Linux Magazine

Dear Reader, The term “vendor lock-in” has been in common parlance for as long as I’ve been working on this magazine. The term, which became popular during the imperial Microsoft era as a way of calling out monopolistic practices of Microsoft and other vendors, refers to the tendency of powerful companies to trap users on their platforms by denying them the tools and interfaces they need to interoperate with other platforms. We associate the practice with Microsoft, but the Redmond FUD slingers stood on the shoulders of a giant called IBM, perhaps the biggest lock-in artist in the storied history of the computer industry. We don’t talk about vendor lock-in as much as we used to, but everyone knows it is still out there, operating in evermore subtle ways to…

Two New Distros Adopt Enlightenment I remember using the Enlightenment desktop many years ago. It was beautiful, highly flexible, and fun. Since then, Enlightenment has been mostly relegated to the shadows by way of niche distributions including Bodhi Linux, which forked Enlightenment and named it Moksha. Moksha is a concept in various Indian religions, particularly Hinduism; it means emancipation or liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth. When the Bodhi developers decided to fork Enlightenment, the name seemed appropriate. For years, Bodhi was one of the very few distributions that used anything based on Enlightenment. That period of loneliness is officially over, with MX Moksha and AV Linux 25. MX Moksha doesn’t replace the original MX Linux. Instead, it will serve as an “official spin” of the distribution. There…

The rolling release Solus Linux has a new version out, and it includes all the usual upgrades to many bits and pieces. Key upgrades include the latest versions of Budgie (10.9.4), Gnome (49.1), KDE Plasma (6.5.3), and Xfce (4.20). You also get kernel 6.17, Mozilla Firefox 145, LibreOffice 25.2.6, and Mozilla Thunderbird 140.5. Other updates include Mesa, GIRepository, and systemd. There are also two removals of note. First, the Gnome version of Solus is now Wayland-only, which means X11 doesn’t even ship with the ISO. That is not the case with the other desktops, because they have yet to make the permanent switch. Additionally, Python 2 has finally been removed. There’s also a new repository called Polaris that, according to the official release notes (https://getsol.us/2025/11/29/solus-4-8-released/), “unlocked our ability to remove…

Prior to the end of Windows 10, a lot of Linux distributions (and members of the open source community) were pushing the open source operating system for those with machines that weren’t upgradable to Windows 11. The push was serious and everywhere. Many assumed it would fail, but one distribution proved that was not the case. The distribution in question was Zorin OS, and it enjoyed over a million downloads in just over a month. What is even more telling is that over 78 percent of those downloads came from Windows machines (https://blog.zorin.com/2025/11/18/test-the-upgrade-from-zorin-os-17-to-18-and-celebrating-1-million-downloads-of-zorin-os-18). That’s not just Linux users going about the usual distro hopping; this is Windows users downloading an alternative OS. Of course, this broke all Zorin OS download records to date. Now, most distributions don’t share their download…

TUXEDO Computers recently announced (https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Discontinuation-of-ARM-notebooks-with-Snapdragon-X-Elite-SoC.tuxedo) it was scrapping its plans for a new laptop built around the Snapdragon X Elite (X1E) SoC. According to the announcement, the “first-generation X1E proved to be less suitable for Linux than expected.” In particular, TUXEDO Computers pointed to long battery runtimes. Battery life is typically a strong point of ARM devices, but the company was unable to achieve the hoped-for results. On top of that, high USB 4 transfer rates, BIOS updates, fan controllers, and virtualization with KVM are either missing at this point or not foreseeable for the current model. Another reason for backing out of this is that, essentially, TUXEDO Computers would be releasing a laptop with a CPU that was more than two years old, with the X2 Elite (X2E) introduced…

Linux Magazine www.linux-magazine.com ADMIN Online http://www.admin-magazine.com/ Fishing with Remora • Jeff Layton Timing techniques and system-level monitoring tools like Remora provide insight into application behavior and how applications interact with system resources. The New Sudo Logging Format • Thorsten Scherf We present an example that shows how syslog-ng uses the new logging format of the sudo tool to process sudo messages. Designing a Secure Active Directory • Evgenij Smirnov Active Directory can be particularly problematic in terms of security. We look at how to make it more secure through design, rigorous hardening, and security-conscious management. Password Best Practices • Mark Heitbrink We take a look at passwords, passkeys, and passphrases and offer recommendations for team-capable password management.…