Linux

The developer team at Discord released a new engineering blog post yesterday (December 8th) detailing lots of fixes, along with some Linux improvements. As one of the most popular chat apps in the world, it's good to see their support of Linux continue to get better over time.

I'd like to set up a self-hosted newsletter. Do you have any recommendations of free software solutions? I would obviously host it on top of a Linux VM.

(Is there a more suitable community for tjis question?)

The developers of the ParrotOS ethical hacking and penetration testing distribution announced today the general availability of the beta version of the upcoming Parrot 7.0 release with major changes.

The biggest change in the upcoming Parrot 7.0 release is the switch from the lightweight MATE desktop environment to the more modern KDE Plasma as the default desktop environment for all editions, along with extending the classic terminal green style across the entire system.

Use case: I want to mirror a bunch of repositories of a project. I suppose this would be pretty easy with a script.

But to the git part: I fear that the developers might force push things and thus revert commits and de facto delete code.

Is there a way to git clone and auto-checking out to a different branch or something else, to avoid force pulling and reverting commits?

TL;DR - About switching from Linux Mint to Qubes OS from among various other options that try to provide security out-of-the-box (also discussed: OpenBSD, SculptOS, Ghaf, GrapheneOS)

With Firefox 146 being released today to the stable channel, Mozilla has promoted the next major version of its open-source, free, and cross-platform web browser, Firefox 147, to the beta channel for public testing.

Firefox 147 promises support for the Freedesktop.org XDG Base Directory Specification, zero-copy hardware-decoded video support on AMD GPUs to improve video playback performance, support for the Safe Browsing V5 protocol, and WebGPU support for all Apple Silicon Macs.

Firefox 147 also promises to improve the Picture-in-Picture feature by adding support to automatically open a new player window for a playing video in a tab if that tab is ever backgrounded, which was previously in Firefox Labs, as well as support for Compression Dictionaries, IETF RFC 9842.

The Linux Foundation today announced it's formed another foundation under its growing umbrella that extends well beyond the traditional "Linux" landscape: the Agentic AI Foundation.

The Agentic AI Foundation "AAIF" has been formed with Anthropic contributing the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Block's goose, and OpenAI contributing their AGENTS.md specification for guiding coding agents.

The Agentic AI Foundation aims for "a neutral, open foundation to ensure agentic AI evolves transparently and collaboratively."

The KDE team has announced Plasma 6.5.4, the fourth bugfix update to the major 6.5 series, which follows three weeks after the previous 6.5.3 release. While no new features are introduced, Plasma 6.5.4 focuses on refinement and reliability.

The release adds updated translations and a long list of targeted fixes. Discover receives several corrections to its Flatpak handling, improving installation management, notifier behavior, and support on aarch64 systems. Headless update scenarios are also addressed, and UI actions now behave consistently across desktop and mobile interfaces.

KWin, the window manager, includes numerous improvements. These range from better handling of input methods and tablet devices to corrections for HiDPI rendering and transformed item painting.

Today I released a new version of SSH Pilot, a user-friendly SSH connection manager.

SSH Pilot packs some useful features:

• Built-in terminal
• Dual-pane SFTP file manager
• SCP file transfers
• SSH Key generation and transfer
• Secure storage for SSH secrets using libsecret and automatic login
• Server grouping and color taggings
• and more

It is available for major linux distributions, and there is a Flatpak that should run on any distro with Flatpak support.

Developer @mfat@lemmy.ml

For the past 15 years the Smatch static analysis tool has been routinely run for uncovering countless bugs within the Linux kernel. Dan Carpenter who authored Smatch and has been routinely analyzing the Linux kernel with it has authored more than 5,568 patches over the years to become one of the top bug fixers for the kernel. But his funding at Linaro has been cut and the project's future now in question.

The Smatch static analysis on the kernel in recent years has been led by Dan Carpenter while working for Linaro. It's fallen under a "Linux kernel quality" project but now that Linaro project is surprisingly ending

AerynOS, an atomic-update-based (not to be confused with immutability) still-in-development Linux distro currently in alpha, has shared its latest project update for December 2025.

The distro released its latest Alpha ISO, version 2025.12. This GNOME-based live environment includes Linux kernel 6.17.10 and uses the Lichen installer, which still requires a network connection to fetch pkgsets during installation.

The update brings COSMIC Beta9, GNOME 49.2, KDE Plasma 6.5.4, KDE Frameworks 6.20, and KDE Gear 25.08.2, alongside updates to core tools such as the Bash shell, Mesa with Vulkan anti-lag, LLVM, Buildah, Docker, OpenVPN, SCX schedulers, Vim, Wine, Zed, and more.

Yesterday I noted some early performance regressions I've found on the Linux 6.19 kernel compared to Linux 6.18 LTS stable. Those initial benchmarks were on an AMD EPYC server. Since then I've seen many of the same workloads regressing similarly on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation between Linux 6.18 and Linux 6.19 Git. Given the significant impact and AMD Threadripper processors always helping out to speed-up Linux kernel build times to make for a quicker and more manageable kernel bisecting experience, here is a look at some of the results for the Linux 6.19 performance regressions.

The Mozilla Firefox 146.0 release binaries are now available with a very exciting improvement for Linux users relying on Wayland.

With Firefox 146, the most exciting change for this last browser release before the holidays is: "Firefox now natively supports fractional scaled displays on Linux(Wayland), making rendering more effective."

Yes, Firefox on Linux is now natively supporting fractional scaling on Wayland!

[TL;DR: I'm looking for resources on Linux so I can catch up and become reacquainted with it. Are there any all-encompassing media about Linux itself, and stuff like backing up, snapshots, file systems, dual-booting, customization, etc. I can use as a reference/ learning material?]

Some background: I used Linux Mint a small bit about 10 or so years ago to save some old hard drives. (Windows 7 era)

I braved Windows 10 but played in Linux VMs as I started to self-teach programming. Things changed when I got my hands on a Steam Deck a few months ago and I fell back in love with Linux. I had no idea how much progress got made. It runs so well and I like the ecosystem.

Last month, I built a new computer. Right before the RAM and SSD shortage (I'm talking mere days). Because of some programs I use, I put Windows 11 LTSC on it, but I want to downgrade back to 10 because it's just so awful. And I'm sick of M$ antics and performance, so I want to dual boot.

All that being said, if there are resources for learning Linux from the ground up or anyone I can approach with questions, I would appreciate some direction there. Many thanks!

Beginning with the Linux 6.19 kernel, the hung task detector and system lock-up detector are now optionally able to provide greater insight into the issues by dumping additional system information. The new lockup_sys_info and hung_task_sys_info sysctl knobs were merged over as part of the pull requests managed by Andrew Morton.

Andrew Morton first sent in the memory management "MM" updates for Linux 6.19. Overall a number of low-level kernel code clean-ups and various minor optimizations

Thinkpad P15v gen 3 running arch. I played around with fedora a bit but it was boring. I got a working gentoo install running but that was too complicated, so I settled on arch.

Since Showtime replaced Totem as the default video player of GNOME, the desktop has lacked thumbnail capabilities for audio and video files. But to address that defect, the Rust-based gst-thumbnailers project has been in development to leverage GStreamer and paired with Rust to provide safe thumbnail generation capabilities for audio and video content.

This past week marked the release of gst-thumbnailers 1.0 Alpha 1 as the inaugural tagged release for this audio/video thumbnailer. Development on this audio/video thumbnailer for GNOME has been led by Sophie Herold.

Earlier this year, LWN featured an excellent article titled “Linux’s missing CRL infrastructure”. The article highlighted a number of key issues surrounding traditional Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), but critically noted how even the available measures are effectively ignored by the majority of system-level software on Linux.

One of the motivators for the discussion is that the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) will cease to be supported by Let’s Encrypt. The remaining alternative is to use Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs), yet there is little or no support for managing (or even querying) these lists in most Linux system utilities.

To solve this, I’m happy to share that in partnership with rustls maintainers Dirkjan Ochtman and Joe Birr-Pixton, we’re starting the development of upki: a universal PKI tool. This project initially aims to close the revocation gap through the combination of a new system utility and eventual library support for common TLS/SSL libraries such as OpenSSL, GnuTLS and rustls.

Manjaro has pushed the first stable-branch update in the upcoming “Anh-Linh” cycle, serving as a preview of the 25.1 release and introducing major changes to the desktop, kernel, and system components. However, the team is issuing a warning to users: do not update yet.

The reason is that several parts of the update require manual intervention, and in some cases, applying them without preparation may break existing systems (more on this below).

The release brings major upgrades such as Plasma 6.5.3, GNOME 49.2, (eventually) COSMIC Beta 9, LXQt 2.3, updated NVIDIA drivers, Blender 5.0, LibreOffice 25.8.3, a refreshed Mesa stack, and the first build of the Manjaro Control Panel.

The Non-Volatile Memory Device (NVDIMM) subsystem updates were merged today for the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel. Most notable this cycle for the NVDIMM code is a new open-source driver addition courtesy of Microsoft.

As talked about on Phoronix one month ago, a Microsoft Linux engineer working in official capacity at Microsoft has contributed a "RAMDAX" driver for Linux to allow carving out regions of memory to create persistent memory interfaces exposed as NVDIMM devices.

Merged to the mainline Linux kernel last year was GPIB drivers in the kernel's "staging" area. GPIB is the General Purpose Interface Bus launched by HP back in 1972 for lab equipment and more. After a year of cleaning up the code in the kernel's staging area, for Linux 6.19 the GPIB drivers have been promoted out of the staging area and into the Linux kernel proper. The Linux kernel now has stable driver support for this 8 Mbyte/s parallel bus that was introduced 53 years ago.

Since being accepted into the kernel's staging area last year, the GPIB code for supporting vintage lab instruments and other hardware has continued to be cleaned up in newer kernel versions and was nearing the point of graduating staging. That's thanks to passionate hardware folks with the standard itself being long obsolete thanks to the likes of USB, Firewire, and Ethernet. The Linux kernel's staging area as a reminder for any new users is effectively a proving grounds / portion of the kernel where code can reside until it's cleaned-up and in better shape for being formally maintained within the Linux kernel source tree.

The Bcachefs project has just released version 1.33 as the “biggest new feature in the past ~2 years” for this modern copy‑on‑write Linux filesystem that supports encryption, snapshots, compression, and more, offering advanced features aimed at rivalling filesystems like Btrfs or ZFS.

The new version brings a major new “reconcile” engine that unifies data and metadata handling, automates replication and recovery, and substantially improves performance, logging, and error reporting under heavy load. But before we get to what’s new in this version, let’s quickly revisit the background.

As we informed you earlier, Bcachefs is undergoing a big transition in how it’s distributed and maintained upstream. In mid-2025, Linus Torvalds dropped Bcachefs from the official Linux kernel 6.17 merge window after a public dispute with lead developer Kent Overstreet.

Not Linux but I figured a review of a Unix system would also be of interest here.

Arch Linux’s pkgstats data provides one of the few large-scale, opt-in snapshots of how real users configure their systems. While not a perfect census (participation is voluntary), the long-running dataset offers a clear picture of how desktop environment and window managers’ preferences have shifted across more than a decade.

At the same time, the data (to some extent) also reflects a broader trend for one key reason: as you know, a default Arch installation gives you only a base system, and you build everything else according to your own needs and tastes. In other words, there’s no predefined desktop environment that users are locked into, unlike most other distributions.

That means these statistics give us a very accurate look at which desktop environments and window managers Arch users actually choose to install and use. But enough talk, let’s move on to the data.