Late Night Linux (mp3)

The US government is trying to break up Google which sounds like a great idea, but it is potentially catastrophic news for Mozilla and Firefox. Alex from Open Web Advocacy tells us all about it. But first we talk about blocking ads on the web with Pi-hole, uBlock Origin, and AdGuard public DNS.    ... Read More

Wikipedia is attacked by Trump lackeys, Bluesky folds under pressure from the Turkish government, Linux YouTube is terrible as usual, Microsoft wants you to use the “proper” VS Code, Intel AI chips aren’t selling well, yet another open source project has to deal with crawlers, TrueNAS goes Linux-only, and more.   News Trump DOJ goon... Read More

Cheap handheld retro gaming, F1 stats in the terminal, running binaries as if they were Python functions, websites that look like TUIs, basic graphics manipulation, strange old audio archives, and more.   Discoveries  POWKIDDY X55 ROCKNIX undercut-f1 WebTUI Astro Docs Pinta 3.0 python-sh Attention K-Mart Shoppers Techmoan r/LiminalSpace The Conet Project You are listening to... Read More

Linus Torvalds’ other big project is 20 years old, new Ubuntu and Fedora releases, the downsides of permissive licences, a quick KDE Korner, and more.   News Git turns 20: A Q&A with Linus Torvalds Fedora 42 Released As A Fantastic Update To This Leading-Edge Linux Distribution – Phoronix The answer is 42! Fedora Linux... Read More

Two very different approaches to setting up security cameras, an IDE-like experience for text adventure games, a glimpse of convergence on Pixel phones, a new LTS of the flight sim FlightGear, and more.   Discoveries Frigate Coral TPUs daylight RPi Improved Pan Tilt Module The Visible Zorker Flightgear new LTS Bagels – TUI Expense Tracker... Read More

AI crawlers are causing serious problems for open source projects, an example of disclosure by vagueposting, Zorin does something good and something bad, LibreOffice downloads are doing well, Thunderbird is planning new services, a quick KDE Korner, and more.   News Open source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries Wikimedia... Read More

What if Google hadn’t come along in the late 90s? What would search, mobile devices, and the web in general look like? Plus a musical discovery, and why moving to a new distro just means moving to new little problems to fix.   Discovery Wilsonic MTS-ESP         Tailscale Tailscale is an easy... Read More

Home Assistant gets even more credible and sustainable, open source users are entitled, changes in KDE land, Fedora says hello to Plasma and goodbye to X11, Ubuntu looks to drop GNU coreutils, GIMP 3 is out and still has a terrible name, and new Pebble devices will be shipping soon™.   News Home Assistant officially... Read More

Tracking WiFi devices with cheap ESP32 devices, using OSM and Google Maps together, deleting your Twitter data, “3D” images with any camera, forcing Ubuntu to give you all the available updates, efficiently importing photos, counting lines of code, and more.   Discoveries espargos and demo video OSM2GoogleMaps Bookmarklet Cyd twitter-defollower Cross Views About apt upgrade... Read More

Mozilla does another terrible job of communicating an important policy change, the movie made with Blender wins an Oscar, EA open sources some Command & Conquer games, the EFF releases a tool to detect cellular spying, an official Debian VM on Pixel devices, a brief foldable update, and more.   News Introducing a terms of... Read More

Remote desktop without a client, Macrodata Refinement, 3D plane tracking, Home Assistant’s new hardware voice assistant, a new version of Pi-hole is a touch buggy, and more.   Discoveries Guacamole Lumon Industries (Macrodata-Refinement) Skies-ADSB Home Assistant Voice PE Casio F91W to 5000m underwater Pi-hole v6 gammastep         1Password Extended Access Management Secure... Read More

The kernel Rust drama nears an end but not without some collateral damage, you should back up your Kindle books while you still can, Mozilla so very nearly gets it, Chrome gets even worse, Apple takes its ball home, and Matrix rattles the donation tin.   News Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel... Read More

What if Linus Torvalds hadn’t written Linux? What if Canonical hadn’t dropped Unity and the phone? Plus what we are self-hosting in Voice of the Masses.   Voice of the Masses What are you self-hosting, and what are you relying on others to host for you?           Tailscale Tailscale is an... Read More

Linux kernel drama with Rust raises the old question about developer succession, the Pebble smartwatch is making a comeback, great news for F-Droid, a movie made with Blender is nominated for an Oscar, RISC-V in a Framework, and loads more.   News Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer Asahi... Read More

What if Qt had been under a friendlier licence? Would KDE have become the standard desktop instead of GNOME? What if IBM hadn’t bought Red Hat? Plus a self-hostable workflow automation platform, simple systemd management, and Redshift on Xfce in Discoveries. Then we wonder why there seems to be less in the way of interesting... Read More

We get angry about a new decentralised social media initiative that seems to ignore the Fediverse, and explain why foldable phones are cool but not the future. Then stitching photos together, analysing applications at the system call level, and an Innertune fork that breaks less often in Discoveries. Plus the details of BarCamp Surrey from... Read More

Molly White joins us to talk about the recent far right attacks on Wikipedia. We get into the lies and false assumptions about funding, reliable sources, objective truth, false equivalence in the media, and more. Plus our favourite discoveries from 2024.   Molly’s personal website [citation needed] newsletter Elon Musk and the right’s war on... Read More

SteamOS is coming to a new Lenovo handheld as well as getting a general beta release, the WordPress drama continues to roll on, the 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 makes no sense to at least one of us (who now owns an N100 mini PC), the Linux Foundation seems to think Chromium-based browsers need a helping... Read More

It’s that time of year where we look back at our 2024 predictions, and make some new ones for 2025.         Sandfly Securitry Sandfly Security’s agentless threat detection identifies Linux threats without requiring software agents, ensuring no performance impact or system risk.   ServerMania Get 15% Off dedicated servers – recurring for... Read More

It’s our 2024 review of Linux and open source news including the end of Linux on Mars, the xz backdoor, great stuff from GNOME and KDE, the WordPress fiasco, why the idea of decentralised social media started to catch on, Raspberry Pi’s IPO, and the inevitable Mozilla doom and gloom.   2024 Linux News in... Read More