section
FOSS
Kernel, distros, and the wider free and open source software world.
491 stories archived
OpenBSD 8.0 released
OpenBSD 8.0 has been released. There are many new features, including the addition of hibernate support for arm64, an increase in the kernel virtual address space for amd64 to 512GB, quite a few improvements for the qwx driver that supports Qualcomm WiFi 6 devices, and much more. See the full changelog for details.
BFS Removed With Linux 7.4 As Old UnixWare File-System
Linus Torvalds began honoring pull requests overnight of new code entering the Linux 7.4 kernel -- as well as removing old code. BFS is the latest obsolete file-system removed from the mainline kernel...
KDE Plasma 6.8.1 Released With Dozens Of Fixes
Following last week's release of Plasma 6.8, the Plasma 6.8.1 point release is out today with dozens of bug fixes...
Omarchy 4.5 Expanding To AArch64 World With Snapdragon X & NVIDIA N1X Laptops
The Omarchy Linux distribution to date has been centered on x86_64 support for this Arch Linux distribution. Released today was Omarchy 4.5-RC1 and with this new version there is initial AArch64 support centered around Snapdragon X and NVIDIA N1X laptop support...
Linux 7.4 Adding New Emulation Function While Some Old CPUs May Soon Be Phased Out
Linux 7.4 is seeing a new emulation function added for cmpxchg() for compare and exchange. This is being done so that two-byte cmpxchg() can be used in common Linux kernel code that is already natively supported on newer CPU architectures. The pull request notes though that some old CPU architectures might no longer be supported by the Linux kernel moving ahead...
17k Lines Of New Rust Kernel Code Heading Into Linux 7.4
Miguel Ojeda sent out his pull request of the new Rust kernel code slated for introduction in Linux 7.4. It's a big one this round due to updating the Zerocopy vendored library plus updating other Rust crates for the kernel...
OpenBSD 8.0 Released With Intel Arc A-Series, Other Hardware Improvements
Theo de Raadt released OpenBSD 8.0 today as the 61st release of this BSD operating system...
Microsoft’s AI Coding Agent Testing Tool Has Been Open-Sourced
Scope is for teams that maintain SDKs, docs, or MCP servers and want to see where coding agents get stuck.
AMD GAIA 0.25 Brings Several Improvements For Local AI Agents On Ryzen AI
AMD GAIA 0.25 is out this week as the latest feature release for this open-source project that began as "Generative AI Is Awesome" and is now going on a tag line of "AMD's open-source agent factory" in building/using local AI agents on AMD Ryzen AI hardware...
BleachBit 6.0.6 released with fixes for admin cleaning on Linux
BleachBit, the free, open-source and cross-platform system cleaning utility has a new maintenance release out – with support for Ubuntu 26.10. BleachBit 6.0.6 ships with new cleaners for the Helium browser and Docker (as well as its AI assistant). This update also delivers a set of speed-ups for app startup time, deep scan, file deletion and file wiping, the latter now wiping in 512 KiB blocks rather than 4 KiB. Existing cleaners are improved. Stale crash reports, GPU caches and session files for Claude, VS Code-based editors and Chromium can (optionally and variously) be expunged. LibreWolf cleaning now covers .deb […] You're reading BleachBit 6.0.6 released with fixes for admin cleaning on Linux , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Audacious 4.6.2 rounds off Qt Winamp support
A small update to the Audacious music player is out, with its Qt Winamp interface now offering ‘feature parity’ with the GTK version. Audacious 4.6.2 allows Winamp skin files to be dropped on the main window to install them when running in Qt mode, shows advanced skin selection in the settings window and improves X11/XWayland support for showing on all workspaces. Other improvements in this update to the newer 4.6.x series, and the first since June 2026, include a boost to accessibility as toolbar buttons, including player controls, can be cycled through using keyboard tab and arrow keys. Seeking in […] You're reading Audacious 4.6.2 rounds off Qt Winamp support , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Linux 7.4 Sunsetting Old EDAC Drivers Due To "AI Generated Fixes Frenzy"
In addition to introducing the new Intel BFF driver, the Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" kernel subsystem is sunsetting a number of old hardware drivers due to increased noise to AI/LLM-generated bug fixes for these likely unused or minimally used drivers...
Linux Plumbers Conference videos now available
Mike Rapoport has announced the release of the video recordings from the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), which was held in Prague from October 5 through October 7. Find the complete set via the YouTube playlist or look for the video links in the schedule . See also LWN's coverage of talks from LPC.
Btrfs Brings More Performance Improvements For Linux 7.4
With Linux 7.3 there are some nice Btrfs performance improvements to enjoy while the in-development Linux 7.4 kernel is set to bring some additional performance optimizations for this copy-on-write file-system...
Intel Working To Add XMX-Accelerated XeSS To Valve's Steam Play (Proton)
An Intel engineer opened the pull requests today for adding Intel XeSS support to Valve's Proton for Steam Play along with associated changes to VKD3D-Proton and DXVK...
Linus Torvalds' AI Code Improved: Huge Performance Wins With Reworked Code
Last week I wrote about Linus Torvalds leveraging AI to come up with a hefty Linux kernel improvement using Claude Code. The code is for reading from the page cache without folio references to help workloads of small reads from a single file across many CPU threads. Meta engineer Kiryl Shutsemau has taken that code and reworked it and showing extremely promising performance results...
Linux In 2026 Continues Improving Support For Benefiting Old Atari & Amiga Hardware
The Motorola 68000 "m68k" CPU support continues being maintained in the mainline Linux kernel and continuing to see new hardware support for these vintage systems from the likes of Commodore Amiga, Atari, and early Apple Macintosh models...
[$] Development statistics for the 7.3 kernel
Linus Torvalds released the 7.3 kernel, at the end of the usual nine-week development cycle, on October 18. This cycle, abundantly fueled by LLM-assisted contributions, broke just about every record imaginable. As usual, we have compiled some statistics showing how this release, which is expected to be the next long-term-support (LTS) kernel, came together. Also included is an attempt to determine whether automated patch review is actually reducing the number of bugs introduced into the kernel.
NordVPN 6.0 for Linux will feature ‘breaking changes’
NordVPN is updating its Linux app to offer a “cleaner, simpler way to manage VPN connections” from the command line. The NordVPN 6.0 update, which is coming soon and not yet out, “cuts down” the amount of commands which “overlap”. The company say this will make it easier for users to enable and configure VPN settings. Among the changes, NordVPN 6.0 combines protocol and technology settings in a nordvpn set protocol command, while obfuscation is now handled by NordWhisper, rather than a separate setting. And now that standard servers support P2P traffic, there’s no longer any need to create a […] You're reading NordVPN 6.0 for Linux will feature ‘breaking changes’ , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
[$] Cross-crate forward declarations in Rust
Rust has several ad-hoc mechanisms to allow user code to influence how the standard library executes. For example, custom panic handlers and custom allocators both involve registering functions that core standard library code needs to call. With more similar features planned, Jana Dönszelmann spotted the developing pattern and put together a general solution, introducing a safer, checked analogue of C's weak symbol linking. At Kangrejos 2026, she explained how this new language feature works, and proposed using it to clean up the kernel's handling of integer overflows in Rust code.
Canonical's Multipass 1.17 Adds Direct Support For Non-Ubuntu Linux Distros
Canonical's Multipass software is used for orchestrating Ubuntu virtual instances with a single command to launch Ubuntu VMs across Windows, macOS, and Linux. Multipass 1.17 was released today and they are now offering direct support for enabling non-Ubuntu Linux distributions as well...
GNU Linux-libre 7.3-gnu Removes More Firmware Blobs
GNU Linux-libre 7.3 is now available following yesterday's Linux 7.3 release. The GNU Linux-libre downstream continues stripping out driver/hardware support where dependent upon firmware blobs or other proprietary elements deemed out of line with free software ideals...
CutefishOS is Back With a Vibe-Coded Desktop That Doesn't Use Qt or GTK
The project says the new desktop has its own Wayland compositor and graphics library.
GNOME Mutter Lands Improvement For Reducing GPU Work While In Power Savings Mode
Stemming from a bug report one month ago with GNOME 51 over high GPU usage while the monitor is sleeping, a set of 17 patches were merged today for addressing this issue...