By ckasprzak | TkOut | August 6, 2026 | Linux, Software
The Hot Take: So Linux isn't creeping to take over windows. Just bots using it are, GOT IT.
StatCounter claims Linux has risen to 10.65% of the United States' web traffic, outstripping Chrome OS at 2.06%, macOS at 8.6%, and OpenBSD at below 1%. That's an interesting number, but the math doesn't add up if you assume the traffic is from human users alone.
As many of today's biggest companies claim, we're in the age of agentic AI,
The Hot Take: Nore more docker on Windows? Interesting.
Windows 11 can now build, run, and manage Linux containers on its own, without Docker Desktop in the background. Microsoft calls this WSL Containers, and after installing the preview and running a few real workloads through it, here is what works, what still needs Docker, and how to get it running on your own PC.
WSL Container should not be confused with the next version of WSL 2, as we already covered how Microsoft shut down the WSL 3 rumors. It has now shipped as a public preview, so we installed it, built a custom container image fromā¦
By ckasprzak | TkOut | June 8, 2026 | Linux, Software
The Hot Take: d0h!
Back in March Steam on Linux skyrocketed to 5.33% with more than double the Steam gaming marketshare of macOS. Then for April Steam on Linux pulled back to a still-great 4.52%, well above the times when Steam on Linux was at 2% or less for many years. Now the May 2026 figures have been published overnight by Valve...
The Hot Take: Linux becoming a target with people migrating over to it for sure.
Qualys's Threat Research Unit (TRU) has discovered and published a logic flaw in Linux kernel "that permits an unprivileged local user to disclose sensitive files and execute arbitrary commands as root on default installations of several major distributions." Friday their blog pointed out "The bug has resided in mainline Linux since November 2016 (v4.10-rc1)."
"Upstream patches and distribution updates are already available."
Working exploits are circulating publicly, and administrators should apply vendor kernel updates withoutā¦
The Hot Take: Been saying it for years, Microsoft is pulling Linux into windows on bite at a time. This probably I would assume only accelerates.
Microsoft is turning Azure Linux into a general-purpose, Fedora-based cloud distribution available to all Azure customers, while also productizing Flatcar as Azure Container Linux for immutable container hosts. "When Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation, there was this big conspiracy theory that somehow the Linux Foundation was undermining open source in partnership with Microsoft, and now you announce that you're shipping a Linux distribution," Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation's CEO, said in response to Microsoft's surprise announcement.ā¦
The Hot Take: Closed source finally making it onto OSS OS, nice!
AMD has taken a major step toward enabling native open-source HDMI 2.1 support on Linux by submitting new patches for its AMDGPU driver. AMD Moves Closer to Open-Source HDMI 2.1 Support on Linux With New AMDGPU FRL Patches It appears that the HDMI 2.1 support is finally arriving to Linux as AMD has submitted the new Fixed Rate Link (FRL) patches for its AMDGPU driver. This has been one of the longest-standing limitations that affected Radeon GPUs on the platform. There have been years of restrictions tied to the HDMI Forum (Org behind the HDMIā¦
By ckasprzak | TkOut | May 3, 2026 | Linux, Software
The Hot Take: This has me very intrigued, I just wish Logitech and others with their software control on mice would jump onboard.
Steam on Linux use in March "had skyrocketed to 5.33%..." reports Phoronix, "easily the highest level we've seen Steam on Linux at since its inception more than a decade ago."
So what happened in April?
[April's results] point to Linux having a 4.52% marketshare on Steam, a drop of 0.81% compared to March. Year-over-year it's roughly double with Steam on Linux in April 2025 being at 2.27%. Or two years ago for April 2024, Steam on Linux was at 1.9%.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Hot Take: As Linux gains market share just put a target on its back for compromise.
A new report from Sonatype identifies 21,764 malicious open source packages in the first quarter of the year, up 21 percent from the same period last year and bringing the total logged since 2017 to 1,346,867. The npm registry continues to be the target of most new malicious attacks, at 75 percent, seeing the equivalent of 46 malicious packages per day, with the quarter defined by credential theft, host reconnaissance, and staged payload delivery aimed at developer and CI/CD environments. Python package index PyPI saw 18 percent of totalā¦
By ckasprzak | TkOut | April 4, 2026 | Linux, Software
The Hot Take: This is good, as Windows 11 is just a pile of poop these days. I'm waiting on native support from game publishing houses, as I hate abstract/emulation layers. We still need the peripheral companies to publish apps to control all those RGB's on our systems and keyboards too.
Valve's March 2026 Steam Survey shows Linux gaming usage jumping to a record 5.33% share -- more than double macOS's 2.35%. Phoronix reports: Steam on Linux was never above 5% and easily an all-time high for the Linux gaming marketshare, especially in absolute numbers. It was a massive 3.1% spike in March while macOS also jumped surprisingly by 1.19% to 2.35%. The Steam Survey numbers show Windows losing 4.28%, down to 92.33%.
Part of the jump at least appears to be explained by Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers. Monthā¦
The Hot Take: Linux is coming for Windows Gamers for sure!
Linux gamers are seeing massive performance gains with Wine's new NTSYNC support, "which is a feature that has been years in the making and rewrites how Wine handles one of the most performance-sensitive operations in modern gaming," reports XDA Developers. Not every game will see a night-and-day difference, but for the games that do benefit from these changes, "the improvements range from noticeable to absurd." Combined with improvements to Wayland, graphics, and compatibility, as well as a major WoW64 architecture overhaul, the release looksā¦