Foss-Issues on Ivon's Blog

KaLuG 2605 Notes: Ubuntu and Fedora Joint Release Party with Lots of Topics

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Sat, 16 May 2026 18:00:00 +0800

Today’s topics were so diverse! Too many to digest. The sheer volume rivaled COSCUP’s Lightning Talk.

Agenda: Ubuntu 2604 x Fedora 44 release party

Adorable AI poster

Brief notes below.

Ubuntu 26.04

Nix

UbuntuCon COSCUP SLAT

Kernel 7.0

Framework 13 Introduction

SBC Module, Luckfox, ESP32, Explanation of ESP32 Usage

SiFive P570

Linux Driver DTS Visulizer

LAVD Scheduler

I could only understand the gist.

Finally, another major showdown of contradictions

Attending the Ubuntu Release Party in Kaohsiung, nine out of ten people were using Framework or Macbooks.

I’ve always wanted a Framework laptop, where I could DIY parts and replace anything.

Today, after contacting Framework’s QA team and getting a sticker… I decided to stick it on my Surface Go (which has zero repairability—everyone knows it’s a plastic leveling board) to cover up the Windows logo!

Because its internal system… I’ve already tuned it to Debian Linux. The metallic casing, plus the Linux system—basically, I have a framework now…😇

When I met up with KaLuG, someone even told me they use an RSS reader to access my website 👀

For a FOSS Digital Camera System, an Android Phone + Open Camera is The Answer

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Wed, 13 May 2026 10:00:00 +0800

I thought about a question: does an open source digital camera system exist?

Does an open source photography image-processing workflow exist? There are open source image-processing programs like GIMP, Krita, digiKam, and darktable. But first we have to solve the problem of the upstream image-capturing device, right?

Those DSLR cameras and camcorders with apertures much larger than phones, such as the ones made by Nikon and Sony, all run closed-source OSes, don’t they?

Is it possible to have a digital camera whose low-level drivers and software are all open? I do not mean just a Raspberry Pi with a camera attached, that kind of toy.

A camera that lacks open source software makes me unable to bring myself to buy it. Actually, I cannot afford it either :P

It is just like how I refuse to buy home consoles such as the Switch or PS5 because I reject proprietary software. They have taken away the open source achievements of BSD. The Steam platform is barely acceptable. But playing proprietary Steam games on a PC is already enough inner torment for me.

Even Android camera photography technology seems to be controlled to a large extent by the algorithms of closed-source apps. Every phone manufacturer develops its own stock camera app, forcing us to depend on these closed-source apps.

Even though we have feature-rich open source apps like Open Camera, FreeDCam, and Photon Camera, they still cannot fully support the lens hardware features of every phone, such as 30x AI zoom or the algorithms behind photo beautification.

As for the algorithms that perform post-processing after a photo is taken, those are even more the trade secrets of the major manufacturers. Sony, Xiaomi, Pixel, and Samsung all have their own flavor. Even if you can port Gcam to other phones, you still cannot figure out what is going on with the algorithms behind it.

As a result, even if photos taken by OpenCamera are a notch below those from the stock camera, it becomes purely a matter of the image sensor’s hardware capability. You need more manual parameter intervention, or you save as RAW and then manually retouch with digiKam.

Still, Android is at least more mature than pure Linux when it comes to accessing camera hardware features. Look at the official AOSP documentation: at least Camera2API can adjust ISO, and Pixel even has official open APIs that let third-party apps use Night Sight.

If you try to drive IMX components in a pure GNU/Linux environment, it is even harder. On Linux, you should already thank heaven if libcamera can make the camera work normally. Nobody is studying the discipline of taking photos.

The guy responsible for writing the Megapixels camera app for PinePhone only barely managed to put together a pipeline.

In short, buying an Android phone with strong enough lens hardware, flashing it with LineageOS, and using Open Camera, just as I did with the Sony Xperia 1 III, is a more acceptable way to do open source photography. If the low-level drivers have to be closed-source, then so be it.

初めてのUnix Socks

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 23:00:00 +0800

They say that if you are a skilled Linux user, and you know how to operate unix sock(et)s, then you should wear unix socks. Your coding power will multiply.

Wearing this kind of long socks on a hot day is seriously so hot 🥵

Mm…… maybe my coding power is still not enough. These pink socks can only barely reach my thighs.

Also, the white hardshell jacket I bought a few years ago rather has the feel of Wubai’s Pure White Beginning album cover.

This year I bought this new blue jacket. It looks like an ordinary varsity jacket.

But if you deepen the color scheme a bit, doesn’t this become Tomori Takamatsu’s MyGO band jacket? (hallucination)

This clothing should work for both men’s and women’s fashion, right…? Somehow it feels like I cannot go outside without makeup. I kind of want to try cross-dressing.

Although I know some impressive engineers, some of whom are into cross-dressing and some of whom are transgender people, with my current identity and the people I interact with, wearing this outside would have a much higher probability of social death. So I only share it in cyberspace.

Hackintosh Is Dead, and That Is Fine. Using macOS Is Itself an Act of Promoting an Unfree System

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:00:00 +0800

Hackintosh is (kind of) dead.

Why use Hackintosh? Or rather, why use macOS?

Macbook and iPhone are prisons, yet users willingly accept Apple’s cage. It has even become fashionable, with people proudly identifying as Apple fans and forming commodity fetishism.

Borrowing what Richard Stallman said on RT, ordinary people were persuaded by Steve Jobs’s rhetoric. They feel Macbook is trendy and cool, and voluntarily run to the Apple Store saying, please put handcuffs on me!

Richard Stallman Talks About Free Software RT News (at 10:58)

Here we can add one sentence: engineers think Unix-based systems are convenient, so sacrificing freedom is fine. Give me a pair of handcuffs too! Look, I spent a lot of money buying overpriced handcuffs with my name engraved on them!

Worshiping Apple’s physical products is already exaggerated, but worshiping an OS is even more exaggerated. The Hackintosh community, formed to install macOS on hardware not officially sold by Apple, is a typical example.

In 2020, Apple began migrating toward the ARM architecture and gradually abandoned support for x86 Mac computers.

Combining Apple’s official information and media reports, macOS 26 should be the last macOS version to support the x86_64 architecture. In the future, even the highest-end iMac Pro, as long as it uses an Intel processor, will be unable to upgrade. From now on, only ARM-based Macs can be used.

So ordinary x86 computers will no longer have Hackintosh to play with. Hackintosh is (almost) dead. At least you cannot install the latest macOS. Although older macOS versions can still be installed on x86 hardware compatible with Hackintosh, mainstream software will slowly abandon support. At the current stage, the open source community’s effort to crack Apple Silicon has produced Asahi Linux, but macOS still cannot be installed on ARM devices not produced by Apple.

Actually, I think this is fine. Let people completely give up on Hackintosh. For more than 20 years, those running Hackintosh were essentially engaging in big-company bootlicking.

Let me tell a Hackintosh cold fact everyone knows: when installing Hackintosh, you usually need to add the following string to the bootloader to successfully decrypt the kernel and boot:

ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)applecomputerinc

This string is Dont Steal Mac OS.kext. Look how well they protect their own OS intellectual property! Running macOS on non-Apple-certified hardware is theft! And you actually want to cater to this company’s face?

The bootlickers here exclude those great people enthusiastic about making open source boot solutions, such as OpenCore and Clover. They have contributed a lot, studying the structure of macOS, writing piles of plist and kext files, making drivers not officially recognized by Apple run. Maybe they can truly help the open source community reverse engineer a completely free macOS someday. For example, ravynOS is a macOS-like system mixing the Darwin kernel with FreeBSD open source components. Its existence is somewhat similar to ReactOS, which reverse engineers Windows. Only using Hackintosh for this kind of research purpose is beneficial.

But I am mainly talking about the mentality of Hackintosh users. It is bootlicking, or perhaps calling them “apple” polishers is better? They satisfy their own vanity by cracking the things of a large company. But macOS remains closed source software, evil capital stealing the fruits of the BSD revolution. This is also BSD’s fault. Who told FreeBSD to use BSD license terms that make it easy to get cucked instead of the GPL? Pathetic.

On macOS, user freedom is controlled everywhere by Apple. Users are forced to use a crippled package manager like Homebrew, and also have to accept Apple’s planned obsolescence. When the time comes, the system can no longer be upgraded, even if the company claims, we have already supported it long enough.

If you crave macOS design aesthetics, clearly you can install the GNOME or KDE Plasma desktop on Linux and add some themes to achieve 80% of a similar graphical experience (see the White-Sur project). Yet you insist on making Hackintosh and willingly lock yourself in prison. It is truly baffling. If you have time to study this, you might as well think about how to run Linux on a toaster.

Taking a step back, even if you want to use commercial software, is installing the more broadly compatible Windows not better than Hackintosh? Although Windows is evil, at least it is still willing to give users the basic freedom to choose hardware, rather than having everything firmly controlled by one big-headed company.

What we should study more is installing Linux on unfree hardware, reverse engineering its drivers, and liberating users’ computers, not trying to spread an unfree system like macOS to more devices.

Even if macOS is Unix-based, it is still not worth recommending. It lost the hacker spirit of the 1980s long ago.

Therefore, porting Hackintosh and Windows on ARM is less valuable than Linux on everything, right? As for those awful companies that heavily modify Linux into Android-like walled-garden systems, they do not count.

Macbook and iPhone are prisons, yet users willingly accept Apple’s cage. It has even become fashionable, with people proudly identifying as Apple fans and forming commodity fetishism.

In 2011, after Apple’s Steve Jobs died, people from all walks of life published condolences, but Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman commented: “Good that he died.”

His original words on his personal blog were:

" Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died. …… I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone. …Nobody deserves to have to die …… not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs’ malign influence on people’s computing. "

Rough translation:

“Steve Jobs, the personal computer pioneer who specialized in creating cool prisons for foolish users and stripping people of freedom, has died. ….. I am not happy about his death, but I am very glad he is gone. …… Nobody deserves to die…… even if the evil he did could not be repaid over several lifetimes. But in the end, we are all affected by Jobs’s malicious design for personal computers.”

There are many ways to interpret this sentence. One is that Richard Stallman deeply disapproved of the influence caused by Apple products, because Apple promotes proprietary software tied to Mac hardware, affecting the public’s preferences in choosing computer products. In addition, Apple products borrowed part of the achievements of BSD open source projects, yet turned the system into unfree software. This can be called an “enemy of free software.” Apple is no kinder than Microsoft, so it is not strange that Richard Stallman hates Apple so much. He is someone who insists on his beliefs to the end.

Now that Jobs has passed away, his influence has disappeared.

Then we saw the even greedier Tim Cook.

Apple’s control over users, like Microsoft and Google, only increases and never decreases. It is euphemistically called the Apple ecosystem, but in reality it traps users in an even deeper cage from which they cannot escape.

If you already have relatively free hardware (x86 has better compatibility than ARM), and also have free Linux and BSD operating systems to choose from, why lock yourself in the macOS prison?

Steam is a threat to FOSS and user freedom on Linux

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:00:00 +0800

Although Steam Has Contributed to Gaming on Linux, We Still Need to Be Wary of the Threat It Brings as Non-Free Software.

Why do users who pursue free software still play closed-source game programs? And help this kind of ecosystem do evil?

Honestly, I can no longer look at any game console casually. Game consoles are also a kind of computer, and they need software. After I learned that consoles such as Playstation and Switch all run on heavily modified BSD systems, and that they are non-free systems, I could no longer accept playing games on them. Game discs are often locked to specific platforms and are hard to circulate. Therefore this is not freedom. I more strongly support playing games on PCs. And when it comes to stores that sell games, the biggest one is Steam, which can also count as a console platform. Besides selling games, it is also a game launcher.

Although Steam has contributed to gaming on Linux, simplifying the pain of playing games through Proton and Steam Deck, it is in reality promoting a closed platform. This is no less than Google Chrome’s ambition to occupy the browser market. After all, it is still proprietary software, and it is driven by a commercial company. Cross-platform support is about expanding commercial reach and covering as many places as possible, not about putting concern for users first, right?

Playing games can easily corrupt the heart. According to the psychological temptation techniques set up by developers, it makes you fall into the traps commercial companies use to seduce you. I know! Not all games are like this, but for games to be fun, they need these mechanisms to tempt people. Psychology is very important in games! Otherwise you would not get addicted to having characters in games call you husband/wife in a daddy-flavored voice!

If Steam has not reached the level of openness of Flathub, then it is still an object we need to be wary of. Valve not doing evil at the current stage does not mean it will not do evil later. We can only hope Gaben lives a long life.

The deeper problem is: why can users who prefer free and open source software make an exception for games? Are games not also a kind of software? I think the discussion here is pretty good: Why are people here so worried about proprietary programs, but games get a pass?

There is also a meme describing this hypocritical mentality. Image source

Here I want to digress a little. Some free software developers have pretty sharp mouths. For example, early versions of Sway did not support Nvidia, partly because Nvidia’s Wayland support was very poor and required workarounds. Therefore, when launching Sway on an Nvidia graphics card, you had to add the --my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia FLAG. After Nvidia support improved, this FLAG was changed to --unsupported-gpu.

Also, the author who ported Steam to FreeBSD: shkhln/linuxulator-steam-utils, believes Steam has full read access to the home directory, and malicious programs could steal your SSH keys. Therefore, you should create a user account specifically for running Steam. Otherwise you have to add the “I am an idiot” environment variable: DUMB_PERSON_FLAG = '--allow-stealing-my-passwords,-browser-history-and-ssh-keys' before Steam can start.

Eh? Why does the Linux community not have this kind of concern? Whether Ubuntu or Arch Linux users, everyone just installs Steam without a second thought.

Open source believers are generally allergic to proprietary software. They think Microsoft and Adobe are villains, and our open source software is better, but only make an exception for those selling games. They think Gaben is a chad who will not do evil like other tech giants. Therefore, when it comes to anti-cheat systems and DRM mechanisms on Steam that violate user rights, they choose silent acceptance rather than resistance.

Do not forget that Steam also monitors your playtime 24 hours a day. It feels scary just thinking about it. Why is Google not allowed to monitor you, but Steam is?

Even if Steam itself does not say games must use DRM or any anti-cheat mechanism, using this platform makes you a tacit accomplice to these mechanisms!

Think about how many magical operations vendors now perform for anti-cheat, while constantly saying it is for your security. Just look at Windows game vendors implementing kernel-level anti-cheat programs to prevent cheating, and you will feel your hair stand on end. These pieces of software are viruses themselves. They are as evil as DRM anti-crack encryption. I hear Valorant’s Vanguard is the most perverted anti-cheat program. It even blocks virtual machines. No matter how I hide with QEMU/KVM, it is useless, and the computer must have Secure Boot enabled before you can play!

We are very worried that if SteamOS, in order to satisfy game developers’ anti-cheat requirements, brings that kind of kernel-level anti-cheat to Linux, it will have to scan permissions for all user programs, and may even require the Linux kernel and kernel modules to be digitally signed by specific vendors before they can boot, destroying user freedom. Then SteamOS will become another Android blessed by Play Integrity!

Taking a step back, sometimes we have to use proprietary software. Fine, games are entertainment items, the ninth art, and can barely be tolerated. If we regard games as files like videos and music, we would not refuse to watch just because the files use non-free formats like H.265 and WAV, right?

But perhaps we Linux users should treat Steam purely as a platform that sells games, and not depend too much on Steam to play games? Treat the Steam client as a browser. After downloading games into the library, close Steam and do not keep it open all the time. Since Steam game files exist on the local disk, games should be launched with an independent Wine launcher. If a game cannot be launched with Wine and must bind itself to the Steam client for DRM verification or other mechanisms, refuse to buy it entirely. That is how it should be, right?

Well…after all, the other Wine launcher solutions besides Steam are all pretty bad. Lutris, Heroic, and Bottles each have their own problems and are not as attractive as Steam. People easily give up freedom and privacy for convenience and comfort.

XFCE Is Outdated. The Unix Philosophy May Not Apply to Graphical User Interface Design

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 06:00:00 +0800

XFCE is good, but it is outdated.

The current version is 4.20, and the interface is still almost the same as it was 20 years ago.

The so-called Unix philosophy may only apply at the level of system programming. It is not suitable as a guideline for graphical environments built on top of an operating system kernel.

Hot take: XFCE can only be a fallback when other desktops cannot be used properly, because it can still run well without GPU acceleration. Otherwise, this desktop would have been outdated long ago. If possible, you should use the KDE or GNOME desktop. Whenever I see people recommend users anything outside these two desktops, I think they are developers who do not treat users as users, but assume everyone is a kernel hacker. Either that, or boomer mentality is acting up and leaning on seniority.

Tell those anti-Systemd people who keep shouting that Linux should stick to the “Unix philosophy” to use FreeBSD, and they will shut up immediately. After all, in an environment where even graphics drivers can easily have problems, they might not even be able to get online to complain. As for those who can get past this barrier? They will quietly use the system.

If you use a BSD system in pursuit of simplicity, you will also face the fact that desktop environments are influenced by Linux.

BSD’s advantage over Linux is that the system is designed as a complete whole, with system software and third-party software well separated. FreeBSD keeps system configuration files and user configuration files separate; one is /etc, the other is /etc/usr/local/. And FreeBSD’s init has not changed from the past to the present.

This insistence on traditional values of course affects FreeBSD’s mainstream desktop choices. According to a 2022 poll, Preferred DE of the FreeBSD users, the mainstream desktops, aside from KDE Plasma, are XFCE. GNOME does not even rank here.

Some people may be perfectly happy using XFCE. It indeed does not rely so much on the latest Linux technologies, so it can be used across Unix-like systems. There are certainly still many people in the Linux community who prefer XFCE.

But for a user who did not live through the old era, XFCE just looks extremely ugly and outdated. Mate, Cinnamon, and LXDE are not much better. As for the design after GNOME 40, it is too radical. It feels like only zoomers who have had more exposure to mobile devices would like it.

If you dislike all these desktops and want to use a WM? Then it cannot really be called a desktop at all. You cannot say modern people have become decadent, can you, boomer? Nobody can really use a WM comfortably, even if they only use a browser to get online. Desktop functionality is missing here and there, so you install a bunch of independent little tools to fill the gaps. In the end, aren’t you just reinventing the wheel?

The only X11 desktop heavyweight that can look modern while preserving the multifunctionality of a traditional desktop is still KDE Plasma 6. Some people may wonder: did I not install BSD in pursuit of a simple system? Would installing such a huge package of a desktop like KDE not seem to violate the philosophy? I think some people’s obsession with KISS has already reached a pathological level. They always criticize modern desktops as “bloated”, but modern desktops have long since stopped being made from such simple components. They have many services that need to run in order to provide users with a good experience. They have to handle changes across all kinds of different monitor parameters without making users manually write xorg.conf, and that inevitably increases complexity. Otherwise, just use tty.

In short, the point is that we cannot look at how desktop graphical environments should be designed from a developer’s perspective. We need to care more about ordinary users.

GPL Is Better Than BSD for Software Licensing: Insist on Militant Democracy and Talk More About Free Software Than Open Source Software

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 05:00:00 +0800

What makes GPL better than BSD licensing is that it is a kind of militant democracy.

Positive Freedom Beats Negative Freedom
#

Adapting the concept of militant democracy (Wehrhafte Demokratie), GPL is a secret formula for protecting the free software movement so it can continue for the long term.

Therefore, software development should use GPL to preserve the spirit of freedom and carry through the free spirit of Copyleft, rather than permissive terms such as BSD, MIT, and Apache. If you are going to use this kind of license that is almost no different from releasing copyright into the Public Domain, you might as well just use WTFPL and be done with it!

We should talk more about Free Software rather than Open Source. GPL does not restrict the freedom; instead, it protects the freedom!

Although both are open source operating systems, where BSD systems fall short compared with GNU/Linux systems is that they lack the spirit of the GPL. Without this moral appeal, the power of the whole community is weakened, becoming pure volunteer labor and a system that lets others take whatever they want.

To put it harshly, the BSD License is basically a “Cuck License,” a cuckold clause. The GPL license is: I let you ride my wife, but your husband also has to let me ride him. The BSD license is: you voluntarily let your wife get ridden by others, receive nothing in return, and still think it is fine!

An image describing the consequences of the Cuck License. The rough idea is that the professor who originally developed Minix released it under a BSD license with the attitude of doing good, never expecting Intel to take it and make Intel ME, a massive surveillance software at the CPU low-level.

From Luke Smith’s website

The hacker community alone is not a powerful enough weapon against the capital of large corporations. It also needs the guidance of the free software movement to protect software freedom. Compared with BSD license terms, GPL can guarantee the healthy future development of software, meaning that after software opens its source code, it must provide equal contribution back, preventing the software from being easily monopolized. GPL itself is unfriendly to existing business models, and the name “free software” is also not as business-friendly as the name “open source software.”

This is built on a high-risk gamble: only if the first company is willing to invest in this rule and spiritually identify with the spirit of GPL can it possibly succeed and develop a complete ecosystem. At present, Linux’s great gamble back then seems to have succeeded. Companies really are willing to support Linux development, with RedHat as a typical example.

Although many companies are now trying to technically bypass GPL, stealing or parasitizing the achievements of the Linux Kernel to develop their own closed-source products, the impact brought by GPL is still enormous, ensuring that the center of Linux is forever free and open source.

The relationship between GNU and Linux should be closer. That is what makes a free operating system. But the current problem is that some projects only seize Linux development results, then use them to make closed-source products, only putting on a surface-level open source appearance to deceive people into trust.

Who would have thought the original image was Richard Stallman speaking at TED Talks

However, it is a bit of a pity that Linus refuses to adopt RMS’s opinion and upgrade the Linux Kernel from GPLv2 to GPLv3. Linus is a pragmatist. What he ensures is negative freedom, only emphasizing the practice of open source contribution back, but he is unwilling to add terms that prevent large corporations from exploiting loopholes and turning it into closed-source products. Part of the reason is also that Linux has already developed maturely and become a worldwide commercial project involving too many interests, so perhaps it is better not to change it.

But, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Arch Linux vs SteamOS: A Brief Look at the Similarities and Differences

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 02:00:00 +0800

It is necessary to correct the myth about the relationship between SteamOS and Arch Linux. The two cannot be equated, and using SteamOS does not mean you can say “I use Arch btw.”

Recently, while playing Galgame on Arch Linux, under almost identical testing conditions, Steam games’ Proton kept crashing for inexplicable reasons until I was annoyed. Going back to Debian made everything fine, so let me talk about this issue.

In my humble opinion, rolling-release distributions such as Arch Linux & CachyOS are not suitable for gaming. Semi-rolling releases such as Fedora & Bazzite are not suitable either. Only battle-tested Debian Stable or Ubuntu LTS are trustworthy. I really do not know how I dared to play games on Arch Linux in the past, but now I use Debian.

Another consideration is that when reporting game compatibility to ProtonDB, I hope to use a traceable and stable system version. The testing platform should be stable, not a system that keeps changing.

According to information from the SteamOS official website, although SteamOS after 3.0 is indeed developed based on Arch Linux, SteamOS is an immutable system. Users cannot, and should not, modify system files. Every system OTA update downloads a new image to overwrite the old version. Also, SteamOS is not a rolling release. The system update schedule is decided by Valve, a commercial company, not by Arch Linux’s rolling updates.

Valve has its own Steam Deck & Steam Machine product experience to take care of. It wants SteamOS to become a reference console platform, so updates cannot be too aggressive. For example, in 2026, the stable SteamOS 3.7.8 desktop mode still uses KDE 5.27, while Arch Linux’s KDE 6.0 was released back in 2024. KDE 6 in SteamOS 3.8.0 is still in beta. At present, the strategy of SteamOS’s main screen compositor, Gamescope, is to run X11 games through XWayland while also enjoying Wayland HDR support, a stitched-together strategy. Whether it can move toward pure Wayland in the future remains a huge question mark.

Valve must ensure the “entire” SteamOS system and Steam client are stable before releasing updates.

On the other hand, according to the Arch Wiki, Arch Linux’s software update schedule is not fixed. Each piece of software has different maintainers, and the open source community releases it when they think it is stable, letting the whole public beta-test and catch bugs. The testing time is not long enough.

The benefit of this approach is that problems can be discovered and fixed quickly. The downside is that nobody can guarantee whether the current system is completely stable, because there are too many variables.

Arch Linux in its freshly installed state has no graphical interface at all. There is no so-called “default”, no “whole”, and therefore it is hard to do comprehensive testing before releasing updates. A small package update may blow up the KDE desktop.

On Arch Linux, the Steam client is modified by the open source community based on the installer released by Valve. Even though the Steam client itself has its own Runtime to satisfy Proton execution and tries not to depend on OS libraries, components of the Arch Linux system still affect the Steam client, and random problems can occur.

From the perspective of release model, SteamOS is still much more stable than a crowd of rolling Linux distributions. It is hard for any rolling-release distribution to approach the SteamOS experience while also being stable.

At present, SteamOS still only supports a few specific hardware devices. If they really release an open source general-purpose x86 image in the future, I wonder whether their Github issue tickets will explode……

Brief Review of the Beginner Linux Reference Book Trying LINUX on a Computer: Hardware Test Notes

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 18:00:00 +0800

Is there a Chinese book I can recommend to beginners for learning about Linux, but that is not entirely about server operations and maintenance knowledge?

Recently, while attending a Software Liberty Association Taiwan member meeting, I learned about Trying LINUX on a Computer: Hardware Test Notes written by member Chao Wei-lun, so I downloaded it and took a look. I found it pretty well written.

Trying LINUX on a Computer: Hardware Test Notes, written by Chao Wei-lun (bluebat, FSF member) and published by the Software Liberty Association Taiwan, is a very detailed Linux reference book. It combines a bit of computer science basics with operational knowledge of modern Linux systems, helping readers understand how Linux runs.

The subject of this book is not the operating principles of the Linux kernel. Instead, it analyzes problems encountered when operating Linux in practice, and explains how to debug system services. Compared with 鳥哥的Linux 私房菜, this book talks more about situations you encounter when actually dealing with hardware.

The book uses the latest Fedora 43 as its example, explaining the operating principles of Linux boot flow, graphics systems, audio systems, network connections, power management, and more. After briefly introducing the principles, it supplements them with actual command operations, using Systemd as the main means of system management. Users interested in everyday use of Linux free software can treat this as a practical reference book and consult it to understand what commands can help debug the system when something goes wrong.

However, the author’s explanations are still mainly command-based. Although the FreeDesktop XDG standards are mentioned, there is relatively little discussion of graphical operations in Linux desktop environments such as GNOME or KDE Plasma, which is quite a pity. And to a large extent, it still discusses operations in the X11 environment, without saying much about Wayland technology as the future trend.

The Linux desktop environment with the highest market share is GNOME. Although the GNOME desktop often randomly moves UI positions in every version update to mess with users, I think the desktop workflow has already “settled” after GNOME 40. It should be possible to explain GNOME’s characteristics a bit; there should not be too much difference caused by Linux system version updates.

This book is published in both print and electronic editions, and the full text can be obtained on GitHub. The book is licensed under CC BY-SA.

Source code: https://github.com/cc-books/testnotes

Buy the physical book: 電腦上試跑Linux: 硬體測試筆記 - 天瓏網路書店