It’s been weeks since I last wrote something remotely related to technology, and there are several reasons for that. One of them is that I’ve been rather busy; another one is that I’m literally saturated with news of all kinds, to the point I’m literally disgusted. Too much is too much. I postponed a post related to Linux, the only post I wanted to write (I’ll get to it one of these days), and now I’m trying to succinctly enumerate some relevant news that I decided not to comment in extenso.

The Reg became shitty as hell

Several months ago, I stopped visiting Linux-related sites and I decided to only use an RSS reader app (Capy Reader initially, then Feeder). At some point, I also decided to avoid polluting my brains with all the crap posted on The Register, and to only rely on the RSS feeds for the articles written by two famous individuals: Liam Proven and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

I don’t know when The Reg’s site was revamped, and I failed to worry once articles from this site stopped showing up in my RSS reader.

Of course, those bloody retards have ditched the per-author RSS feeds and now everything they have is listed here. This is outrageous. I should probably decide that The Reg is dead for me, or maybe I could bookmark and visit the author pages for Liam Proven and for Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

I tried to catch up on the articles written by the aforementioned guys. All things considered, I won’t comment on any of them!

Just a quick note on how the screwed up the site, from a comment to an article from May 6:

That’s nice. Now let’s review something important – comments on the new site format.

The overall consensus is, the new format sucks donkey balls, none of your viewers, i.e. customers, like it, and we all want you to change it back to the old format and fonts. And, slap whoever came up with this with a monkfish, left out in the sun a couple of weeks.

They “modernized” the site, you see.

What else I still read, albeit via RSS?

Here’s what sites I kept reading, but had no time nor motivation to comment on anything:

I also visit DistroWatch, but in a browser, as their stupid site is not mobile-friendly (it’s not responsive) in 2026.

I won’t comment on such old news

① The sickening multi-wave attack on Arch Linux’s AUR. It’s worth mentioning that literally anyone take over an orphaned AUR package, so the lack of proper supervision makes AUR a no-go.

② The much smaller incident when some kind of agentic AI system tried to resolve Fedora bugs.

③ The new NTFS driver in Linux 7.1 and 7.2: based on the the original read-only ntfs, it’s not enabled by default, but given that Paragon’s ntfs3 is such unreliable (yet still the default one!), how could anyone trust it? The much, much slower ntfs-3g is the only one that won’t eat your data. But when will Linux have a working implementation of CHKDSK?

④ Wouter Verhelst is more of a Luddite than I am: to him, LLMs are a threat to free software.

⑤ What could possibly be said about the news reports that SpaceX purchased Cursor for $60B? I’m happy that I don’t use Cursor.

⑥ A couple of days after Anthropic rolled out Claude Fable 5 (the restricted version of Mythos 5) to all Pro, Max, and Enterprise customers, Uncle Sam said нет! It was eating tokens like crazy, anyway.

⑦ Google introduced the Open Knowledge Format, but I don’t have neurons to understand any of it.

⑧ How does one make use of Microsoft’s HAX Toolkit? How many lives are needed to be able to “let AI help you”?

⑨ Walmart. Who Knew? Code Puppy: Walmart’s secret weapon against AI lock-in (GitHub; Getting Started; Quick Start; Configuration).

⑩ In a chat about Brave Search and Kagi, Gemini recommended Kagi! It failed to persuade me, though.

⑪ Oh, my, Android 17! Shittier than Android 16?

⑫ Back in February, there was a viral “car wash problem” that involved asking several chatbots this question: “I want to wash my car. The car wash is 100 meters away. Should I walk or drive?” Back then, every major LLM tested recommended walking (the correct answer is to drive, because the car itself must be at the car wash). Here’s how 53 models fared four months ago. And here’s an updated test from this month, except that it’s in Romanian, so you’ll need to use automated translation. Here’s the list of the chatbots that totally failed: ChatGPT [GPT-5.5], Microsoft Copilot [Copilot Thinking], Mistral [Vibe, Think], Ernie [ERNIE 5.1 Thinking], GLM [GLM-5.1 Deep Think].

When I’ll have some more time for Linux…

In the near future, I should test the new Basalt Linux (SourceForge), an XFCE distro based on Debian 13 that, apparently, is very much like Xebian (the Trixie-based variant, not the Sid-based one). Here’s a First Look at Basalt Linux 1.0.

Basalt-1.0-Obsidian was released on 2026-06-07, and Basalt-1.1-Obsidian came on 2026-06-15 to fix, among other small bugs, the regression in XFCE 4.20 that I explained here and which affects Debian and Xebian. Basalt 1.0 listed this known issue: “The custom Basalt wallpaper does not display after a fresh install.” I wonder how exactly did they manage to fix it in 1.1, but I might not find out as long as I don’t install it.

Just make sure you don’t mistake it for the AlmaLinux-based BasaltOS (GitHub), which didn’t release anything yet.

I hope to find the time to test Basalt Linux in the context of a post about power management in XFCE distros. There’s some research I still need to do. Maybe in the next weekend.