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FOSS
Kernel, distros, and the wider free and open source software world.
491 stories archived
Hate Chromium? Well, There’s a Linux Desktop Based on it Now
Domicile lets you build your desktop in React and CSS, with Manganese being included as the ready-made tiling option.
OpenIndiana 2026.10 Released With Updated Tools & Compilers, New Apps
OpenIndiana Hipster 2026.10 is out today as the newest six-month update to this operating system based on Illumos and with the lineage tracing back to the fruitful Sun OpenSolaris days...
Automake 1.20 Brings New Features, Desires To Re-Establish GNU As Leading Build System
Out today is GNU Automake 1.20 with the new --enable-jobserver option and opting for GPLv3+ licensing...
HyprBSD Provides Wayland-Based Desktop Built Atop FreeBSD, Complete With Steam Gaming
While FreeBSD has been working to improve its desktop and laptop experience, that work isn't yet shipping in released form for the OS installer and other ongoing efforts. Now there's a new desktop FreeBSD distribution on the scene with HyprBSD providing a Wayland-based desktop experience and with the Linux binary compatibility layer even an easy route to gaming with Steam...
Kmorph Aims To Provide Rebootless Linux Kernel Crash Recovery
Kmorph aims to provide reboot-less kernel crash recovery for Linux systems and can yield as little as ~2 second downtime for recovering the Nginx web server or other important services in the case of a kernel crash...
KDE Plasma 6.9 Will Stop Leaking Memory When Right Clicking Files/Folders On Desktop
With Plasma 6.8 stable approaching one month old, KDE developers continue ramping up work toward Plasma 6.9. Here is some of the interesting work they've been up to so far in November...
Vulkan 1.4.368 Released With New Extensions From Valve & NVIDIA
Vulkan 1.4.368 is out as the newest weekly spec update for this high performance graphics and compute API...
Microsoft's Azure Linux 3.0.2022 Ships With More Than 470 Security Fixes
Microsoft released Azure Linux 3.0.2022 on Friday night as the newest version of their in-house Linux distribution. Given the rampant AI/LLM-fueled bug reporting and security research, Azure Linux 3.0.2022 ends up incorporating more than 470 security fixes for different CVEs across the many open-source projects making up Azure Linux...
Asahi Linux Makes Progress On Gaming, More Apple Silicon Upstreaming
Given the recent Linux 7.3 upstream kernel release, the Asahi Linux project published a new status report to outline recent code they have upstreamed to the mainline kernel as well as other efforts taking shape in their downstream codebase...
Asahi Linux 7.3 progress report
The Asahi Linux developers have put out a new report on their progress toward a Linux distribution for Apple devices. Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors. As such, we made the difficult decision to begin the process of transitioning all of our repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Amutable Foundations: A Technical Overview
Lennart Poettering, Michael Vogt, and Joaquim Rocha have put together a detailed overview of what the Amutable Operating System (AOS) and associated infrastructure will look like. The image-based OS approach enables us to enforce some very strict but powerful security properties, which elevate the security posture of the system substantially above traditional Linux systems. Specifically, let's highlight seven major essential security properties of AOS here: No Shell + No SSH + No Language Interpreters . By default AOS does not install a UNIX shell, nor makes remote access via SSH available on the nodes. Moreover, we do not install any of the usual language interpreters (Python, Perl, …) by default. For most nodes a shell or interpreted language support is not required and it removes a whole class of attacks. Signed Images Only . On AOS only images that come with Verity data signed by a signing key listed in the Verity keyring may be activated. [...]
FreeBSD 15.2 Beta 1 Allows Experimental Cross-Building Of Base Packages On Linux/macOS
FreeBSD 15.2 Beta 1 is out today as the release dance kicks off in working toward the next installment of FreeBSD 15...
ReactOS Lands Initial USB3 Driver Support
After years of work, ReactOS as the "open-source Windows" operating system striving for Windows program and driver compatibility now has an initial USB 3.0 driver stack in place...
Videos from XDC 2026 are available
Videos from the 2026 X.Org Developers Conference (XDC) are now available on YouTube . XDC was held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada September 28-30.
A RISC-V Based TEE With AMD Zen 6 CPUs
An interesting technical detail I noticed today from the latest AMD Linux activity is that Zen 6 processors apparently are featuring a RISC-V based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) where in the past it was an ARM-based core...
[$] Locking down hibernation for the winter
When a computer hibernates, the kernel writes the contents of memory to disk and then shuts the system down. Resuming from hibernation involves reading that data back into memory, and then having the kernel pick up where it left off. Unfortunately, the kernel does not have any way to know that the data it is reading back has not been tampered with, which is why lockdown , an optional kernel feature that attempts to prevent modifications to the running kernel, disables hibernation. Matthew Garrett, who has been working on lockdown for many years, has shared a patch set that aims to fix this problem. His solution must also protect against downgrade attacks (where an attacker reboots the computer with an older kernel version to bypass new protections), which complicates the implementation.
Seven stable kernels with fixes for three Xen vulnerabilities
Hot on the heels of the previous two stable kernels , Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.3.3 , 6.18.62 , 6.12.116 , 6.6.162 , 6.1.192 , 5.15.225 , and 5.10.274 stable kernels. Each one only contains fixes for three use-after-free vulnerabilities announced today by the Xen security team. Two of the vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to DoS the entire Xen host machine with possible information leakage ( CVE-2026-100080 , CVE-2026-100082 ), and one may allow privilege escalation as well as a DoS of the host machine ( CVE-2026-100081 ). Users should, of course, upgrade if they are using Xen.
Two stable kernels for Friday
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 7.3.2 and 6.18.61 stable kernels. Each contains quite a few changes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.
Global menu extension puts app menus in GNOME’s top panel
A new global menu extension for GNOME Shell was released this week, and unlike ones you may might tried (and given up on) in the past, this one seems to work well. Earlier global menu efforts have been scuppered by Wayland, API changes and the fact that many modern Linux apps no longer ‘export’ menus, leaving the top panel empty for most apps. This one has menus for 292 well-known app and, by installing an optional companion tool, allows apps like GIMP and Shotwell to display their full apps menus too. For more than 290 well-known applications, ones which don’t […] You're reading Global menu extension puts app menus in GNOME’s top panel , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Linux 7.4-rc2 Change Yields As Much As 162x Improvement For FAT32
In addition to a FAT32 optimization yielding as much as a 265x improvement that was merged for the Linux 7.4 cycle and separately another big FAT32 improvement expected for Linux 7.5, merged this week as part of the non-MM fixes for Linux 7.4-rc2 was another big FAT32 performance optimization...
Arch Linux vs. CachyOS vs. Omarchy 4.5 Performance Benchmarks
With CachyOS recently having rolled out its Linux 7.3 based kernel and various other improvements plus with Omarchy 4.5 having been released this week, this article provides a look at how CachyOS and Omarchy are competing on the performance front relative to upstream Arch Linux.
Linux x86 32-bit Patches Clean Old Kernel Code After Recently Removing Vintage CPUs
With the Linux kernek having phased out i486 CPU support and dropping old AMD Elan SoC code along with removing other obsolete and stagnate 32-bit x86 hardware support, some x86 32-bit clean-ups are proceeding along with being able to make the kernel depend unconditionally now on some features...
FEX Awaits The Linux Kernel To Align With Windows & macOS On ARM Register Usage
FEX 2611 is out for running Linux (and Wine) x86/x86_64 games/applications on AArch64 Linux. FEX 2611 brings JIT improvements while also waiting for the Linux kernel to align with the AArch64 specification and Windows on ARM and macOS Apple Silicon behavior around a particular register's usage...
Kitty 0.50 Picks Up Where You Left Off After a System Restart
The release also adds docked windows, three new cursor trail shaders, and touchscreen support on Wayland.