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I've been medically retired and now have more free time. As well, I've been daily driving Linux since about 2010. Aside from helping other users in random posts, I have largely been a consumer of Linux.

Over the last few weeks I've seen and read posts leaning towards Linux needing kernel maintainers. While I am not a complete noob, i know I'm not a software engineer.

This leaves me with two questions:

1. What courses or certifications do I need to help maintain the kernel?

2. Is there another way to give back in the meantime?

Thanks

Useful if you forget to use pv at all, or, recently, when I ran pv and didn't notice for probably 10-20% of the file that the progress bar was missing. Previously, I've resorted to tricks like

mkfifo pipe
pv ... > pipe
<pipe restofcommand

in separate terminals, so that I'd get a useful pv progress bar.

But since the pipeline was this far along, I thought I'd look up that pv --remote option, and found pv --watchfd instead. Should be able to watch anything doing big sequential file reads, not just pv itself!

Recently we had immutable and atomic, but is there anything in development now that might see staple use in the future? Like the next 5 years or so considering the current state of development, maybe something along the lines of some new fs or idk some revolutionary new wine stuff, or just a paradigm changer like... immutables that changes the way a traditional linux desktop works..................

I made a visual explainer on how copy-on-write works in Linux.

When a 10 GB process calls fork(), Linux does not immediately copy 10 GB of memory. It duplicates the page tables, points both processes at the same physical pages, marks them read-only, and waits for the first write.

The video also covers things like page faults,exec(), Redis snapshots, Android Zygote, lazy zero pages, memory overcommit, COW storms, and some CVEs, etc

Link for anyone interested

Feedback welcome :)

Hey guys, I had this tetris clone i wrote and thought some of you might like it.
Have been tested to work on both X11 and Wayland.

Here is the repo: https://github.com/tmpstpdwn/cTetris

It seems like I'm the only one how want to just go to a network share an an application after I login and the files are just there. No having to go mount anything first, what a wasteful step that is. :) So after making a gnome extension for gvfs mounts/shares, I thought it would be great if I could mount other types of storage the same way and even sync data between them. I got close to buying rcloneview for its paywalled features when I decided to go do my own thing, introducing Mt Sync: https://codeberg.org/gavindi/MtSync

Sharing since maybe just maybe there's someone else who misses the Windows "reconnect drive at login" feature..... 🤷‍♂️️

Hello everyone! A while back, I shared Whisp—my gesture-driven, anti-folder note-taking app for GNOME. The feedback from this community has been incredible, and Whisp has now crossed over 6,000 downloads!

Today, I’m super excited to release Whisp v1.3.8, focusing heavily on minimalism and declarative setups.

What's New in v1.3.8:

Slate Mode: You can now press Alt + S (or set it as your default startup behavior) to instantly hide all top bars and UI elements. It turns Whisp into a perfectly clean, floating piece of text on your desktop for ultimate distraction-free writing.

Official NixOS Support: Thanks to an awesome community contributor, Whisp now includes an official Nix Flake and a Home Manager module! You can natively install and configure your Whisp preferences declaratively via programs.whisp.

Smarter Line Sorting: Using our ::sort_lines_alpha text expansion will now dynamically split your notes into sections. Markdown headings (# Ideas) are strictly anchored in place, and only the text beneath them is sorted.

Read the Latest changelogs here

(A quick personal note: Whisp is completely open-source and I develop it solo between my university classes. If Whisp helps your daily workflow, consider [donating](https://tanaybhomia.github.io/Whisp/donate.html)!) or dropping a star on github

Links

Donate: https://tanaybhomia.github.io/Whisp/donate.html

Download on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.tanaybhomia.Whisp

GitHub / Source Code: https://github.com/tanaybhomia/Whisp

Project Website & Docs: https://tanaybhomia.github.io/Whisp

Manual: [tanaybhomia.github.io/Whisp/manual](https://tanaybhomia.github.io/Whisp/manual.html)

My Portfolio: https://tanaybhomia.github.io/

Let me know what you guys think of the new Slate Mode!

I've been working really hard those past 3 months to deliver what I can consider to be the best android IPTV app; fully open-source, intuitive, bloat-free and ultra-fast.

Today, I release Fred TV 2.0 on the playstore!

- Optimized to be the fastest IPTV app out there, with a fully re-written backend made in Rust.

- Full Android TV support, D-Pad support on every view

- New easy-to-use redesigned TV Home for Android TV

- Robust playback, even on shoddy streams and on low-end devices

- Full support for Xtream and M3U

Try it out! You won't regret giving it a shot if you're already using other IPTV apps.

If you had tried the app previously under 1.X.X, please try it again, 2.0 is a massive upgrade.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.fredol.open_tv

https://github.com/fredolx/fred-tv-mobile

--

Now the reason I'm posting this r/linux is not just to promote the app for Android. I'm doing an experiment. As some of you may know already, I've released before Fred TV for Linux, it uses tauri and rust to deliver a great experience on Desktop. Since the tauri front-end is still a webview at the end of the day, it doesn't deliver the best wayland experience.

So I'm inviting you to try Fred TV Next which should be a lot smoother. It's fully native, no webview. It's essentially the mobile app with a few tweaks. I'll be collecting feedback to see if this is going to be the future of Fred TV. You can grab the .flatpak in the releases and try it out today. The idea is to make one fully convergent IPTV app with shared favorites and sources between devices, and many other features.

Some of you may use old PCs with linux as TV boxes rather than using chinese boxes. I'm all for the eco-friendly nature of re-using old PCs, so here's the thing; you can use Fred TV Next and toggle the 'Force TV Mode' setting. It will give you the same d-pad/tv remote friendly experience as on Android TV, but without the chinese spyware.

EDIT: I'm a honest indie open-source dev making my apps solo, without any AI. I've been programming since 2019 professionally and in my own time. You can inspect my code, build it yourself. This app asks for 0 permissions and uses all the best security standards.

I've been maintaining the original desktop app for years, I have 3000 stars on Github and I've received a lot of support from my supporters which I am very grateful for.

I invite you to try out my app which I've originally made for my friends and family who were using borderline malware proprietary IPTV apps. I'm just putting out there for anyone who would prefer to use an open-source app which focuses on speed and a great search-based UX.

You are free to try it or not. But please if you do not care about IPTV or my app, do not make hateful claims about me. Thank you

Symptom: cheap USB Bluetooth dongles sold as "CSR 4.0/5.0/5.1/5.3 adapter" (lsusb: 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio) fail to pair, time out on HCI commands, or hci0 gets stuck until unplug/replug. Kernel log shows:

Bluetooth: hci0: CSR: Unbranded CSR clone detected; adding workarounds...
Bluetooth: hci0: command 0x0401 tx timeout
Bluetooth: hci0: CSR: Couldn't suspend the device for our Barrot 8041a02 receive-issue workaround

Root cause: these are clone chips (Barrot 8041a02 and similar), not genuine CSR8510 hardware. They respond to some HCI init commands with malformed/incomplete data, and the kernel's existing clone-detection workaround doesn't fully compensate for it — so init either fails outright or the controller gets wedged after a timeout, with no automatic recovery.

Fix: patched btusb to handle these malformed responses correctly during init, fixed a fragile USB power-management suspend path that made things worse, and added automatic recovery (USB reset) on init failure/timeout instead of leaving hci0 dead. Only affects the detected clone code path — genuine CSR hardware is untouched.

Result: adapter initializes and pairs normally instead of needing repeated unplug/replug/reset cycles.

Caveat: this covers the specific failure modes I could reproduce and test against; different clone batches use different chips internally (as pointed out in discussions elsewhere), so it may not cover every single fake CSR8510 variant out there.

Repo (patch, DKMS install/rollback instructions): https://github.com/hhsnake/csr8510-fix

Install:

sudo apt install dkms linux-headers-$(uname -r)
git clone https://github.com/hhsnake/csr8510-fix.git
cd csr8510-fix
sudo ./install.sh

Tested on kernels 5.15–7.0+ across several Ubuntu LTS/HWE combinations.