Category: free software

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Learning every day…

… if you’re using Linux, and are interested enough, you’ll have quite the journey ahead. The latest “Aha!” moment for me was when I read a post on Planet Debian from Samuel Henrique titled “I use curl with ECH btw (in Debian)“. I hadn’t heard about ECH before, so that was great in itself. Turns out that this TLS Encrypted Client Hello routine took about 7 years and some 10-15k lines of code to be written – but it’s kind of important, so thanks to Stephen Farrell from Dublin for his patience and all of his work! Hear him talk about it on last years’ OpenSSL conference on the tube if you like.

And about Samuel Henrique, a Debian Developer: there’s more stuff to like on his site, for instance his also very interesting post called “Debian 13: My list of exciting new features“. So in case you’re interested in that, it’s a nice read as well.

Also on Planet Debian, and interesting as well:

“The Death of Twitter“, by Russell Coker, or

“systemd has not implemented age verification“, by Marco D’Itri

As always, thanks for reading.

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Firefox sync *could* be useful…

… if they hadn’t given up on their Livemarks, which I now use as a plugin on my desktop version of this browser. Sadly, the mobile Android version doesn’t have it, so in case you try to sync, you’ll have some cleanup work to do later… sigh…

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Motorola and GrapheneOS announce partnership

Now it’s official: both GrapheneOS and Motorola announced a partnership agreement – which means that if you want to run GrapheneOS, you won’t necessarily need a Google Pixel device much longer, but you’ll have a bit more choice. And choice is always good.

Also: I sometimes get asked by friends who don’t have Pixel devices what other operating system than GrapheneOS would be advisable to run on their devices? And I just learnt through a post on the GOS forum that finally DivestOS has a spiritual successor called AXP.OS – so have a look in case you’re interested in a bit more privacy, and in case you want to have support beyond what the hardware vendors (and GOS) offer. Unlike with other systems, this one offers to relock your bootloader if your device supports that (Pixels do).

You’re welcome.

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Free software: a shoutout to Debian – and to KDE Connect

Larry Cafiero wrote a nice review of Debian 13.3 “Trixie” over at FOSS Force, and I have to admit that Debian is also my standard go-to Linux distribution after years and years of use. I second his mentioning of the XFCE desktop especially for older devices like my wife’s old Lenovo SL500 laptop with only 2GB of RAM and a by now ancient Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and his mentioning of KDE Connect (Gnome has something similar called GSConnect, but the KDE guys invented that one) is also worth consideration. Pretty happy with it, and GSConnect always reminds me when my Pixel phones (6a and 3a) or my new Samsung Galaxy Tab A11+ are fully charged.

If you search my site here for Debian or for Ian Murdock, you’ll find an interview I did with him (RIP Ian), and even my late and not so computer-literate brother Willi (RIP as well) did never look back to Ubuntu after I showed him Debian.

Recommended reading for beginners of GNU/Linux.

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First bigger upgrades of 2026

Hey and good morning, dear friends and readers of this blog.

This morning after the usual

yay -Syu

line in Arch, I got lots of updates, some 200+ packages IIRC, including a new kernel as shown in my conky as well:

Later, I found this post from Marcus Nestor in 9to5 Linux about Debian – so I went and updated that as well, which also got me a new kernel amongst lots of other things:

What most people who aren’t that much into Linux probably don’t know is that it’s nowadays more and less automatic, like in Windows from versions 10 and upwards – you are notified about new updates, and often they come without much fuss, just by themselves. Lately I also read the old question again of when to reboot after such upgrades, and for me the answer is simple: whenever you get a new kernel or some other really low-level stuff like systemd or GRUB. Some distributions like Debian now automate updates via Gnome, which is a bit too much in my opinion – contrary to the later Windows versioning, this reboots pretty much each time instead of when really necessary. But I digress.

Marius’ article also mentions why and when you should probably download such upgrades – when making new boot images on your USB sticks or elsewhere. So while pretty much all modern distributions update themselves, and you don’t really need such downloads, if – like me – you’re carrying around a bootable stick with some of these images with you in case you’d need to help some friends with these, go for it and download those “point” distributions of monthly images (in Arch), and put them onto your boot media.

Oh, and in case you dual- or even triple-boot like me (yes, I still keep Windows 11 around as well), you’ll have to update your bootloader of choice of course – in my case, that is GRUB on Arch, like this:

sudo grub-install –target=x86_64-efi –efi-directory=/boot/ –bootloader-id=Arch

followed by

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

as documented in the very nice Arch Wiki about GRUB. If you don’t do that, then you won’t see your new kernel in Debian 😉

Like always, thanks for reading, and have a nice day 🙂

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Tried secureblue

Last week I had a brief look at secureblue, a hardened Linux distribution based on a so-called “atomic” Fedora distribution (called “silverblue” in case you’re interested). I was interested because I’ve read about it on several security-related websites like for instance here or here.

And I liked it a lot, becauise it takes many very good ideas from GrapheneOS, like their hardened Chromium-based browser Vanadium which here is called Trivalent. Even their webpages kind of look alike.

And since I haven’t had a look at a tiling window manager yet, I first tried the “Sway” version. With the <super> and <Enter> keys, you open a terminal window, here called “foot”. Looks like this:

You’ll notice the “us” keyboard, which I couldn’t switch to a German one, except in the login manager which looks like this:

This isn’t a problem of Sway; I later tried that with another distribution where it worked. Maybe some overlay “header” on Fedora’s version was responsible for this, I didn’t find out during my test.

I stopped testing it because neither this Sway nor the KDE Plasma or Gnome based versions of secureblue ran on Mitchie’s old Lenovo laptop which still has a Celeron-class dual core CPU, and only 2GB of RAM. Too heavy for old metal like that. I also can’t do all of my stuff (like music making which requires real time) on such an atomic version of Linux, and with flatpaks.

But in case you want a nice and reasonable secure machine, and have the hardware for it – I recommend a quad core with at least 4GB of RAM – then go for it, and have a look. Could be well worth trying it.

And like always, thanks for reading.

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A tip for those who cannot run GrapheneOS…

… because they don’t have a Pixel phone. GrapheneOS is by far the best mobile OS, and its built-in Vanadium is the best browser engine for Android-based phones. But Vanadium only runs on GrapheneOS, so what should users of other systems choose?

That question was recently asked on the GrapheneOS discussion channel, and the answer was Cromite. And indeed, just look at the long list of features needed to make Chrome a bit more private and secure…

You’re welcome.

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Interesting guesstimations about Linux usage

Liam Proven writes about Ubuntu Linux – and that’s all very nice to know. As the leading European “corporate” Linux vendor, I wish them luck – and suggest the usage of Ubuntu to our European parliament, the governments in European countries, and of course the business users as well.

Still happily running Debian here, as well as Arch for peeking into the newest stuff. But others in my family are happy with Ubuntu since years. And it’s indeed a nice one, including Ubuntu Studio for artists.

Like always, thanks for reading.