Horoscopes are a great way to pass a boring lunchbreak, and an excellent excuse for ending a ill-considered relationship. They’re also a hilarious way to handle CPU scheduling under Linux, thanks to the work of [Lucas Zampieri]. The project is called scx_horoscope, and it’s a sched_Ext scheduler that makes its CPU scheduling choices based on […]
You’ve probably heard — we’re currently experiencing very high RAM prices due mostly to increased demand from AI data centers. If you’ve been priced out of new RAM you are going to want to get as much value out of the RAM you already have as possible, and that’s where today’s hack comes in: if […]
Your new project really could use a block device for Linux. File systems are easy to do with FUSE, but that’s sometimes too high-level. But a block driver can be tough to write and debug, especially since bugs in the kernel’s space can be catastrophic. [Jiri Pospisil] suggests Ublk, a framework for writing block devices […]
If you were asked to pick the most annoying of the various Microsoft Windows interfaces that have appeared over the years, there’s a reasonable chance that Windows 8’s Metro start screen and interface design language would make it your choice. In 2012 the software company abandoned their tried-and-tested desktop whose roots extended back to Windows […]
Over the decades the number of Linux distributions has effectively exploded, from a handful in the late ’90s to quite literally hundreds today, not counting minor variations. There lately seems to be a counter-movement brewing in response to this fragmentation, with Project Bluefin’s Distroless project being the latest addition here. Also notable are KDE’s efforts, […]
I’m going to go ahead and admit it: I really have too many tray icons. You know the ones. They sit on your taskbar, perhaps doing something in the background or, at least, giving you fingertip access to some service. You’d think that creating a custom tray icon would be hard, but on Linux, it […]
Programmers hold to a wide spectrum of positions on software complexity, from the rare command-line purists to the much more common web app developers, and the two extremes rarely meet. One point of contact, though, might be [Jan Antos]’s Brow6el, which uses sixel graphics to display a fully graphical web browser within a terminal. Behind […]
Although flying well under the radar of the average Linux user, D-Bus has been an integral part of Linux distributions for nearly two decades and counting. Rather than using faster point-to-point interprocess communication via a Unix socket or such, an IPC bus allows for IP communication in a bus-like manner for convenience reasons. D-Bus replaced […]
Our computers can display an astonishing range of symbols. Unicode alone defines more than 150,000 characters, covering everything from mathematical operators and phonetic alphabets to emoji and obscure historical scripts. Our keyboards, on the other hand, remain stubbornly limited to a few dozen keys. On Windows, the traditional workaround involves memorizing numeric codes or digging […]
Until the 2000s, game consoles existed primarily to bring a bit of the gaming arcade experience to homes, providing graphical feats that the average home computer would struggle to emulate. By the 2000s this changed, along with the idea of running desktop applications on gaming console for some reason. Hence we got Linux for the […]