~/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

    In 2025 Rust shed its experimental status in the Linux kernel, GNOME and KDE moved to drop X11 for Wayland, and Steam Deck driven gaming helped push desktop Linux market share past earlier plateaus.

    ·linux·202 reads

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

    The Intel Xe VFIO driver in kernel 6.19 brings SR-IOV based GPU virtualization to mainstream Intel graphics, letting KVM and QEMU users pass virtual GPU functions to virtual machines.

    ·linux·257 reads

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

    Let's Encrypt, founded by Josh Aas's ISRG with EFF and Mozilla backing, turned ten after issuing free automated TLS certificates through the ACME protocol and helping push the web to near universal HTTPS.

    ·security·67 reads

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

    Schleswig-Holstein's migration from Microsoft to LibreOffice, Nextcloud, and Linux saves the German state about 15 million euros a year, and the project recovered its costs within roughly one year.

    ·linux·110 reads

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

    Arch Linux's December 2025 ISO ships archinstall 3.0.14, which adds guided support for installing a full persistent Arch system onto a USB drive, turning the rolling release into a portable OS.

    ·linux·41 reads

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

    Jonathan Corbet, LWN.net editor and longtime kernel documentation maintainer, stepped down from the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board after 18 years, opening a seat in the 2025 TAB election.

    ·open source·114 reads

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

    Kali Linux 2025.4 moves its GNOME 49 desktop to Wayland only, retiring X11 sessions while keeping Xfce as the default and updating its penetration testing toolset and NetHunter builds.

    ·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

    At the 2025 Maintainers Summit in Tokyo, Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman declared Rust a mainstream part of the Linux kernel, closing years of dispute over Miguel Ojeda's Rust for Linux effort.

    ·linux·112 reads

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

    Most Linux distributions boot on Secure Boot hardware through a shim signed by Microsoft's third-party CA, a trust chain running through GRUB, SBAT revocations, Machine Owner Keys, and kernel lockdown.

    ·linux·968 reads

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

    Part two measures AI coding against four earlier shifts, from assembly to compilers, high-level languages, object-oriented programming, and the internet era, each of which grew developer jobs instead of ending them.

    ·ai·6 reads

  13. NixOS vs Fedora Silverblue: Immutable Linux Distributions Compared

    NixOS builds immutability from declarative configuration and the Nix package manager with flakes, while Fedora Silverblue pairs rpm-ostree atomic updates with Flatpak apps; both allow rollbacks by different routes.

    ·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's agentic AI work and AMD's ROCm stack converge on Linux as the base for enterprise AI infrastructure, giving PyTorch users an open alternative to Nvidia's CUDA lock-in in the data center.

    ·ai·24 reads

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

    Valve's Proton, DXVK, and the Steam Deck have made Linux gaming a present reality, with most Windows titles running through Vulkan translation and anti-cheat support remaining the main holdout.

    ·linux·24 reads

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

    Clement Lefebvre's Linux Mint keeps its Ubuntu base but strips Snap, ships the Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce desktops, and puts stability for beginners ahead of chasing new desktop technology.

    ·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

    Part one traces four upheavals in software development, assembly giving way to compilers, high-level languages, object-oriented programming, and the internet era, as a baseline for judging AI coding claims.

    ·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

    A trial of Omarchy, David Heinemeier Hansson's opinionated Arch Linux setup built on Hyprland tiling and keyboard-driven workflow, ended in frustration despite the distro's polish and hype.

    ·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

    On-call engineers bound to 2-hour SLAs face pages around the clock, and the resulting alert fatigue and escalation pressure drive burnout across SRE and DevOps teams.

    ·engineering·7 reads

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

    Eight production database failures from 2024 and 2025 across PostgreSQL and MySQL share recurring causes, failed backups, broken replication, and botched failovers, along with recovery practices that limit the damage.

    ·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 declared full Wayland readiness across its Qt6 components, letting the low-resource desktop run on compositors including Labwc, KWin, Sway, and Hyprland while keeping X11 support.

    ·desktop·657 reads

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

    Keynotes at QCon SF, SAG Berlin, and AWS re:Invent in late 2025 converged on AI agents and platform engineering, a shift away from the microservices and serverless talk that dominated earlier years.

    ·engineering·5 reads

  28. Scaling Our Family Cluster from 2 to 3

    Can Artuc's family grows from two to three with a new baby, a life update on fatherhood written in the language of scaling a cluster.

    ·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's decision to make Rust a hard requirement for Debian's APT package manager set off a governance firestorm on the mailing lists, threatening ports to CPU architectures without Rust toolchains.

    ·open source·81 reads

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

    On Dwarkesh Patel's podcast, Safe Superintelligence founder Ilya Sutskever said the era of scaling pretraining compute is over and progress toward AGI now depends on new research ideas rather than bigger clusters.

    ·ai·212 reads

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

    An engineer on call without runbooks becomes the team's single point of failure; knowledge silos and a bus factor of one turn every incident into a test of memory and a path to burnout.

    ·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, LUKS2 persistent storage with Argon2id, and anti-fingerprinting fixes, keeping the amnesic distribution Edward Snowden relied on current for whistleblowers.

    ·linux·310 reads

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

    Linux kernel maintainers set disclosure rules for LLM-generated patches, citing hallucinated APIs and GPL license contamination, with contributors required to name their tools and take full responsibility for the code.

    ·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 Silverblue pairs a read-only root managed by rpm-ostree with Flatpak apps, giving atomic updates and instant rollback, an approach Kinoite and NixOS carry across the Linux desktop.

    ·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 █