section
FOSS
Kernel, distros, and the wider free and open source software world.
320 stories archived
Mir 2.27 Released With More Wayland Rust Code
Canonical today released Mir 2.27 as the latest version of this set of compositor libraries for easily building Wayland-based shells on Linux and fitting into the Ubuntu Linux paradigm...
ASUS ZenVision Laptop Lid Screen Reverse Engineered & Now Able To Work On Linux
ASUS ZenVision is a feature of some ASUS laptops like the Zenbook 14X OLED Space Edition where there is a 3.5-inch monochrome screen embedded into the top lid of the laptop. From this mini display embedded into the top lid of the laptop it's possible to display animated themes, show the current date/time, battery status, or customized messages and the like. The practicality is rather limited as primarily it's for showing off to people around you besides when your laptop lid is closed, but now with experimental code it's now possible to use ZenVision on Linux...
COSMIC Desktop's Frosted Glass Is Giving Windows Aero Vibes
Some of the latest feature work for the Rust and Wayland based COSMIC desktop environment is on creating their new "Frosted Glass" appearance. It's getting closer to release and giving off Windows Aero vibes for that design language from the Windows Vista days...
Shotcut 26.6 Beta Brings Many Fixes, OpenFX & VST2 Plugin Support
Shotcut 26.6 is now available in beta form as this latest feature update for this popular, open-source and cross platform video editor...
AlmaLinux Day is Coming to Hollywood's Backyard This July
Expect a new AlmaLinux edition built for media and entertainment workflows to make its debut at the July 18 event.
KDE Linux is Coming Along Nicely, Ditching the AUR and Tightening Up Security
The project's May update also brings a better build system and replaces KWalletManager with the new KeepSecret app.
X.Org Server Starts June With Nine New Security Vulnerabilities Discovered Via AI
There are nine new security vulnerabilities impacting the X.Org Server as well as the XWayland component. Yep, more than a decade after X.Org Server security issues began coming to light with a security research acknowledging it's a disaster and "it's worse than it looks", it continues holding true...
AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE Linux Performance
Yesterday AMD kicked off Computex 2026 in announcing the Radeon RX 9070 GRE alongside a number of other product announcements. With the Radeon RX 9070 GRE going on sale today, the review embargo has now lifted on this new RDNA 4 consumer graphics card slated to be priced around $549 USD. Here is an initial look at the Linux performance benchmarks of this new AMD graphics card offering.
Play Catan in your terminal with El Poblador, a FOSS clone
El Poblador is a fully playable Settlers of Catan clone that runs entirely in your terminal. Written in Go by developer vicho, El Poblador is a compete rendition of the iconic competitive board game, which is all about resources, trading, building settlements and blocking your opponents. All of Catan’s core mechanics are accounted for, albeit free of the tactile joy of handling and placing tiny wooden blocks in the real game. It’s a game designed for 3-4 players, so you’ll want to huddle around a laptop or on a PC to play it. You use arrow keys to navigate the […] You're reading Play Catan in your terminal with El Poblador, a FOSS clone , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Intel Xeon Diamond Rapids EDAC Driver Changes Readied For Linux 7.2
Ahead of Intel Diamond Rapids server processors launching in 2027, the Linux kernel continues getting into shape for these next-gen Xeon processors. The latest enablement work taking place for Diamond Rapids is readying the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver support for propagating memory errors/correction information under Linux...
Ombredanne: An AI agent ported our codebase from Python to Rust
Over on the AboutCode blog, lead maintainer Philippe Ombredanne writes about an agentic LLM system porting the ScanCode Toolkit to Rust. In the process, the LLM (or the people behind it) infringed the ScanCode trademark, stripped copyright and license notices, " and started an outreach campaign, without ever engaging the AboutCode community ". Ironically, the toolkit is used to scan source code and binaries in order to figure out licensing and copyright information; it also reports on package dependencies, vulnerabilities, and more. This is worth repeating: A comprehensive test suite, decent documentation, and curated datasets is what makes automated porting possible. It is also what makes a codebase easier to replicate without understanding it. The agent's initial approach, using an existing Rust license-detection library, failed to match ScanCode's output quality. The agent then did what any translator would do when a loose paraphrase fails: it copied the original more closely. The final port reproduces ScanCode's core algorithms, code organization, and data-driven architecture in Rust, not because the agent understood them, but because it had enough training data and test feedback to converge on equivalent code.
[$] Representing the true signatures of kernel functions
Optimizing compilers can, under some circumstances, infer when a parameter to a function is not needed, and remove it. This is all well and good until the kernel's tracing or BPF subsystems need information on how to call the function or where its arguments are stored. Alan Maguire and Yonghong Song spoke at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit about their work on recording information regarding changed function signatures in the kernel's BTF debugging information, to better support tracing such functions.
Seven stable kernels for the first day of June
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.11 , 6.18.34 , 6.12.92 , 6.6.142 , 6.1.175 , 5.15.209 , and 5.10.258 stable kernels. As usual, each contains important fixes throughout the tree, including a fix for the "CIFSwitch" vulnerability ( CVE-2026-46243 ) which could allow a local-privilege exploit . Users are advised to upgrade.
Flathub bans AI-coded apps and automated submissions
You’ll have to sift through fewer vibe-coded apps on Flathub in future, as the store has announced a policy change on software made using AI tools. Flathub, the de-facto place to find and install Flatpak applications, is banning the use of “AI” coded applications and automated submissions going forward. It’s not a blanket ban – mature projects with AI code are allowed A change to the store’s policy note says “applications containing AI-generated or AI-assisted code, documentation, or other content are not allowed”. A carve out will allow “mature, well-maintained projects” to include AI generated code and use AI tools […] You're reading Flathub bans AI-coded apps and automated submissions , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
DistroWatch turns 25
The DistroWatch site is celebrating its 25th anniversary . " All in all, it has been an incredible ride. Many of you who read these pages regularly know that downloading and testing distributions is a highly addictive pastime. I have been an avid distro-hopper for the last 25 years and I don't see myself abandoning this activity for many more years to come. " Congratulations to Ladislav Bodnar and all the others who have kept that resource going for so long.
[$] Reconsidering x32 — again
The x32 ABI was meant to be the best of both worlds, providing the expanded registers and instruction set of the x86-64 architecture while preserving the lower memory use of 32-bit systems. The Linux kernel has supported x32 since the 3.4 release in 2012. The initial excitement around x32 did not last, though, and kernel developers are considering removing that support — and not for the first time. Even the most unloved features tend to have a few users, though, making removal hard.
Multiple redhat-cloud-services npm packages compromised (StepSecurity Blog)
StepSecurity is reporting that a number of npm packages in the @redhat-cloud-services scope include malware that runs automatically on every npm install : The payload is a multi-stage credential harvester that sweeps GitHub Actions secrets along with AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, HashiCorp Vault, npm, and CircleCI tokens, and it is purpose-built to evade detection, including an explicit attempt to bypass StepSecurity Harden-Runner. StepSecurity analyzed @redhat-cloud-services/host-inventory-client@5.0.3 in full. Its index.js , executed at install time, is 4.2 MB, a file that should weigh a few kilobytes, with the real payload buried under three separate layers of obfuscation. The malware is also a self-propagating worm: using stolen npm tokens and npm's bypass_2fa parameter, it republishes backdoored versions of other packages on its own, even against accounts protected by two-factor authentication, so every infected machine can seed the next wave with no attacker involvement. All affected packages were published via GitHub Actions OIDC from the RedHatInsights/javascript-clients repository, indicating the upstream CI/CD pipeline itself was compromised. Analysis of the remaining packages is ongoing. A blog post from SafeDep has additional analysis about the incident. We did not find an advisory from Red Hat on this yet.
Intel Preparing WiFi 8 "UHR" Support For Their IWLWIFI Linux Driver
Intel open-source software engineers have been busy beginning to prepare their upstream IWLWIFI wireless driver in the Linux kernel for supporting their next-gen WiFi adapters supporting the WiFi 8 "Ultra High Reliability" standard...
Fedora F44 election interviews published
The Fedora Project has published interviews with candidates running for the open seats on the Fedora Council , Fedora Engineering Steering Committee , Fedora Mindshare Committee , and EPEL Steering Committee . Voting is open through Friday, June 12 at 23:59 UTC.
Linux 7.2 Proceeding To Deprecate AF_ALG Due To "Massive Attack Surface", Drops Offloading
The Linux kernel's AF_ALG interface for user-space applications to directly access the Linux kernel's built-in cryptographic engine is proceeding with a quick deprecation cycle due to a "massive attack surface" with increased vulnerabilities coming to light due to AI/LLM-based tooling...
Phoronix Marking 22 Years Of Linux Hardware Coverage This Week
On 5 June marks 22 years since starting Phoronix.com for covering the Linux hardware space and open-source news...
Some Elements Of Intel APX Not Proving Beneficial On Nova Lake / Diamond Rapids
Some compiler tuning merged today to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is disabling some features of Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) for upcoming Intel Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids processors as they are not proving worthwhile for performance...
This Credit Card-Sized Linux Box Has a Keyboard, Camera, and AI Capability
M5Stack's offering has already pulled in over 10,000 Kickstarter backers.
NBD-VRAM Provides Swap Space On Your NVIDIA GeForce GPUs
An open-source developer has created NBD-VRAM as a way to create swap space on your consumer NVIDIA GPU's video memory under Linux...