Wringing full speed out of a network used to be a niche pursuit, the stuff of 10G home labs and datacenter transfers. That’s changing fast. Multi-gig fiber is landing in homes everywhere, even Hawaiian Telecom is selling 3 Gig out here on the Big Island. A fast link is no longer just the wire between your own machines; it’s the wire to the internet too. And Linux still ships network defaults sized for a slower era, so on a fast link, especially a long one, they leave throughput unused. Here’s the sysctl set I run, what each knob does and where it actually matters, and the single-stream iperf3 result over 20 feet of in-wall Cat 5e: 9.75 Gbit/s.

Eventually, every Linux user opens an app and finds a generic placeholder icon staring back from their dock/panel. It looks like the dock is broken, but it almost never is - the cause is a single line in the app’s .desktop file, and it only takes a minute to fix. Here’s how to find it and fix it yourself, on any desktop.

I spend a lot of time on the computer, using a lot of software. This makes me acutely aware when things don’t quite work right. A button that renders incorrectly. Inconsistent padding. Unthemed dialogs. Even the best themes out there had small bugs that annoyed me. I care deeply about a smooth, consistent desktop experience.

When Plank first emerged, it promised to be the simplest dock on the planet. Today, Plank Reloaded carries that torch forward, bringing modern updates and solid Cinnamon desktop support while maintaining that same commitment to simplicity.

Recently, I found myself searching for a polished motivational app for Linux, but everything I discovered either required using the terminal or had interfaces that felt outdated. Knowing the wealth of wisdom available in fortune-mod’s databases, I decided to create Fortunate, a modern graphical interface that delivers inspiring quotes throughout your day, while giving me an opportunity to explore GUI development with Fyne.