A comm dedicated to the fight for free software with an anti-capitalist perspective.
The struggle for libre computing cannot be disentangled from other forms of socialist reform. One must be willing to reject proprietary software as fiercely as they would reject capitalism. Luckily, we are not alone.
$CURRENT_YEAR, take Linux Mint for a spin. If you're ready to take the plunge, flock to Fedora! If you're a computer hobbyist and love DIY, use Arch, NixOS or the many, many other offerings out there."A such simpler time" 
I love having Amazon dot com glued onto my screen 
Love having the power button be so small, it helps my clicking reflexes 
context
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, the last release with Canonical's unity desktop on top of xserver before they came to their senses and went with GNOME. 
As the sun continues to set on the X11 display protocol, X.Org - the premier implementation - has been forked by a former developer who accuses its maintainers of "abandoning the project, and letting it rot forever."
He's not exactly wrong. X.Org is essentially mothballed. It is an enormous, complicated piece of deprecated infrastructure, with a very limited amount of resources and experienced maintainers. The corporations which sponsor Free Software development don't particularly care about desktop end-users, and the resources which are being spent on desktop experience are largely being spent on Wayland compositors. On the other hand, it appears many of his commits on X.Org were reverted for sloppy management of licensing / attribution, as well as some regressions which were introduced.
It is worth noting that when Wayland was introduced in 2008, X.Org developers were among its biggest advocates and contributors. The writing has been on the wall for a long time now, and the work of building an alternative is mostly complete.
That said, Wayland is not at all a 1 to 1 replacement for X, and like with the introduction of Systemd, there are a lot of people with strong feelings about this, a lot of conspiracy mongers cranking out YouTube slop. People throwing out accusations about how "they" are trying to ruin Linux yet again.
I personally have fond memories of X. Especially in the later days when the whole "unix porn" phenomenon bloomed and there was a sort of renaissance of customization. I miss herbstluftwm terribly. That said, I've been running Wayland for something like 6 years now and I do not really get why people hate it. It works fine, and it actually has a future.
Update:
It's also worth noting the author of this fork is a chud. Some excerpts from the README
This fork was necessary since toxic elements within Xorg projects, moles from BigTech, are boycotting any substantial work on Xorg, in order to destroy the project, to eliminate competition of their own products. Classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics.
This is an independent project, not at all affiliated with BigTech or any of their subsidiaries or tax evasion tools, nor any political activists groups, state actors, etc. It's explicitly free of any "DEI" or similar discriminatory policies.
Together we'll make X great again!
This started as a post to ask a question I was stumped with. But in the process of writing the question, I solved the problem. rubber ducked myself without realizing it.
Anyway, GNU Emacs is cool, and I'm deep in the hole now. I might be able to make the transition to using it as my IDE at some point, but that seems to be involved, with language servers and all that.
One thing that was driving me a little crazy was the window behavior. I was able to solve that with a plugin called window-purpose which allows you to assign modes and buffers to a specific "purpose" and then lock the window into only showing new buffers based on that information. So I can have a main editing window where all editable file buffers appear, and a sidebar with some specific buffers locked into place. It can also save that window configuration and load it later. Which I use to standardize the window configuration every time I open Emacs.
Sadly, the Emacs community on Reddit is rife with AI content for some reason, and thus it is a pretty useless source of information. I don't really understand the subs fascination with running LLMs inside of Emacs. But I digress.
Org-Mode is pretty dope, and Org-Roam is even doper. I've used things like Logseq pretty extensively, but I eventually stopped using it as much, mainly because you're locked into using their interface/editor for the whole thing. It's nice being able to use Emacs for other text editing, and then jumping into an Org file and gaining all that functionality automatically.
I also wasn't a huge fan of the way the markdown files were generated in Logseq, where every file is just a massive unordered list on the backend. Now, I get that Org-Mode and Org-Roam are effectively the same thing, using a header hierarchy, but it feels a lot more deliberate, and you can enter text outside that hierarchy since you get to decide when to use the hierarchy or not.
In Logseq you're always working inside the hierarchy, which can be annoying when working externally and creating markdown files outside the Logseq application, intending them to be loaded by the system. What makes Emacs different is that I have access to all the underlying functions right inside the editor. I could use Emacs to extend Emacs' own functionality, life, while I'm using Emacs.
If I wanted to interact with an API endpoint and take it's output and feed it through an Org-Mode capture template, it likely wouldn't hard. Doing that in Logseq requires writing a plugin using its Javascript API in an external editor, and packaging it up, loading it into the software, testing within the software in developer mode, then going back to my code editor to address errors and refine the tool. The development loop is just way more cumbersome.
Anyway, I could go on and on. Is anyone else using Emacs here?
This post contains a canary message that's cryptographically signed by the official BusKill PGP release key
 |
|---|
| The BusKill project just published their Warrant Canary #010 |
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512
Status: All good
Release: 2025-06-16
Period: 2025-06-01 to 2026-05-31
Expiry: 2026-06-30
Statements
==========
The BusKill Team who have digitally signed this file [1]
state the following:
1. The date of issue of this canary is July 16, 2025.
2. The current BusKill Signing Key (2020.07) is
E0AF FF57 DC00 FBE0 5635 8761 4AE2 1E19 36CE 786A
3. We positively confirm, to the best of our knowledge, that the
integrity of our systems are sound: all our infrastructure is in our
control, we have not been compromised or suffered a data breach, we
have not disclosed any private keys, we have not introduced any
backdoors, and we have not been forced to modify our system to allow
access or information leakage to a third party in any way.
4. We plan to publish the next of these canary statements before the
Expiry date listed above. Special note should be taken if no new
canary is published by that time or if the list of statements changes
without plausible explanation.
Special announcements
=====================
1. We are changing from twice-yearly to once-yearly canaries
Disclaimers and notes
=====================
This canary scheme is not infallible. Although signing the
declaration makes it very difficult for a third party to produce
arbitrary declarations, it does not prevent them from using force or
other means, like blackmail or compromising the signers' laptops, to
coerce us to produce false declarations.
The news feeds quoted below (Proof of freshness) serves to
demonstrate that this canary could not have been created prior to the
date stated. It shows that a series of canaries was not created in
advance.
This declaration is merely a best effort and is provided without any
guarantee or warranty. It is not legally binding in any way to
anybody. None of the signers should be ever held legally responsible
for any of the statements made here.
Proof of freshness
==================
16 Jun 25 19:17:39 UTC
Source: DER SPIEGEL - International (https://www.spiegel.de/international/index.rss)
"Teacher Li": Catching Up with the Most Effective Chinese Regime Opponent
Firing at the Desperate: Palestinians Killed as They Gather to Receive Relief Supplies
Source: NYT > World News (https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/World.xml)
Live Updates: Israel Strikes Iranian State TV as It Expands Targets in Tehran
With No Clear Off-Ramp, Israel’s War With Iran May Last Weeks, Not Days
Source: BBC News - World (https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/world/rss.xml)
No further damage seen at Iran nuclear sites, global watchdog says
'Nowhere feels safe': Iranians on life under Israeli attacks
Source: Bitcoin Blockchain (https://blockchain.info/q/latesthash)
00000000000000000000f2c3a15949aac2f6d7bc153330a4fca496f68c8c4b21
Footnotes
=========
[1] https://docs.buskill.in/buskill-app/en/stable/security/pgpkeys.html
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Sa4k/6pswal3CYJSu+imbRmhoFnpv1pFZ1ch2b8k8K/1q727NkU=
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-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
The BusKill team publishes cryptographically signed warrant canaries on an annual basis.
Although security is one of our top priorities, we might not be able to inform you of of a breach if served with a State-issued, secret subpoena (gag order).
The purpose of publishing these canary statements is to indicate to our users the integrity of our systems.
For more information about BusKill canaries, see:
To view all past canaries, see:
BusKill is a laptop kill-cord. It's a USB cable with a magnetic breakaway that you attach to your body and connect to your computer.
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| Watch the BusKill Explainer Video for more info youtube.com/v/qPwyoD_cQR4 |
If the connection between you to your computer is severed, then your device will lock, shutdown, or shred its encryption keys -- thus keeping your encrypted data safe from thieves that steal your device.
Reasons to switch:
Hexbear-related reasons to switch:
After getting a new laptop with win 11 installed, and having to run all the tweaks to make it less obnoxious and disable all the annoyances, I started getting adds pop up in the corner after an update and decided enough was enough. I was forced to pay for that shit and it's serving me ads? Fuck off.
So I just installed Bluefin and it's been absolutely awesome. The things they have set up by default are pretty wonderful. Gnome is up with useful extentions to start with so I didn't have to bother tweaking it to my liking. There is also a KDE based version called Aurora, and the famous gaming spin called Bazzite has both KDE and Gnome versions. There is even a command that lets you easily switch between all the different ublue flavors.
It's an immutible distro, so it has a base you can't easily change, but it relies on flatpaks, appimages, homebrew, podman/docker, and distrobox for all the user apps you want, all set up to work by default. The gnome software center is populated by flatpaks, for example. Almost all of the sensible default apps are flatpaks that you can easily uninstall if you don't want them. And it keeps all of this up-to-date in the background, it checks weekly, and you just restart when convenient to upgrade. The last successful linux distro I installed and stuck with was debian with flatpaks, so I could have a stable base with more up-to-date apps, so it's a paradigm I like.
There is no traditional package manager unless you install one via distrobox, but flatpak and homebrew cover almost everything most people could want, really.
Want to install jellyfin media server or the ARR stack? Just open up podman-desktop and look for a docker images and then follow a set up guide. Want some command line bling? They have a custom command that installs a bunch of useful terminal apps from homebrew. The bluefin team basically listens to the userbase and then adds whatever they ask for by default if they can get it working, which includes a lot of peripheral support. The results are fantastic.
Previously I was messing around with NixOS, and I like how that works, but I quickly ran out of time to set up my own computer and kind of lost steam messing with it. The ublue distros offer similar functionality: you can create your own custom setup and make it wasy to clone, but you don't have to bother with that to get a usable experience. It's usable by default.
It doesn't support dual booting, because they are a small team and don't want to have to do tech support whenver windows screws up the boot manager, so if you want to install it and don't want to wipe your windows install you'll need a install on a seperate drive (an external drive works) and switch between installs when you boot up. It's a little more annoying, but it's a cleaner way to do things.
I've never had a linux install be this trouble free and sensibly set up by default. I'm very impressed and would recommend to anyone thinking of switching.
EDIT - I SOLVED THE PROBLEM LOL
i had a timeshift snapshot that was like 500GB because i had been including /home in my backups. fixed.
So, my system has been complaining that my main OS drive is almost completely full. However, I just deleted like 250GB of games off it to fix the problem. It's a 2TB SSD.
output of df says i only have 52GB free:
Dolphin file manager agrees. However, using Filelight, and my own reckoning, I can only account for 660GB of space used up.
even doing du -sh */ from / only seems to show about 1TB of space used on the disk. Where is my other ~800GB of space?
This is going to be a fairly simple post. I just want to share some of the things I've been enjoying on GrapheneOS lately, although they're not necessarily related to GrapheneOS and more of Android in general! Honestly, things have gotten pretty good for my use case recently:
Accrescent keeps getting updates and is getting better with each one! The app repository is still limited, but it's expanded to add a number of apps that I actually use. Best of all, they're the kind of apps that a lot of people would use. GrapheneOS ships their repo in the built-in app "store", which is also very nice! Here's what I've enjoyed using (and most of this I was already using, interestingly enough:
Auxio is a great and good-looking offline music player. It just works really well, supports the basic quality of life features, and fits in really well with the design philosophy of modern android. This is essentially what I listen to all of my music on, I really enjoy using it.
Organic Maps is still my favorite application for mapping! It's great for trails and walking, and is even great for driving to be honest (although it doesn't calculate traffic, which can be a deal-breaker for many, including me at times). However, it works when I need it for driving, and I will use it for when I'm moving around without a car. Another very great application.
IronFox is a newer project that seeks to continue the work of Mull, which unfortunately stopped receiving updates. I know just as much about it as I do any of the mobile firefox applications, but it seems to be the best. Mull was already way ahead of the others in terms of hardening, and IronFox continues that, which is nice. Everything I use seems to "just work" as well, so it seems like a great drop-in replacement for something like Firefox, Iceraven, or Fennec.
Molly is exactly what it says on the tin! It's an improved Signal app, and Accrescent comes with the FOSS version that strips the proprietary bits that I honestly can't see most people, if any people, using (while replacing with alternatives for what people do use). Molly also supports UnifiedPush, which is really nice for GrapheneOS notifications, and once I learned how to get it going, it works so smoothly! Molly also supports regular notifications that run with Google Play Services, and it also supports running in the background to send notifications (although this is a bit more of a battery drainer and is spotty, I would honestly just use UnifiedPush over this). Molly is great!
Accrescent also ships the basics! There's a really good-looking note application that follows modern android design, a flashlight application that allows for adjusting brightness and automatically flashing morse code, ExifEraser for cleaning metadata, and AppVerifier, which is quite useful when it comes to the second half of this :D
Obtanium ships the rest of the goods! AppVerifier from before makes the process of checking package integrity very simple, and Obtanium grabs the packages straight from a multitude of sources, from Github, to Gitlab, to Fdroid and even generic websites with APK links! Here's what I've got from here, although a lot of this hasn't changed since the last time I made a post similar to this idk when:
Breezy Weather continues to be the best weather app I have ever seen, period. Better than the proprietaries, better than the stock, and best of all, they have both the regular version and the fdroid version on their github, so you can use whichever you want!
Fossify is still great for a lot of the basic, although I've replaced a couple of these since last time (ex. notes). Still great for a clean and minimal phone, sms, calculator, calendar, etc. while being functional and FOSS.
PipePipe is the only thing that consistently gets around YouTube's efforts to block third-party clients and services, and it works great. It's a FOSS YouTube client that allows for easy ad-free viewing and easy downloading. It also supports a variety of other services, including PeerTube! If you've heard of Newpipe, it's very similar and started as a fork, though has diverged since, and as such is able to implement workarounds to blocking much faster than newpipe tends to.
ntfy is the greatest discovery of recent times. Remember when I was talking about UnifiedPush notifications before? This is it. It's seamless push notifications for anything from Molly to Element X (the everything client, enjoy my inside joke 
) , and it makes it so these apps don't have to run in the background (or can actually support push notifications in the case of Element X. This is honestly a must for any android user, especially if you're using applications that might support UnifiedPush, whether it's in addition to traditional push notifications through Google or exclusively UnifiedPush. It's genuinely great, has saved so much battery life already, and allows me to get notifications from my lovely friends over on the glorious matrix protocol.
But yeah, that's all I've got for now. I hope you liked my app showcase, it only took until my third or fourth post of this kind to finally get the wording right and not sound either condescending or elitist or whatever. It's never been my intention, I just want to share software that I enjoy, and I want you to use it if you find it interesting. Some of this might be more use-case or threat model specific, but a lot of these are just great for any user, and I mean any. So yeah, I hope you all have a wonderful day/night/dusk