linux

Older PCs that feel hot, noisy, and sluggish under modern Windows builds can often be revived and kept responsive for years by switching to a lightweight Linux distribution — not as a one‑off speed trick, but because of measurable architectural differences in how Linux handles services, updates...

Nitrux 5.1 lands as a deliberate, highly opinionated Linux distribution update — not a Windows 11 replacement in the conventional sense, but a polished, Wayland-first alternative that will tempt users tired of Windows’ hardware gating, opaque updates, and inconsistent performance. Background...

Loss32 is a deliberately provocative thought experiment: what if a Linux distribution were not merely capable of running Windows programs, but was built from the ground up to be a Win32 runtime with the Linux kernel as its substrate? The idea — sketched by a developer who goes by the handle...

Manjaro’s latest stable release, 26.0 “Anh-Linh,” makes a clear, deliberate push toward modern Linux desktop technology and practical polish — and for many Windows 11 users that means a genuine, arguable alternative is finally within reach. This release updates all three flagship editions —...

I switched my household from Windows 11 to Linux — and the change forced a hard rethink about what an operating system should do for you, who controls your data, and how much of your computing life you want to outsource to a single vendor. The move wasn’t a panacea, but it rescued three...

AnduinOS has taken a careful — and increasingly pragmatic — step toward smoother upgrades for its users, announcing a path that makes point releases in the 1.4 series reachable without a full reinstall while the project continues to refine its cross‑fork migration options. What appears at first...

Linux’s desktop moment will not arrive because of a single press release or a viral distro launch — it demands a near-simultaneous collapse of friction across games, hardware, OEMs, enterprise applications, and vendor incentives, and while 2025–2026 has moved the needle, the moat around Windows...

Zorin OS 18 rocketed to a million downloads in just over a month — and according to the project, roughly 78% of those downloads were initiated from Windows machines, a clear signal that a large number of Windows 10 users are actively testing Linux as a practical alternative. Background...

If you have an aging Windows 10 PC that won’t—or shouldn’t—move to Windows 11, a lightweight Linux distribution can be the fastest, cheapest, and greenest way to breathe new life into that hardware. ZDNET’s comparison of Puppy Linux and Linux Lite frames the choice succinctly: Puppy Linux...

If you want Adobe Photoshop to open like a native app on your Linux desktop—no dual‑boot, no constantly switching to Windows, and no juggling separate VM windows—there’s a practical, community-driven path that makes it possible: WinApps. It ties a lightweight Windows virtual machine to your...

Pop!_OS, Ubuntu Budgie, Rhino Linux, Bodhi, elementaryOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, Ubuntu Server, Zorin OS, Mandrake and Caldera — the ZDNET list is both a personal tour through three decades of Linux desktop evolution and a practical guide for Windows users weighing a migration, and it reveals how...

You can run full Linux userland apps on modern Windows without firing up a traditional virtual machine — and for many workflows, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is the fastest, lightest, and most integrated way to do it. WSL now supports GUI apps (WSLg), ships as an easy single-command...

The Linux desktop’s problems are not mysterious or technical so much as political and product-design failures: fragmentation — of interfaces, of packaging, of distribution channels and vendor buy‑in — keeps the Linux desktop a powerful hobbyist and specialist platform while putting a practical...

The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission’s decision to sue Microsoft over how it rolled Copilot into Microsoft 365 is more than a local regulatory tussle — it is a spotlight on how bundled software and platform lock‑in compress genuine consumer choice and why an increasingly credible...

Windows and Linux no longer have to be stove‑piped ecosystems, and that practical fusion is the through‑line of the How‑To Geek piece “7 Reasons Windows Subsystem for Linux Works For Me.” The author’s list—being able to jump on coding ideas instantly, running a Linux toolchain beside mainstream...

ZDNET’s practical roundup of “Windows-like” Linux distributions landed at a pivotal moment: with Windows 10’s support window closing and many users facing the choice of buying new hardware, upgrading to Windows 11, or migrating to something else. The list — which highlights KDE Neon, Linux Mint...

A subtle validation gap in Linux's ethtool handling of Receive-Side Scaling (RSS) indirection tables can be weaponized to trigger kernel crashes and full host outages — the defect tracked as CVE-2024-46834 forces ethtool to “fail closed” when the kernel cannot reliably determine the highest...

The Linux kernel received a targeted fix for a narrowly scoped but potentially disruptive ext4 race where the filesystem could attempt to start a journaling transaction after its journal had begun teardown, tracked as CVE-2025-22113; the patch introduces an explicit mount-level flag to mark the...

If you’re thinking of leaving Windows 10 behind but worried that Linux will feel alien, ZDNET’s recent roundup of five desktop environments makes a persuasive case that you don’t have to relearn everything — several Linux desktops deliberately mimic the familiar Windows desktop metaphor while...

Storage Sense is the quiet Windows 11 background tool that will automatically clean up temporary files, empty your Recycle Bin, remove stale downloads when asked, and even convert locally cached OneDrive files to online‑only — and enabling it correctly can keep a busy PC feeling responsive...