Linux on libcom.de

Device Management for the Linux Desktop: The Gap We Close Ourselves

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Name a platform, and I’ll name its device management. Windows? Microsoft Intune — and before it, SCCM, now called MECM, which nobody pronounces with confidence. macOS? Jamf — so taken for granted that Mac admins couldn’t act otherwise if they tried. iPhones and iPads? MobileIron, MaaS360, Workspace ONE — a whole zoo of MDM suites, all speaking the same Apple protocol. ChromeOS? The Google Admin console, elegant to the point of dullness. Android? No trouble at all — every Knox fleet, every carrier plan ships with management baked in.

The Raw Power of the Computer

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Computers matter.” Say it today and you provoke scarcely any dissent — and scarcely any notice. Too self-evident, too obvious. Yet what we mean by it is no longer what one would first suspect.

I am not speaking of the computer as typewriter, as gateway to the internet, as screen for streaming services. I am speaking of a quality that borders on the provocative: the union of what one nowadays calls a personal computer with a system like Linux. Of a certain measure of rawness.

Linux: The story of an idea that reshaped the world

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There are numbers you don’t comprehend — you only marvel at them.

The Android smartphone in your pocket runs on Linux. The server delivering this webpage runs on Linux. Your bank’s cash machines, the city’s traffic systems, your TV provider’s set-top box, the ISS orbiting overhead — Linux. Current estimates put the number of active Linux installations above four billion. No other operating system on Earth comes even close.

No proprietary product, no corporation, no marketing machine has ever achieved that. A collective of volunteers, on the other hand, did. Free of charge. Freely accessible. Without central authority.

The operating system is the most fundamental choice we make

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a scene that has played out thousands of times this year.

Someone owns a computer. Not old, perhaps three or four years. Decent CPU, enough RAM, an SSD, a perfectly usable machine. And then the message arrives: this device does not meet the system requirements for Windows 12, the newest Windows release. A coprocessor called TPM, a particular firmware level, a CPU generation released a few months too early — some technical detail the user never knew and never wanted to know suddenly decides the lifespan of their machine.