Linux Mint shortcuts that made me stop reaching for the mouse
I switched my daily driver to Linux Mint about two years ago after a stretch of macOS that left me wanting more control over my own machine. The first week, I was…
Open Source
Articles about open source software and projects
64 articles
Synaptic deserves a modern successor, and here’s why
I have been running some flavor of Debian or Ubuntu on a personal machine for around fifteen years. Synaptic (the GTK graphical package manager that used to ship by default on Debian-based…
I retired Nextcloud for something that actually loads fast
I had been running Nextcloud on a Synology DS923+ for about three years when I finally admitted I was not using it. The web UI took five to eight seconds to load…
Fedora on a Pixel, no Red Hat strings attached
I spent a long weekend flashing PocketBlue onto a spare Pixel 7a. PocketBlue is a community project that builds immutable Fedora images (an “immutable” image is one where the root filesystem is…
I swapped Slack for open source. The team did not revolt.
I switched our small consulting team’s chat off Slack about four months ago. The reason was not the price. The reason was that Slack had trained us into a state of low-grade…
Gitea runs your repos fine on a Pi or a $5 VPS
I self-hosted (ran on my own server rather than using a third-party service) Gitea for about eight months before I wrote this down. The reason for the wait is that the first…
Ubuntu’s AI bet is staying out of your face, and that’s the point
I read Jon Seager’s post on the Ubuntu Discourse about where AI is going in Ubuntu, and the part that stuck with me was the sentence: “Ubuntu won’t become an AI product.”…
Xubuntu 26.04 LTS, reviewed by someone who keeps it installed
Xubuntu 26.04 LTS: Best New Features Xubuntu 26.04 LTS (codenamed “Resolute Raccoon,” a long-term-support release of the lightweight Ubuntu flavor that uses the Xfce desktop environment instead of GNOME) shipped on April…
3 key open source challenges in developing countries
3 key open source challenges in developing countries I spent two years working on open-source deployment projects in West Africa and Southeast Asia, and the patterns I saw on the ground are…
Test your Drupal website with Cypress
Testing a Drupal site with Cypress, the way I wish someone had shown me I have been writing Drupal code on and off for about six years, and the part of the…