And we’ve finally reached 2026! I wish you all lots of nice Free Software contributions and good news regarding sustainability. Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-01.

How We Lost Communication to Entertainment

Tags: tech, social-media, communication, community

Indeed, social media even the fediverse isn’t really about communication or community, it’s about consuming content.

https://ploum.net/2025-12-15-communication-entertainment.html

I’m brave enough to say it: Linux is good now

Tags: tech, linux, foss, gaming

Another call for gamers to switch to Linux. Let’s see if the numbers are following in 2026.

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/linux/im-brave-enough-to-say-it-linux-is-good-now-and-if-you-want-to-feel-like-you-actually-own-your-pc-make-2026-the-year-of-linux-on-your-desktop/

Europe gets serious about cutting US digital umbilical cord

Tags: tech, politics, business, europe

Looks like Europe is finally waking up. It needs to pick up the pace now.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/22/europe_gets_serious_about_cutting/

A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet

Tags: tech, business, politics, DRM, attention-economy, privacy, gafam, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, technical-debt

Probably one of the most important talks of 39C3. It’s a powerful call to action for the European Union to wake up and do the right thing to ensure digital sovereignty for itself and everyone else in the world. The time is definitely right due to the unexpected allies to be found along the way. It’d be a way to turn the currently bad geopolitical landscape into a bunch of positive opportunities.

https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet

Beyond the Machine

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, philosophy, music, art, programming

Long but interesting piece. There’s indeed a lot to say about our relationships to tools in general and generative AI in particular. It’s disheartening how it made obvious that collaborative initiatives are diminishing. In any case, ambivalence abounds in this text… for sure we can’t trust the self-appointed stewards of the latest wave of such tools. The parallel with Spirited Away at the end of the article is very well chosen in my opinion. The context in which technologies are born and applied matters so much.

https://frankchimero.com/blog/2025/beyond-the-machine/

Thanks AI!

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, criticism

I think Rich Hickey hit that nail on the head.

https://gist.github.com/richhickey/ea94e3741ff0a4e3af55b9fe6287887f

My first meshtastic network

Tags: tech, radio, distributed, meshstatic

This is really fun tech. I need to find time to experiment with it.

https://rickcarlino.com/notes/electronics/my-first-meshtastic-network.html

Gaming Couch – Play Couch Co-Op Games Instantly

Tags: tech, gaming, indie, web

Looks like a neat option for quick party games.

https://gamingcouch.com/

Email Privacy Tester

Tags: tech, email, security, tools

This looms like a handy help to check your email client is doing the right thing and is not leaking information.

https://www.emailprivacytester.com/about

Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: Full Disclosure of Airoha RACE Vulnerabilities

Tags: tech, bluetooth, security

This is definitely a bad one, there seem to be quite a few popular devices affected. And there might be more devices affected of course.

https://insinuator.net/2025/12/bluetooth-headphone-jacking-full-disclosure-of-airoha-race-vulnerabilities/

A Modern Recommender Model Architecture

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, data-science

Very comprehensive resource to make your own recommender model.

https://cprimozic.net/blog/anime-recommender-model-architecture/

How uv got so fast

Tags: tech, rust, python, design, performance

Unsurprisingly, this is mostly not related to the use of Rust. The design choices are what male uv so fast.

https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/26/how-uv-got-so-fast.html

witr: Why is this running?

Tags: tech, processes, system, tools

Early days for this little system tool. I really like the idea though.

https://github.com/pranshuparmar/witr

TIL: Restarting systemd services on sustained CPU abuse

Tags: tech, system, processes, systemd

Might be an interesting pattern to avoid a service going awry.

https://taoofmac.com/space/til/2025/12/28/1400

Huge binaries

Tags: tech, system, assembly, hardware, cpu

Nice little introduction in the fascinating world of very large binaries.

https://fzakaria.com/2025/12/28/huge-binaries

On the Brokenness of File Locking

Tags: tech, linux, filesystem

It’s been written a while ago now… and it’s admittedly still a mess. Be sure to read the addendum as well.

https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/locking

Everything you never wanted to know about file locking

Tags: tech, unix, linux, filesystem, python

The situation about file locking is really complicated in the Unix systems family.

https://chris.improbable.org/2010/12/16/everything-you-never-wanted-to-know-about-file-locking/

By how much does your memory allocator overallocate?

Tags: tech, system, memory

A good reminder that allocators generally do more than you expect.

https://lemire.me/blog/2025/12/30/by-how-much-does-your-memory-allocator-overallocates/

The production bug that made me care about undefined behavior

Tags: tech, c++, memory

Careful of undefined behaviours. They can be reached fairly quickly. Especially in C++ and its initialisation maze.

https://gaultier.github.io/blog/the_production_bug_that_made_me_care_about_undefined_behavior.html

Software taketh away faster than hardware giveth: Why C++ programmers keep growing fast despite competition, safety, and AI

Tags: tech, c++, community, safety

This piece is (unsurprisingly) biased. Still there’s some truth there. C++ is here to stay, like it or not. The safety issues are overblown and are getting addressed. Now where the article is lacking is that the language has other issues. Also, will profiles ever become a real thing?

https://herbsutter.com/2025/12/30/software-taketh-away-faster-than-hardware-giveth-why-c-programmers-keep-growing-fast-despite-competition-safety-and-ai/

The Second Great Error Model Convergence

Tags: tech, exceptions, failure, go, zig, rust, type-systems

This is indeed interesting to see how the landscape evolved around error handling. There’s clearly a tension between exceptions and the result types we’ve seen popping up everywhere now.

https://matklad.github.io/2025/12/29/second-error-model-convergence.html

Rust Errors Without Dependencies

Tags: tech, rust, failure, exceptions

A bit too unapologetic regarding Rust API choices for my taste. Still, it gives a good idea on how error handling works in Rust.

https://vincents.dev/blog/rust-errors-without-dependencies/

TIL: serde’s borrowing can be treacherous

Tags: tech, rust, serialization, failure

You assumed you could deserialise in a zero copy fashion? Are you really sure about that? Think twice.

https://yossarian.net/til/post/serde-s-borrowing-can-be-treacherous/

Scratchapixel

Tags: tech, 3d, graphics, learning

Looks like a nice resource to get started with graphics and 3D.

https://www.scratchapixel.com/

A silly diffuse shading model

Tags: tech, 3d, graphics, shader

It’s not that silly. It can come in useful in some cases, for artistic or debug reasons.

https://lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/a-silly-diffuse-shading-model.html

You can’t design software you don’t work on

Tags: tech, design, architecture

I’m not sure I fully align with this piece. The core tenet of generic design advice vs concrete design advice makes sense though.

https://www.seangoedecke.com/you-cant-design-software-you-dont-work-on/

The 9 indispensable DEBUGGING RULES

Tags: tech, debugging

A good summary on the important rules to follow to debug something.

https://tpierrain.blogspot.com/2010/11/9-indispensable-debugging-rules.html

Pair Programming – What Works, What Breaks, & What’s Next

Tags: tech, pairing, team

Interesting insights about pair programming.

https://spin.atomicobject.com/ten-years-of-pair-programming/

The Rime of the Ancient Maintainer

Tags: tech, maintenance, sustainability

This is a good praise for the work of maintainers. They’re fighting off entropy and this should be well regarded.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-rime-of-the-ancient-maintainer/

Definition of Ready

Tags: tech, agile, product-management, tests

The definition of ready can be a big help avoiding too many questions about stories as they are implemented. They should be clear before hand.

https://blog.gdinwiddie.com/2014/03/27/definition-of-ready/

The Humanizing Work Guide to Splitting User Stories

Tags: tech, agile, project-management, product-management

This is a very good resource on the different ways to split user stories.

https://www.humanizingwork.com/the-humanizing-work-guide-to-splitting-user-stories/

Stop Using Story Points

Tags: tech, agile, estimates, project-management

Estimates are always the weak spot in project management in my opinion. Story points are generally confusing and there are better ways.

https://www.industriallogic.com/blog/stop-using-story-points/

Bye for now!

During the December holidays, the developers found time for a few bugfixes.

Read on for a look at development news and the Krita-Artists forum's featured artwork from last month.

Development Report

Luna fixed two crashes in the Stable branch; when undoing the Transform Tool during another transformation (bug; change), and when an embedded color profile is invalid. (bug; change).

Dmitry fixed loading TIFF files with JPEG compression (change).

In the Unstable branch, a handful more bugfixes were made:

Wolthera fixed parsing white-space-only text elements (bug; change), and issues setting text color (bug; change).

Carsten worked around multitouch gestures being cancelled on Xiaomi Pad devices (bug; change), and combined simultaneous canvas rotation and zoom messages (change).

Community Report

December 2025 Monthly Art Challenge Results

The winner of the "Chiaroscuro" challenge is…

steve.improvthis's two entries.

Ginger's Gift by steve.improvthis

Join This Month's Art Challenge!

For January's theme, last month's winner has chosen "Vintage Travel Poster", with the optional challenge of using the Assistant Tool. What kind of fantastic destination could you illustrate an advertisement for? Show others new horizons in the new year!

Featured Artwork

This month's featured forum artwork, as voted in the Best of Krita-Artists Nominations - November/December 2025:

Speedpaint 10. Apple by Tromplier

Barn at Sunset by Brian_Bigelow

"Save Me" Freddie Mercury and Brian May Artwork by deerblue

Charcoal head study by sognidigitali

Realistic pear oil painting by Younel0

Nominate and Vote For Next Month's Featured Artwork!

Participate in next month's nominations and voting to voice your opinion on the Best of Krita-Artists - December 2025/January 2026.

Krita is Free - But You Can Contribute!

Krita is free to use and modify, but it can only exist with the contributions of the community. A small sponsored team alongside volunteer programmers, artists, writers, testers, translators, and more from across the world keep development going.

If this software has value to you, consider donating to the Krita Development Fund. Or Get Involved and put your skills to use making Krita and its community better!

Nightly Builds

These pre-release versions of Krita are built every day.

Get the latest bugfixes in Stable Krita Plus (5.2.15-prealpha): Linux — Windows — macOS (unsigned) — Android arm64 – Android arm32 – Android x86_64

Or test out the latest Experimental features in Krita Next (5.3.0-prealpha). Feedback and bug reports are appreciated!: Linux — Windows — macOS — Android arm64 – Android arm32 – Android x86_64

They say never underestimate the bandwidth of a station-wagon full of tapes, but a USB 3.2 NVMe enclosure with a 1TB stick in it is pretty slick, also. I’ve been moving it back-and-forth between FreeBSD machines to get everything updated, and here’s some notes (for my future-self, mostly).

ZPool is cool

The stick has a GPT on it, and then a couple of partitions. I followed the example in the gpart(8) manpage under GPT. That creates a boot-partition, some swap, and a UFS partition – as if you want to create a bootable FreeBSD disk.

After that I put a rest-of-the-disk partition of type freebsd-zfs. Using glabel(8) I labeled that partition as zjail (ZFS pools traditionally start with the letter Z, and this one is going to be mostly-for-jails).

Then zpool can be used to create a pool from that labeled partition.

gpart add -t freebsd-zfs da0
glabel label zjail da0p4 
zpool create zjail label/zjail

Sure, it’s not got any redundancy, nothing special, but it’s 1TB I can carry around, and it’s easier than configuring NFS drives and/or WiFi on the laptop. To use the space, zpool import zjail (just don’t forget to zpool export zjail before shutting down).

etcupdate, ugh

Initially, I had a zjail/src filesystem, and under that some directories like src/ and ports/. It is possible to buildworld and buildkernel there, but etcupdate (which is a tool that updates the things in /etc/ based on the newly-built world) needs extra handholding for that, and the error message isn’t very informative. I forget what it is, even, because I ended up re-creating ZFS filesystems zjail/data/src and zjail/data/ports and then setting the mountpoint property for them to mount them in the traditional locations.

AMD graphics

The graphics drivers in FreeBSD are imported from Linux. There are some kernel shims, but basically we run the same graphics stack. However, the shim code is some tricky PCI-wrangling, and in my case with FreeBSD 15.0 I could get a text console, but loading the graphics drivers with kldload amdgpu would panic the kernel.

There are issues #391 and #393 which look similar to the panic that I would see. Bjorn has a proposed patch which simplifies the PCI-wrangling a little (to my eyes, anyway). I applied the patch and rebuilt “all the things”, after which both slightly-older (drm-66-kmod) and newer (drm-latest-kmod, which corresponds to Linux 6.9) drivers seem to work.

I imagine some fixes will land soon, because “AMD graphics just doesn’t work” does not seem like a long-term sustainable situation. With the fixes applied, I have a working graphics stack, so …

KDE Plasma Wayland on FreeBSD 15

Assuming the graphics stack works, then KDE Plasma can be installed with pkg install plasma6-plasma . You can’t do much with only Plasma and no applications at all, so pkg install konsole is recommended as well.

After that “it just works”, at least for the way that I use KDE Plasma. It takes a few clicks to change the settings to what I actually want (e.g. CTRL is next to the letter A) but after that it’s … just the usual KDE Plasma session, which looks like this in KInfoCenter:

This is a recipe post. Allergens: contains gluten, lactose, and alcohol.

The oliebol is a Dutch thing for new year’s eve. From mid-November you can find stalls in front of supermarkets, at the home-improvement store, outside the mattress store, in squares everywhere. The oliebollenkraam. And then the boxes of Koopman’s Oliebollen Mix start blocking the aisles at the supermarket, and the 5 litre jugs of frying oil appear on shelves. More information about oliebollen (and how as a food-product they’re not limited to the Netherlands) can be found on the internet.

It’s a thing.

At new year’s eve, the neighbours at the end of my little street get together – Adriaan, Adriaan, Antoon, and whoever else shows up – to fry oliebollen under my car port. Each year our getup gets a little more fancy, with better screening from the wind, improved lighting, what have you. There’s a fire to keep us warm, music (Snob 2000 is a good pick), and whatever weird-ass alcoholic beverages we’ve collected this year. Slovenian “Punch” liqueur? Elster kruitenbitter? Maracuja cream? Lychee fizz? Pour it.

Here’s what I made this year, since I don’t use the boxes of mix. The mix is good enough, but there’s some joy to be had in do-it-yourself. Besides, as a daily baker-of-bread I have everything in-house anyway. Recipe is good for about 20 boils, depending on the size of the spoon used to spoon the batter into the deep-fryer.

Volkoren Herfstbok Oliebollen

Wets:

• 250ml Grolsch Herfstbok, warmed up in the microwave (about 1min at 600W)
• 250ml milk, also warmed up

Drys:

• pinch of salt
• 8g (a small scoop) brown sugar
• 6g (a heaping teaspoon) dry yeast
• 250g whole wheat flour (for bread; the local windmill adds a little extra gluten and ascorbic acid)
• 250g white flour (patentbloem from the supermarket)

Lumps:

• 125g of raisins or currants, soaked in warm water and then drained

Mix the wets. Mix the drys. Mix the drys into the wets and stir to a smooth(-ish) batter. Stir in the lumps. Let rise for at hour or a little more at 40℃. Fry spoonfuls (I have a small soup-ladle that yields a nice size) at 180℃ for 5 minutes, flipping them in the hot oil after about 3 minutes to brown them nicely on both sides.

Volker mentioned that we need better blog post coverage of events, so hereby I’m doing my part :)

I attended the yearly 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3), together with a number of KDE people and my local hackerspace Spline.

This year I wanted to attend a few more talks live and in person, which worked somewhat well. I’ll include a list of talks in the end, in case you are looking for some ideas for talks to watch on media.ccc.de.

Just like last year, I spend a large amount of time at the KDE assembly. Once again, we were part of the Bits & Bäume Habitat. My initial worries about our new location being being in a fairly dark hall instead of the bright and very visible area near the central stairs turned out to be unjustified. We received tons of great feedback and had many nice and motivating conversations with other developers and users.

Victoria started a Konqi hotline service on the Congress phone network, which was in high demand.

The most important activity for me at Congress was meeting some Transitous contributors I had not yet talked to in person. It was great to meet you all.

There were also multiple opportunities to connect with GNOME developers and designers. We identified some low-level components that we might be able to share. We exchanged our ideas for making contributing as easy as possible for new contributors, a topic which GNOME is doing fairly well at as far as I can tell.

Projects

Later on, the KDE assembly turned into a (very small) mini-KDE-Sprint. We shipped much improved maps in KDE Itinerary, based on the MapLibre project. This allows us to render vector-based tiles, which means they can be displayed at any size without visible pixels. Zooming in and out should also be much smoother. This should also fix the pixelated rendering at certain zoom level that sometimes showed with the previously used map. Another advantage is, that the map now shows labels in the local language as well as English. This makes the map much more useful in case you cannot read a locally used script. In the future, we might even be able to use map tiles that can display labels in your preferred language. A big Thanks to Volker, Carl and Tobias who helped with bundling and testing MapLibre for Android.

Afterwards, we looked into options for making a more general KDE maps application, but this will take a bit more work. However, we already have a number of great components, which should make this much easier, such as the code for accessing public transport data known from KDE Itinerary, KPublicTransport, the library for reading opening hours (KOpeningHours) and our library for accessing weather forecasts, KWeatherCore. That leaves this as mostly a matter of tying together all of these components in a nice UI. However, the Qt bindings for MapLibre don’t currently expose enough details for us to do that, so some preparation is required.

I also managed to work on a few long-standing tasks in Transitous. It is now possible to add manual configuration options to public transport feeds in France, which used to be overwritten by a script. Additionally, it is now possible to automatically add all feeds for a country from the Mobility Database, which should make adding new countries a lot easier.

Sessions

• Railway-bubble Meetup Meetup of people interested in a diverse list of railway-adjacent topics. I joined the subgroup interested in crowd-sourcing GPS positions of trains, where I presented the minimal prototype I built for Transitous.
• Transitous Meetup We met with some users of the Transitous API and apps, and exchanged ideas for future improvements. A major topic was support for accessibility features, like considering elevator status in routing. We also discussed possible ways to improve the accuracy and details of data in Germany, where schedules go through a long pipeline that loses details and introduces long delays in the delivery of changes. Thanks to Julius for organizing and moderating this.

Talks

• Zentrum für Politische Schönheit: Ein Jahr Adenauer SRP+ und der Walter Lübcke Memorial Park - A quite fun and hopeful talk, considering the broader topics covered, about the work of a political art collective in Germany.
• All my Deutschlandtickets gone: Fraud at an industrial scale Investigation into different kinds of fraud patterns based on Deutschlandtickets.
• Human microservices at the Dutch Railways: modern architecture, ancient hardware? - Insights into the operations of Dutch Railways
• Infrastructure Review - Interesting statistics on the huge scale of infrastructure involved in the Congress

As you can see, I still left a lot to watch online over the following few days.

Here comes Kaidan 0.14.0! It includes some great new features and fixes!

Most of the work has been funded by NLnet via NGI Zero Entrust and NGI Zero Commons Fund with public money provided by the European Commission.

Advanced Media Sharing

It is now possible to select media to be shared while being offline. Once you are connected, all media is automatically uploaded. Even downloads can be enqueued to be started as soon as you are online. In addition, ongoing transfers are canceled on disconnecting and automatically restarted once connected again. Up- and downloads can be manually canceled and restarted as well.

Filtering XMPP Providers for Account Creation

Kaidan’s manual registration now allows to filter all XMPP providers by various properties. For example, you can choose whether only providers are shown that store their data in a specific country or whose service runs on renewable energy. That is possible because Kaidan uses the data from XMPP Providers.

Highlighted Messages

Messages are now precisely highlighted on various actions. A border is displayed around a message if you open its context menu, search it, or jump to if from a reply. That makes it possible to quickly see the relevant message.

XMPP URIs

If you received an XMPP URI such as xmpp:alice@example.org, you can paste it directly into the field for adding a new contact. There is no need to remove any characters that are required to be machine-readable. The same applies to XMPP group chat URIs.

Changelog

There are several other improvements. Have a look at the following changelog for more details.

Features:

• Keep draft messages on top of pinned/unpinned chat list items (pehg)
• Optimize thumbnail creation (fazevedo)
• Display border around searched/referenced message instead of bar (melvo)
• Display border around message if its context menu is shown (melvo)
• Highlight message’s avatar if hovered (melvo)
• Display provider chat (used for welcome messages and service announcements) as such (melvo)
• Always display same name and proper avatar initials for notes chats (melvo)
• Allow to cancel downloads/uploads (fazevedo)
• Allow to restart canceled uploads (fazevedo)
• Allow to resend failed message via context menu (melvo)
• Retrieve support addresses from server instead of provider list (XEP-0157: Contact Addresses for XMPP Services, XEP-0128: Service Discovery Extensions) (melvo)
• Allow adding contact by entering XMPP URI (including authentication of OMEMO 2 keys) (melvo)
• Allow joining group chat by entering XMPP URI (melvo)
• Add option for allowing SASL PLAIN (needed for servers using LDAP) to custom connection settings (melvo)
• Add filtering options to choose provider for registration (melvo)
• Cancel file transfers on disconnecting from server (fazevedo)
• Add support for offline media sharing queue (fazevedo)
• Restart downloads canceled on logout once logged in (melvo)
• Remove all related data on message removal (such as reactions and media) (melvo)

Bugfixes:

• Fix displaying message reaction details (melvo)
• Fix adding unneeded separator on mention after new line (melvo)
• Wrap hint for actions needing user to be connected to server (melvo)
• Fix displaying icons on Windows (pehg)
• Fix adding new line at cursor position (melvo)
• Ensure that own encryption devices are not removed if notes chat is removed (melvo)

Notes:

• Kaidan requires KIconThemes (for Windows) now
• Kaidan requires Qt6GuiPrivate (for Qt 6.10 or above) now
• Kaidan requires Qt 6.7 now
• Kaidan requires QXmpp 1.13 now

Download

• Source code (.tar.xz) (sig signed with 04EFAD0F7A4D9724)
• Linux (Flatpak on Flathub)

Or install Kaidan for your distribution:

Last week on Dec 26 we had the yearly family admin day and a day later 39C3 (the 39th Computer Chao Congress) started. I usually try to watch interesting talks about security, reverse engineering and hardware. Most if not all I wanted to join are available as recordings and I will add a list of the ones I enjoyed most.

While watching the talk about the End-of-10 campaign (I have met Joseph at Akademy 2024 in person) I was reminded at one spot to my job as family admin. When the presenters referred to the administration of a Linux system compared to a Windows one. I got reminded of chats with folks in my town who talked about “re-installing Windows” a few times during the year because something was broken. I don’t remember when I last re-installed one of the family computers.

Bringing Linux closer to the family already started many years ago. I started out using Linux already in the last millennium. My wife at the time used a Windows 2000 system. At some point (seems to be usual for Windows systems) I needed to install a fresh system. That was the time, when I installed OpenOffice and told my wife that this is the word processor to be used in the future. Of course, she asked why I hadn’t installed the MS Suite, but when you tell someone with legal training that we don’t have a license, that answers the question without further inquiry. So it was Windows 2000 with OpenOffice as word processro and spreadsheet program and Pegasus Mail as mail reader.

At some point the hard drive of this computer broke and I was lucky to be able to rescue the most important files off of it. Because I did not have a replacement drive at hand, I simply setup a TFTP bootable Linux system keeping all the files on the network drive on the Linux server in my house. This allowed me to use the same box but without a hard drive. So this hard drive crash in the early 2000s allowed me to introduce my wife to Linux.

When my kids got into the age to go to grammar school, they have seen me working on the computer during our summer vacation and also wanted to play with it. Since I did not have games with me, I installed KTouch, a typewriter trainer for learning to touch type for them. They had a lot of fun and actually learned how to touch type in the following weeks.

Later on, when they got their own computers, it was clear to install a Linux system, because they were already used to it. They liked writing stories of all kinds and used LibreOffice for it. I had a few arguments with teachers at their school why we don’t have the usual widespread tools. I remember one time though, when my daughter came home and reported, that they now have new white boards at school. Due to German bureaucracy, the hardware was financed but the money for application software licenses (beyond the operating system) was not included in the budget. So one of the teachers simply installed free software like the OpenOffice suite and the problem was solved. Well, only to some extent, because the other teachers did not know how to operate this software. This was the time, when my daughter – out of the sudden – gained a big advantage.

Later, she enrolled in university to study computer science and bought herself a new computer. A Samsung Book 2 with a pre-installed operating system (guess which one). She was playing around with it for some time when she came to me and said “Daddy, please install some real software on it. I can’t use it the way it is”. I had a bit of a hard time to find the right Linux distro which already supported it at the time but we got it working. And she was more than happy when we ported all the data from her old laptop over. Today, five years later, she is still using it after a few updates of the operating system. Oh, 3 months after she enrolled, she withdrew again to start a career as paramedic.

My mom on the other hand, uses Linux also for more than 15 years now. At one point, she told me that she needs a new computer and asked if I could provide support for it. I told her, that I would only provide support if we will install Linux on the computer. At first, she was a bit scared, but today she is happy that I can provide even remote support from the other end of the world and that things are simply working.

All in all, coming back to the End-of-10 campaign, I see that I am not affected by all of this. All – well most of all – of my family members are already using Linux for a long time. Of course I made sure to install KDE as the desktop environment and that they have KMyMoney to maintain their finances

Thanks for reading until here. The post got longer than expected. And since I promised to leave links to the 39C3 talks (and one from 37C3 and 38C3 each which need to be watched in series) here they come:

37C3

• Reverse engineering a train to analyze a suspicious… and it’s follow-up on

38C3

• We’ve not been trained for this: life after the Newag DRM disclosure

39C3

• A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet
• All my Deutschlandtickets gone: Fraud at an industrial scale
• To sign or not to sign: Practical vulnerabilities in GPG & friends
• Hacking washing machines
• KIM 1.5: Noch mehr Kaos In der Medizinischen Telematikinfrastruktur (TI)
• Who cares about the Baltic Jammer?
• Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: A Key to Your Phone
• Excuse me, what precise time is It?
• Schlechte Karten – IT-Sicherheit im Jahr null der ePA für alle
• Pwn2Roll: Who Needs a 595€ Remote When You Have wheelchair.py?
• FeTAp 611 unplugged
• How To Minimize Bugs in Cryptography Code
• Spectre in the real world: Leaking your private data from the cloud with CPU…
• Celestial navigation with very little math
• BitUnlocker: Leveraging Windows Recovery to Extract BitLocker Secrets
• “End Of 10”: How the FOSS Community is Combatting Software-Driven Resource and Energy…

All 39C3 recordings.

My initial post on Ni! OS gained more interest than I expected. Any time I jokingly do something, people react to it more than when I do something serious. :)

As a reminder, KDE Ni! OS is not a distribution, but a configuration for NixOS that aims at providing a ready-made immutable system for KDE users and developers with similar features to those of proper immutable KDE distributions.

If the Google search AI tells you it is a distribution, do not trust it:

Further, if the Google search AI tells you Ni! OS is a code name for KDE Linux, do not trust it:

Repository

The project got a repository at invent.kde.org which is currently in a very rough/bare state. Could be useful to existing NixOS users, but has a long way to go to become a proper resource on how to install and use Ni! OS.

Logo

NixOS has its own (quite cool, if you ask me) logo which doesn’t suite the comical image Ni! OS is trying to achieve.

For this reason, Ni! OS now has a proper custom logo – representing a – a shrubbery! – one that looks nice, and not too expensive.

It is also meant to represent the way NixOS achieves immutability. Many packages are present on the system, but hidden from the plain sight as they belong to the previous system versions or are just hidden-from-the-user dependencies of other packages.

After my talk about TeX syntax-highlighting font at TUG2025 conference, then vice-president of TeX Users Group, Boris Veytsman approached me with a proposal to develop a Math counterpart for the beautiful Arsenal font designed by Andrij Shevchenko.

What followed was a deep dive into the TeXbook to learn about math font parameters, OpenType Math specification, and related documentation & resources. Fortunately, FontForge has really good support for editing Math tables; and the base font used (KpMath-Sans by Daniel Flippo) already had all the critical parameters set (which needed slight adjustments). I started the development of Arsenal Math by integrating the glyphs for Latin letters, Arabic numerals, some symbols etc. and with proper scaling & stem thickness corrections, for regular, bold, italic and bolditalic variants, plus math calligraphic letters. In addition, a lot of Math kerning (known as ‘cut-ins’ in OpenType parlance) was added to improve the spacing.

Being an OpenType font — XeTeX, LuaTeX or some Unicode math typesetting engine (e.g. MS Word) is required to use Arsenal Math. Boris did testing and provided many feedback, and Vaishnavy Murthy graciously reviewed the glyph changes I made. The CTAN admins were quite helpful to get the font accepted into the repository. There is a style file and fontspec file supplied with the fonts to make the usage easy. The sources are available at RIT fonts repository.

Boris also donated funding for the project, but he had already paid me many folds by mailing The TeXbook autographed by Donald Knuth for me, so I requested the LaTeX devfund team to use funding for another project. Karl Berry suggested to write an article about the development process, which is published in the issue 46:3 of the TUGboat journal, and has a lot more technical details.

The learning experience of Math typesetting internals, and contributing to the TeX ecosystem has been a fulfilling spare-time work for me in 2025. Many thanks to all those involved!

We achieved significant milestones during 2025 on the Ocean design system for Plasma. Here is a video recap of all of the things that happened.