Linux Magazine March 2025

Dear Reader, The business universe changed a little during the pandemic, and the fact is, it hasn’t fully changed back. We’re in unfamiliar spaces – the working world is clearly not like it was in the past, but did we actually choose these spaces we’re in, or are we just here by default? Business leaders are considering these questions now as they contemplate a return from the work-from-home policies initiated during the pandemic years. According to a recent report in Business Insider [1], Amazon’s sweeping return to office mandate didn’t go as planned. Employees reported full parking lots and not enough desks, with employees working out of lunchrooms and needing to tie up meeting spaces for private phone calls. It is almost as if they had never done a head…

AlmaLinux 9.5 64-bit AlmaLinux is a leading community-based alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Its releases are binarycompatible with RHEL rather than sharing the same code. Developed independently of RHEL, AlmaLinux includes hardware support that is not included in RHEL. Originally developed as a replacement for the discontinued CentOS, AlmaLinux’s version numbers continue CentOS’s numbering system. AlmaLinux 9.5 adds. NET 9.0 and BIND 9.18 to its collection of toolkits. However, like most point releases, the 9.5 release is mostly concerned with updates of existing packages. These include numerous toolkits, application streams, performance tools and debuggers, and performance monitors. Also featured in the 9.5 release are the usual security updates and device monitors not included in RHEL. For a complete list of these changes, see https://wiki.almalinux.org/release-notes/9.5.html#changelog. Manjaro Gnome 24.2 64-bit…

Plasma 6.3 Ready for Public Beta Testing Plasma 6.3 is ready for beta testing, and it has plenty to offer by way of new fea-tures and improvements over current offerings. According to the official blog post (https://blogs.kde.org/2025/01/11/this-week-in-plasma-final-plasma-6.3-fea-tures/) from the KDE team, there are updates to Bluedevil, Breeze, Breeze-gtk, Discover, DrKonqi, Flatpak permissions, and much more. After picking through the list, some of the more exciting changes include a new UI for cloning panels that could make it considerably easier to create the exact desktop UI you need; improved Do Not Disturb functionality; a new desk-top context menu entry, Show Target; more consistency with close buttons throughout Plasma; an improved look for desktop widgets (with them now being slightly translucent to give them a more modern look); and plenty of bug…

There Are Standards and Standards One of the most bizarre areas of kernel development lies in the relationship between the kernel and the compiler. Since the creation of Linux at the start of the 1990s, there have been wars fought between the developers of these two projects. In one such case, Linus Torvalds refused to recognize any GNU C Compiler (GCC) version after a certain date, on the grounds that later versions produced bad machine code. Relationships have become a lot less strained between the two projects since then. However, the question of mending fences does sometimes arise. And it’s not always clear whether a problem in the Linux kernel would be best solved by changing the kernel source code or changing the compiler source code. Sometimes the best answer…

The groove-billed ani, which is native to Mexico, is a bird that builds its nests communally in small groups. Although these cute little birds have a tongue twister of a name in English, the Mexicans simply call them Pijuls. Pijul is also the name of a relatively new version control system created by Pierre-Étienne Meunier and Florent Becker [1]. Like the groove-billed ani, the Pijul version control system focuses on distributed teamwork. Pijul is also extremely fast and easy to use, and it does away with some of the problems that haunt Git users. At least that’s the full-bodied promise of the makers. At first glance, working with Pijul actually seems surprisingly simple: After you have registered all files with the version management system by typing pijul add *,…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a cur-rent technology buzzword. It was inevitable that AI would find its way into a Linux distro. Among the first signs were Warp, a ter-minal that transfers tasks to its AI and uses AI instead of man pages [1], and Fe-dora’s ongoing debate on how to incor-porate AI [2]. But perhaps the most sig-nificant indication is that in December 2024, MakuluLinux, a distribution that is basically a showcase for AI [3,] was listed on D-stroWatch. For those who are curious about AI, or would like to incor-porate AI into their computing, Makulu-Linux is one of the easiest tools available, with extensive video documentation and examples of emerging possibilities. MakuluLinux takes its name from the isiXhosa and isiZulu word for “big” or “boss,” which is often used…