Linux

The Bcachefs project has just released version 1.33 as the “biggest new feature in the past ~2 years” for this modern copy‑on‑write Linux filesystem that supports encryption, snapshots, compression, and more, offering advanced features aimed at rivalling filesystems like Btrfs or ZFS.

Manjaro has pushed the first stable-branch update in the upcoming “Anh-Linh” cycle, serving as a preview of the 25.1 release and introducing major changes to the desktop, kernel, and system components. However, the team is issuing a warning to users: do not update yet.

Earlier this year, LWN featured an excellent article titled “Linux’s missing CRL infrastructure”. The article highlighted a number of key issues surrounding traditional Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), but critically noted how even the available measures are effectively ignored by the majority of system-level software on Linux.

The Mozilla Firefox 146.0 release binaries are now available with a very exciting improvement for Linux users relying on Wayland.

Thinkpad P15v gen 3 running arch. I played around with fedora a bit but it was boring. I got a working gentoo install running but that was too complicated, so I settled on arch.

Not Linux but I figured a review of a Unix system would also be of interest here.

Catch up on the latest Linux news: Kernel 6.18, Alpine 3.23, NVIDIA Display Driver v590 Beta, VLC 3.0.22, When Linus met Linus, Linux Mint 22.3 nears release, Jolla Linux phone, and more.

The set of six branches containing SoC and platform updates/additions for the Linux 6.19 kernel have been merged for enabling a lot of new RISC-V and ARM 64-bit hardware as well as enhancing some existing SoCs/platforms.

Merged to the mainline Linux kernel last year was GPIB drivers in the kernel’s “staging” area. GPIB is the General Purpose Interface Bus launched by HP back in 1972 for lab equipment and more. After a year of cleaning up the code in the kernel’s staging area, for Linux 6.19 the GPIB drivers have been promoted out of the staging area and into the Linux kernel proper. The Linux kernel now has stable driver support for this 8 Mbyte/s parallel bus that was introduced 53 years ago.

Beyond technical improvements, Linux Kernel 6.19 will also deliver something that, oddly enough, can be seen from a more aesthetic point of view. And more specifically, it is set to introduce a new Terminus 10×18 console bitmap font, offering a clearer, more balanced option for users who rely on text-mode consoles.

Arch Linux’s pkgstats data provides one of the few large-scale, opt-in snapshots of how real users configure their systems. While not a perfect census (participation is voluntary), the long-running dataset offers a clear picture of how desktop environment and window managers’ preferences have shifted across more than a decade.

Merged last night for the Linux 6.19 kernel merge window were all of the USB and Thunderbolt driver changes. Standing out this cycle is Apple Silicon devices like the M1 Macs now having working USB3 support on the mainline Linux kernel.

One of the most exciting merges this weekend to the Linux 6.19 kernel is establishing the infrastructure for supporting PCI Express link encryption and device authentication. Multiple vendors are working on PCIe link encryption for their hardware while this initial pull begins laying the foundation of AMD SEV-TIO Trusted I/O support for the mainline kernel.

Flowblade 2.24 released today as the newest version of this open-source, non-linear video editing application. Flowblade 2.24 brings a number of refinements while also interesting is their commentary concerning the future with Wayland and GTK4 porting.

KDE developers continue preparing Plasma 6.6, and although there are still over two months to go before the final stable release (scheduled for February 17, 2026), the team posts weekly updates on the KDE Blogs about what changes to expect from this version. After covering some of them last week, we now have a new batch to look at.

Sent in for the Linux 6.19 merge window when it comes to the frame-buffer device “FBDEV” subsystem are just a set of “fixes” for FBDEV drivers and code clean-ups. But it does also include a new console font option for better supporting modern laptops with high density displays.

IINA is only on macOS. I looked up linux alternatives but none of them seem to have similar looking UIs, at least out of the box. I want the player UI to float on top of the video + with a blurred background, it as shown in the image; or at least the ability to theme it like so.

GParted Live 1.7.0-12 arrives as a new stable update of the popular Debian-based live environment for disk partitioning, delivering GParted 1.7 alongside refreshed system components.

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

A review of the new version of Gnoppix AI Linux from DistroWatch. Seems to be in a fairly poor state and fulfills little of what it actually claims to do. Not shocked from something claiming to be an AI focused Linux distro.

For Linux 6.19 as what will be the first stable kernel release of 2026, the IEEE-1394 Firewire stack continues dealing with device quirks and improving support for different Firewire-connected devices. In 2026 is also when the Linux Firewire maintainer plans to begin recommending users migrate away from the IEEE-1394 bus followed by closing the Linux Firewire efforts in 2029.

As anticipated the first release candidate of Wine 11.0 is now available in working toward the annual stable release in January.

Mitchell Hashimoto, one of the founders of HashiCorp and lead developer behind Ghostty, a GPU-accelerated open-source terminal emulator launched in 2023, announced that the app has formally become a non-profit project through fiscal sponsorship by Hack Club, a registered 501(c)(3) organization.

Finnish company Jolla started out 14 years ago where Nokia left off with MeeGo and developed Sailfish OS as a new Linux smartphone platform. Jolla released their first smartphone in 2013 after crowdfunding but ultimately the Sailfish OS focus the past number of years now has been offering their software stack for use on other smartphone devices. But now it seems they are trying again with a new crowd-funded smartphone.

While NTFSPLUS continues to be developed as a new and modern NTFS open-source driver for Linux systems, at the moment NTFS3 from Paragon Software remains the most capable NTFS file-system driver within the mainline kernel. For the Linux 6.19 merge window a variety of fixes have landed for this driver.

After launching Gemini 17 Gen3 in September 2024, TUXEDO has now introduced the next generation of their powerful Linux laptop line, Gemini 17 Gen4 INTEL, a new 17-inch Linux notebook positioned as an affordable desktop replacement.

The many hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem updates were merged today for Linux 6.19 that is predominantly around delivering new hardware support.

Linus Torvalds doesn’t usually seek the spotlight, so it was a pleasant surprise to see him appear a few days ago as a guest on another well-known Linus’s show—Canadian YouTube star Linus Sebastian from the Linus Tech Tips (LTT) channel.

The merged EXT4 changes for Linux 6.19 bring some of the most prominent feature changes in recent times for this mature and widely-used Linux file-system.

Linux’s Integrity Policy Enforcement “IPE” module is gaining a useful addition with the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel.

The Linux kernel’s printk code for logging kernel messages has some useful improvements with the Linux 6.19 kernel.

The out-of-tree Bcachefs file-system is ready with its reconcile feature, which previously was known as “rebalance_v2”, and what lead developer Kent Overstreet calls the biggest feature to this copy-on-write file-system in the last two years.

Less than two weeks after the November release, Raspberry Pi OS received its December update with a collection of usability improvements, desktop refinements, and important stability fixes.

Developers behind Redox OS, the original open-source operating system written from scratch in the Rust programming language, have ported Wayland to it with initially getting the Smallvil Wayland compositor up and running along with the Smithay framework and the Wayland version of the GTK toolkit.

The Linux kernel’s innovative sched_ext code for being able to easily write extensible task schedulers using eBPF programs has some nice enhancements merged for Linux 6.19.

Alpine, a lightweight, musl-based and systemd-free (OpenRC is the default init system) Linux distribution, has just released version 3.23 as the distro moves to the brand-new Linux kernel 6.18, which was promoted to an LTS release today.

ReactOS as the open-source operating system aiming to be an “open-source Windows” by striving for binary compatibility with Windows programs and device drivers is now slightly better with its USB support.

Alpine Linux 3.23 is out today as the newest feature release for this lightweight Linux distribution built around musl libc and BusyBox that has become quite popular for containers and embedded uses.

It’s time to finally build the ticket to my well-deserved freedom from Windows! Join me as I desperately try to make this new Linux PC work, and who knows, it might even end up amazing!

Over time, many Linux users wind up with a collection of aliases, shell scripts, and makefiles to run simple commands (or a series of commands) that are often used, but challenging to remember and annoying to type out at length. The just command runner is a Rust-based utility that just does one thing and does it well: it reads recipes from a text file (aptly called a “justfile"), and runs the commands from an invoked recipe. Rather than accumulating a library of one-off shell scripts over time, just provides a cross-platform tool with a framework and well-documented syntax for collecting and documenting tasks that makes it useful for solo users and collaborative projects.

Last week I provided a look at how Intel’s GPU compute performance on Battlemage evolved in 2025. In today’s article is a similar Intel Arc A-Series “Alchemist” and B-Series “Battlemage” look at how the OpenGL and Vulkan graphics performance has evolved over the past year. Simply put, the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack has evolved immensely this year… Not just for Vulkan but even the OpenGL support continues moving in the right direction too.

A proposal was raised a month ago for Fedora Linux 44 to replace the kernel’s frame-buffer console “FBCON” with KMSCON in user-space. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now granted approval for making this change in Fedora 44 as part of a larger foal to eventually deprecate FBCON/FBDEV emulation in the kernel.

Red Hat’s Peter Hutterer announced the release today of xkbcomp 1.5, the CLI utility used for compiling X Keyboard Extension (XBD) keyboard descriptions for the X.Org Server. Driving this new xkbcomp release are fixes for four security issues.

This is your friendly reminder that the Linux 5.4 LTS kernel series has reached end of life after being maintained for more than six years, receiving over 300 maintenance updates.

As expected, the recently released Linux 6.18 kernel series has been officially marked as LTS (Long Term Support) on the kernel.org website with a predicted life expectancy of at least two years.

AlmaLinux, an enterprise Linux distribution, is widely used as a free and reliable alternative to RHEL for server workloads. Now, somewhat unexpectedly, it’s also aiming to broaden its reach on the desktop—specifically in the multimedia and film-industry content-creation niche.

The Sharp PC-G801 was an impressive little pocket computer when it debuted in 1988. However, in the year 2025, a Z80-compatible machine with just 8 kB of RAM is hardly much to get excited about. [shiura] decided to take one of these old machines and upgrade it into something more modern and useful.

Lepton appears to be the new official name for Valve’s version of Waydroid (Android in a Linux container).

Valve released the statistics from the Steam Hardware & Software Survey for November 2025, which shows once again that Linux use is trending nicely upwards.

After AlmaLinux 9.7 appeared two weeks ago, followed by Oracle Linux 9.7, the Rocky team now announced the general availability of Rocky Linux 9.7 (Blue Onyx), as the seventh refresh to the 9.x series for this RHEL-based replacement, with refreshed installation media, cloud, container, WSL, and live images now available via the project’s downloads page.

The Mint team has just released its regular monthly newsletter. This time, we have some exciting updates to share with you: the project has outlined the final steps toward the release of Linux Mint 22.3, codenamed “Zena,” the third refresh in the 22.x series following 22.1 “Xia” and 22.2 “Zara” releases.

An important set of patches were just merged a few minutes ago to Linux Git for the ongoing Linux 6.19 kernel with some important performance implications.

Via the openSUSE Innovator Initiative, packaging of the Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) driver for the openSUSE ecosystem has begun. This is helping to jump-start the Intel NPU support within the openSUSE space although user-space applications ready to leverage the Intel NPU still remains very limited.

TLP, an advanced command-line power-management tool for Linux that improves battery life and optimizes system power usage, released v1.9, focusing on enhanced power-saving capabilities, more flexible profile switching, and stronger battery-care support across a wider range of hardware.

Merged as part of the objtool changes for the Linux 6.19 kernel is introducing the “klp-build” script as a new solution to generate livepatch modules using a source .patch file as the input. This klp-build effort was spearheaded by Josh Poimboeuf with ideas learned from the out-of-tree Kpatch project over the past decade.

My primary use case for Amber is when I need to write a Bash script but don’t remember the silly syntax. My most recent Bash mistake was misusing test -n and test -z. In Amber, I can just use something == "" or len(something) == 0

NVIDIA released the beta version of the upcoming NVIDIA 590 series of their graphics drivers for NVIDIA GPUs on Linux, BSD, and Solaris systems.

Linux has maintained a default 4MB minimum writeback chunk size but with the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel it will allow file-systems to override that minimum value. This in turn can help avoid fragmentation and yield a better experience for zoned rotation media and other uses.

SUSE engineer David Sterba submitted the Btrfs pull request for Linux 6.19 on Friday, ahead of the Linux 6.18 stable kernel release that took place on Sunday. This copy-on-write file-system continues seeing some enticing feature work and other improvements for this next version of the Linux kernel.

Fedora stakeholders have been eyeing a nicer experience for NTSYNC usage with Wine and Steam Play by being able to have the NTSYNC kernel module load when it’s likely to be used. That approval has now been granted by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) for the Fedora 44 release.

The media subsystem updates were sent out this morning for the now-open Linux 6.19 merge window. There are some new Rockchip drivers and other media drivers that are new for Linux 6.19.

Following yesterday’s Linux 6.18 kernel release, GNU Linux-libre 6.18-gnu is out today as the latest release of this free software purist kernel that will drop/block drivers from loading microcode/firmware considered non-free-software and other restrictions in the name of not pushing binary blobs even when needed for hardware support/functionality on otherwise open-source drivers.

KDE Connect is a popular cross-platform app that allows you to send files across devices and more - with a security advisory being sent out due to a woops. Noted as CVE-2025-66270, that woops could allow an attacker to entirely skip proper authentication.

Almost a month after the previous 2.0.17 release, fwupd, an open-source tool designed to simplify firmware updates on Linux-based systems, has reached version 2.0.18.

While some Linux distributions have begun establishing AI policies, we haven’t seen any communicated from the Ubuntu camp yet but will apparently be permitted at least for project infrastructure. AI is being used currently in an effort to help modernize the Ubuntu Error Tracker.

Last night Intel finally posted their Gaudi 3 accelerator open-source driver support for the mainline Linux kernel with hopes of getting that long-delayed AI accelerator support into the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel. But as I pointed out, the pull request was coming unusually late for being such a large set of patches and would face an uphill battle to make it for the Linux 6.19 merge window. Sure enough, the pull request was already rejected and withdrawn from being v6.19 material.

Miguel Ojeda has already submitted the core Rust programming language infrastructure updates intended for the Linux 6.19 merge window. In the pull request he also notes that moving forward the minimum supported Rust version for compiling the Linux kernel will likely follow whatever the minimum Rust version currently in use by the latest Debian stable release.

The UBports team has officially released Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.1 and Ubuntu Touch 20.04 OTA-11 as maintenance updates for supported devices.

The good news is that Intel tonight posted a pull request for open-source Gaudi 3 accelerator support for the mainline Linux kernel! The bad news is that it’s coming quite late in the product cycle, much later than the former excellent Habana Labs open-source track record, and their hopes of squeezing this code into the Linux 6.19 kernel may be dashed.

Linux kernel 6.18 brings expanded architecture support, BPF updates, new namespace file-handle features, and wide-ranging hardware enablement across CPUs, GPUs, and sensors.

KaOS, a rolling KDE-centric Linux distribution that uses the Pacman package manager and bets on the XFS file system, has released its November 2025 installation image, marking the first step toward adopting the Limine bootloader, now offered as an optional choice for UEFI installations via Calamares.

The Armbian team released Armbian 25.11 today as a major update to this Debian/Ubuntu-based distribution and build framework for ARM devices that enhances performance, security, and hardware compatibility.

Six months after the previous 25.05 “Warbler” release, the new stable version, NixOS 25.05 “Xantusia,” is officially here. Targeted at advanced users and developers, NixOS bets on an immutable design and an atomic update model, emphasizing reproducibility and reliability with the Nix package manager.

Archinstall, a guided, user-friendly TUI installer for Arch Linux with a menu-driven setup that provides a semi-automated alternative to the traditional manual Arch installation process, has just rolled out version 3.0.14.

With the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle there are yet more Rust kernel bindings being introduced and other additions to make it possible to write more Linux kernel drivers within the Rust programming language. Among the new Rust additions expected for Linux 6.19 are making it possible to write Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C) bus drivers in Rust.

Ubuntu’s roadmap for the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS “Resolute Raccoon” (scheduled for release on April 23, 2026) has been published, revealing some interesting details.

Landlock: What Is It?

With the Linux Vendor Firmware Service serving more than 135 million downloads for Linux users updating their system and device firmware, LVFS has been working to get more hardware vendors to contribute either engineering resources or directly contributing annual dues as sponsors. Framework Computer is now the first one to have executed an agreement under these new sponsorship efforts.

Three months after its previous 25.08 release, Niri, a Wayland compositor known for its scrollable-tiling layout, where windows are arranged in columns on an infinite strip, rolls out a new 25.11 version, bringing many improvements.

We’re nearing the holiday season, and what better way to kick it off than by releasing new Solus ISOs? This release is called Opportunity, for all the new opportunities that are open to us. A lot has happened since we released Solus 4.7 at the beginning of this year, so let’s go over the changes.

Eight months after the previous Mercury Neo release, the Arch-based EndeavourOS rolls out its long-awaited Ganymede ISO refresh, introducing the first major update to the live environment and offline installer in quite some time. The developers say the long gap between releases isn’t a sign of trouble, and that the project is doing just fine.

Over a month after its previous August update, and after topping DistroWatch’s rankings, the Arch-based performance-focused CachyOS has released its seventh refreshed ISO snapshot for the year, powered by Linux kernel 6.17.