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• Post #2902978

  Forgot your root password? No problem! With #PackageKit <= 1.3.4 you can do all the fun root action on any Linux system you have local access to, no privileges required! Don't like that? Then PLEASE UPDATE your system ASAP to PackageKit >= 1.3.5 or any fixed distro package. Fixes for this vulnerability should already be available everywhere since today. You can read more about CVE-2026-41651 on the security researcher's blog: https://github.security.telekom.com/20...

• Post #2902977

  Just had to switch another system at a research lab from Plasma Wayland to X11 for the customers - the reason? Remote desktop and multi-window positioning. #RustDesk did not work on that network, and they were using #AnyDesk with Windows machines anyway, which has no Wayland support. And they were very annoyed that scientific apps did not position windows at the usual spots and predictably. Really not a good impression, and a pretty bad migration experience still 😕

• Post #2902976

  #Syntalos 3.0.0 is out, for all of your scientific data acquisition needs! This version drops Qt from all public interfaces (allowing wider use of its API), has a rewritten Python interface, rewritten IPC (using #iceoryx2), support for more scientific hardware, and a new network interface to manage a fleet of machines running one experiment. This release has breaking changes, existing projects may need adjustments! Get it at: https://syntalos.org/ Changes: https://syntalos.org/get/changes/

• Post #2902975

  I just made the first release of the now open-sourced LibWinpos today! This #Qt library allows clients to set window positions on Mac/Windows/X11 and Wayland. It works for the latter if the #Wayland compositor implements the experimental `xx-zones` protocol or the kwin-zones plugin is used on #KWin. The lib provides a single API for all platforms, graceful fallbacks, and is used in one internal proprietary project, as well as in one FOSS project now. Find it at: https://github.com/ximion/libw...

• Post #1332124

  I tried this AI thing - it very helpfully found a bug in my code and suggested a fix... It is a damn helpful tool sometimes, but it really feels so strange to me when people say the machines are "understanding" or "thinking". They aren't (yet...). Humans just gained a new tool to help them problem-solve, but they will still have to do that work, instead of giving up control to the statistics machine.

• Post #1332123

  I genuinely never received so many security vulnerability reports across multiple projects in such a short time. They usually are a very rare event. All of them were found with AI, with reports written by humans. All of them are valid so far. Damn. Lots of work to do!

• Post #1332121

  It took 11 years, but @razze and I managed to create a folder on Linux... https://blog.tenstral.net/2026/04/hello-projects-directory.html #freedesktop

• Post #408515

  @drakulix Hey! Can I find you at FOSDEM today somewhere? 😁

• Post #408513

  The xx-zones #Wayland protocol for client window-positioning hints has been merged as experimental protocol into w-p a few days ago! 🎉 This means toolkits and compositors are now able to implement it and experiment with it, and we will see how the protocol fares in the wild and is actually used by toolkits (which was a matter of great debate). It also permits all the prototype implementations to converge on one protocol, instead of shipping incompatible snapshots. 1/x https://gitlab.freedesk...

• Post #408512

  I had to build a Windows app (for scientists...) and while we do love to complain a lot about fragmentation and all the issues we have on Linux: Windows is a different kind of hell, with fragmentation just being at a different spot! Creating CI for Windows was absolute hell, vcpkg is nice, but without caching slows down automation a lot, trying to build an MSI package was a very bad idea (what a crazy design from a Linux perspective!), getting anything reproducible isn't easy... 1/2

• Post #408511

  Fun times in AppStream and Debian land: GNOME 2048 dropped the "GNOME" part from its app name, so that it is now just named "2048". Nobody expected app names to be plain integers, so when this value is written to a JSON/YAML file by libappstream's C code, it writes/reads a str, but type-aware parsers (in Python) parse it as int. In Debian's downstream tooling, something that should be str is suddenly an int and fails validation. This in turn h...