Weekly Forum Summary

Our Community
72

This week in our forums…

Key Stats

In the past week, our Linux forums had the following activity and key statistics:

  • Total New Posts: 200
  • Total New Topics: 14

Top Contributors

Interesting Topics

In Showcase, @Bitpainter75 introduced a major new photography workflow tool in FerrumPix: bringing photo management, RAW editing and image editing together on Linux. Members like @jmarkus, @tkn, @Norm24 and @andreas put it through its paces, comparing results with Lightroom and Negative Lab Pro, probing privacy and “phone home” behavior, NAS workflow via /etc/fstab, and the limits of RAW/infrared support. The follow‑up posts from @Bitpainter75 detail rapid 0.9.50 and 0.9.52 releases with a GPS map view, RAW comparison against embedded JPEG previews, a redesigned dehaze tool, improved brush performance, and red‑eye removal, making this one of the week’s deepest technical app threads.

@goatherd shared a retro‑friendly terminal audio setup in Showcase with A TUI music player written in Go. The “goatplayer” uses mpv as its backend and sparked discussion with @tkn and @Halano about trusting binaries versus building from source, safe hosting on GitHub/Codeberg, and handling terminal quirks. The debugging back‑and‑forth around libtag_c.so.0, terminal escape sequences and minimum terminal sizes turned the thread into a mini case study on distributing TUI applications cleanly across different environments.

Also in Showcase, @Halano published XCropper - Fast Linux image cropping tool, a tiny 90K X11 cropper aimed at being faster than heavyweight editors for quick cuts and resizing. Members compared it with tools like GIMP, Shotwell, Mirage and Krita, while @Halano explained why startup latency and responsiveness pushed them to build yet another cropper. The thread is a compact look at “do one thing fast” utilities on the Linux desktop.

In Showcase, performance‑minded users got something new from @MadGoat with RamSleuth — RAM telemetry + memory benchmark for Linux. The tool offers live DDR timing and controller telemetry, SPD decoding and AVX2/AVX‑512 bandwidth/latency benchmarks, all via GUI and TUI frontends. Early Intel timing bugs are being chased down, and the thread invites people with newer Intel systems to contribute diagnostics, making it a useful place to follow if you care about memory tuning on Linux.

In General Discussions, browser enthusiasts continued a lively debate in Let’s talk about web browsers. @Jymm argued for classic Firefox with a full toolbar and deep about:config tweaks, while @svhs27102 and @Itachixkurosaki described reluctantly keeping Chromium around for “Chromium‑only” government and school portals. @MadGoat contributed a long piece on Brave, Pi‑hole setups, and the looming risk of platform integrity APIs locking down user‑controlled browsing. The thread is a great snapshot of the current browser monoculture concern from practical Linux users.

Another General Discussions discussion from @Jymm, Do you prefer classic/simple or modern/interactive shells?, explored command‑line preferences prompted by a DistroWatch poll. Several regulars, including @tkn, @ericmarceau and @andreas, made the case for sticking with POSIX‑style shells like sh and bash for scripting portability and documentation, while still acknowledging the appeal of modern interactive features in shells like fish and zsh. The thread highlights how many here lean conservative on shell tooling for reliability.

In General Discussions, nostalgia and Linux history surfaced in Are you a Registered Linux User? where @ClaudioDC asked who remembered the old Linux Counter project and its “Registered Linux User #12345” signatures. @pavlos and @JohnWick recalled participating, and @hydn dug up the original developer’s website and closing announcement archived on the Wayback Machine. The conversation doubles as a small oral history of early Linux community culture.

The Debian category saw detailed troubleshooting in Blue Tooth mouse disappeared, but it’s there?. Running MX Linux under VirtualBox, @jmarkus reported an invisible pointer while mouse actions still worked. After initial suggestions from @hydn, @Itachixkurosaki walked through how Liquorix kernels and mismatched VirtualBox Guest Additions can leave integration half‑broken. The recommended path involved switching back to a stock Debian kernel, checking module builds and avoiding premature kernel purges, all laid out in accessible steps for VM users.

In Ubuntu, @Pramit_Regmi posed a conceptual question in How to make ISO file empty about building an ultra‑minimal, immutable “naked Linux” ISO. @ugnvs clarified terminology around “completely blank” versus minimal, then pointed to Linux From Scratch as a learning route, while @Brian_Masinick and @ericmarceau suggested real‑world options such as antiX Net/Core setups and Canonical’s Ubuntu Core with its own image‑building tools. The thread is a concise pointer map for anyone interested in DIY minimal distributions.

In #help, @Watford asked why Thunderbird reports a 16 MB attachment as 22 MB in Email size under TBird. @ericmarceau and @tkn provided clear explanations of Base64’s 33% overhead and how MIME multipart emails duplicate plain text and HTML bodies. Their replies include intuitive bit‑level reasoning and give a practical mental model for why email size limits feel tighter than file sizes suggest.

Finally, in mate, desktop users continued to track project direction in Mate 1.30 development?. @Norm24 cited Fedora 45 notes mentioning a potential 1.30, and @ericmarceau outlined how incomplete handover of accounts and infrastructure from long‑time lead Martin Wimpress complicates visible progress. The thread ties into the broader Probing for status of handover discussion, where @ericmarceau shared a polite but pointed status request on Ubuntu’s discourse and @Norm24 and @Jymm echoed the desire for more transparent updates about Ubuntu MATE’s future.

Activity by the @staff Group

In Showcase, @hydn gave practical publishing advice in A TUI music player written in Go, recommending that @goatherd host both source and binaries on Git forges like GitHub or Codeberg, attach static binaries to tagged releases, and document mpv as a dependency. This guidance helped steer the project toward a more standard, trustable release process.

Within Arch Linux, @hydn joined Would you consider Arch to be for more experienced users? to ground the discussion in Arch’s own documentation. By quoting the official “Why would I not want to use Arch?” section and elaborating on the expectations around self‑maintenance, they provided a concise reality check for newcomers considering a switch from more automated distributions.

In Debian support, @hydn contributed concrete commands to the VirtualBox cursor issue in Blue Tooth mouse disappeared, but it’s there?. Their suggested sequence to install stock Debian kernels, boot them via GRUB’s “Advanced options,” reinstall Guest Additions, and later remove Liquorix packages gave @jmarkus a safe, ordered plan for recovering a working VM without losing the fallback kernels.

The News & Shares section also saw @hydn open ZOOM reading everything written to X11 clipboard after a link surfaced in the weekly news roundup about Zoom’s clipboard behavior. They coupled understandable concern with an explanation of how the topic was split using Discourse’s “Reply as linked topic” feature, which both highlighted a privacy‑relevant issue and modeled good use of the platform’s discussion tools.

In server, @hydn continued to iterate on their pfSense series with a follow‑up in pfSense Firewall 2.8: Install & Config – Settings Walkthrough. They detailed how adjusting Intel N100 CPU energy performance preferences from “balanced” to more energy‑saving modes dropped firewall temps by about 20°C in a hot Caribbean environment without impacting throughput. The post includes concrete screenshots and notes about idle versus load behavior that are useful for anyone running low‑power fanless firewalls.

Around meta‑forum topics, @hydn also helped members make better use of Discourse features. In Local capture of entire discussion topic as a single PDF they pointed to the keyboard shortcuts overlay and the Ctrl+P export behavior, and in ZOOM reading everything written to X11 clipboard they showcased Discourse AI’s “Related” tab and the standard “Suggested” topics list, explaining how each is powered and when they are most useful.

Lastly, in Arch Linux, staff member @andreas stayed active both as a developer and community voice. They engaged across threads such as Laser – A simple CD ripping application, clarifying that their Laser CD ripper uses MusicBrainz for disc and track lookups, and participated in general discussions about browsers, MATE development, and hardware setups, reinforcing the blend of staff support and peer‑level participation that defines much of the forum’s tone.

Best Reply or Topic of the Week

The standout reply this week is @Itachixkurosaki’s detailed VirtualBox diagnosis in Blue Tooth mouse disappeared, but it’s there?.

In that post, they:

  • Explain how VirtualBox’s mouse integration hides the guest cursor and what happens when Guest Additions fail to rebuild against a new kernel.
  • Suggest a quick test using the mouse integration toggle, then walk through inspecting the running kernel with uname -r and checking loaded modules via lsmod | grep -i vbox.
  • Describe how Liquorix kernels can outpace VirtualBox’s module support and why the in‑kernel vboxguest driver can leave things half‑working.

The reply is practical, clearly written, and uses minimal but effective commands, making it very accessible for anyone running Linux guests in VirtualBox.

You can read it directly here: Blue Tooth mouse disappeared, but it’s there? – post #4.

Top Contributor

Congratulations to @Brian_Masinick on earning this week’s Top Contributor badge! :trophy:

Thanks for reading. See you again next week! :penguin:

Our community remains free of banner ads thanks to our partnership with Better Stack.

Better Stack offers infrastructure observability services, uptime monitoring, logging, incident management, and a free tier worth checking out. Visit Better Stack

:warning: Important: Avoid replying to this topic. Instead, reply to the topics linked within. Or, if you have questions or comments related to this weekly summary, please post them in the #site-help or Our Community forum category.

2 Likes