Playing DVDs directly on an Android tablet in 2025 ►

◄ Project Zebra: Upgrade to Debian 13 and switching to Wayland

This entry is part of my Project Zebra series covering migration to Linux for personal computing use.

Title reference: folk song probably from the 1960s although DC Comics actually released a one-shot seasonal comic with the title last year in 2024.

Just a links dump for the last couple of months, starting with an unusually hoary old chestnut for a Reg hack to be bringing up and discussing:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/10/deduplicating_the_desktops/
Personally I think the argument is somewhat confused and may as well be arguing for only one text editor. In Linux, the DE is just another piece of software. I don't like the choice (Gnome) that Canonical and Red Hat have chosen for their flagship distributions, and don't think it gives a good first impression of Linux, but the desktop environments supported by Mint (Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce) are all reasonable choices if you're helping a friend leave Windows and my preference of KDE Plasma is also well-known and widely used. The ecosystem can support and survive having choices of DE, and people who embrace open source and using open source value choice.

Fun find, some years ago Usborne books published some of their really old kids' programming books: https://usborne.com/gb/books/computer-and-coding-books

Dilution of resources does have impacts though:
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/12/ubuntu-unity-mate-26-04-lts-status

Early signs of resistance to Google news about blocking side loading except approved developer software:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/13/google_keep_android_open_response/

Thunderbird adding more Exchange support:
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/11/thunderbird-145-microsoft-exchange-support-ews

Debian 12 (Bookworm) is in normal support until June next year, then two years of extended support - might try an upgrade before that, but 13 (Trixie) will be in normal support until 2028.
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases

https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues.en.html#ch-information
I386 is deprecated, although people using Wine for older software are on the case. The minimum space requirement for /boot shouldn't be an issue, personally I'm not using a /boot partition, and /tmp is replaced by use of a RAM disk by default which is probably okay, I often barely touch most of the 16GB in this system.

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/3-antimalware-solutions
I tried chkrootkit and rkhunter. chrkrootkit detects Veracrypt as possible Linux.Xor.DDoS and warns about a few other things that I'm not surprised about, which googling seems par for the course. rkhunter warns on /usr/bin/lwp-request which others have found also. I haven't investigated Tripwire (yet).

I noticed that "Calendar Reminders" was a running task using over 600Mb:
https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/vp4bam/why_is_calendar_reminders_using_270_mb_or_ram_on/
It seems to be due to kalendarac, which can be uninstalled (and I have).

Debian 14 will probably ship Plasma that still supports X11, which suits me fine.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/11/kde-plasma-6-8-no-x11-wayland-only

I haven't tested it but someone's working on a Plasma kdocker equivalent for Wayland:
https://github.com/user-none/KDocker/issues/95
https://github.com/luisbocanegra/kwin-minimize2tray
So presumably rather than generically address the problem (kdocker works on other DEs) this interacts directly with the specific window manager. Which is okay and architecturally what's needed as far as I know. It isn't the only project aiming to do similar...
https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/15ecad2/kdocker_alternative_that_works_on_wayland/
https://github.com/Druco/WKDocker/
Assuming either works, I could probably start looking at a transition.

Nemo gains regex filename searching and file operation pausing.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/12/linux-mint-22-3-beta-released

Pop!_OS by System76 sees Cosmic DE released (it's Wayland only, BTW)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IyXzjnd6q3g

Haven't dug into this properly due to time, but I'm looking for options to run a few Android apps on the desktop... some of the solutions may be something to come back to post Wayland adoption:
https://cyberpanel.net/blog/run-android-apps-on-linux

How are things going in Windows land? Huge XAML bug with the desktop shell.
https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-finally-admits-almost-all-major-windows-11-core-features-are-broken/

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