Day: June 14, 2026

yserver screenshot demonstrating compiz comptibility

Why Not Yserver? It’s Xserver, But Rust-y.

June 14, 2026 by 2 Comments

If you’re not into Wayland as a display manager, it seems like your options are slowly dwindling. Xorg isn’t exactly a hotbed of activity, and the one fork everyone knows about is best known as a political lightning rod. Luckily, Rust developers can apparently never see a tool without pulling it into their heavily oxidized bucket of crabs, so we now have another option: the creatively named yserver, released under the MIT license by [joske].

The name, yserver, for the record, is just a placeholder name, but we rather like the simple logic of “Y comes after X” — sure, you could call it X12, but that could imply continuity, and this is a clean break. It’s also not a full reimplementation of the huge, sprawling mess that Xorg has become over the decades. It can’t launch multiple screens and thus lacks full multi-monitor support. So, for now, it may be too bare-bones for some people’s use cases.

As it uses Vulkan, it is limited to relatively modern hardware, but has been tested on Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and Apple chips. The target kernel is good old Linux, but the docs do cover compiling for FreeBSD; just be aware that that’s very much a secondary target. FreeBSD users are probably used to that, though.

On Linux, a standalone DRM/KMS yserver can successfully run not just window managers but full desktops — specifically MATE, Cinnamon, and XFCE, as they’re not on the Wayland bandwagon. It even supports Compiz, in case you missed the cube and wiggly window animations. You can also use yserver via Xwayland or even Xorg. Speaking of Xorg, [joske] has run the X.Org X Test Suite (xts5) against this proposed successor, and it currently scores 66.2%, which seems pretty good considering the project explicitly does not plan to copy all of Xorg’s functionality.

Aside from multiple screens, one thing that would have been neat to see is support for the Asterinas rust-based Linux-compatible kernel — though if that project achieves full Linux compatibility, that may be a non-issue. Even if you aren’t an oxidization enthusiast, you might find reasons to be happy to see more competition in the display-manager market — after all, Wayland Will Never Be Ready For Every X11 User. If Xorg really is destined to the slow death critics predict, perhaps yserver could cover the holdouts.

The OpenCAL printer, projector on the right, print volume on the left.

OpenCAL: Computed Axial Lithographic 3D Printing For Everyone

June 14, 2026 by 7 Comments

Computed Axial Lithographic printing gets even closer to the Star Trek replicator fantasy than any other 3D printer we’ve seen: there’s a machine, it glows with a mysterious bluish light, and an object appears. OK, the object is appearing inside a spinning vat of photochemical ooze, not in thin air, but that’s a detail. It’s still very cool tech, and now it’s open source enough to replicate with full documentation and a GitHub repository.

This project is descended from the same Berkeley research that we featured last year, but at that point, they were inviting everyone to join their Discord server, and that was about it. At the time, we put on our old man outfit to yell at clouds and say, “A Discord shouldn’t count as open source!” For once, it looks like those geriatric grumblings were heeded. There is still a corporate-hosted chat server named for a malignant goddess, and you’re still invited, but now there’s also actual, searchable documentation!

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Is A CS Degree DOA Thanks To LLMs? IEEE Says TBD.

June 14, 2026 by 24 Comments

The ongoing AI apocalypse is hitting prices for high-end components from RAM to GPUs to storage hard, which is bad enough when you have a job to try and budget for those now-pricier items — but what if you don’t? Once upon a time, it might have been good advice to tell a jobless friend to “learn to code,” but is that still true in the era of AI? [Brian Jenney], writing for IEEE Spectrum, says the death of the CS degree has been vastly exaggerated, but your take might differ. Let’s look at the numbers.

Unemployment is higher amongst new Computer Science grads than ever: in the US, it’s at 6.1%, while 7.5% of Computer Engineering graduates are on the dole. That’s a record high, and while various EU countries have their own numbers, they all have one thing in common: they’ve all shot up like a rocket in the past few years. In the USA, Philosophy grads report only 3% unemployment. Let that sink in: the folks you used to bully as being the most useless on campus are twice as likely to get a job as you would be if you were in school today.

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Double The VRAM Of An RTX 3070

June 14, 2026 by 9 Comments

Modern games are quite often limited by the amount of volatile memory available to the GPU. Games can require many gigabytes of data during the rasterization process. So the obvious solution for better performance would be to buy a faster GPU, right? Well, not for [AssassinWarlord], who decided to find just what happens when you double the VRAM on an RTX 3070. The forum post is in German, but a translator gets the job done rather nicely.

For those of you following along at home, you will need a set of eight Samsung K4ZAF325BM-HC16 GDDR6 memory modules. In this case, the memory modules were salvaged from an AMD RX6900XT with a defective core. Naturally, you will need to re-ball the chips. To help the process, [AssassinWarlord] bought a stencil from AliExpress, with a 3D-printed holder for the memory modules.

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