packaging

Excerpts from Linus Torvalds's DebConf 14 talk on why desktop Linux struggles. He covers application distribution, distros breaking backwards compatibility, wasted package management effort and how Windows does app distribution better.

Charlie Marsh of Astral explains how uv, a Rust Python package manager, got so fast. He covers allocators, concurrency, zero-copy tricks and the challenges of Python packaging.

Dave Jones of EEVblog tears down a 1991 IBM 9121 thermal conduction module from a System/390 mainframe, a 63-layer ceramic hybrid module with 2772 pins worth about $250,000, and demonstrates a BGA desoldering technique.

CuriousMarc connects a restored 1930 Model 15 Teletype to a Linux machine and uses it as a terminal, after commenters requested it. The video shows the challenges of linking a 5-bit mechanical device to a modern OS.

Tantacrul explains how he and engraver Simon Smith designed the free music notation font for MuseScore 3.6. It draws on the history of the SCORE notation application by Leland Smith.

FortNine looks at the data on why newer pickup trucks with tall, blunt grilles kill so many pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists. It argues that lowering hood height would substantially cut fatalities.

Keith Packard traces the 35-year history of the X Window System at linux.conf.au 2020. He uses X to examine licensing, corporate interests and community dynamics in free software, including Unix workstation vendors and Stallman's influence.

The author of copyparty introduces the FOSS file server he has built over five years, demoing its features such as resumable uploads, WebDAV and deduplication. The video itself is shown running on a demo server.

Benno Rice's linux.conf.au 2020 talk asks whether UNIX was the best design we could have had. He looks at what alternatives existed, what was gained and lost, and what could be re-learned, including the limits of treating everything as a file.

Posy explores segmented displays, from the seven-segment display to alternative designs with fewer or more segments, with patents and history.

Isaac Freund, author of the River Wayland compositor, talks about writing a Wayland compositor in Zig. He covers why he chose Zig over C and Rust and how Zig can wrap a hairy C library.

A Technology Connections video essay on how analog and digital clocks shape different mental models of time, with the minute hand acting as a progress indicator.

Naomi Wu visits the Shenzhen offices of smartphone maker UMIDIGI in person to get them to release source code they owed under the GPLv2, and they comply.

Sam Holmes Sailing visits sailing legend Sven Yrvind and tours his boat, covering the man and his small-boat design philosophy.

Technology Connections examines an old feature-rich microwave and shows how it uses a humidity or steam sensor and lookup data to cook food well, arguing it beats many modern ones.

A walkthrough of installing Synapse, Riot and Jitsi from scratch on Debian to run your own Matrix communication service. The description warns it is now quite outdated and links to updated material.

A design essay on why products designed in Western contexts often fail when deployed in developing countries. It covers expert blindness and cultural assumptions, with examples such as malaria nets and the One Laptop Per Child project.

Ben Vallack compares finger movement on a staggered keyboard with an ortholinear grid keyboard, using an Anne Pro 2 and a ZSA Planck EZ. He argues the stagger forces awkward finger motion.

Technology Connections praises a 1940s-50s Sunbeam toaster and explains what makes a toaster well designed, drawing on a vintage Sunbeam video.

A FOSDEM 2023 talk from the Matrix team on Matrix 2.0, covering sliding sync, the Element X client rewrite and next-generation calling. It explains how Matrix aims to match the speed of proprietary messengers.

Andrew Kelley's Zig SHOWTIME talk on an experiment to ship static Linux executables that can do graphics and gaming, followed by an interview. It covers the problems of Linux binary stability, dynamic linking and the graphics ABI.

Matt Ahrens presents the FreeBSD Foundation sponsored RAID-Z Expansion project for ZFS at the June 2021 FreeBSD Developer Summit. It explains how a RAID-Z vdev can be grown by adding disks on the fly.

Louis Rossmann explains why he stopped using GrapheneOS, describing his interactions with its lead developer Daniel Micay. It includes chat logs shown in the video.

Peter Hutterer's linux.conf.au 2020 talk on creating libinput, the unified userspace input library, and the difficulties of handling the many quirks of input devices.

Linus Tech Tips builds a Linux PC together with Linus Torvalds, who talks through parts selection, kernel development and some of his side projects. The conversation also touches on AI in kernel work.

Scott Jenson, a veteran UX designer formerly at Apple and Google, argues that the 'UX/UI' split pits programmers against designers and narrows ambition in open source. He makes the case that desktop UX has stagnated and that open source projects could lead experimentation beyond current interaction models.

Technology Connections explains how refrigerator and freezer design affects energy use, using chest freezers to show why top-opening designs and layout choices matter. It includes thermal-camera footage of cold air spilling out of upright units.

Veritasium tells the story of the XZ backdoor, how a patient attacker became maintainer and nearly compromised SSH on Linux systems. It also covers free software history and how encryption in SSH works.

Day one of the X.Org Developer's Conference 2020 stream, including talks on the Raspberry Pi 4 Vulkan driver, the WSL graphics architecture, X11 and Wayland apps in WSL, and Mesa for D3D12.

A long personal account by a former NixOS contributor of his experience in the community, his ban and the governance events. He aims to correct what he sees as a false narrative about the NixOS drama.

Technology Connections spends 22 minutes on the humble can opener and what its design shows about products and why people don't know what to look for. It uses an everyday tool to draw broader lessons.

PewDiePie describes switching to Linux and encourages viewers to do the same. It is a casual, enthusiastic video aimed at a mainstream audience.

Netflix engineer Drew Gallatin explains why the company runs FreeBSD-current on its CDN. He describes the team, how they track upstream, their contributions and performance milestones, and a bug causing a 20% performance regression.

GitHub interviews Linus Torvalds on twenty years of Git, from its creation in about ten days as a Linux kernel tool to its role in modern software development. He discusses technical decisions, community contributions and the project's philosophy.

Mitchell Hashimoto walks through his setup for running a NixOS virtual machine on a Mac as his development environment, with a config repo on GitHub.

Linus Tech Tips starts a series in which Linus and Luke move their home workstations to Linux. This episode has each pick a distro and try to get a game running on it, and Linus ends up breaking his Pop!_OS install.

Dave2D reviews the Lenovo Legion Go S running Valve's SteamOS instead of Windows, calling it the first true competitor to the Steam Deck. He compares handheld gaming performance and experience across the two operating systems.

A long Techlore video documenting what it presents as hostile conduct by GrapheneOS leadership and community members, including lead developer Daniel Micay, toward CalyxOS and others.

FOSDEM 2020 talk from Collabora on pressure-vessel, an experimental mechanism that puts Steam games in containers on Linux. It covers using namespaces to give games their own runtime library stack independent of the host.

Linus Tech Tips replicates the Threadripper workstation Linus Torvalds built for himself, discussing the parts such as the CPU and cooler.