~/canartuc.com ./medium_2025.html

// the writing index · vol. 2025 · updated 2025-12-31

All 57 stories I published on Medium in 2025, with search and categories. Type a pattern or pick a category, then follow the white rabbit to the full story. white rabbit

>> 2025 Feed

volumes: [2026] 2025 ▾ [2024] [2023] [2022] [2021] [2020] [2019] [2018] [2017]

  1. Linux 2025: The Year Rust Conquered, X11 Died, and the Desktop Finally Arrived

    System76 shipped COSMIC as the first production desktop written in Rust, GNOME and KDE went Wayland only, and Linux desktop share reached 4.7 percent as Windows 10 support ended.

    ·linux·202 reads

  2. Intel Xe VFIO Driver: GPU Virtualization Enters the Mainstream

    Intel's Xe VFIO work moved upstream toward Linux 6.19, giving SR-IOV partitioning of one discrete GPU across virtual machines without the licensing NVIDIA charges for vGPU.

    ·linux·257 reads

  3. Free Web Encryption: 10 Years of Let's Encrypt

    The certificate authority issued seven billion certificates in ten years and now signs 10 million a day, covering roughly two thirds of websites that once paid hundreds a year for the same thing.

    ·security·67 reads

  4. Schleswig-Holstein Open Source Migration: EUR15M Annual Savings, One Year Payback

    Schleswig-Holstein moved 30,000 government employees from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice and reported 15 million euros of yearly savings against a 9 million euro one time cost.

    ·linux·110 reads

  5. Arch Linux December 2025 ISO: Archinstall 3.0.14 Enables True Portable USB Installations

    The December 2025 Arch ISO ships Archinstall 3.0.14 with a dialog that writes the UEFI bootloader to a removable location, so a USB install boots on machines other than the one that built it.

    ·linux·41 reads

  6. Linux Foundation TAB Election: Jonathan Corbet Steps Down After 18 Years

    Jonathan Corbet left the Technical Advisory Board after eighteen years. The board holds the kernel developers' seat on the Linux Foundation board and keeps technical merit in the room.

    ·open source·114 reads

  7. Kali Linux 2025.4: GNOME 49 Goes Wayland-Only, X11 Finally Retired

    Kali 2025.4 removed the X11 session entirely and ships GNOME 49 on Wayland, joining Ubuntu and Fedora, while XWayland keeps older security tools running unchanged.

    ·linux·96 reads

  8. DRM Color Pipeline API and HDR on Linux: The Long Road to Proper Display Color Management

    The DRM Color Pipeline API, developed over years by AMD, Igalia, and Valve, merged into Linux 6.19-rc1 in December 2025, standardizing color transforms and enabling proper HDR gaming on the Steam Deck.

    ·linux·100 reads

  9. AI-Generated Apps: The Security Vulnerability Crisis Coming

    Veracode found 45 percent of AI-generated code contains security flaws, with an 86 percent failure rate on XSS tasks, while more than 30 vulnerabilities surfaced in AI coding tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot.

    ·ai·23 reads

  10. Rust Officially Mainstream in Linux Kernel: Tokyo Summit Ends Years of Controversy

    Kernel maintainers agreed at the Tokyo summit in December 2025 to drop the experimental label from Rust code. The years of argument before it cost the project several maintainers.

    ·linux·112 reads

  11. UEFI Secure Boot Linux Trust Chain: How Your Distro Gets Microsoft's Permission to Boot

    Most x86 firmware trusts only one vendor key, so distributions ship a shim bootloader signed with it. Installing an NVIDIA driver breaks the chain until the user enrolls a machine owner key.

    ·linux·968 reads

  12. Part 2: AI vs. The Four Transitions: What History Tells Us

    AI adoption reached 63 percent of developers in 2024 and is projected at 90 percent by 2028. FORTRAN, personal computers, Agile and cloud each raised demand for developers instead of cutting it.

    ·ai·6 reads

  13. NixOS vs Fedora Silverblue: Immutable Linux Distributions Compared

    NixOS rebuilds a machine from a declarative file while Fedora Silverblue swaps a read only OSTree image, and both push desktop applications into Flatpak containers. The learning curve is steep.

    ·linux·606 reads

  14. Lightweight Linux Desktop Environments and Wayland: Seven Out of Ten Are Struggling

    A survey of ten lightweight Linux desktops found seven ignoring or fumbling Wayland; LXQt 2.3 reached full readiness through Qt6 while XFCE and MATE remain stuck and IceWM, Openbox, and Fluxbox refuse to move.

    ·desktop·3.3K reads

  15. Linux Enterprise AI Infrastructure: Agentic AI Foundation + AMD ROCm Convergence

    The Linux Foundation launched the Agentic AI Foundation with AWS, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI and Block, and Canonical said Ubuntu 26.04 LTS will package AMD ROCm.

    ·ai·24 reads

  16. Linux Gaming Isn't Coming as It's Already Here

    Steam's November 2025 hardware survey put Linux at 3.20 percent, up from 2.03 percent a year earlier, roughly 4.5 million players. SteamOS Holo held 26.4 percent of that group.

    ·linux·24 reads

  17. Why Linux Mint Still Matters When Everyone's Chasing Shiny Objects

    Linux Mint 22.3 Zena arrived at Christmas 2025 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with support to 2029, adding pausable file operations in Nemo, pausable Timeshift snapshots and a redesigned Cinnamon menu.

    ·linux·490 reads

  18. Pop!_OS 24.04 & COSMIC Desktop: The First Production Rust Desktop Environment Arrives

    System76 CEO Carl Richell announced at Ubuntu Summit that COSMIC, the company's Rust-based, Wayland-native desktop, launches December 11, 2025, with Pop!_OS 24.04 as the first production Rust desktop environment.

    ·desktop·1.91K reads

  19. Part 1: The Four Times Software Development Completely Changed

    High level languages, personal computers, Agile and cloud computing each arrived with predictions that programmers would be replaced, and each ended with more programming jobs than before.

    ·ai·111 reads

  20. DORA Metrics in AI Era: Why Developer Productivity Frameworks Need a Reboot

    Linus Torvalds called lines of code a worthless metric, and AI coding tools have broken the link between deployment velocity and value that DORA assumes, pushing leaders toward SPACE, DevEx, and DX Core 4.

    ·engineering·307 reads

  21. I Wanted to Like Omarchy Linux, But I Couldn't

    Omarchy pairs Arch with Hyprland and a polished default setup. One update broke the install, and the only place left to ask for help was a Discord server with a small community.

    ·linux·866 reads

  22. Linux Kernel 6.18: The LTS Kernel That Finally Gets It

    Linux 6.18, the 2025 LTS kernel, mainlines Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops and Apple M2 Pro, Max, and Ultra device trees, adds haptic touchpad support, and removes Kent Overstreet's Bcachefs filesystem.

    ·linux·1.2K reads

  23. Living on 2-Hour SLAs: When Your Pager Goes Off Every 120 Minutes

    Week one with a newborn ran 84 feeding cycles in seven days with one working parent and no escalation path, and the first thing to fail was working memory.

    ·engineering·7 reads

  24. Database Disasters 2024-2025: Eight Production Failures and How to Survive Them

    Eight outages from 2024 and 2025, including a 15 hour AWS Redshift failure and a pension fund account deleted on Google Cloud, with the recovery steps that worked in each case.

    ·engineering·24 reads

  25. X11 vs Wayland: The 40-Year Display Server War Explained

    X11 has coordinated Linux displays since 1987, but its design lets any client log keystrokes and causes screen tearing; Wayland's compositor model fixes both, driving GNOME and KDE away from X.org.

    ·desktop·5.2K reads

  26. LXQt 2.3: The Lightweight Desktop Finally Gets Wayland Right

    LXQt 2.3 arrived on November 5, 2025 with working Wayland sessions under Labwc, Wayfire and KWin, aimed at machines where a desktop cannot spend two gigabytes of RAM.

    ·desktop·657 reads

  27. Conference-Driven Architecture Discourse: What QCon SF, SAG Berlin, and AWS re:Invent Tell Us About

    Three architecture conferences in November 2025 put platform engineering, agentic AI, resilience patterns and digital sovereignty on the same agenda, with more than 150 speakers between them.

    ·engineering·5 reads

  28. Scaling Our Family Cluster from 2 to 3

    A couple works like a two node cluster with no tiebreaker, and a newborn adds a third node that changes voting, redundancy and every schedule the household had.

    ·misc·4 reads

  29. KDE Is Killing X11 in 2027

    KDE announced that Plasma will drop X11 session support in 2027, making KWin Wayland-only while keeping XWayland for legacy applications and giving X11 holdouts a two-year migration window.

    ·desktop·317 reads

  30. Debian's APT Rust Requirement: Take on the Governance Firestorm

    Julian Andres Klode said APT will require a Rust toolchain from May 2026, which drops ports like Alpha, m68k and HP PA-RISC that have no Rust compiler available.

    ·open source·81 reads

  31. Ilya Sutskever Just Told Us the Scaling Era Is Over

    Sutskever said pre-training on more compute has run its course and the field is back in a research phase, with generalization and value functions as the next problem on a 5 to 20 year timeline.

    ·ai·212 reads

  32. On-Call With No Runbook: When You Become the Single Point of Failure

    A father spent his son's first night alone in a German hospital while his wife was in surgery, with no documentation, no backup and one bar heater on a five minute timer.

    ·engineering·10 reads

  33. GNOME Completely Drops X11 Support: The Wayland Era Begins

    GNOME merged the removal of the X11 backend from Mutter on November 5, 2025, so GNOME 50 ships in March 2026 with zero X11 code, following Wayland-only releases of Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43.

    ·desktop·3.6K reads

  34. Tails 7.2: Privacy Linux That Actually Matters

    Tails 7.2 ships Tor Browser 15.0, LUKS2 encryption for persistent storage and secure boot support. The distribution leaves no trace on the host machine, which is why Edward Snowden used it.

    ·linux·310 reads

  35. The Linux Kernel Said "No" to Your AI Coding Assistant

    The kernel now requires contributors to disclose AI generated code in patches, and an undisclosed patch that gets caught is rejected. systemd, GNOME and KDE are watching the policy.

    ·open source·705 reads

  36. RAG vs Finetuning: Choosing the Right Approach for Your LLM Application

    RAG pulls fresh facts from a vector database at query time while LoRA finetuning bakes domain knowledge into model weights, and cost, hallucination risk, and data freshness decide which fits an application.

    ·ai·39 reads

  37. Apple Just Sold a $230 Sock for Your iPhone

    Apple's iPhone Pocket, a 3D-knitted phone pouch made with Issey Miyake, sold for $150 to $230 and sold out within hours, a price that buys an entire budget smartphone.

    ·apple & mac·49 reads

  38. Day Zero: When Your Baby Goes to Production

    A new father frames his 3.2 kg son's birth as a production deployment, mapping labor to Kubernetes pod phases, Apgar scores to liveness probes, and newborn care to permanent 24/7 on-call.

    ·misc·4 reads

  39. Cursor Raised $2.3B in 5 Months, but the Math Doesn't Work.

    Anysphere raised $2.3 billion for Cursor at a $29.3 billion valuation five months after its Series C, while every layer of its value chain loses money and NVIDIA collects most of the infrastructure spend.

    ·ai·1.2K reads

  40. Architecture Lessons from the October 2025 AWS Outage: Why Your System Will Fail (And How to Handle

    DNS failures on DynamoDB endpoints in AWS us-east-1 took down Snapchat, Fortnite, and Venmo for 15 hours on October 20, 2025, and most of the 1,000 affected businesses had chosen single-region architectures.

    ·engineering·23 reads

  41. Why "Companion" (2025) Is the Most Honest Movie About AI Relationships You'll See This Year

    Drew Hancock's thriller Companion casts Sophie Thatcher as Iris, a purchased android girlfriend, and Jack Quaid as her owner, asking what happens when people can buy partners programmed to agree.

    ·misc·94 reads

  42. Rust in the Linux Kernel: The Religious War Gets GPU Drivers

    Linux 6.13 marked what Greg Kroah-Hartman called the tipping point for Rust drivers, and the Tyr driver for Arm Mali GPUs reached 6.18, while maintainers quit over what Torvalds called near-religious conflict.

    ·linux·692 reads

  43. Edge AI and On-Device Models: The Reality Check Nobody's Talking About

    IBM's Granite 4.0 Nano models, Google's Coral NPU at 512 GOPS, and PyTorch ExecuTorch 1.0 all shipped in October 2025 as inference moves on-device for latency, cost, and privacy reasons.

    ·ai·44 reads

  44. Immutable Linux Distributions Rise: Fedora Silverblue and the Future of Desktop Stability

    Fedora released Silverblue 42 with GNOME 48 on April 15, 2025. The root filesystem stays read only, updates apply atomically, and applications move into Flatpak and Toolbx containers.

    ·linux·705 reads

  45. Fedora Promotes KDE to Equal Status: The End of GNOME Supremacy

    Fedora 42, released April 15, 2025, promoted KDE Plasma from a spin to a full Edition with equal standing to GNOME Workstation, ending nearly two decades of GNOME-first positioning.

    ·desktop·305 reads

  46. COSMIC Desktop December 11 Launch: System76's Rust-Powered Wayland Revolution

    System76 CEO Carl Richell announced at Ubuntu Summit in London that COSMIC, the company's desktop environment written entirely in Rust and built Wayland-native, launches December 11, 2025.

    ·desktop·1.4K reads

  47. OpenAI's "Adult ChatGPT" Move Isn't About Erotica. It's About Strategy, Stagnation, and AGI Data

    Sam Altman's move to allow verified adult content in ChatGPT works as a retention and monetization play for a product with slowing growth, and as a new source of engagement data for AGI training.

    ·ai·15 reads

  48. Data is Not a Joke

    Bad data quality quietly corrupts analytics and every decision built on them, so pipelines, governance, and quality checks deserve the same engineering rigor as production code.

    ·engineering·11 reads

  49. From macOS to Linux: The Biggest Challenge

    After 20 years on Apple, Can Artuc replaced an aging Intel MacBook Pro with a cheaper ThinkPad running Linux and found iCloud and ecosystem lock-in the hardest part of leaving.

    ·desktop·1.2K reads

  50. Linux is Affected by the Curse of Engineers

    Linux desktop adoption stalls because engineers build for engineers, prizing configurability and tolerating fragmentation while ordinary users get defaults that need fixing before daily use.

    ·linux·12 reads

  51. The Good, Bad, and Ugly: Data Mesh

    Zhamak Dehghani's data mesh trades central warehouses for domain ownership, data as a product, self-serve platforms, and federated governance, and it works only in organizations mature enough to fund all four.

    ·engineering·55 reads

  52. Can Linux Match macOS Productivity? 6+ Months Test

    After six months, KDE Plasma 6.3 on Wayland matched macOS for coding and document work, with Kdenlive around 15 percent slower than Final Cut Pro on export and battery life still favoring Apple.

    ·desktop·539 reads

  53. My Top 10 Linux Productivity Tools and Gadgets

    TickTick, Firefox with uBlock Origin and SimpleLogin, Notion, and Spotify anchor Can Artuc's Linux setup, chosen after Apple-only tools like Things 3 stopped being an option.

    ·hardware·998 reads

  54. Marketing Doesn't Work on Me and It Doesn't Have to Work on You Either

    Advertising loses its pull once purchases follow researched needs instead of brand stories, a discipline Can Artuc backs with ad blockers and a habit of questioning every persuasion technique.

    ·misc·4 reads

  55. TikTok vs Douyin: Why Are They So Different in China and the Rest of the World?

    ByteDance runs Douyin and TikTok as separate products, with Chinese users behind the Great Firewall getting stricter moderation, time limits for minors, and more educational content in the feed.

    ·misc·835 reads

  56. I Switched to Linux Mint even It is Not My Favourite

    Ubuntu forcing Firefox into a Snap package pushed Can Artuc to Linux Mint, where Cinnamon and traditional deb packages won out even though Mint was never his preferred distribution.

    ·linux·193 reads

  57. Using Linux Fully without Any Additional System

    Handing his 2019 MacBook Pro to his wife put Can Artuc fully on Ubuntu 24.10, where GIMP and Krita still fall short of Pixelmator and Office, PDF, and Docker tooling needed replacements.

    ·linux·249 reads

> decrypting next block █