A new version of miracle-wm, the Mir-based compositor/tiling window manager looking to rival Hyprland, is out with a welcome set of improvements.
You're reading Miracle-wm 0.7 Released, Completes IPC Implementation, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
It is time once again to share a list of the best free and open-source software I’ve come across in
The post 50+ Best Free and Open-Source Software for Linux in 2025 first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides.As someone who has been using Linux for more than 12 years, I’ve often come across the same question: “Can
The post Why I Use LibreOffice and ONLYOFFICE Instead of MS Office first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides.
This article explores how modern DevOps teams are redefining stability and reproducibility in production environments by embracing truly unchangeable operating systems. It delves into how NixOS’s declarative configuration model and OSTree’s atomic update mechanisms open the door to systems that are both resilient and transparent. We'll explain the advantages, technologies, comparisons, and real-world use cases fueling this shift.
Why the change happened: The traditional model, logging into servers, tweaking packages, and patching in place, has led to unpredictable environments, elusive bugs, “snowflake” systems, and configuration drift as environments diverged over time. Immutable infrastructure treats machines like fungible artifacts: if you need change, you don’t fix the running system, you replace it.
Key benefits:
Reliability at scale: Automated, reproducible deployments, no divergence across servers.
Simplified rolling back: If something breaks, spin up the previous, working version.
Security by design: Core systems are read-only, reducing the attack surface.
How it works: System configuration, including packages, services, kernels, is expressed in the Nix language in a config file. Rebuilding produces a new system “generation,” which can be booted or rolled back.
Why DevOps teams love it:
Reproducibility: Exact environments can be rebuilt from config files, promoting parity across development, CI, and production.
Speed and consistency gains: In one fintech case, switching to NixOS reduced deployment times by over 50 percent, erased environment-related incidents, shrank container sizes by 70%, and cut onboarding time dramatically.
Edge readiness: Ideal for remote systems or stateless servers rebuilt nightly to ensure fleet consistency with easy rollback.
Personalization meets immutability: With tools like Home Manager, even user-specific configurations (like dotfiles or shell preferences) can be managed declaratively, and consistently reproduced across machines.
Linux Mint, the popular Ubuntu LTS based Linux Distro, announced new 22.2 point release today.
Linux Mint 22.2, code-name “Zara”, is the second update for the 22 release series that’s based on Ubuntu 24.04 with support until 2029.
The release introduced new XApp called Fingwit, which provides a graphical interface to record and manage your fingerprints, and configure to enable fingerprint authentication for login screen (screensaver), sudo commands, and admin apps.
The app uses system default libfprint daemon to detect if your computer has a supported fingerprint reader. Meaning it won’t work (e.g., ThinkPad T480s in my case) for those using third-party libraries.
Besides new XApp, there are many improvements to other apps. The Sticky app now has rounded corners (top 2 corners), supports running in Wayland session, and a new d-bus method has been added to reload the notes.
The Hypnotix IPTV player app now has 2 new “Theater Mode” and “Borderless Mode”, allowing to toggle the app window to hide all the controls and menus, and even window borders. And, it’s now faster on startup and searching with large playlists.
Linux Mint 22.2 also improved its login screen (handled by LightDM display manager). It now displays user avatars, and applies blur effect to the panel and user selection dialog box for better appearance.
image from linuxmint.com
Linux Mint supports Flatpak out-of-the-box. As so many great applications use LibAdwaita for their modern user interface, the release patched LibAdwaita with theme support, and added it support for Mint-Y, Mint-X and Mint-L themes.
Some apps, e.g., gnome-calendar, baobab (Disk Usage Analyzer), and simple-scan (Document Scanner), have been updated with the new LibAwaita library, so they follow the themes mentioned above.
Other changes in the release include:
Loginxapp-aiff-thumbnailer thumbnailer for cover art in .aiff audio filesFor more, see the official release note.
The official Mint 22.2 .iso images for Cinnamon, MATE, and XFCE desktops, are available to download via the link below:
For Linux Mint 22.1, simply launch Update Manager, refresh and install new version of mintupdate or mint-upgrade-info. Finally, go to Edit -> Upgrade to “Linux Mint 22.2 Zara” to start the upgrading process.
