The European Union is at it again and, as usual, taking direct aim at GREAT American Companies! After having fined Apple, for no reason at all, 15 Billion Dollars, Meta, 3 Billion Dollars, Amazon 2.5 Billion Dollars, and many others, we have just been informed that Google, a truly advanced and amazing group, has been fined yet another 1 Billion Dollars, without explanation. This brings the Google total to over 18 Billion Dollars! This illegal and highly discriminatory practice started at these high levels during the first year of the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration, but it's not going to continue during the Trump Administration. The United States of America is not a "PIGGYBANK" for Europe, nor will we allow it to be! Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that we will immediately initiate a 301 Investigation into the practice of "ROBBING" American Companies and, in turn, the American Taxpayer. The European Union will pay a very big price for this illegal and highly unethical conduct, which I have consistently warned them about. The penalties will be entirely reversed and, we anticipate, a substantial TARIFF to be placed on them at the earliest possible moment.
So it will not play cyberpunk 2077, but if you prefer opensource drivers for your hardware, nouveau is certainly an option for some opensource gaming.
Using kernel 7.0 from debian backports, I could run opensource classics requiring 3D acceleration flawlessly with nouveau:
I would like to highlight here how good is LibreQuake.
It is an horror cosmic 3D shooter, using the Quake engine, but with newly made game assets under the GPL, thus creating a 100% opensource Quake-based first person shooter. Although their documentation mentions it is a work in progress, as of 2026 I find it very much of a finished product.
Dismal shores, my preferred game level.
I missed Quake in the 90s, happy to discover such a classic today.
WhatsApp is rolling out a new design for message bubbles on iOS, reports WaBetaInfo. The platform's message bubbles are rounder than before with a softer shape – similar to iMessage – while shared media files appear without the original borders, giving them a cleaner look.
One of the features of systemd that is most controversial is the option to kill user processes when the user logs out. That initially killed screen/tmux/nohup processes too. In recent Debian releases the default configuration of systemd-logind (the login manager for systemd) is to allow processes to keep running, the configuration file /etc/systemd/logind.conf has an option KillUserProcesses that can be enabled to have user processes killed. If you do that then there are options to only kill processes for certain users and to exclude some users (default to excluding root). If using that option you can apparently use a systemd unit to start screen which prevents it being killed on logout.
This is a very handy feature for some particular user cases. One situation was that I was supporting some people who weren’t very good at computers on a system running KDE and some KDE processes would linger. So the option of logout and login again to deal with an issue of akonadi or some other KDE service misbehaving didn’t work. On that system I enabled the option to kill user processes which reduced the number of problems they had while not requiring rebooting.
It is widely believed that the “linger” feature is required to allow screen/tmux/nohup to work, in Debian (and probably most distributions) that is not the case. It might be that some combinations of configuration requires “linger” to allow screen/tmux to work but I am not interested in trying to discover them. Of all the people I have directly supported for Linux desktop use (which numbers in the hundreds) none of them have had the ability to use screen/tmux and also the cluelessnes that makes me want to automatically kill their processes when the logout.
You can enable and disable “linger” for your own account with the following commands if polkit is installed and in a typical configuration:
loginctl enable-linger loginctl disable-linger
If running as root you can enable and disable it for another user with the following commands:
loginctl enable-linger $ACCOUNT loginctl disable-linger $ACCOUNT
There doesn’t seem to be any documented way of discovering if an account has linger enabled or for listing accounts that have it, it seems that “ls /var/lib/systemd/linger” is the only option.
On a Debian system with close to default settings the processes won’t be killed on logout and the only difference “linger” makes is to start programs in the user’s context BEFORE they login. A friend was recently testing out a bunch of LLM programs on one of my servers and the account he used for that ended up with “linger” enabled, presumably one of the install scripts he ran was written on the assumption that enabling linger was necessary for nohup to work and it did so automatically without being asked.
One benefit I’ve found from this behaviour is on my laptop. I’m currently testing out new SE Linux policy on my laptop and rebooting it a lot. When I enabled linger on my account it caused the laptop to connect to wifi on boot without needing to login which is convenient. I can then ssh to it even when the X11/Wayland login configuration is broken.
I will leave it enabled after finishing these tests. Having background processes like Pipewire and Bluetooth start before I login will presumably make things slightly faster when I do login.
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In 2018 I reviewed a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen6 that was assigned to me for work [1].
In April last year I wrote about the failings of my Thinkpad Yoga Gen 3 and how I was going back to the Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 [2]. The Gen5 in question has 8G of RAM and a 1920*1080 display compared to 16G and 2560*1440 for the Yoga but runs reliably on battery without crashing. The Yoga in question has been used by relatives who don’t need to do much when on battery and is currently being used by a relative who runs Windows so the occasional crash is something they are used to.
In mid last year I bought a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen6 for $350 which has 16G of RAM and a 2560*1440 display. The higher resolution display is a significant benefit and while 8G of RAM is still usable for medium to heavy Linux desktop use it does cause problems sometimes. The new laptop I now have is significantly better than the one I had for work in 2018!
I realised that my previous review of that laptop was incorrect in one aspect, there are two USB-C ports it’s just that one may be covered by a rubber stopper when you get it. When I received this one the Ethernet dongle port was covered by a rubber stopper and the seller was unaware of the possibility of using a dongle and didn’t have such a dongle. It’s not a big deal as I have a collection of USB Ethernet devices but would still be handy to have while not worth the $20 it costs to buy one (a 2.5Gbit USB Ethernet device cost me $16 two years ago).
Today I saw a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen9 with 3840*2400 display and 16G of RAM for $550 on Facebook marketplace, which is a very tempting deal. 3840*2400 is 2.5* as many pixels as 2560*1440 while 2560*1440 is only 77% more pixels than 1920*1080. So if my eyes were able to properly distinguish pixels that that high DPI then the benefits of getting the 3840*2400 laptop would be greater than going to what I currently have from FullHD. But as a 1440p display in a 14″ form factor is already past the stage where I can see individual pixels the benefits of 4K are more about making curves more rounded which improves readability and allows slightly smaller font sizes but doesn’t give anything like the benefits that going from a FullHD desktop monitor to a 4K desktop monitor.
Also I have different usage patterns for my laptop than for my desktop. I use my laptop for reading blog posts and ebooks for which even FullHD would be fine as the amount of text that can be usefully displayed on screen isn’t that great. I also use my laptop for emergency sysadmin work, ssh to a server to restart a daemon, run ping while changing network hardware, and other things where I don’t have a lot of text on screen.
I also use my laptop for light coding tasks while watching TV. It’s not possible to effectively do complex debugging tasks while watching TV or while using a small screen. But a very large portion of coding time is spent dealing with things like testing builds with different versions of libraries, applying patches to a new upstream release of software, fixing issues related to functions being renamed, testing to see if a new version has really fixed a bug it’s supposed to fix, and other things that don’t require a lot of skill.
I am not claiming that 4K displays aren’t great for laptops. Merely that at the current time it’s not worth $550 of my money.
I like the Thinkpad X1 Carbon line and plan to continue buying them as they get cheap.
The Gen11 is the first one to have a minimum of 16G of RAM, the reason this is important to me is that the ones I buy aren’t the lowest model because I want more than the minimum display resolution. As people who get above the minimum spec in one area tend to get above the minimum in others that means that there will be plenty of Gen11s on the market with 32G of RAM when I’m ready to buy one of that era. Presumably by that time Linux software will have become more bloated and make me want more RAM. Yes soldered RAM has some downsides, but if you want an ultra-light laptop it’s a trade-off you need to deal with. One problem with the Gen11 is that the maximum display resolution is 2880*1800, it’s still a reasonable improvement over what I’ve currently got but not close to the 4K I desire.
The Gen12 has support for 8K display at 60Hz over Thunderbolt which is nice. By the time the Gen12 is in my price range it’s quite likely that I will have a monitor with higher than 5120*2160 resolution (the maximum video out resolution of Gen11 and previous models in the Thinkpad X1 Carbon range) on my desk.
The Gen13 still has 2880*1800 as the maximum resolution but has OLED as an option.
So it looks like a Gen9 or Gen10 may be ideal for me as they are the last ones in the Thinkpad X1 Carbon series to support 4K displays. Another option is the Thinkpad Yoga Gen8 which is of the same era as the Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen11 but has a 3840*2400 OLED touch screen, I might be able to get one of those cheap with the touch screen damaged.
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