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KDE's Plasma team has announced that KDE Plasma will drop X11 session support with Plasma 6.8:

The Plasma X11 session will be supported by KDE into early 2027.

We cannot provide a specific date, as we're exploring the possibility of shipping some extra bug-fix releases for Plasma 6.7. The exact timing of the last one will only be known when we get closer to its actual release, which we expect will be sometime in early 2027.

What if I still really need X11?

This is a perfect use case for long term support (LTS) distributions shipping older versions of Plasma. For example, AlmaLinux 9 includes the Plasma X11 session and will be supported until sometime in 2032.

See the blog post for information on running X11 applications (still supported), accessibility, gaming, and more.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind, binutils, delve and golang, expat, firefox, haproxy, kernel, libsoup3, libssh, libtiff, openssh, openssl, pam, podman, python-kdcproxy, shadow-utils, squid, thunderbird, vim, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, and zziplib), Debian (cups-filters, libsdl2, linux-6.1, net-snmp, pdfminer, rails, and tryton-sao), Fedora (chromium, docker-buildkit, docker-buildx, and sudo-rs), Gentoo (librnp), Mageia (webkit2), SUSE (amazon-ssm-agent, buildah, curl, dpdk, fontforge-20251009, kernel, libIex-3_4-33, librnp0, python311, rclone, and sssd), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.8, linux-ibm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-oracle, linux-aws-6.14, linux-oracle-6.14, linux-aws-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-realtime, linux-realtime-6.8, mupdf, openjdk-17, openjdk-8, and openjdk-lts).

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, firefox, go-rpm-macros, kernel, kernel-rt, podman, and thunderbird), Debian (erlang, python-gevent, and r-cran-gh), Fedora (buildah, chromium, k9s, kubernetes1.33, kubernetes1.34, podman, python-mkdocs-include-markdown-plugin, and webkitgtk), Gentoo (Chromium, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge. Opera, qtsvg, redict, redis, UDisks, and WebKitGTK+), Mageia (cups-filters and ruby-rack), Oracle (kernel and libssh), Red Hat (.NET 8.0, tigervnc, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), SUSE (act, bind, cups-filters, govulncheck-vulndb, grub2, libebml, python39, and tcpreplay), and Ubuntu (linux-raspi, linux-raspi-realtime, openjdk-21, openjdk-25, python3.12, python3.11, python3.10, python3.9, python3.8, python3.7, python3.6, python3.5, python3.4, and runc-app, runc-stable).

AlmaLinux 10.1 has been released. In addition to providing binary compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10.1, the most notable feature in AlmaLinux 10.1 is the addition of support for Btrfs, which is not available in RHEL:

Btrfs support encompasses both kernel and userspace enablement, and it is now possible to install AlmaLinux OS on a Btrfs filesystem from the very beginning. Initial enablement was scoped to the installer and storage management stack, and broader support within the AlmaLinux software collection for Btrfs features is forthcoming.

In addition to Btrfs support, AlmaLinux OS 10.1 includes numerous other improvements to serve our community. We have continued to extend hardware support both by adding drivers and by adding a secondary version of AlmaLinux OS and EPEL to extend support of x86_64_v2 processors.

See the release notes for a full list of changes.

It is rarely newsworthy when a project or package picks up a new dependency. However, changes in a core tool like Debian's Advanced Package Tool (APT) can have far-reaching effects. For example, Julian Andres Klode's declaration that APT would require Rust in May 2026 means that a few of Debian's unofficial ports must either acquire a working Rust toolchain or depend on an old version of APT. This has raised several questions within the project, particularly about the ability of a single maintainer to make changes that have widespread impact.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.17.9, 6.12.59, and 6.6.117 stable kernels. As usual, he advises users of stable kernels to upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (calibre, chromium, cri-o1.32, cri-o1.33, cri-o1.34, dotnet10.0, dovecot, gnutls, gopass, gopass-hibp, gopass-jsonapi, kubernetes1.31, kubernetes1.32, kubernetes1.33, kubernetes1.34, and linux-firmware), Mageia (ffmpeg, kernel, kmod-xtables-addons & kmod-virtualbox, kernel-linus, konsole, and redis), Red Hat (bind and bind-dyndb-ldap and kernel), SUSE (act, alloy, amazon-ssm-agent, ansible-12, ansible-core, blender, chromium, cups-filters, curl, elfutils, expat, firefox, glib2, grub2, helm, kernel, libipa_hbac-devel, libxslt, nvidia-container-toolkit, ongres-scram, openexr, podman, poppler, runc, samba, sssd, thunderbird, and tomcat), and Ubuntu (cups-filters, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-hwe-6.14, linux-oracle, linux-realtime, linux-oem-6.14, and linux-realtime-6.14).

Linus has released 6.18-rc7, probably the last -rc before the 6.18 release.

So the rc6 kernel wasn't great: we had a last-minute core VM regression that caused people problems.

That's not a great thing late in the release cycle like that, but it was a fairly trivial fix, and the cause wasn't some horrid bug, just a latent gotcha that happened to then bite a late VM fix. So while not great, it also doesn't make me worry about the state of 6.18. We're still on track for a final release next weekend unless some big new problem rears its ugly head.

The Racket programming language project has released Racket version 9.0. Racket is a descendant of Scheme, so it is part of the Lisp family of languages. The headline feature in the release is parallel threads, which adds to the concurrency tools in the language: "While Racket has had green threads for some time, and supports parallelism via futures and places, we feel parallel threads is a major addition." Other new features include the black-box wrapper to prevent the compiler from optimizing calculations away, the decompile-linklet function to map linklets back to an s-expression, the addition of Weibull distributions to the math library, and more.

The Oracle blog has a lengthy article on enhancements to GCC to help detect overflows of flexible array members (FAMs) in C programs.

We describe here two new GNU extensions which specify size information for FAMs. These are a new attribute, "counted_by" and a new builtin function, "__builtin_counted_by_ref". Both extensions can be used in GNU C applications to specify size information for FAMs, improving the buffer overflow detection for FAMs in general.

This work has been covered on LWN as well.

The call for candidates for the 2025 election for the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board has been posted.

The TAB exists to provide advice from the kernel community to the Linux Foundation and holds a seat on the LF's board of directors; it also serves to facilitate interactions both within the community and with outside entities. Over the last year, the TAB has overseen the organization of the Linux Plumbers Conference, advised on the setup of the kernel CVE numbering authority, worked behind the scenes to help resolve a number of contentious community discussions, worked with the Linux Foundation on community conference planning, and more.

Nominations close on December 13.

Unpacking Python iterables of various sorts, such as dictionaries or lists, is useful in a number of contexts, including for function arguments, but there has long been a call for extending that capability to comprehensions. PEP 798 ("Unpacking in Comprehensions") was first proposed in June 2025 to fill that gap. In early November, the steering council accepted the PEP, which means that the feature will be coming to Python 3.15 in October 2026. It may be something of a niche feature, but it is an inconsistency that has been apparent for a while—to the point that some Python programmers assume that it is already present in the language.

Version 8.5.0 of the PHP language has been released. Changes include a new "|>" operator that, for some reason, makes these two lines equivalent:

$result = strlen("Hello world"); $result = "Hello world" |> strlen(...);

Other changes include a new function attribute, "#[\NoDiscard]" to indicate that the return value should be used, attributes on constants, and more; see the migration guide for details.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (delve and golang), Debian (webkit2gtk), Oracle (expat and thunderbird), Red Hat (kernel), Slackware (openvpn), SUSE (chromium, grub2, and kernel), and Ubuntu (cups-filters, imagemagick, and libcupsfilters).

In July, Collabora announced the Rust-based Tyr GPU driver for Arm Mali GPUs. Daniel Almeida has posted an update on progress with a prototype of the driver running on a Rock 5B board with the Rockchip RK3588 system-on-chip:

The Tyr prototype has progressed from basic GPU job execution to running GNOME, Weston, and full-screen 3D games like SuperTuxKart, demonstrating a functional, high-performance Rust driver that matches C-driver performance and paves the way for eventual upstream integration! [...]

Tyr is not ready to be used as a daily-driver, and it will still take time to replicate this upstream, although it is now clear that we will surely get there. And as a mere prototype, it has a lot of shortcuts that we would not have in an upstream version, even though it can run on top of an unmodified (i.e., upstream) version of Mesa.

That said, this prototype can serve as an experimental driver and as a testbed for all the Rust abstraction work taking place upstream. It will let us experiment with different design decisions and gather data on what truly contributes to the project's objective.

There is also a video on YouTube of the prototype in action.

BPF allows programs uploaded from user space to be run, safely, within the kernel. The io_uring subsystem, too, can be thought of as a way of loading programs in the kernel, though the programs in question are mostly a sequence of I/O-related system calls. It has sometimes seemed inevitable that io_uring would, like many other parts of the kernel, gain BPF capabilities as a way of providing more flexibility to user space. That has not yet happened, but there are currently two patches sets under consideration that take different approaches to the problem.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind, bind9.18, container-tools:rhel8, expat, grub2, haproxy, idm:DL1, kernel, kernel-rt, lasso, libsoup, libssh, libtiff, pcs, podman, python-kdcproxy, qt5-qt3d, redis, redis:7, runc, shadow-utils, sqlite, squid, vim, webkit2gtk3, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, and zziplib), Debian (chromium), Oracle (lasso and postgresql), SUSE (erlang27, ghostscript, grub2, kernel, libIex-3_4-33, python312, and sbctl), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux-aws-6.8, linux-fips, linux-aws-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-oracle, and mysql-8.0, mysql-8.4).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Hardware architectures; Fedora Flatpaks; Debian hardware support; sockaddr structure; NUMA nodes; Homebrew.
• Briefs: LightDM security; Debian Libre Live; Xubuntu postmortem; Blender 5.0; Git 2.52.0; Rust in Android; Thunderbird 145; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The Linux kernel supports a large number of architectures. Not all of those are supported by Linux distributions, but Debian does support many of them, officially or unofficially. On October 26, Bastian Blank opened a discussion about the minimum version of these architectures that Debian should support: in particular, raising the de-facto minimum versions in the next Debian release ("forky"). Thread participants were generally in favor of keeping support for older architecture variants, but didn't reach a firm conclusion.

In mid-October, the Xubuntu download site was compromised and had directed users to a malicious zip file instead of the Torrent file that users expected. Elizabeth K. Joseph has published a postmortem of the incident, along with plans to avoid such a breach in the future:

To be perfectly clear: this only impacted our website, and the torrent links provided there.

If you downloaded or opened a file named "Xubuntu-Safe-Download.zip" from the Xubuntu downloads page during this period, you should assume it was malicious. We strongly recommend scanning your computer with a trusted antivirus or anti-malware solution and deleting the file immediately.

Nothing on cdimages.ubuntu.com or any of the other official Ubuntu repositories was impacted, and our mirrors remained safe as long as they were also mirroring from official resources.

None of the build systems, packages, or other components of Xubuntu itself were impacted.