lwn.net

LWN has received the sad news that Seth Nickell passed away, on April 16, from his father, Eric Nickell:

Many of you knew Seth from his work in the GNOME Usability Project, but his roots in that community trace back to his high school years. As a father of a high school junior, I remember being terrified when he flashed the hard drive of a computer he purchased for himself with this weird "Linux" thing. And I was a bit awed by the college application essay he wrote about open source and Linus Torvalds.

It was his interest in packet radio that drew him into working with the Linux AX.25 HOWTO as a high schooler, and from there to his focus on making the Linux desktop work for everyone.

The family plans to share news of a memorial at a later time. He will be deeply missed.

The Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora Linux 44. There are "what's new" articles for Fedora Workstation, Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop, and Fedora Atomic Desktops. The Fedora Asahi Remix for Apple Silicon Macs, based on Fedora 44, is also available. See the Fedora Spins page for a full list of alternative desktop options.

Fedora Linux 44 Workstation ships with the latest GNOME release, GNOME 50. This comes with a long list of refinements to your desktop, including everything from accessibility to color management and remote desktop. Many of the applications that are installed by default on Fedora Workstation have also seen improvements, from Document Viewer to File Manager and Calendar. To learn more about these and other changes, you can read the GNOME 50 release notes.

KDE Plasma Desktop: If you are a KDE user, you should also notice a couple of very obvious changes. Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44 is based on the latest Plasma 6.6, which includes the new Plasma Login Manager and Plasma Setup to provide a more cohesive and integrated experience from the moment the computer is powered on for the first time. The installation process has been simplified, enabling you to easily set up Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop for a computer for a friend or a loved one.

The release notes include important changes between Fedora 43 and Fedora 44 for desktop users, developers, and system administrators.

There are dozens of music-player applications for Linux; the options range from bare-bones programs that only play local files to full-blown music-management projects with a full suite of tools for managing (and playing) a music collection. Strawberry is in the latter category; it has a bumper crop of features, including smart playlists, support for editing music metadata tags, the ability to organize music files, and more.

We have received the sad news that Tomáš Kalibera, a member of the R Project core team, has passed away after a short illness.

A friend who knew him well wrote to me: he was very happy, and his work fulfilled him. That is, perhaps, the best thing one can say about a life in open source — that the work mattered, that it reached millions, and that the person who did it found meaning in it.

Kalibera was mentioned in this 2019 article about C programs passing strings to Fortran subroutines. He will be greatly missed.

FOSDEM's organizers have announced that all of the video recordings "worth publishing" from FOSDEM 2026 are now available.

Videos are linked from the individual schedule pages for the talks and the full schedule page. They are also available, organised by room, at video.fosdem.org/2026.

LWN's coverage of talks from FOSDEM 2026 can be found on our conference index.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (openjdk-21 and webkit2gtk), Fedora (botan3, chromium, cockpit, firefox, flatpak, gum, libarchive, libcoap, mingw-python3, ngtcp2, nss, openssh, openssl, openvpn, PackageKit, python3-docs, python3.11, python3.12, python3.13, python3.14, vim, and xrdp), Oracle (firefox, gdk-pixbuf2, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, python3.12, python3.9, sudo, and tigervnc), Red Hat (tigervnc and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Slackware (mpg123 and proftpd), SUSE (emacs, firefox, fontforge, freeciv, freerdp, libngtcp2-16, libsystemd0, and strongswan), and Ubuntu (authd, clamav, glance, haproxy, jq, lcms2, nginx, nltk, ntfs-3g, packagekit, pillow, strongswan, and vim).

Version 26.1 of the pip package installer for Python has been released. Richard Si has published a blog post that looks at some of the highlights of 26.1 including dependency cooldowns, experimental support for pylock (pylock.toml) files, and resolver improvements that will move pip closer to the goal of removing its legacy resolver. The release also includes several security fixes and drops support for Python 3.9.

By the time Linus Torvalds released 7.1-rc1 and closed the 7.1 merge window, 12,996 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline repository; just over 9,000 of those arrived after the first-half summary was written. These changes were more driver-oriented than those seen earlier, but still also included many new features across the kernel as a whole.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.2, 6.18.25, 6.12.84, and 6.6.136 stable kernels. As usual, each contains important fixes throughout; users are advised to upgrade.

David Steele, maintainer of the popular pgBackRest backup and restore project for PostgreSQL, has archived the project and announced that it is no longer being maintained.

After a lot of thought, I have decided to stop working on pgBackRest. I did not come to this decision lightly. pgBackRest has been my passion project for the last thirteen years, and I was fortunate to have corporate sponsorship for much of this time, but there were also many late nights and weekends as I worked to make pgBackRest the project it is today, aided by numerous contributors. Every open-source developer knows exactly what I mean and how much of your life gets devoted to a special project.

Since Crunchy Data was sold, I have been maintaining pgBackRest and looking for a position that would allow me to continue the work, but so far I have not been successful. Likewise, my efforts to secure sponsorship have also fallen far short of what I need to make the project viable.

Version 0.16.0 of the Zig programming language was recently announced, and with it an expanded version of the new Io interface that we covered in December. The new interface is based on an idea called structured concurrency that makes writing correct concurrent applications easier. Zig's implementation of the idea is more explicit and verbose than other languages, however, which could offer an opportunity to explore the consequences of different designs.

Jon Seager, VP engineering for Canonical, has posted an update on "what Canonical and Ubuntu will do (or not) to incorporate AI" that explains what part AI will play in the future of the company and its distribution.

The bottom line is that Canonical is ramping up its use of AI tools in a focused and principled manner that favours open weight models with license terms that feel most compatible with our values, combined with open source harnesses. AI features will be landing in Ubuntu throughout the next year as we feel that they're of sufficient maturity and quality, with a bias toward local inference by default.

AI features in Ubuntu features will come in two forms: first as a means of enhancing existing OS functionality with AI models in the background, and latterly in the form of "AI native" features and workflows for those who want them.

This year Canonical has begun a more deliberate push toward education and developing competence with AI tools. We are not setting shallow metrics on token usage, or percentages of code written with AI, but rather incentivising engineers to experiment and understand where AI tools add value. Rather than force a single early-choice AI stack, we're incentivising teams to each pick 'something different' and go deep, so we learn more as an org in the next six months.

Version 26.04 of the niri scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor has been released. The most notable change in this release, as the "most requested niri feature by far", is support for the blur effect using the Wayland protocol's ext-background-effect. This release also features optional configuration includes, screencasting support enhancements, and a number of improvements for input devices.

In short, background blur turned out to be a massive undertaking. Not because of the blur algorithm itself (by the way, if you want to learn about different blurs, including the widely used Dual Kawase, I highly recommend this blog post), but because window background effects in general required a lot of thinking and additions to the code, especially to make them as efficient as possible. This is one of the most complex niri features thus far.

LWN covered niri in July 2025.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (java-25-openjdk, kernel, osbuild-composer, thunderbird, webkit2gtk3, and wireshark), Debian (chromium, distro-info-data, libde265, mbedtls, and thunderbird), Fedora (awstats, bind9-next, bpfman, buildah, calibre, cef, chromium, composer, corosync, coturn, cups, curl, dnsdist, doctl, erlang, fido-device-onboard, flatpak-builder, freetype, glab, goose, jq, kea, libarchive, libcap, libcgif, libgsasl, libinput, libmicrohttpd, libpng, libpng12, libpng15, mapserver, mbedtls, micropython, minetest, mingw-exiv2, mingw-libpng, mingw-LibRaw, mingw-openexr, mingw-python3, moby-engine, mupdf, nginx, nginx-mod-brotli, nginx-mod-fancyindex, nginx-mod-headers-more, nginx-mod-modsecurity, nginx-mod-naxsi, nginx-mod-vts, opam, openbao, opensc, openssh, openssl, opkssh, perl-Net-CIDR-Lite, pgadmin4, pie, podman, pspp, pypy, python-biopython, python-cairosvg, python-cbor2, python-cryptography, python-flask-httpauth, python-msal, python-pillow, python-pydicom, python-tomli, python3-docs, python3.13, python3.14, python3.15, python3.9, rauc, roundcubemail, rpki-client, rust-sccache, skopeo, smb4k, stb, sudo, tcpflow, thunderbird, tigervnc, tinyproxy, trafficserver, trivy, usd, util-linux, vim, xdg-dbus-proxy, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, and yarnpkg), Oracle (buildah, golang, grafana, java-17-openjdk, and java-25-openjdk), and SUSE (chromium, cockpit-podman, coredns, corosync, cups, dnsdist, flatpak, freerdp2, frr, gdk-pixbuf, golang-github-prometheus-alertmanager, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, google-guest-agent, haproxy, ignition, ImageMagick, kernel, kyverno, libcap, libminizip1, libpng16, librsvg, libXpm-devel, Mesa, opensc, openssl-3, ovmf-202602, PackageKit, podman, python-ecdsa, python-pillow, python311-Mako, sudo, thunderbird, tomcat, tomcat10, and vim).

Linus has released 7.1-rc1 and closed the merge window for this release.

Things look fairly normal, although we do have a few different projects to cull some old hardware support to help minimize maintenance burden: phasing out i486 support (configs deleted, code deletions to follow) and independently starting to remove some really old networking hardware support, and removing some SoC support that never went anywhere.

But we're more than making up for any stale code removal with all the new features and code added, so the diffstat still shows many more lines added than removed.

Werner Koch has announced the release of GnuPG 2.5.19. This release includes a few new options and a number of bug fixes, and comes with the reminder that the GnuPG 2.4 series will reach end-of-life soon

The main features in the 2.5 series are improvements for 64 bit Windows and the introduction of Kyber (aka ML-KEM or FIPS-203) as PQC encryption algorithm. Other than PQC support the 2.6 series will not differ a lot from 2.4 because the majority of changes are internal to make use of newer features from the supporting libraries.

Note that the old 2.4 series reaches end-of-life in just two months. Thus update to 2.5.19 in time. As always with GnuPG new versions are fully compatible with previous versions.

LWN recently covered Fedora's discussion about what to offer after GnuPG 2.4 is no longer supported.

The kernel coverage here at LWN often touches on memory-management topics and, as a result, tends to talk a lot about both pages and folios. As the folio transition in the kernel has moved forward, it has often become difficult to decide which term to use in writing that is meant to be both approachable and technically correct. As this work continues, it will be increasingly common to use "folio" rather than page. This article is intended to be a convenient reference for readers wanting to differentiate the two terms or understand the state of this transition.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (anaconda, dnf5, firefox, flatpak-builder, libexif, minetest, nss, plasma-setup, python-blivet, rpki-client, and xorg-x11-server), Oracle (bind, kernel, osbuild-composer, thunderbird, webkit2gtk3, and wireshark), Red Hat (java-25-openjdk), SUSE (cacti, cacti, cacti-spine, cockpit-machines, cockpit-podman, cockpit-tukit, csync2, flannel, gdk-pixbuf, go1.25-openssl, go1.26-openssl, haproxy, kernel, libcap, libpng16, libtree-sitter0_26, libvirt, ncurses, ntfs-3g_ntfsprogs, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, openvswitch, perl, python-pyOpenSSL, python311, rclone, sudo, and tomcat), and Ubuntu (gst-plugins-bad1.0, jq, libopenmpt, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, and php-league-commonmark).

Ubuntu 26.04 ("Resolute Raccoon") LTS has been released on schedule.

This release brings a significant uplift in security, performance, and usability across desktop, server, and cloud environments. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS introduces TPM-backed full-disk encryption, expanded use of memory-safe components, improved application permission controls, and Livepatch support for Arm systems, helping reduce downtime and strengthen system resilience. [...]

The newest Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Cinnamon, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Unity, and Xubuntu are also being released today. For more details on these, read their individual release notes under the Official flavors section:

https://documentation.ubuntu.com/release-notes/26.04/#official-flavors

Maintenance updates will be provided for 5 years for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu WSL, and Ubuntu Core. All the remaining flavors will be supported for 3 years.

See the release notes for a list of changes, system requirements, and more.

The famfs filesystem first showed up on the mailing lists in early 2024; since then, it has been the topic of regular discussions at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management and BPF (LSFMM+BPF) Summit. It has also, as result of those discussions, been through some significant changes since that initial posting. So it is not surprising that a suggestion that it needed to be rewritten yet again was not entirely well received. How much more rewriting will actually be needed is unclear, but more discussion appears certain.