's "big tech owns all your accounts" design) were rammed through specifically to centralize control of the open web.
At this point, if the federal government actually forced OS-level censorship, most literate folks would just download Linux. So, first, they need to close the remaining door.
I'm not exactly holding a candle for debian. SystemD has already started adding support for this, and, in the past, downstream has been able to force unpopular debian votes through.
Someone · 2026-02-25
FTA: “So far to the new OAC codebase there has been some tuning adjustments, renaming various symbols to using an "oaci_" prefix and other preparations for establishing the new Open Audio Codec project,”
So, basically all we know is that it’s a fork of Opus.
https://linuxiac.com/aomedia-begins-developing-oac-next-generation-ope… agrees:
“Project documentation states that OAC is experimental and not production-ready. There is no finalized specification, standardization timeline, or guarantee of backward compatibility. It is also important to note that OAC currently mirrors Opus capabilities, with no publicly documented functional advantages.
[…]
In other words, at this stage, OAC appears to be just a development fork of Opus under the Alliance for Open Media’s governance. Whether it ultimately replaces Opus or evolves into a complementary format remains to be seen.”*
tw04 · 2025-08-11
Ubuntu had ads in the terminal in 2022: https://linuxiac.com/ubuntu-once-again-angered-users-by-placing-ads/
Unless you're going to call letting users know they have access to onedrive for free an "ad", Microsoft didn't do anything until Windows 11 in 2024.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-pushes-start-menu-ads-to-windows-…
anonnon · 2025-08-02
Reminds me of this Redbar clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0uZCDlS_YM
tl;dw: you getting accused of rape or sexual misconduct isn't "cancellation." And I say this as someone who posts primarily on 4chan, because I hate the downvotes, flagging, shadawbanning and other groupthink-enforcement cudgels reddit and orange reddit employ, so it's not as though I'm sympathetic to "cancel culture."
This is what cancellation looks like:
https://drewdevault.com/2023/09/17/Hyprland-toxicity.html
https://linuxiac.com/xlibre-xserver-project-plans-revival-of-x11/
Maybe the OP is completely innocent, but it's much easier to side with the "she" in a "he said, she said" dispute when there's more than one "she."
pjmlp · 2025-07-18
> I even read that windows embeds ads. In the OS. How is this remotely acceptable?
The same way FOSS projects, and Linux distros happen to do, because they need the money.
https://github.com/standard/standard/issues/1381
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fw8bbugc6v37…
https://linuxiac.com/ubuntu-once-again-angered-users-by-placing-ads/
em-bee · 2025-06-28
clan · 2024-09-14
That was a decision Linus regretted[1]. There has been some recent discussion about this here on Hacker News[2].
[1] https://linuxiac.com/torvalds-expresses-regret-over-merging-bcachefs-i…
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41407768
ofrzeta · 2024-06-06
One thing that's missing in the blog post is the fact that they changed licensing from GPLv2 to AGPLv3, see https://linuxiac.com/zabbix-7-0-open-source-monitoring-system-released…
vmoore · 2024-03-12
Set SSH to use a different port if you're paranoid[0]
[0] https://linuxiac.com/ssh-to-port-other-than-22/
crote · 2023-05-02
You mean the Devuan which for more than a year and a half had a bug which resulted in the empty string being set as root password?[0]
[0]: https://linuxiac.com/devuan-users-are-at-risk/
smoldesu · 2023-02-08
On the contrary, I'd argue that the tracing visibility you're looking at isn't inherently a software trait at all. It's a deployment feature, which is something you address at-cost when building a product, but almost never when building FOSS software. It's not that people in FOSS don't see that upsides to it, it's that those upsides are insignificant relative to the cost of sustained market research. It's easier to just... make stuff, and have companies plaster over the gaps when their interests align.
Look at GNOME, which recently pushed for it's users to contribute telemetry: https://linuxiac.com/gnome-survey-results/
Nothing wrong with what they've done here, but we already had most of these metrics. Nothing was really learned, and it took Red Hat and a few thousand users to get here. For smaller-scale projects, imagine how much smaller the returns would be.
nobody9999 · 2023-01-29
>For a personal server I find Fedora fine, since my local packages will match my server's.
Absolutely. I also use Squid[0] as a proxy for updates[1] which, after initial download for one of the dozens of my Fedora boxes, caches the updates, reducing bandwidth usage and (more importantly) speeding up updates significantly.
[0] https://serverfault.com/questions/837291/squid-and-caching-of-dnf-yum-…
[1] https://linuxiac.com/how-to-use-yum-dnf-command-with-a-proxy-server/
znpy · 2025-11-05
> Maybe this even harder push by Gnome on Wayland will drive even more effort into the alternative software, and continue to fuel the healthy competition that (for better or worst) the Linux desktop is stuck with.
Competition in this space has been everything except healthy. Wayland people have been essentially sabotaging X11 development.
Example: people wanting to keep X11 alive have been literally banned from the freedesktop.org infrastructure: https://linuxiac.com/xlibre-xserver-project-plans-revival-of-x11/
> In a dramatic turn of events, Red Hat employees banned developer Enrico Weigelt from the freedesktop.org infrastructure. Weigelt’s account, repositories, tickets, and merge requests (more than 140) associated with the Xorg project were also abruptly deleted. As a result of these actions, in a message titled “History repeats: Redhat censored me on freedesktop.org,”.
(more in the link).
As somebody that has a functioning desktop environment (XFCE) and that doesn't bother much with new stuff, this is incredibly annoying, as the Wayland people have been breaking the linux desktop for everybody while pushing for incomplete alternatives (case in point: another comment to this same thread: wayland breaks accessibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45824341 - they should have first developed it AND THEN push for it but no, they had to push incomplete and non functional garbage down everybody's throat).
I'm not really against Wayland per se, I'm against the…
magicalhippo · 2025-06-17
These problems exist because Wayland’s design omits basic functionality that desktop applications for X11, Windows and macOS have relied on for decades—things like being able to position windows or warp the mouse cursor. This functionality was omitted by design, not oversight.
We do not investigate or support bug reports related to Wayland-specific issues.
For now, if you need to use KiCad on Linux, use X11.
Can totally understand their position. I've developed cross-platform applications and it was enough work without the extra headache they describe Wayland brings.
I've been thinking about ditching Windows as my primary OS for some years, but Wayland has been really detrimental to the Linux desktop. Over a decade later and it's still not production ready, at least in my tests. Yet X11 is dying it seems, with GNOME and KDE dropping support soon[1][2].
From where I stand, the intentional fragmentation of the ecosystem seems like an especially poor decision.
[1]: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/05/gnome-dropping-x11-support-ubuntu-…
[2]: https://linuxiac.com/kde-x11-support-to-continue-until-plasma-7/
d3Xt3r · 2025-04-24
Canonical keeps doing stupid, anti-user, anti-community stuff constantly, to the point that many people consider them to be the Microsoft of the Linux world.
For instance, not long ago, they were including ads/Amazon results in the Apps menu[1], similar to what Microsoft did with the Start menu. They also keep sneaking in suggestions (aka ads) for their Ubuntu Pro subscription in various places like the MOTD, or when you run apt[2], which isn't cool.
Most recently, the biggest annoyance is with the way they've been aggressively pushing their Snap store, to the point of even hijacking regular "apt install" commands - normally, you'd expect an "apt install" to fetch a regular .deb from the distro's repos, but they silently hijack the command to fetch apps from their Snap store instead[3]. Now, you may think that normal, non-technical users don't need to care about Snaps - and you'd be right, if they actually worked well. Snaps are slow and buggy and have been a constant source of pain for many users[4].
A major issue is with how buggy Ubuntu has become, especially OS upgrades, which may result in anything from minor issues like broken shortcuts, to complete breakage[5]. This might lead you to think that it's better to do a fresh install, but of late, new ISO releases have been incredibly buggy - like the 24.04 LTS installer, which kept crashing for many users[6] - and considering that LTS is supposed to be the super-stable version, that is not a good user…
dangus · 2024-06-09
Ugh, here we go.
Not all that stable: honestly an outright lie. Windows is stable. Linux is stable. Mac is stable. They’re all fine.
Ads for Apple products: they absolutely can be disabled and never come up after the first time they’re dismissed. By the way, not all Linux is non-commercial and the most popular distributions like Ubuntu and Red Hat are commercial distributions.
https://linuxiac.com/ubuntu-once-again-angered-users-by-placing-ads/
I think the parent comment to yours was saying “more standard” in the sense that more software (especially commercial software) knows what to do with a Mac and works well with it. There are a whole bunch of commercial applications that have a Mac and Windows version but no Linux version.
macOS is also only one distribution while there are hundreds of flavors of Linux. If you’re on a Mac then someone targeting your platform knows what components you have. People who make accessories consider your existence and test their products with your platform.
Finally, most people aren’t web developers. But even if they were, I would argue that making your workstation exactly match the production server environment isn’t going to work that well even if you’re on a Linux desktop and is probably the wrong approach anyway. If I’m using an Arch Linux workstation and my application is running on Amazon EKS backed by Amazon Linux, there’s no possible way to make my container environment perfectly match the production technology.
HoHoHoe · 2025-09-19
KDE now has its own Linux distribution called KDE Linux!
https://kde.org/linux/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45204393
https://news.itsfoss.com/kde-linux-alpha/
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/09/kde-officially-release-the-first…
https://linuxiac.com/kde-linux-alpha-launches-with-immutable-base-and-…