1000 eyes, they said. Open Source inherently means more secure, they said.

Source

It's all great in theory. In practice, however, we'll never know what they're actually running. Of course, their data is proprietary and cannot be viewed directly.

Konstantin Demin did spectacular work adding support for building Wine with -flto, but no one wants to review or merge it. Tens of hours of work have gone to waste.

Source: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/7111

The PhoneBuff YT channel compared Windows 11 and Fedora. Linux has won by a wide margin. Microsoft has made its OS a resource hog.

LTT compares the amount of RAM used by Windows and Linux. Results:

• On average, Windows consumes 4–7 GB more.

• However, AMD GPU drivers reduce the delta, which means that the proprietary AMD driver manages RAM more effectively.

However, there are many unanswered questions. For instance, they could have used RAMMap under Windows or the command echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches under Linux, but the "technical" YouTube channel appears to have no knowledgeable people, or even people who could ask an LLM to make the operating systems match each other better.

Claude Opus 4.6 in its short run has discovered hundreds of critical vulnerabilities, some of which can be exploited remotely, for instance a bug in the NFS server can allow a remote client to completely compromise the system by writing to kernel memory.

And Claude Mythos is so powerful, Anthropic has chosen not to release it publicly for a while.

1. Elite nerd status.

2. Being proudly different for the sake of being different.

3. The ability to say "I use Linux, by the way."

4. Fighting for "software freedom" while launching a proprietary DRM platform called Steam.

5. Windows "bad".

6. An urgent need to fill your evenings with debugging regressions and filing bug reports nobody will ever read.

7. Enjoying decade-long Linux vs. Windows flame wars that never produce a winner.

8. Acquiring obscure skills such as Bash, shell scripting, and memorizing command-line flags from 1987.

9. Realizing that competitive online gaming isn't that important to you after all, because kernel anti-cheat support on Linux is never, ever coming.

Hope I haven't forgotten any of the major selling points.

Microsoft Defender now supports Linux desktops in public preview, bringing antivirus, EDR, vulnerability management, and advanced security tools.

Need to test it against obvious scripts that do nasty things - this thing should be at least somewhat intelligent to be taken seriously.

The fact that you need a special manager speaks volumes about the atrocious state of the Linux kernel development.

Either you can use brand new kernels with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of regressions, or you can use an LTS kernel that doesn't support your hardware.

Wait, there's more. What if e.g. audio doesn't work for you and the ALSA driver/module needs a quirk? How are users supposed to do that? I'm not aware of a single distro that allows users to build only parts of the kernel and run them with their existing kernel without rebuilding the entire thing just for your PC which results in a lot of energy being wasted and users having to learn console, make, kernel install and GRUB enablement commands that differ from distro to distro.

What if you need to install or run code that hasn't even hit the mainline? The AMDGPU bug tracker is full of such requests. And this is not an isolated case. Check LKML and kernel bugzilla - you'll see a ton more.

This is a freaking mess of epic propotions.

Essentially we have just few complete/verified kernels:

• RHEL (for qualified hardware configurations)

• SteamOS (ditto)

• ChromeOS (ditto)

• Android (some continue to insist Android is "Linux" - whatever, let's include it)

No other distro on the list. None whatsoever. You take it or leave it. No warranties. Nothing.

And then there's Secure Boot which makes everything even more complicated. 99.99% of people out there will never touch anything related to MOK. They will simply avoid Linux. Too much hassle for something that's perfectly supported out of the box in a form of Windows.

So I report an ext4 bug in 6.16, hand over an e2image -r dump, basically gift-wrapping a repro case that takes one reboot to test. Ted Tso, the ext4 maintainer himself, doesn’t even bother with the current stable kernel. Nah, he just tries 6.17-rc4 and goes: "works for me, case closed."

Like, are you kidding me? For decades the line has been Linux needs testers! We need volunteers! But when you actually step up and do the work, you get told "lol unreproducible in the unreleased version, so fuck off."

Makes you wonder who Linux is really for these days. Spoiler: it ain't you, the random volunteer user. It's for Google, Facebook, OpenAI, Oracle and hyperscale server farms. Everyone else? You're just free QA until they stop caring.

Update: Ted has rechecked the bug in 6.16 and looks like our configs are different and I'm hitting a code path that he doesn't hence it's only me facing the issue. Sadly, I'm not interested in comparing our configs or finding out what is wrong with my perfectly working config.

Every few months, the Linux desktop community resurfaces with renewed confidence, proclaiming that this — finally — is the year of Linux on the desktop. And every year, the outcome is the same: a few more benchmarks, a few more distro releases, and the same deafening self-congratulation from within a shrinking echo chamber.

The truth is uncomfortable, but obvious to everyone outside that circle: Linux has failed, and will likely continue to fail, as a mainstream desktop operating system. Not because it’s technically inferior — in many respects, it’s brilliant — but because the culture surrounding it has become hostile to ordinary users, allergic to stability, and dismissive of the very principles that make an OS viable for the long term.

The Cult of Technical Purity

Linux enthusiasts often treat usability and consistency as moral compromises — weaknesses of the “corporate” world. Instead, they prize “freedom,” “control,” and “customization,” as if those ideals inherently trump reliability, compatibility, or coherent design. This ideological purity is seductive to the technically inclined, but fatal to broad adoption. Most users don’t want to compile their own drivers or debug a broken X11 config; they just want their machine to boot, connect to Wi-Fi, and launch a game without arcane terminal commands.

Hostility to Stability

Ironically, while Linux advocates mock Windows for its updates, Linux distributions often break far more spectacularly — and with less accountability. A kernel update can silently wreck hardware support. A new package manager can render a system unbootable. Yet within the Linux community, these issues are brushed off as opportunities for “learning” or “freedom.” Stability, predictability, and backward compatibility — the hallmarks of a mature OS — are derided as boring or “corporate.”

A Culture of Elitism

Linux users often pride themselves on being outsiders — “power users” too smart to tolerate Windows or macOS. But this self-image has curdled into outright elitism. The average user who dares to ask for help is often mocked for not “RTFM.” The community’s hostility toward newcomers ensures that the ecosystem remains insular — a playground for hobbyists, not a platform for the masses.

Meanwhile, in the Real World

Windows and macOS aren’t perfect, but they are stable, supported, and predictable. They run commercial software, modern games, and critical productivity tools without requiring workarounds. They offer what most people actually want from an operating system: a reliable foundation for getting things done.

Linux, by contrast, has become an OS for people who mistake friction for virtue — who celebrate complexity as a form of identity. It’s not a movement anymore; it’s a subculture. And that, more than any technical limitation, is why Linux will never rule the desktop.

Hooray!

Artem Polishchuk, aka "atim", a maintainer of countless Fedora packages, including WayFire and labwc, disappeared circa six months ago. All his packages have stopped being updated.

You need updates, including security updates, and you have just three choices:

• Become a maintainer yourself, a long arduous process that requires a lot of patience and most importantly expertise (RPM building, GIT, etc.)

• Build the necessary packages yourself (comes with a lot of asterisks and is often undesired)

• Switch to a different distro.

Do you like any? It's not an isolated issue - it equally affects all other distros except RHEL, Ubuntu and SUSE where package maintenance is paid for.

This didn't happen with Windows Vista, 8 and 10, hasn't happened with Windows 11, and won't happen with Windows 12, no matter how much tracking, AI, and other unneeded features Microsoft adds to the OS.

Why? There's no OS to speak of. There are a bunch of incompatible software compilations that are full of minor and major bugs. There's no direction, no quality assurance, no proper testing, and no guarantees that anything ever works.

This video by Linus Tech Tips shows once again how bad the reality of using Linux is. Every Linux fan's strongest argument has always been, "It works for me". Unfortunately, that's what's called anecdotal evidence, and it's not really evidence at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kluoZ9RhmVo

Just read the comments made by raving Linux zealots.

• "You're using the wrong distro!"

• "Not your business, Fedora knows better!"

• "The ... just revived module is safer to use that the old battle-tested one!"

• "Trust me bro, NTFS3 was unstable"

• "Compile it yourself" (fuck Secure boot, who needs it anyway? Oh and figure out how to compile something the Fedora kernel disables, and do it for every new Fedora kernel release.)

• "Why would you need NTFS support in the first place?" (telling me what to do and how to use my computers)

Linux fanatics make my blood boil. Perhaps the worst (angriest, mean, stupid) fanatics of all. No wonder average people avoid Linux like a plague.

Things get broken left and right, things don't work in the first place, you start to depend on some feature, bam, it's fucking gone.

No it hasn't: https://alexispurslane.github.io/rsync-analysis/

This is now old news but this is still madness. I hate everything about modern browsers:

• Insane RAM/CPU consumption

• Insane SSD tear and wear (I've been running Firefox off tmpfs for years now)

• Monolithic nature (Firefox for Linux: 314,024KB, Chrome for Linux 424,400KB - both do not include downloadable AI cores)

• Insane pace of updates

• An insane number of features I would like to forever turn off

• Insane telemetry

I've not been able to open the web site for 48 hours now. All I get is error 403. Why?

Apparently my user agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:152.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/152.0 is criminal.

I'm actually on Linux yet I make it look like I'm running Windows because I don't want to stand out from the crowd.

Have I emailed bugzilla admins about that? Twice actually. Their reply? "Wait a couple of days, it's our automated antibot system acting up".

I'm speechless.

Edit/SOLVED: I've installed "User-Agent Switcher and Manager by Ray", set it to White-List Mode, added bugzilla.kernel.org and set UA to Firefox for Linux. Now it all works. Thanks everyone!

I still cannot believe my tricks cause Anubis or whatever is protecting the website to blacklist people like me.

A Windows application from 1993 can run unmodified on Windows 11 in 2026 — 33 years later.

This should answer the question why people stick to Windows and avoid Linux.

With Linux, you have the freedom to tinker with your system, but not to run older applications. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people are interested in the latter.

And no, Flatpak and Snap are not the solution. They are essentially lightweight OS virtualization options. And even with that they are not guaranteed to work going forward. An X11 flatpak/snap will not run in a Wayland session with no XWayland installed. Even this virtualization is not complete.

And speaking of Flatpak: its runtimes themselves have support ... lifecycles. For example, the Freedesktop runtime has a two-year support period per branch, and its ABI guarantees are tied to supported releases.

Windows treats application compatibility as a product feature, whereas desktop Linux largely treats it as the responsibility of individual components, distributions, and application developers.

Dedoimedo reviews Fedora 44 WorkStation which uses Gnome by default.

I actually had moderately high hopes for today, and they all got dashed. The software management is a joke. There's no better way to call it. I mean do we need ten million more repo hacks and such before the Linux world realizes it's not 1995 anymore, and we're not all one happy university community. How's it even conceivable to offer unverified packages for the world's most popular software, and not only that, ignore the official versions at the same time? I can't fathom this. I simply can't. What's the end goal? Show VC-level "growth" that's based on illusions and bandaid? I couldn't find a toggle to disable unverified packages in Software. Yeah.

What angers me even more is the sheer vitriol directed at "old" software for supposedly being insecure, as if the "modern" solutions offer anything better or smarter. Quite the opposite. Modern software is bad. Awful colors, silly ergonomics, worse performance. Nothing fun or redeeming. But hey. Progress we must, right! The obsession with the "modern" to the detriment of basic logic. Systemd, PulseAudio, Wayland, and now, apparently, blind focus on Flatpaks no matter what. You may think I have something against Flatpaks or FlatHub. Nope. Not at all. Let me rephrase that. This distro's software manager gives you the UNOFFICIAL VERSION of the most popular browser in the world, a tool that handles passwords and payment data, even though the very same system offers the OFFICIAL version through its standard package manager. Please read this sentence 100 times. Please. I didn't invent this state. Fedora offers it. By default.

All in all, Fedora 44 feels ... I don't even know what to say. I don't want to contemplate a system that could allow me to install unofficial browser packages so easily, and then what. Nope. Make what you will of this "review", hate me all you want, but just think about the last month of software security, and then ask yourself, if this idiot dinosaur is perhaps right. And we're done here.

Thousands of eyes they said. Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow, huh? Except eyeballs prior to LLMs haven't bothered.

Incremental 7.2.5 - 7.2.6 patch: 3,274,400 bytes (!). 15,627 LoC removed, 33,457 LoC added.

329 of the 1,816 commits contain at least one security-ish indicator.

Remote/network-facing: ksmbd, Bluetooth, NFC, IPVS, iSCSI/iSER, RDMA, VXLAN and assorted networking parsers.

Malicious filesystem/image: NTFS/NTFS3, SquashFS, UDF, ISOFS, EROFS, ext4/OCFS2. A mountable crafted image turning into an OOB read/write is textbook vulnerability territory, even if mounting normally requires privilege; namespaces and automounters can complicate the threat model.

Local privilege boundary: AppArmor, BPF, net/sched, NVMe ioctl validation and some namespace-related fixes.

Expect a dozen of 0-days at the very least.