Linux - Reddit

Can "public domain licensing" pull the rug under your feet?

I know this is better suited for law.SE and related places, but I wanted a less formal discussion.

I can slap a 2015-2025 GPL on previously unreleased code. If the code was already published without a license, I believe I can again slap a 2015-2025 GPL and, if confronted, argue that "I forgot" to add an explicit license notice previously. But can I slap a 2015-2025 GPL where I have previously had a 2015-2025 Unlicense (or any other reputable SPDX-listed license like WTFPL that tries to legally imitate the public domain)?

Both the Unlicense and CC0 are quite popular on GitHub. Can we rely on "public domain" software staying (at least) permissive? Or are we simply trusting the maintainers to not re-license everything "retroactively" in a patch release?

https://redd.it/1v6l4iv
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What distro would be best for my situation

To preface, I am tech savvy and have toyed around with Linux in the past. Im just not super familiar with all things linux and usually need to rely on guides or recommendations for my specific use cases.

Im going to be finishing up a small home server soon. Its primary use is going to be a Plex server, first and foremost. Other than that, I'd like to run the occasional game server for me and a couple of buddies, as well as some local file backups. The endgame will have it running headless so remote access from my phone and pc is a must.

Im not sure if there's a hyper specific distro that will do everything I need or if I should just get one thats sort of general use oriented. I know I hear a lot about unraid, but I dont think im willing to spend money on that at the moment but am open to it down the road.

https://redd.it/1v6oufh
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PCLinuxOS 2007 .iso now available stand-alone on Archive.org (READ BODY)

EDIT: also added Community Fedora Remix 12.3 iso to this post to avoid spamming

This is an rip+upload of a CD-R containing PCLinuxOS 2007. I've seen it online only in large bundles from archives of German computer magazines (!com and Linux User). I was unfortunately unable to use the CD on my computer to test it, but I believe it may work better on older hardware, since my computers post-date it by a few years and what little I can see online about it suggests it may be finnicky on computers using SATA hard drives? Either way, I am uploading this both for preservation, and to see if other people have more luck with this particular .iso than I have had.

https://archive.org/details/pclinux-os-2007

I also have uploaded Community Fedora Remix 12.3, a previously completely lost Fedora Remix from 2010. It comes with multiple desktop environments and preloaded games. This .iso worked without issue from DVD-Rs for me, but did not work on a Ventoy USB stick (contrary to the description on Archive, I was mistaken and failed to test that it actually worked with Ventoy. Sad it didn't)

https://archive.org/details/community-fedora-remix-12.3

https://redd.it/1v6jvs8
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XL-View, an HDR JPEG XL image viewer for Linux

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on **XL-View**, an open-source HDR still-image viewer for Linux. It is designed to handle large JPEG XL images and is written in Rust.

GitHub:
[https://github.com/andrinbr/xl-view](https://github.com/andrinbr/xl-view)

XL-View currently requires:

* Wayland
* A Vulkan-capable GPU
* A working HDR display setup (SDR tone mapping works too)

At the moment, it supports JPEG XL only. The number of formats suitable for delivering actual HDR images to end users is still fairly limited, but I may add AVIF support in the future.

Both PQ and HLG images are supported. Gain-map-based HDR images are not currently supported.

The project is still in beta, and HDR support on Linux is relatively new, so results may vary depending on your GPU, drivers, compositor, desktop environment, and distribution. I have primarily tested it on Fedora 44 with an AMD GPU under KDE Plasma and GNOME.

One important limitation is memory usage during decoding. Very large images can require a substantial amount of RAM. For example, decoding a 200-megapixel image may use up to 6 GiB.

I’d appreciate feedback, bug reports, and testing on different hardware and desktop environments.

https://redd.it/1v6k1py
@r_linux

[Project] Reclaiming Android with a dependency-free, POSIX-compliant management protocol
https://redd.it/1v6c8hk
@r_linux

Niri + DMS has been a much better experience than COSMIC for me

I had used COSMIC for quite a while, and honestly, I still think it's pretty rough around the edges.
I've run into memory leaks, many missing features like window exceptions/rules, and a lot of animation glitches and inconsistencies. What surprised me the most is that I switched to niri + dms, and I simply don't have any of those issues anymore. On top of being more stable, it also offers significantly more customization and functionality.
At work I use gnome + paperwm with several extensions, and despite the extensions, the experience is still far more stable and consistent than what I had with COSMIC.
I know the obvious response is going to be: "COSMIC is still in development." That's true, but so are Niri and DMS. The difference is that those are essentially side projects maintained by a handful of developers, while COSMIC has an entire company behind it. Given that, I expected COSMIC to have progressed much faster by now.

I'm not trying to hate on the project I actually want it to succeed because I think competition in the Linux desktop space is great. But based on my experience, it still has a long way to go before I'd consider using it as my daily desktop again.

https://redd.it/1v67n6r
@r_linux

One of the biggest ui framework Avalonia now supports wayland

https://avaloniaui.net/blog/release-12-1



Avalonia is basically wpf for cross platform. And they are more popular than wpf nowadays.

This is wpf repo it has 7.7k stars.

https://github.com/dotnet/wpf

this is winui repo it has 7.8k stars

https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/

this is avalonia repo it has 31.2 stars.

https://github.com/avaloniaui/avalonia

demonstrates that the era of UI frameworks targeting only a single platform is over. It also shows that frameworks supporting Linux—which has surpassed a 7% market shar such as Flutter, Uno, Qt, and Avalonia, are increasingly being preferred as long-term investments.

https://redd.it/1v6a2x5
@r_linux

US government targets Cop City protester over phone operating system
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/23/cop-city-protester-phone

https://redd.it/1v66bbl
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Spotted this at danish libraries! Anyone know the distro they're running? So good!
https://redd.it/1v663cm
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Feed it your LinPEAS output and it draws every path from a low-priv user to root
https://redd.it/1v636oj
@r_linux

High-Performance data transport in Rust on Linux: Putting madvise, mremap, and mmap to work, with optional iouring. Lightstream measured faster than Apache Arrow Flight (gold standard) on every axis in open 50gbps EC2 network benchmarks. Not supporting Windows was a pleasure.


Hi everybody,

Yesterday I released [Lightstream](https://github.com/spacecell/lightstream), a high-performance data transport library in Rust with Python bindings, that makes it effortless to send Apache Arrow, Protobuf, and Message Pack data over the network, shared memory, or piped out to the terminal.

During the development process I made extensive use of Linux sys call primitives including madvise, mremap, and mmap, and optionally enabled io\uring, for handling memory allocation efficiently, using zero-copy techniques. This included use of arena memory layouts to pack 'flatbuffers' next to each other, to help squeeze every ounce of performance out of the hardware. This differs from other libraries in the niche that tend to favour cross-system compatibility which I found was at the expense of performance, due to Linux's native capabilities.

It exceeded the performance of the gold standard industry comparison - Arrow Flight, on every axis of a 50gbps networking open benchmark, the details of which are attached and open to run in the Lightstream GitHub repository. This includes fully saturating each TCP connection thread, the NIC at 5.8GiB/s, and with p99 batch send time within 1% of p50 (I.e., stable).

For example, using 'mmap' , I was able to reach warm memory map reads from disk at 170GB/s, which is close to raw RAM speed.

If anyone here is big on this low-level hardware and software optimisation stuff, please feel free to ask any questions, I would be happy to discuss the architecture.

An excerpt of the comparison results are below.

Thanks,

Pete

Lightstream saturated the 50gbp\/s NIC with its decoding speed

Workload Shape

Mixed

|Streams|Arrow Flight GiB/s|Lightstream GiB/s|Ratio|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
||
|1|0.939|1.109|1.18x|
|4|3.262|4.005|1.23x|
|8|5.138|5.677|1.10x|
|16|5.142|5.784|1.12x|

Numeric

|Streams|Arrow Flight GiB/s|Lightstream GiB/s|Ratio|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
||
|1|0.649|1.109|1.71x|
|4|2.901|4.307|1.48x|
|8|4.851|5.693|1.17x|
|16|5.434|5.780|1.06x|

String Heavy

|Streams|Arrow Flight GiB/s|Lightstream GiB/s|Ratio|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
||
|1|0.828|1.109|1.34x|
|4|3.052|3.861|1.27x|
|8|4.899|5.782|1.18x|
|16|5.217|5.790|1.11x|

Wide (100 cols)

|Streams|Arrow Flight GiB/s|Lightstream GiB/s|Ratio|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
||
|1|0.695|1.108|1.59x|
|4|2.685|3.790|1.41x|
|8|4.549|5.725|1.26x|
|16|4.911|5.753|1.17x|

https://redd.it/1v63fh7
@r_linux

RefluXFS: A Linux Kernel Local Privilege Escalation to Root in XFS (CVE-2026-64600)
https://blog.qualys.com/vulnerabilities-threat-research/2026/07/22/refluxfs-a-linux-kernel-local-privilege-escalation-to-root-in-xfs-cve-2026-64600

https://redd.it/1v56hde
@r_linux

Any DJs running on Linux? What has worked well for you?

I want to make the jump to Linux on all of my machines however I worry about my DJ hardware compatibility with software. I have read Mixxx is decent on Linux. I have primarily used Serato for many years and would like something similar with hardware support. Anyone who uses primarily Serato based gear running well on Linux? My main rigs are a DJM-S11 w 2 Rane 12s, a DJM-S9 with 2 Pioneer PLX-1000s and various DJ mixers. Curious if other DJ folks have made the jump and have a stable situation going. Any recommendations on Linux build/dj software to try for maximum stability?

https://redd.it/1v5inyz
@r_linux

GR proposal: Ban LLM contributions from Debian
https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2026/07/msg00000.html

https://redd.it/1v5q78f
@r_linux

Purchasing Linux

I only discovered this because Louis Rossmann said in a video that he purchased Linux when he was a teenager and then showed the CD. I looked on eBay and I saw a few CDs that were still in their boxes and the labels that were on the box looked like they came from a bookstore, I did not know that these were sold commercially.

My question is, back when they used to sell these CDs in bookstores who was distributing the CDs and where was the money going to when someone made a purchase?

My second question is, if Linux is an open source operating system why would someone want to buy it? I still see some websites to this day selling Linux CDs, I'm really curious where the money is going when someone purchases the CDs.

Edit: I made a comment earlier but so many people replied I don't think a lot of people saw it so I will repost it here. "Thank you to everyone who replied, all of my questions have been answered, it was interesting reading through all the replies, there was a lot of different points that people brought up that I never considered before"

https://redd.it/1v5kxok
@r_linux

Is exFAT feasible for internal ssd long term ?

Dual booting win/linux for a while now (dedicated ssd per OS). And I need some shared storage so I've been using ntfs for 2 storage ssd's but it's been a huge headache as the linux/win combination constantly corrupts the ntfs file system and I end up with a ton of issues on linux, always having to repair it in windows.

I already do full shutdowns on windows (even started disconnecting the drives from the windows partition manager before shutdown), it doesn't seem to help (i'm suspecting that linux itself corrupts the file system sometimes).

So I'm thinking of switching to using exfat but I've not been able to find much on how feasible that is to use on internal drives. Anyone have any experience with this ?

Of note - the data is not that critical as to warrant a high degree of reliability, but at the same time if exfat presents known issues, same or worse as ntfs, it doesn't make sense to switch.

https://redd.it/1v5dpw3
@r_linux

Where do you install software from? Standard repos, sources, Flatpak, AppImage, etc

Do you install only flatpaks? Or only native RPM/DEB/etc? Maybe you're religios about it.

Or maybe you don't care and just use what's convenient, which happens to be... what channel usually for you?

Curious to know as a developer where this ship is moving recently

https://redd.it/1v56fjz
@r_linux

midscroll: Windows-style middle-click autoscroll for Linux, implemented at the evdev layer so it works in every app on Wayland and X11

Windows has middle-click drag autoscroll. On Linux you get it in Firefox, and Chromium has it behind a flag, but nowhere else, which bugged me enough to write a daemon for it.

Hold middle-click and drag, page scrolls that way, faster the further you drag. Release to stop. A plain middle click still pastes and opens links like normal. Diagonal drags do both axes. There's a toggle mode too if you'd rather click once to start it instead of holding.

It works everywhere because it sits at the kernel input layer instead of hooking a toolkit. Grabs each mouse via evdev, re-emits through a per-mouse uinput mirror, injects wheel events during a drag. Nothing above it has to cooperate, so Wayland and X11 both just work. Mirrors copy the source mouse's name and IDs so libinput keeps your per-device pointer speed.

Speed curve is Chromium's actual Windows autoscroll formula, 0.000008 * distance\^2.2 px/ms. Tiny drags crawl, big ones fly. Tunable in a config file or a GTK settings window.

Fair warning that it reads every mouse as root, so read it before you run it. It's two small Python files. The systemd unit is sandboxed and I left comments on why the directives I couldn't use would break it.

Badge only shows on KDE Wayland, no flatpak, toggle mode kills middle-click paste. Rest is in the readme.

FOSS under Unlicense

https://github.com/gnhen/midscroll

https://redd.it/1v503xk
@r_linux

FlatRoot v0.1.0 - Build linux rootfs without root privileges or a package manager.
https://github.com/flatroot/flatroot

https://redd.it/1v4q3k3
@r_linux

How do you interpret JSIG AC-10?

Hello all,

I am curious if anyone has to deal with the JSIG AC-10 control in their environment. As a reminder, here it is:

AC-10 CONCURRENT SESSION CONTROL Control:
The information system limits the number of concurrent sessions for each non-privileged and privileged to maximum of three (3) sessions.

Supplemental Guidance: Organizations may define the maximum number of concurrent sessions for information system accounts globally, by account type (e.g., privileged user, non-privileged user, domain, specific application), by account, or a combination. For example, organizations may limit the number of concurrent sessions for system administrators or individuals working in particularly sensitive domains or mission-critical applications. This control addresses concurrent sessions for information system accounts and does not address concurrent sessions by single users via multiple system accounts.

This control may require third party software or development of a script.

I have a solution set up in my environment that tracks how many logons a person does (stored in sqlite3 db). In my pam.d files, I have it check on logon and denies a person from opening more than 3 (ssh, console, xrdp) sessions. It works pretty good although annoying when I want to open a bunch of sessions on patch weekend.

I am starting to question why that might matter. What I would more than likely expect to see is "control how many concurrent sessions per machine there are". This certainly seems to be what RHEL-09-412040 talks about, which is /etc/security/limits.conf "maxlogins". That could help prevent DDOS.

How do you interpret this? How do you meet this control in your environments?

https://redd.it/1v4wns0
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