Egidio Docile 
Sed stands for “Stream EDitor”: it is a free and open source utility installed by default on all Linux and Unix-based operating systems out there. What it does, is performing text manipulation on files, but it can also be used as part of pipeline and supports the use of regular expressions. In this tutorial, we learn the basics of the sed substitute command.
Restic is a modern backup program with support for encryption and deduplication. As we saw in this tutorial, restic is easy to use, but it doesn’t make use of a configuration file, and doesn’t natively include a method to orchestrate and organize multiple backups. That is where autorestic comes in handy: it is a wrapper around Restic which let us configure and orchestrate backups in a single yaml configuration file, specifying multiple sources (locations) and destinations (backends).
Let’s Encrypt is a Certificate Authority which is able to create and release free SSL/TLS certificates we can use to enable encryption and secure our websites. All the biggest hosting providers allow their customers to request Let’s Encrypt certificates in a user-friendly way, via administration panels like Cpanel or Plesk. If we have SSH access to a remote host, however, we can obtain a Let’s Encrypt certificate from the command line, by using Certbot. In this article, we learn how to install Certbot on the most used Linux distributions, and how to use it to obtain and manage valid Let’s Encrypt certificates.
Distrobox is a free and open source tool which allows us to integrate the userlands of Linux distributions. Under the hood it uses Docker or Podman to create containers, and integrates them with the host by sharing access to the graphical server, the user HOME directory and USB devices. In this tutorial we see how to install and use Distrobox on the most used Linux distributions.
When using QEMU/KVM, there are many methods to share data between the host system and guest virtual machines. In this tutorial, we focus on creating a filesystem passthrough, using virt-manager or by manually editing a virtual machine definition, and we learn how to mount a host directory inside a virtualized guest.
Dmenu is a dynamic menu for X often used on minimal window managers setups. It is part of the suckless tools suite of free and open source utilities created by the suckless.org project, which include, among the others, the dwm window manager and the st terminal emulator.
Batocera is a free and open source Linux distribution designed to create retrogaming consoles out of a vast selection of devices. It supports a variety of platforms and architectures, from Intel-based computers to Raspberry Pi boards and handheld consoles, and works as a central control panel for all the best console emulators.
Waybar is an highly customizable Wayland bar for Sway and other Wlroots-based compositors, such as Hyprland or River. The many available functionalities of Waybar are organized in modules, which can be easily configured and styled.
Polkit is an authorization framework installed on every modern Linux distribution: it provides API which allow privileged applications to expose services to unprivileged subjects. Communications with Polkit happens over D-Bus, which is an IPC (Interprocess Communication) system; to understand how the former works, we have to get a grasp of how the latter is implemented, first.
ZoneMinder is a free and open source closed-circuit television software we can install on our Raspberry Pi (or any other Linux system) to monitor and protect our home, or whatever we deem valuable. ZoneMinder is easy to install, supports a vast selection of cameras, and has also APIs for third party software integration.
GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment), is one of the most popular desktop environments on Linux, and probably the most used one, since all major distributions use it as their default interface. Version 42 of the D.E., introduced a global “light/dark” UI mode switch, which is respected by all GNOME applications and wallpapers: switching the global style to “dark”, automatically changes the GTK theme to Adwaita-dark, and all the wallpapers supporting this feature, to their “dark” versions. GNOME also supports time-shifting wallpapers.
Quickemu is a free and open source project which allows us to quickly launch Linux, macOS, and Windows optimized virtual machines. The project is hosted on GitHub, and is basically a wrapper around QEMU and some other tools.