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FOSS
Kernel, distros, and the wider free and open source software world.
495 stories archived
This Dev Built an Office Suite Because His Wife Kept Going Back to Microsoft Office
ElixirOffice is a new suite based on Euro-Office components and developed using AI.
Epic Games To Improve Easy Anti-Cheat On Linux With Anti-Cheat Systemd Service & eBPF
In addition to Epic Games announced a preview of their new Epic Games Launcher, including Linux support, they also announced plans to improve their Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) software on Linux. Along with this improved EAC they are also working on official Linux support for the popular Fortnite game...
KDE Plasma 6.8 released to celebrate 30 years of project
KDE Plasma 6.8 has been released, arriving on the 30th anniversary of the free, open-source desktop environment’s founding. Changes are, as you’d expect, varied across the stack. A new backup tool, Kup, is included as part of Plasma 6.8 to make automated backups to external media easier, while Spectacle, the screenshot and screen capture tool, is now able to record system audio and microphone alongside screen contents. When running the Steam desktop client, it now renders shadows and rounded corners for better visual consistency with other apps run-on the desktop. Accessibility is boosted by a new ‘click dwell’ option to […] You're reading KDE Plasma 6.8 released to celebrate 30 years of project , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Ubuntu 26.10 amd64v3 Packages Provide Some Additional Uplift On AMD EPYC
In addition to Ubuntu 26.10 itself delivering some nice performance gains on Ubuntu 26.10 for AMD EPYC servers and other hardware, the optional and currently-unofficial amd64v3 package archive also provides additional performance uplift. Here is a look quantifying the performance impact of amd64v3 packages on AMD EPYC 9005 series servers.
[$] Collaborating with out-of-tree tracers
LTTng creator Mathieu Desnoyers seems a bit trapped in something of a catch-22 . At the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), he led a discussion on the problem he is having in trying to collaborate with other tracing projects (e.g. ftrace , perf ) in the kernel. The feedback he has gotten, both over the years and more recently, does not show a path that would allow him to contribute the 21-year-old GPLv2-licensed LTTng tracing framework, or, incrementally, features from it, to the mainline kernel.
Linus Torvalds's first LLM-assisted patch series
At the recently concluded Maintainers Summit , Linus Torvalds said that he had been using a large language model to work on a patch series addressing a longstanding problem; he has now posted that series for review . The fairly short series of ten patches basically enhances folio lookup by noticing when folios are hot, and setting a "delay releasing this folio until after a RCU period", and then using that RCU delay it does not just the folio lookup itself under RCU (which we've done forever), but also the actual folio data accesses themselves under RCU. No refcount taking needed for the fastpath where we can just read the data from the folio entirely in an RCU-protected region when the user copy doesn't cause page faults. The end result is an order-of-magnitude speedup for a read() -heavy benchmark. Review has already identified a race condition in the code, though, so further work will be needed.
Linux Mint 23 is No More. A New Release Takes its Place
The new one, Linux Mint 27 "Adrien," is due Christmas with an Ubuntu 26.04 LTS base.
KDE Plasma 6.8 released
Version 6.8 of the KDE Plasma desktop has been released. The The KDE project has timed the release to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Matthias Ettrich's email announcing the project: Unix popularity grows thanks to the free variants, mostly Linux. But still a consistent, nice looking free desktop-environment is missing. There are several nice either free or low-priced applications available, so that Linux/X11 would almost fit everybody needs if we could offer a real GUI. Notable changes include accessibility improvements, inclusion of the Kup backup tool as part of Plasma, as well as the ability to include system audio and microphone input in Spectacle screen recordings. Plasma 6.8 also drops support for Plasma X11 sessions, as was announced in November 2025. X11 applications are still supported via XWayland, and KDE applications will continue to support X11 " for the foreseeable future ". See the KDE wiki for a list of major user-facing changes, and the changelog for all changes since Plasma 6.7.5.
[$] GCC development with large-language models
After much deliberation, the GCC project recently came up with a policy on the use of large language models for development of the compiler suite. It is somewhat restrictive, but still leaves room for LLMs in the development process. At the 2026 GNU Tools Cauldron , Jeff Law and Kyrill Tkachov discussed how these tools have been useful for them.
HP EliteBook 6 G1q Powered By Snapdragon X1 Plus Sees Linux Patches
Canonical engineer Juerg Haefliger posted a set of Device Tree patches in working to support the mainline Linux kernel on the HP EliteBook 6 G1q laptop that is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Plus SoC...
Linux Finally Making It Easier To Answer The Question: "Is This RISC-V System RVA23?"
The RISC-V RVA23 profile is a big deal for reducing fragmentation in the RISC-V ecosystem and standardizing more of the ISA to make it easier to distribute modern RISC-V binaries and the like. Modern versions of Ubuntu mandate RVA23 even though compliant hardware is still quite limited. Somewhat surprisingly, only coming about now is an easy ability for Linux users to find the answer to "is my RISC-V system RVA23 compliant?" Pending Linux kernel patches are finally offering a one-shot way of telling you...
BeOS-Inspired Haiku Landed More Hardware Improvements & Other Changes In September
Released at the end of August was Haiku R1 Beta 6 and over the course of September, further improvements continued to land for this BeOS-inspired project now in its 25th year of development...
Cloud Hypervisor 54 Released With Live Migration Improvements
Cloud Hypervisor, the Rust-based Virtual Machine Monitor that began as an Intel open-source project and evolved into a multi-vendor Linux Foundation project, is out today with a sizable feature update...
Rustls 0.23.46 Released With Four Security Fixes
Rustls as the modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language with an emphasis on memory safety is out today with its v0.23.46 release in order to ship four new security fixes...
KDE Plasma 6.8 Released, Marks 30 Years Of The KDE Project
The feature-packed and polished Plasma 6.8 KDE desktop is now available. Making this release all the more special is that it coincides with the 30th anniversary of the KDE project...
This Rust File Manager Was Designed for Omarchy, but Arch Users Can Run it Too
Strata is a new offering that can open folders, preview images, and remember the sort order and icon size from previous sessions.
Mesa Expands NPU Capabilities With Support For YOLOX With PyTorch
While Mesa is predominantly used for GPU drivers, open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso continues advancing the capabilities of NPUs within the Mesa driver stack...
Intel ISPC 1.32 Released With AVX10.2 & APX Support, Even AMD Zen 6 Too
Intel ISPC 1.32 released today as the newest version of this Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler built atop LLVM/Clang. ISPC is a variant of the C programming language with extensiosn catering to Single Program Multiple Data programming for both Intel CPUs and GPUs...
ONLYOFFICE 10.0 is a ‘fully rebuilt app’ with expanded AI tools
A new version of free, open-source productivity suite ONLYOFFICE is out, bringing more than a thousand bug fixes and an expanded set of AI features. ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors v10.0 is billed as a “fully rebuilt app”, and its developers warn those who will upgrade from earlier versions that not all of their settings and preferences will transfer over. AI features in ONLYOFFICE 10.0 now come as a separate AI Tools add-on that has to be manually installed. Its makers say they removed AI features from the the open-source build based on user feedback. When AI Tools are installed and configured […] You're reading ONLYOFFICE 10.0 is a ‘fully rebuilt app’ with expanded AI tools , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
[$] KDE Linux at two
KDE Linux , the KDE Project's second stab at creating its own distribution, was first introduced as "Project Banana" at the Akademy conference in 2024 by Harald Sitter. Nate Graham announced the first alpha-quality release during Akademy 2025 . Graham and Sitter paired up at Akademy 2026 to provide an update on its progress, lay out plans for refining the distribution to address user feedback, and discuss some of the problems that still need to be dealt with. KDE Linux is still not-quite-ready for prime time, but Graham hopes that it will be suitable for widespread use soon—for an undefined value of "soon".
With an Eye on Europe, Mozilla Launches Firefox Enterprise With Self-Hosted Browser Management
Mozilla has announced Firefox Enterprise, a commercial offering for businesses and government agencies. It combines Firefox with a management console that organizations can run on their own servers.
Nix and Lix local root-privilege-escalation vulnerabilities
The Lix and Nix projects have jointly disclosed a set of vulnerabilities that can be used to escalate privileges to root on systems running the Lix or Nix daemons. " All systems that build untrusted derivations are affected. " Releases with fixes from each project are available today. CVE IDs have not yet been requested. See the announcement for more details on the vulnerabilities.
Linux Mint 27 “Adrien” is on course for a Christmas release
Linux Mint shook up its release schedule this year and now it’s shaking up its versioning scheme as well – the next major release won’t be Linux Mint 23, but Linux Mint 27. Releases will now be numbered by year. Linux Mint 27 will be followed by v28, and so on. The release also sees the start of a new series of release codenames. Mint has traditionally used feminine first names, cycling through the alphabet from Linux Mint 1.0 ‘Ada’ in 2006 through to Linux Mint 22.3 ‘Zena’ in 2026. The series returns to ‘A’ with Linux Mint 27 and […] You're reading Linux Mint 27 “Adrien” is on course for a Christmas release , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Framework Laptop 12 Offers Improved Performance & Efficiency With Intel Core 3 Wildcat Lake
Last year Framework Computer launched the Framework Laptop 12 as a convertible, 2-in-1 laptop that was friendly with Linux and upgradeable inline with the beloved Framework Laptop 13 and 16 models. The initial Framework Laptop 12 was nice but the use of an Intel Raptor Lake U SoC in 2025 wasn't all that exciting. Now though Framework Laptop 12 is available with Intel Core 3 "Wildcat Lake" for offering better performance and power efficiency.