geroge is a TUI dashboard with a bunch or random and handy functionality built in, including a terminal. Runs in X (mine auto-runs from .xinitrc at login) and tty.
You can use a terminal, take notes and or send scratch buffers off as an email. There's a launcher you can easily modify and a bunch of handy script action that you can easily modify, too.
Listen to music 3 or 4 different ways including random Nina Simone. Heh, I thought it would be pretty funny to have a random Leave it to Beaver episode appear from nowhere on your desktop so that's included in george (CH 57), too, as well as another channel showing old funny stuff; cartoons, docs, shows, whathave you.
You can pop off reminders and or events that will announce (hey, man, it's time).
george isn't a very important app or life-changing, but, it's built-up pretty well and is handy. Try it out, leave some feedback, tear it up. Release 1.1.1 at github: https://github.com/rabmach/george
I'm a student, started programming with C++, and for the past few months I've been building my own Debian-based distro called Kavis. before this i was thinking how os works how kernel and other things works etc then it hit me why wouldn't i make a os that can play games and that I'd actually enjoy using
What it is: Debian trixie base, X11 + Openbox, custom boot splash with the letter k, taskbar and start menu, settings app, and an app store. I don't compile my own kernel — I use Debian's signed one so Secure Boot can stay on and nobody has to go digging through UEFI settings trying to find it.
Current numbers: 563 MB ISO, 232-240 MB idle RAM. im trying to make idle ram usage and iso as small as possible , and right now there's a lot of room left for gaming and things you want to do.
What I'm working on right now:
Moving the panel from Python/GTK to Vala. Python was eating 117 MB of RAM on its own and felt slower than a turtle, which is not acceptable for a taskbar in my opinion. The Vala build is a 28 KB binary. Vala compiles down to C and links straight against GTK, so there's no runtime penalty, but it's way less painful to write than raw GObject C.
Kavis Store — a GUI front-end for apt. If a package is in Debian it installs from apt; if it isn't there or the version is ancient, it falls back to Flatpak. Only the store binary and the Flathub remote definition ship in the ISO, so no runtimes bloating the image.
Game Mode — gamescope + Feral GameMode + MangoHud, plus a service that reads sysfs to find the CPU's cache-heavy CCD and pins games to it. On X3D chips this should be a real gain. I'm still verifying the sysfs paths on actual hardware because they move around between kernel versions.
Two things I think are genuinely different:
File search that works like Everything app on Windows. plocate with live inotify updates instead of a stale nightly database, filters like ext:, size:>, path:, and apps, settings and a calculator in the same box. This was the single thing I missed most when I started using Linux, and I never found a good answer for it.
Hardened but still able to game. Read-only /usr, sysctl hardening, blacklisted kernel interfaces — and Flatpak and Proton still work. Those two goals fight each other and getting them to coexist took more thought than I expected.
There's also automatic btrfs restore points before updates, and if Windows is already installed on the machine it stays the default boot entry — I didn't want the thing hijacking anyone's boot order.
I'm actually looking for people to work on this with me. Not in a vague "contributions welcome" way — there are three specific things I need:
Translation. The whole system is bilingual, Turkish and English. Turkish is my native language so that side is fine, but I'd like more languages, and I'd also like a native English speaker to go over my strings — I know some of them read a bit off. If you speak anything else and want your language in a distro, this is an easy place to start.
Testing. I only have one laptop and a VM. I have no idea how this behaves on AMD graphics, on hybrid-graphics laptops, on high-refresh or HiDPI displays, or on an actual X3D CPU. If you have hardware and half an hour, that's genuinely useful to me — even "it didn't boot, here's the screen" is useful.
Code. Vala/GTK for the panel, Python for the store and settings, and Debian packaging. I'm learning Vala as I go and I'm sure parts of it are written badly, so if you know GTK properly I'd take the review as much as the code. The store's download manager and the settings app are both wide open if you want something self-contained to pick up.
On AI and googling: I use Claude heavily while building this — for Vala I'd never written, for packaging I didn't understand, and for working through design decisions out loud. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I don't have anyone around me who works on this kind of thing, so AI and search are what I have. But I make the calls: the architecture, what goes in and what doesn't, and every bug I've actually hit I've had to understand before I could fix it. The 117 MB panel problem, the user-setup package silently not installing, the splash ordering — those were found by testing and reading logs, not by asking a model. If you think that disqualifies the project, fair enough. I've learned more in these few months than in anything else I've done.
The repo is private for now while I finish the Vala move and clean up the git history — I didn't want the first public version to be half-broken. My GitHub is KARANKOYU, and everything is written with English names and comments so it should be readable when it goes up. If any of this sounds interesting, comment or DM me your GitHub username and I'll send you an invite. I'd rather build this with people than alone.
I'm not claiming this is the next big distro or would change the world. It's one person's project and it exists mostly because I wanted to understand how a desktop actually fits together and how system parts like memory cpu gpu works. But it works, and I'd rather build the rest of it out in the open.
Logos are mine — drew them in SVG, exported to PNG.
So how accurate is my buddy when he says Linux has no shot at growing (even though it’s more popular than it has ever been and was easier to set up than windows)? Like he hasn’t used goddamn Ubuntu since he was in high school so I don’t think he has a clue about what he’s talking about.
What do you all think?
I have the PSP my dad got me since my thirteenth birthday and I’ve been getting into tech a lot recently. I was wondering if there was a way to use a PSP as a cyber deck/something similar or if it’s possible to connect other hardware and run Linux on it? I assume SteamOS would do wonders for PSP gaming!
Weird issue I can't figure out. My desktop (Linux Mint XFCE) randomly restarts, but only when it's hooked up to Ethernet. Unplug the cable or turn off the router and it's totally stable. Right now I'm just tethering internet off my phone through USB-C and it hasn't restarted once.
Stuff I've already checked/ruled out:
- Swapped the router AND the cable for new ones, still happens
- Went through journalctl for the previous boots — no kernel panic, no Oops, no MCE, no thermal shutdown, no watchdog reset. Nothing. The log for the crashed boot just stops mid-sentence basically, no shutdown sequence logged at all
- Ran smartctl on my SSD thinking maybe it was dying — health says PASSED, no reallocated sectors, temps fine. Only weird thing in the error log was a handful of READ commands that got cut off within like 30-40 seconds of boot, which honestly just looks like the power died mid-read, not the drive actually failing
- Also tried moving the PC off the extension board straight into the wall socket, didn't help
It's not instant either — I can be connected and just sitting there and it's fine, but if I actually start using the internet (browsing etc) for like 5-10 min it eventually reboots, sometimes 2-3 times back to back before it stabilizes again.
Onboard NIC, pretty sure it's a Realtek chip but I need to double check. Anyone run into this before? Trying to figure out if this is a dying NIC, some driver issue (r8169 maybe), or something totally different I'm not thinking of. Can post more logs if it helps.
