Practical Linux tips and tricks – terminal shortcuts, productivity hacks, and configuration tweaks for Ubuntu and other distros.
89 Liam’s Desktop UX Brief: I have spent countless hours jumping between GNOME and KDE on every distro I can get my hands on. If you are new to Linux, the desktop environment choice feels overwhelming. I get it. You open a forum and see people arguing about GTK versus Qt like it is a…
When a new disk appears in lsblk, it is visible to Linux but still has nowhere to store files. The disk needs a partition table and at least one partition before you create a filesystem and mount it. The parted command manages those boundaries from the terminal, works with both GPT and MBR tables, and…
Even after all these years, some people still have a strong dislike for systemd. My colleague, Umair, stopped hating systemd after realizing its automation capabilities. He has created two courses on systemd: Systemd playbook: A hands-on, text-based course to turn you into a confident systemd user. Systemd automation: Learn to schedule, monitor, sandbox, and optimize…
Linux command line has a lot of fun around itself and many tedious task can be performed very easily yet with perfection. Playing with words and characters, their frequency in a text file, etc is what we are going to see in this article. Almost every word-frequency one-liner floating around the web has the same…
The GNOME Extensions ecosystem is packed with tools that let you customize almost every part of the desktop. Whether it’s changing the appearance of the top panel, replacing the app launcher, adding visual effects, or making the interface behave exactly the way you want. We have covered extensions in the past: Since there are so…
In early 2025 it was being discussed to potentially drop the HFS and HFS+ file-system support with the code having been orphaned over a decade and becoming a maintenance burden. But that dismal outlook quickly turned around with some developers stepping up to maintain the old Apple file-system support. Over a year later, fortunately, it’s…
Apprise 1.13 has been released as the final update in the 1.x series of the open-source notification framework, adding new notification services, feature improvements, and bug fixes while preparing users for the upcoming 2.x branch. The release introduces support for three additional notification services: Pinglet, Trigv, and Pingram. The latter replaces the previously supported NotificationApi…
After years of technical research and foundational work, the Fedora Badges application service has been rebuilt from the ground up, and it is heading to production. Whether you have been collecting badges for years or you are brand new to the Fedora Project community, here is what is waiting for you there. Completely modernized user interface The archaic server rendered pages are now gone. The Fedora Badges application service…
A new project file format is in the works for GIMP, as the existing one can’t handle larger, complex projects. Since 1997, the famed FOSS image editor has used the binary .xcf format to save projects so layers, effects and anything else can be edited and adjusted again – which doesn’t happen in a flat file…
19 Liam’s Desktop UX Brief: Whether you are touching up vacation snapshots or building social media graphics from scratch, GIMP 3.2 gives Linux users a genuinely powerful photo editor without spending a dime. In this walkthrough I will show you how to install it on Ubuntu 26.04, navigate the redesigned interface, and master the core…
