Practical Linux tips and tricks – terminal shortcuts, productivity hacks, and configuration tweaks for Ubuntu and other distros.
Sent out today was this week’s round of x86 (x86_64) fixes ahead of the Linux 7.2-rc3 kernel test candidate due out on Sunday. The x86 fixes for Linux 7.2-rc3 are mostly some minor fixes but one that does stand out is fixing the x86 VGA display fallback logic during the Linux boot process on some…
COSMIC Desktop’s long-awaited Frosted Glass effect is no longer simply an attractive preview or an unfinished feature hidden in development branches. It is now available to Pop!_OS 24.04 users through the regular update process. And after trying it myself, I can say it looks genuinely beautiful. To get it, open COSMIC Store and install all…
A new version of miracle-wm, the Wayland compositor built on Mir with an i3/Sway style tiling window manager, has been released. Developer Matthew Kosarek, a Canonical engineer developing this keyboard-driven UX in his free time, says the new v0.10.0 release sees the plugin system introduced in the April 2026 release “getting better and better everyday”. Plugins…
12 Arjun’s Systems Brief: I have spent the better part of a decade managing production server fleets where a single incompatible flag in a core utility can cascade into failed deployments and midnight incident calls. When Ubuntu announced its switch to Rust coreutils, I watched the transition closely because my team relies on automated image…
The familiar read, write, and execute permissions cover most of what you do with files, but Linux has three more permission bits that change how programs run and how shared directories behave. They explain why an ordinary user can change their own password with a tool owned by root, why files created in a team…
Most microcontroller boards on the market today rely on Python, usually in the form of MicroPython or CircuitPython. If you’ve ever wanted something leaner without giving up that no-compile, REPL-driven workflow, Lua is the option worth considering. But then most microcontroller boards are not built for Lua even if you can run Lua on them….
Upstreamed for the Linux 7.2 kernel was initial support for booting Linux on the Apple M3 SoC devices. But just the barebones suppport for booting with not yet any accelerated graphics or other typical function needed for daily use of M3 Apple devices on Linux, just booting to a console. Now this work is complemented…
Wine 11.13 has been released as the latest version of the compatibility layer that allows Windows applications and games to run on Linux, macOS, and other Unix-like systems. Here are the highlights. Wine now provides enhanced support for input pointers and improved keyboard scancode mapping under X11, thus enabling more accurate translation of physical keyboard…
A new update to System76’s COSMIC desktop is now rolling out with a new system monitoring tool and a fresh set of fixes and fine-tuning. COSMIC Epoch 1.1.0 also sees the developers behind the Rust-based desktop opting to “[increment] the minor version regularly in order to allow for mid-release patch versions if necessary”. The biggest…
28 Arjun’s Systems Brief: I have spent the better part of a decade tuning Linux systems for production workloads. Sysctl is the single most underused tool in the average administrator’s toolkit. Most people know about vm.swappiness and that is where their knowledge ends. This guide covers what actually matters across Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch-based systems….
