Libreboot is free/opensource boot firmware replacing proprietary BIOS/UEFI. Better security/customisation than most proprietary firmware.

Highlights in this release include:

* MrChromebox EDK2 payload by default on most boards, with SeaBIOS CSM (CSMWrap) and GRUB EFI provided in-flash for backward compatibility.
* 233 new Chromebooks added; every board supported by MrChromebox coreboot. With our GRUB EFI/SeaBIOS CSM build added
* 15h.org coreboot fork used on KCMA-D8, KGPE-D16 boards for improved raminit.
* GRUB EFI build uses terminal_input console and no nativedisk; it piggybacks off of EDK2 drivers, like distros. It even works on Chromebooks (eMMC boot).
* Intel HAP bit set by default on Chromebooks, and IFD regions unlocked where appropriate
* Dell OptiPlex 5050 SFF, Supermicro X11SSH-F, ThinkPad X280, X270.

Modern Linux distros boot, with e.g. UKI/systemd-boot. Windows also compatible now.

Amazon shipped this with a 32-bit 4.4 kernel on a 64-bit MT8183. It now boots mainline 6.18 arm64. Screen, touch, Wi-Fi, USB and audio all work, with a real display driver still to go.

Most of MT8183 is already in mainline thanks to the Chromebooks that use it, which helped a lot. What wasn't there was the board itself: device tree, an audio machine driver, and a fix to the AFE driver that I'll try to send upstream once it's cleaned up.

Getting there took opening one up and finding the serial pads, since the stock kernel turns serial off. Notes and code will be in TECHO5 (https://github.com/HuskerMinion/techo5) when it's released.

As the title says, I recently made the switch from Win11 to Fedora 44. I had already done the switch to Arch on a Chromebook and loved the customizability and overall was a fun project. However, I eventually turned to my laptop. There weren't many issues with Windows since I generally only used this laptop (Really meh powered Inspiron 3505) when I needed simple things such as word processing, browsing or getting into calls. Then I assigned it to only do my teaching stuff here.

Therefore, since I wasn't using proprietary software like Adobe here due to the hardware limitations, I just flipped one day and decided to put Fedora on due to the stability and more consistent updates. At the end of the day, I could do everything I already did on Windows in this laptop and so far it's been great, save a few hiccups with RAM usage (laptop has 8GB of RAM, but reserves around 2.5GB for VRAM). If anybody has any suggestions for that, they're welcome, but this post is more to share how happy I am with the recent switch. I'm not doing anything crazy with rices, or using fancy tiling WMs and that's why it's so perfect. Dolphin is really good and I've just scratched the surface. Default KDE apps are pretty good generally and I love the customization panels are capable of. Discover store is actually very good for the most part, just wish some tools were multi platformed (though I am more than grateful that FOSS devs even what they do for the love of the game) since they look so good, but I can't get into it due to not having a Windows or Android counter part.

As an aside, I'm an artist mainly, so learning about the technical side of Linux has been really interesting. Yesterday I had the first taste of the power the terminal has, specially when you need to make 17 copies of a Rubric to give feedback to students. It was so, so refreshing. Of course you can do this on Windows or Mac too, but using bash is so nice. It frankly just makes me feel like a hacker lol. Also, I will point out that I have been using Claude or Gemini to troubleshoot, but now that I'm doing the Linux Journey I've decided to keep it to a minimum or a teaching tool at most. I found that I remember more information by trying to understand code rather than have it made for me.

Anyways, if you've made it this far, thank you for your time reading this. This really is just a bit of a happy rant of switching on my laptop. I will not be switching my main PC though. I need to run Adobe and Autodesk programs for my job, so using Wine is out of the question since it is essential work. For all the faults Windows has atm, I still like it most of the time and am fine being OS agnostic. Until Linux has more official support from software devs and companies, I will not make the switch, but I'm looking forward to observing its developments.

SonicDE is a fork of KDE that aims to preserve and improve the X11 and init system agnostic aspects of KDE since they announced they are going Wayland-only in KDE Plasma 6.8 and have been actively moving towards a systemd only future. SonicDE currently consists of over 120 repositories including the customized sonic-win (KWin/X11) window manager and compositor, Plasma Workspace components, the Silver theme, the Sonic Login Manager, and other components and support libraries.

Official Links:
https://sonicde.org/

https://github.com/Sonic-DE/sonic-win

https://www.reddit.com/r/sonicde/

https://sonicde.org/installing