Papirus XApp Symbolic Icons is out: a drop-in set that gives the xsi-* icon names used by Linux Mint, Cinnamon, and the XApp projects proper Papirus artwork. Upstream draws its own Adwaita-derived versions and installs them into hicolor, so on a Papirus desktop every app asking for one of those names gets an icon that matches nothing around it. The set covers 628 of the 666 names, at 16, 22, and 24 pixels where upstream draws only 16, and installs into the Papirus theme so xsi-* lookups resolve there first. Nothing is hand-drawn: the whole set is generated from the Papirus and XSI sources, with no fuzzy matching anywhere.

Tiler is here: a grid-based window tiling extension for Cinnamon, built for anyone who wants flexible tiling without switching to a tiling window manager. It brings grid placement on a hotkey, multiple grids, gaps between windows, reserved screen space for docks and Conky setups, and one-press auto-tiling for the whole workspace, all working with the mouse or entirely from the keyboard. I wrote it from scratch, inspired by gTile, because the existing solutions never suited my needs.

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.