Linux

While the "Nova" driver continues to be developed as a modern Rust-written, open-source and in-kernel NVIDIA graphics driver for Linux, for the time being Nouveau is what's working for end-users for those wanting a mainline open-source NVIDIA graphics driver for gaming and other workloads. With Linux 6.19 the Nouveau driver is picking up support for handling larger pages as well as compression support.

Sent out today was the latest round of drm-misc-next updates intended for Linux 6.19. Standing out there on the Nouveau side is enabling support for larger pages and compression support.

I just wanted to share a tip here, as my microphone is shit. In pulseaudio I could fix with that module, now in pipewire I just imported the module, configuring the file ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d/99-echo-cancel.conf with:

context.exec = [
    {
        path = "pactl"
        args = "load-module module-echo-cancel aec_method=webrtc aec_args=\"analog_gain_control=0 digital_gain_control=1\""
    }
]

After this, restarting pipewire with systemctl --user restart pipewire pipewire-pulse, the source appeared and the sound from the Echo-Cancel Source is much cleaner than my microphone.

As I don't hear anything talking about this, this might be valuable information.

!!! IF YOU ARE AN EU CITIZEN, PLEASE DO THE FOLLOWING FORM !!!

https://fightchatcontrol.eu/#contact-tool

Be especially sure to select your home country's permanent representation in the Committee, but selecting everyone the website proposes is a very good idea (and done by default).

Raise your voices and flood their inbox, this might be the last chance we ever get

Source

Patrick Breyer's warning about this from 2 days ago

If you use Arch Linux, you’ve probably noticed that after a while, and especially after system updates, files with the .pacnew extension start showing up on your system. And since you’re reading this, that’s likely what brought you here: to figure out what these files are, why they appear, and what you’re supposed to do with them.

Well, you’ve come to the right place. In the lines below, I’ll try to explain everything clearly and straightforwardly. So, let’s start with the main question.

Posted to the mailing list on Friday were the latest proposed guidelines for tool-generated contributions to the Linux kernel. The coding tools in large part being focused on AI generated content.

Intel Linux engineer Dave Hansen posted the third draft of the proposed AI/tool generated content guidelines for the Linux kernel. The new guidelines rename "LLM" mentions to "coding assistant", mentioning testing as part of the change if done by a tool, and some other minor revisions.

I want a display manager that shows the desktop as the background, instead of a background image or video. I'm thinking of auto-logging in on boot, and adding another startup command to Hyprland to lock the desktop and show the display manger. My searches didn't yield anything. The closest I could find is hyprlock which blurs the desktop, but that's just a lock screen & not a proper display manager.

Patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week are seeking to remove SHA1 support for signing of kernel modules. This is part of the larger effort in the industry for moving away from SHA1 given its vulnerabilities to hash collisions and superior hashing algorithms being available.

SUSE engineer Petr Pavlu sent out the patch set this week to remove SHA1 support for module signing within the Linux kernel. He noted on that patch series:

"SHA-1 is considered deprecated and insecure due to vulnerabilities that can lead to hash collisions. Most distributions have already been using SHA-2 for module signing because of this. The default was also changed last year from SHA-1 to SHA-512 in f3b93547b91a ("module: sign with sha512 instead of sha1 by default"). This was not reported to cause any issues. Therefore, it now seems to be a good time to remove SHA-1 support for module signing.

Looking at the configs of several distributions, it seems only Android still uses SHA-1 for module signing."

The Tails project has announced the release of Tails 7.2, a new version of the privacy-focused Linux distribution that routes all internet connections through the Tor network.

The update’s highlight is the upgrade to Tor Browser 15.0.1, introducing a trio of interface improvements inherited from Firefox 140. These include vertical tabs, tab groups, and a redesigned address bar with enhanced search.

Back in early September we reported on a Linux hardware enablement leader planning to leave Red Hat. Hans de Goede has been a longtime contributor to improving Intel/AMD Linux desktop/laptop hardware support and in fact an x86 platform drivers subsystem maintainer. We now found out where this lead Linux x86 driver developer ended up: Qualcomm.

Hans de Goede during his 17 year tenure at Red Hat worked on improving the Intel web camera support in recent years, improving x86 tablet support with the mainline kernel, occasionally dabbling with the open-source graphics drivers, improving VirtualBox driver support, and countless other Intel/AMD Linux laptop improvements and various other kernel enhancements to benefit hardware support on Linux. A quick search shows 124 articles on Phoronix news articles where I've brought up Hans de Goede's contributions by name.

lightdm-kde-greeter is a KDE-themed greeter application for the lightdm display manager. At the beginning of September one of our community packagers asked us to review a D-Bus service contained in lightdm-kde-greeter for addition to openSUSE Tumbleweed.

In the course of the review we found a potential privilege escalation from the lightdm service user to root which is facilitated by this D-Bus service, among some other shortcomings in its implementation.

The Linux kernel's port to the DEC Alpha processors remains alive over 30 years after these processors first appeared.

Sent out yesterday was a pull request for the DEC Alpha code with the sole change of introducing another maintainer for the Alpha port. That change is now merged for Linux 6.18 with having another recognized maintainer of the Alpha code within the Linux kernel.

The EROFS read-only file-system started by Huawei and now maintained by a growing number of contributors continues attracting even more interest. EROFS has exhibited much potential for mobile devices as well as container use-cases while proving itself to be quite robust since its mainlining back in 2019.

Merged today as part of the EROFS fixes for Linux 6.18 kernel ahead of this weekend's Linux 6.18-rc6 is adding another EROFS code reviewer.

I was sick of reinstalling after every experiment, so I built a desktop that survives distro hopping, dumb package upgrades and the occasional X11/Wayland meltdown. The trick is simple: encrypted LUKS root, Btrfs subvolumes with aggressive zstd compression and snapshotting, plus borg backups mirrored offsite with rclone. I can break everything and be back to a working system in 10 minutes.

Quick recipe you can follow (NVMe primary, small EFI, LUKS encrypted root):

• Partition: EFI 512M, root as LUKS. Cryptsetup and create Btrfs inside the LUKS container: cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/nvme0n1p2; cryptsetup open /dev/nvme0n1p2 cryptroot; mkfs.btrfs -f /dev/mapper/cryptroot
• Create subvolumes: mount /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt; btrfs subvolume create /mnt/@; btrfs subvolume create /mnt/@home; umount /mnt
• Mount for install: mount -o subvol=@,noatime,compress=zstd:15,space_cache=v2,ssd /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt; mkdir -p /mnt/home; mount -o subvol=@home,compress=zstd:15 /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt/home
• Install your distro onto /mnt normally, put /boot or EFI on the unencrypted partition if your distro needs it.

Make snapshots and backups part of the routine:

• Local snapshots: use Timeshift (GUI) or snapper for automatic pre/post package snapshots. Snapper is great for root snapshots on Btrfs.
• Offsite backups: borg init --encryption=repokey-blake2 /path/to/repo; borg create --stats /path/to/repo::'{now:%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M}' /home /etc; borg prune --keep-daily=7 --keep-weekly=4 --keep-monthly=6. Mirror the borg repo to cloud with rclone or an inexpensive S3/backblaze bucket.

How to recover when you inevitably mess up:

1. Boot a live USB, open the LUKS container with cryptsetup open /dev/nvme0n1p2 cryptroot.
2. Mount the Btrfs and list snapshots: btrfs subvolume list -s /mnt.
3. Make the snapshot the default root with btrfs subvolume set-default /mnt and reboot.

Hardware notes: buy a second NVMe or a small external SSD for local borg archives and cold snapshots. Avoid weird consumer RAID features on laptops and get a wifi card known to have mainline driver support. This setup saved my butt more than once when a kernel update nuked my X11 config or when I wanted to try a new distro without grief.

If you want, I can post a ready-to-run install script for Ubuntu/Arch with these exact commands and a sample snapper config. Stop treating your root filesystem like a fragile snowflake and start building resilience.

OC by @Bagel@lemmings.world

Compared to other atomic distributions on the market, the ability to live-update without needing to reboot is an important usability requirement for us, such that the user experience remains friendly to downstream users.

As covered recently on Phoronix there has been several exciting improvements for aging AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 era graphics cards for the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack. This work has been led by Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux Open-Source Graphics Driver Group with an ultimate goal of shifting the GCN 1.0/1.1 open-source Linux driver hardware support from the aging "Radeon" kernel graphics driver over to the "AMDGPU" kernel driver already used by default for all AMD GPUs/accelerators from GCN 1.2 and newer.

Timur Kristóf over the past several months worked out analog video connector support for AMDGPU DC as one of the missing features when using GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs on the AMDGPU kernel driver. He's also been working on other fixes and improvements for allowing the Radeon Southern Islands and Sea Islands GPUs to play nicely with this driver. By going with the AMDGPU driver, these first two generation Graphics Core Next GPUs can enjoy RADV Vulkan driver support out-of-the-box, better performance, and all around a more well rounded and better maintained open-source driver than using the legacy Radeon driver.

Just hours ago Valve announced the new Steam Controller along with the Steam Frame VR headset and new Steam Machine. While these new Steam hardware products won't be available until early 2026, Valve has just-now upstreamed support for the new Steam Controller to the SDL3 library.

The Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL) is important to Valve's Steam runtime and used by many games for cross-platform hardware/software abstractions. In ensuring good support ahead of the new Steam Controller's retail availability and seeing that it makes it into the next SDL3 update, today that new Steam Controller support is already upstreamed to SDL Git.

Valve today (12 November 2025) announced their new Steam Machine (x86 CPU, 6x more powerful than Steam Deck) and Steam Frame (self-contained and PCVR streaming VR headset with ARM CPU & "FEX" translation of x86 to ARM) to be released in early 2026. No prices yet.

I'm trying to speculate what effects this will have on the wider Linux ecosystem. Both devices will be running Steam OS and be open so you can run any OS.

First, I've read many people state that the Steam Deck considerably increased the number of devices running Linux, so it seems to me that these two new devices will accelerate that trend.

Second, it seems to me that the Steam Frame will significantly increase VR use and development for Linux.

Third, I wonder what the implications of Frame's x86 to arm translation layer (based on FEX, an open source project that I only learned about today) as well as Android compatibility (they state it can sideload Android APKs) will be. Could this somehow help either Linux on Apple silicon or Linux phone efforts? I'm very unfamiliar with what's going on with either of these efforts, so I may be way out on a limb here.

What do you think about all this?

OQB @Cricket@lemmy.zip

Despite this not being FOSS like GIMP, I think it's great that there is at least some very viable alternative that can run on Linux even with some workaround, for free (besides Photopea).

Canonical has significantly expanded the scope of its enterprise offering by extending the Ubuntu Pro Legacy add-on, which now brings the total lifecycle for Ubuntu LTS releases to 15 years.

The change applies retroactively, starting with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), providing organizations with a longer, more predictable maintenance horizon for mission-critical systems.

A Chromium engineer at Google posted the initial Device Tree (DT) files for being able to boot their latest-generation Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, and Pixel 10 Pro XL devices with the mainline Linux kernel.

Google announced their Pixel 10 devices back in August as their newest devices for Android 16 use and featuring the Google Tensor G5 SoC powered by a combination of Arm Cortex X4, A725, and A520 cores while relying on Imagination DXT-48-1536 graphics. Outside the confines of Google's Android, out today is the initial Device Trees for being able to boo the Google Pixel 10 / Pixel 10 Pro / Pixel 10 Pro XL devices with these patches proposed for the mainline Linux kernel.