Linux

The Armbian team released Armbian 25.11 today as a major update to this Debian/Ubuntu-based distribution and build framework for ARM devices that enhances performance, security, and hardware compatibility.

Coming three months after the Armbian 25.8 release, Armbian 25.11 adds support for new ARM boards and chips, including Radxa ROCK 4D, Radxa CM4 IO, Radxa E54C, NanoPi R76S, NanoPi M5, ArmSoM Forge1, Banana Pi M5 Pro, NineTripod X3568 v4, ODROID-M1S, XpressReal T3, and Mekotronics R58-HD.

Armbian 25.11 also adds support for Linux kernel 6.17, support for building images based on Ubuntu 25.10, as well as the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Debian 14 “Forky”, SATA overlay support for Orange Pi 5, a user-friendly tool for interacting with Qualcomm devices, and a Wi-Fi injection patch for Linux 6.12 kernels.

Im a total child in terms oft Linux distros. Since im sick of Microsoft i decided to switch my gaming completely to Linux (Xbox to Tower with bazzite, switch to steamdeck). Im quite happy that i installed the distro by my self and found the place where i was able to change the keyboard layout. Because i want to play in my livingroom form the couch i got a bluetooth keyboard. The mouse i already have connected perfectly the keyboard didnt. I tried finding a solution online but soon realised that i have to learn to read the Linux lingo.

Can please someone teach me or point me in the right direction were i can learn the basics. Treat me like i know nothing about distros (because i dont) and PC (because i barely do).

This is also to try the Linux community. Show me what you got.

Archinstall, a guided, user-friendly TUI installer for Arch Linux with a menu-driven setup that provides a semi-automated alternative to the traditional manual Arch installation process, has just rolled out version 3.0.14.

The update includes multiple snapshot-related fixes. Snapper-GRUB integration has been corrected to ensure snapshot entries are properly generated, and f-string handling in the snapshot debug installation has been fixed to avoid runtime errors during debugging.

Bootloader logic receives notable updates. A new dialog now allows the EFI bootloader to be installed to a removable location, improving support for systems that depend on EFI removable media.

Ubuntu’s roadmap for the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS “Resolute Raccoon” (scheduled for release on April 23, 2026) has been published, revealing some interesting details.

The release will ship with GNOME 50, which is scheduled to appear a month earlier on March 18. Two new default applications will be introduced: Showtime, replacing Totem as the video player, and Resources, replacing the current system monitor. Both are designed to provide a more modern and consistent GNOME-native experience.

Wayland remains the default graphics session, and this cycle targets smoother performance and better reliability on a wider range of Nvidia hardware.

With the Linux Vendor Firmware Service serving more than 135 million downloads for Linux users updating their system and device firmware, LVFS has been working to get more hardware vendors to contribute either engineering resources or directly contributing annual dues as sponsors. Framework Computer is now the first one to have executed an agreement under these new sponsorship efforts.

Red Hat in employing lead developer Richard Hughes has contributed the most to LVFS/Fwupd's success, the Linux Foundation has also hosted the project since it has shifted into their umbrella, AMD's Mario Limonciello is among the significant contributors, and now Framework Computer is a new sponsor to the project.

Three months after its previous 25.08 release, Niri, a Wayland compositor known for its scrollable-tiling layout, where windows are arranged in columns on an infinite strip, rolls out a new 25.11 version, bringing many improvements.

The headline feature is the new Alt-Tab switcher, developed through multiple design iterations. It shows large live previews, fades long window titles, and properly masks windows blocked from screencasts.

Because Niri users often work with many terminal windows, the switcher operates on windows rather than applications, and it uses a debounce delay so that transient focus changes don’t pollute the recent-windows list. It can also scope switching to the current workspace or monitor.

Over a month after its previous August update, and after topping DistroWatch’s rankings, the Arch-based performance-focused CachyOS has released its seventh refreshed ISO snapshot for the year, powered by Linux kernel 6.17.

The ISO and installer now ship with Orca and espeak-ng, providing screen-reading capability throughout the installation process. Under the hood, the team has enabled the mkinitcpio systemd hook on supported configurations.

For compatibility reasons, however, the hook is automatically disabled when users select ZFS or Bcachefs as the root filesystem. Bcachefs users now receive bcachefs-dkms, replacing the stock kernel module to provide better filesystem integration.

Eight months after the previous Mercury Neo release, the Arch-based EndeavourOS rolls out its long-awaited Ganymede ISO refresh, introducing the first major update to the live environment and offline installer in quite some time. The developers say the long gap between releases isn’t a sign of trouble, and that the project is doing just fine.

“We still love what we do over here, but we all have chosen to let our lives and loved ones come first over the project. That certainly doesn’t mean we will let you down by letting the community hang there and our releases left to deteriorate. No, we are still active within the community, and our released ISO does receive the necessary updates regularly for the online installer to run smoothly over time.”

The new Ganymede release now brings the ISO back in sync with the current Arch base and includes KDE Plasma 6.5.3, Calamares 25.11, Firefox 145, Linux kernel 6.17, Mesa 25.2, xorg-server 21.1.20, and NVIDIA-utils 580.105.

One of the most significant changes is a complete overhaul of NVIDIA support. The ISO now automatically detects whether a GPU requires the proprietary nvidia driver or the open nvidia-open variant and loads the correct modules in both the live session and the installed system.

The oldest of the open source Linux desktops is planning its final steps away from X11, while an even older Unix desktop is getting freshened up.

The team behind the KDE Plasma desktop announced it is going all-in on a Wayland future. The Plasma version 6.8, "which we expect will be sometime in early 2027," will completely drop X11 support.

You don't need to worry just yet. Plasma 6.5 appeared less than a month ago, and it's currently at version 6.5.3. That means there are the entire 6.6 and 6.7 release sequences to get through, which will probably take most of 2026 and some of 2027.

Ten months after the previous 4.7 “Endurance” release, the Solus team announced the immediate availability of Solus 4.8, codenamed “Opportunity,” which delivers a wide range of system updates, desktop improvements, and infrastructure changes across all editions, along with a completely redesigned website.

With this release, the team finally completed its long-running Usr-Merge transition. With the new epoch, the project moved to the Polaris package repository, enabling the removal of compatibility symlinks and unblocking major upgrades such as systemd 257.10. The update also allowed the distribution to drop Python 2 entirely after migrating all tooling to Python 3.

For Solus 4.8, the Plymouth boot splash system is now enabled by default. Earlier concerns about performance no longer apply, and its inclusion provides a cleaner interface for offline updates through GNOME Software and Discover. Offline updates download packages in advance and install them at boot, reducing the chance of breakage during active sessions.

Finally making the transition from Windows to a Linux. I'm pretty sure it's been asked several times but which Linux OS would you recommend a beginner to use? I've seen Ubuntu and Mint as a good start. Not looking to do much. Game here and there (not too worried about Linux compatibility), streaming, editing videos. If I break any rules. I'm sorry.

We’re nearing the holiday season, and what better way to kick it off than by releasing new Solus ISOs? This release is called Opportunity, for all the new opportunities that are open to us. A lot has happened since we released Solus 4.7 at the beginning of this year, so let’s go over the changes.

General Epoch jump In October, we made the jump to a new epoch, the final chapter of our “Usr-Merge” saga. With the new epoch, we started using a new package repository, named Polaris, after the North Star. This unlocked our ability to remove “Usr-Merge” compatibility symbolic links from packages, update our systemd package, and more.

For those Linux desktop users in the US needing another reason to be thankful this Thanksgiving, a huge and long-awaited accomplishment is ready for merging to the kernel: the Color Pipeline API that is important for HDR is ready for merging! As of last night the code is queued in DRM-Misc-Next for this years-in-the-making effort.

AMD, Igalia, Valve, and other stakeholders have long been working on the Color Pipeline API for advanced color management. Much of the focus has been on the AMDGPU driver and the hardware capabilities of recent AMD Radeon GPUs, since after all, much of the Valve-aligned and Valve-funded work has been focused on the needs of the Steam Deck and now Steam Machine too.

Hello everyone, I hope you are doing well.

I was a wee bit tired of staring at default folders in my home folder for the Games, Build, and Books locations, so I ended up making my own icons for each by using outlines of different already-existing icons from applications. Feedback is greatly appreciated.

In case any of you just so happen to use the Qogir icon theme, and that you have these folders in your home folder, the SVGs are available here if you are interested.

Please note that I threw these files together using the scalable version of the folder icon, and that I don't have any dedicated 32, 48, 96 etc versions of these files. On top of that, I only have the folder versions of these icons, not symbolic. SVGs are difficult (due to my lack of experience), and so I had to cheat by targeting each individual colour, rather than making an outline and then messing with transparency like the rest of the icon set. Needless to say, if anyone has good inkscape tips, please let me know!

OC by @OutwateredFish@lemmy.ca

In addition to the proposed Hierarchical Queued NUMA-aware spinlocks for better performance, another interesting performance-enhancing patch series posted in the past 24 hours for the Linux kernel is for improving the performance of single-threaded tasks running on high core count CPU desktops / workstations / servers.

Gabriel Krisman Bertazi of SUSE posted the request for comments (RFC) patch series to better the performance of single-threaded tasks with today's many-core CPUs. The optimization is focused around the Linux kernel's "rss_stat" structure that holds statistics around the Resident Set Size (RSS) for the process with the amount of memory in use.

Canva is seriously considering porting Affinity to Linux - a move that could transform desktop Linux and challenge Adobe.

As some additional enticing Linux kernel patches posted this week for review, an updated patch series is working to optimize code generation during context switching.

Xie Yuanbin pposted the set of three patches working to optimize the compiler's code generation during context switching, which given its frequency can be an expensive task especially with the ever-increasing number of CPU security mitigations often making context switching even more costly.

It's been two months since there were any notable Intel Linux engineering departures to note following various layoffs and voluntary departures this year that have unfortunately impacted their Linux/open-source talent. Sadly this US Thanksgiving is a new departure to note: one of Intel's maintainers for the Xe open-source Linux kernel graphics driver is leaving the company. This is for the modern Xe driver used by default since Lunar Lake and playing a pivotal role for Intel Linux graphics moving forward

Whonix 18.0 is now available as a major release upgrade. However, if you haven’t heard of it, let me start with a brief introduction.

It’s a Debian-based distro, targeting privacy-focused individuals who require maximum anonymity protections, designed around a security architecture that separates all activities into two virtual machines: a Gateway VM that routes all traffic exclusively through the Tor network, and a Workstation VM that has no direct internet access and can only communicate through the Gateway.

This design isolates applications from the networking stack, preventing IP leaks even if software inside the Workstation is compromised. Now, back to the novelties in the new release.

Wine 10.20 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software enabling Windows applications and games to run on Linux. This is also with Wine 11.0 stable quickly approaching.

Wine 10.20 was released a few minutes ago while coming next Friday on 5 December will be Wine 11.0-rc1 to mark the beginning of the code freeze for the annual Wine stable release. Wine 11.0 is planning for a January debut and for that to happen the plan is to start the code freeze on 5 December, as previously communicated. Wine 11.0 is a big one with upstream NTSYNC support in the Linux kernel, continued WoW64 support, and many other features having landed over the past year.

0:00 sg2d - https://www.supergrubdisk.org/super-grub2-disk/

0:48 rescatux - https://www.supergrubdisk.org/category/download/rescatuxdownloads/rescatux-stable/

1:06 cmd gems - https://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse

1:30 tldp - https://tldp.org/index.html

2:05 wikis - https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Main_Page, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page, https://wiki.debian.org/

2:38 cmdline weather - curl wttr.in

3:22 sh bible - https://github.com/dylanaraps/pure-sh-bible, https://github.com/dylanaraps/pure-bash-bible

4:10 shellcheck - https://www.shellcheck.net/

4:44 uefi vs bios - https://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/booting.html

5:47 performance guides - https://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html

6:16 tldr, manual pages - https://github.com/tealdeer-rs/tealdeer

7:44 cmdline cheatsheets - curl cheat.sh

8:31 fhs - https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/index.html

8:58 otw games - https://overthewire.org/

9:38 awesome lists - https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome

10:40 how to learn.

EDIT: v0.9 released

and a dark version

I really just put a bunch of pieces together. Forked from Reactionary Plus, but swapped out the icons, cursors, window decorations, color scheme, and made some slight tweaks to the layout.

More screenshots and changelogs here: https://store.kde.org/p/2330858

To install this, open System Settings, go to Colors & Themes -> Global Theme. In the top right there's a button for "Get New...", wait for it to load (it's very slow) then search for reactionary, and wait again, then install Reactionary 98.

This is my first time messing with any of this stuff, it was a bit janky lol.