Linux

ReactOS as the open-source operating system aiming to be an "open-source Windows" by striving for binary compatibility with Windows programs and device drivers is now slightly better with its USB support.

ReactOS developers shared news today that a number of bug fixes for USB drivers have been merged. In particular, it should fix various Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) issues reported when running ReactOS on real hardware with USB. They remarked, "USB stack is now reported to be a bit more stable ;)"

Alpine, a lightweight, musl-based and systemd-free (OpenRC is the default init system) Linux distribution, has just released version 3.23 as the distro moves to the brand-new Linux kernel 6.18, which was promoted to an LTS release today.

Core developer tools receive major upgrades, including GCC 15, LLVM 21, Go 1.25, Rust 1.91, PHP 8.5, and PostgreSQL 18. The release also updates a long list of user-facing components, including GNOME 49, KDE Plasma 6.5.3, LXQt 2.3, Sway 1.11, and Qt 6.10.

Another highlight is that this version introduces APK-Tools v3. The new package manager version is designed to be a seamless in-place upgrade for most users, retaining the v2 package format while preparing the system for future changes.

Valve released the statistics from the Steam Hardware & Software Survey for November 2025, which shows once again that Linux use is trending nicely upwards.

Lepton appears to be the new official name for Valve's version of Waydroid (Android in a Linux container).

We still don't have a whole lot of details about how this is all going to work, outside of Lepton enabling Android APKs for developers on the upcoming Steam Frame VR kit, but it's now that little bit more official with a proper name and even a logo.

The Linux kernel's innovative sched_ext code for being able to easily write extensible task schedulers using eBPF programs has some nice enhancements merged for Linux 6.19.

With Linux 6.19 the extensible scheduler class brings improved recovery for misbehaving (e)BPF schedulers. The pull request explains:

"Improve recovery from misbehaving BPF schedulers. When a scheduler puts many tasks with varying affinity restrictions on a shared DSQ, CPUs scanning through tasks they cannot run can overwhelm the system, causing lockups. Bypass mode now uses per-CPU DSQs with a load balancer to avoid this, and hooks into the hardlockup detector to attempt recovery. Add scx_cpu0 example scheduler to demonstrate this scenario."

It’s time to finally build the ticket to my well-deserved freedom from Windows! Join me as I desperately try to make this new Linux PC work, and who knows, it might even end up amazing!

The Sharp PC-G801 was an impressive little pocket computer when it debuted in 1988. However, in the year 2025, a Z80-compatible machine with just 8 kB of RAM is hardly much to get excited about. [shiura] decided to take one of these old machines and upgrade it into something more modern and useful.

The build maintains the best parts of the Sharp design — namely, the case and the keypad. The original circuit board has been entirely ripped out, and a custom PCB was designed to interface with the membrane keypad and host the new internals. [shiura] landed on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W to run the show. It’s a capable machine that runs Linux rather well and has wireless connectivity out of the box. It’s paired with an ESP32-S3 microcontroller that handles interfacing all the various parts of the original Sharp hardware. It also handles the connection to the 256×64 OLED display. The new setup can run in ESP32-only mode, where it acts as a classic RPN-style calculator. Alternatively, the Pi Zero can be powered up for a full-fat computing experience.

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer announced the release today of xkbcomp 1.5, the CLI utility used for compiling X Keyboard Extension (XBD) keyboard descriptions for the X.Org Server. Driving this new xkbcomp release are fixes for four security issues.

These four security issues originate from within code originally inside the libxkbcommon library and back in 2018 was flagged with four CVEs. Those security issues included endless recursion resulting in a crash and three null pointer dereference issues leading to possible crashes.

Over time, many Linux users wind up with a collection of aliases, shell scripts, and makefiles to run simple commands (or a series of commands) that are often used, but challenging to remember and annoying to type out at length. The just command runner is a Rust-based utility that just does one thing and does it well: it reads recipes from a text file (aptly called a "justfile"), and runs the commands from an invoked recipe. Rather than accumulating a library of one-off shell scripts over time, just provides a cross-platform tool with a framework and well-documented syntax for collecting and documenting tasks that makes it useful for solo users and collaborative projects.

just what it is

Using just has a few advantages over a collection of scripts or bending make to uses it may not be intended for. It's certainly easier to get started with than make for newer Linux users who haven't had the need to learn make previously. Generally, just is more ergonomic for what it does; it isn't a complete replacement for shell scripts or scripting, but it provides a better framework, organization, and user experience.

As expected, the recently released Linux 6.18 kernel series has been officially marked as LTS (Long Term Support) on the kernel.org website with a predicted life expectancy of at least two years.

Linux kernel 6.18 was released at the end of November 2025 with new features like support for the Rust Binder driver, a new dm-pcache device-mapper target to enable persistent memory as a cache for slower block devices, and a new microcode= command-line option to control the microcode loader’s behavior on x86 platforms.

While Linux 6.18 is making its way into the stable software repositories of various popular GNU/Linux distributions, such as Arch Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora Linux, and others, it has already received LTS (Long Term Support) status on the kernel.org website, supported until December 2027.

This is your friendly reminder that the Linux 5.4 LTS kernel series has reached end of life after being maintained for more than six years, receiving over 300 maintenance updates.

“All users of the 5.4 kernel series must upgrade to a newer branch at this point in time.”

Originally released on November 24th, 2019, the long-term supported (LTS) Linux 5.4 kernel series received six years of support, from November 2019 until December 2025. The last maintenance update is Linux 5.4.302, released today by renowned kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman.

This morning, an announcement on the Linux kernel mailing list published by Greg Kroah-Hartman stated that Linux 5.4.302 is the last maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 5.4 kernel series, which is now marked as EOL (End of Life) on the kernel.org website.

Alpine Linux 3.23 is out today as the newest feature release for this lightweight Linux distribution built around musl libc and BusyBox that has become quite popular for containers and embedded uses.

With Alpine Linux 3.23 it's powered by the new Linux 6.18 LTS kernel as well as moving to the GCC 15 compiler and having LLVM 21 available. Plus a variety of other software updates like Rust 1.91, Valkey 9.0, OpenZFS 2.4.0-rc4, Docker 29, OpenJDK Java 25, PHP 8.5, Perl 5.42, PostgreSQL 18, and many other key package updates. On the desktop side there is GNOME 49, KDE Plasma 6.5.3, LXQt 2.3, and Sway 1.11.

A proposal was raised a month ago for Fedora Linux 44 to replace the kernel's frame-buffer console "FBCON" with KMSCON in user-space. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now granted approval for making this change in Fedora 44 as part of a larger foal to eventually deprecate FBCON/FBDEV emulation in the kernel.

There is some apprehension if all the proper fall-backs will be in place and robust enough in the event of any problems with this user-space console solution, but ultimately there was unanimous approval in the FESCo ticket for going ahead with these KMSCON plans for Fedora 44.

The Mint team has just released its regular monthly newsletter. This time, we have some exciting updates to share with you: the project has outlined the final steps toward the release of Linux Mint 22.3, codenamed “Zena,” the third refresh in the 22.x series following 22.1 “Xia” and 22.2 “Zara” releases.

The team reports that most components have now been tagged for inclusion, and a beta release is planned for the next 10 days.

According to the devs, development has entered its final phase, and packaging work has been committed to the repositories. Given that historically the gap between a Mint’s beta release and the final stable one is typically 2 to 4 weeks, with a high degree of predictability, we can expect 22.3 “Zena” around Christmas.

My primary use case for Amber is when I need to write a Bash script but don't remember the silly syntax. My most recent Bash mistake was misusing test -n and test -z. In Amber, I can just use something == "" or len(something) == 0

AlmaLinux, an enterprise Linux distribution, is widely used as a free and reliable alternative to RHEL for server workloads. Now, somewhat unexpectedly, it’s also aiming to broaden its reach on the desktop—specifically in the multimedia and film-industry content-creation niche.

In light of this, the AlmaLinux community has introduced a new Special Interest Group focused on the Media and Entertainment sector, designed to support studios working in visual effects, animation, and post-production, as licensing shifts and rising support costs affect the software ecosystem.

Its objective is to provide a stable, community-owned, enterprise Linux platform tailored for production environments.

NVIDIA released the beta version of the upcoming NVIDIA 590 series of their graphics drivers for NVIDIA GPUs on Linux, BSD, and Solaris systems.

The NVIDIA 590 graphics driver series promises improved support for Wayland users by raising the minimum supported Wayland version to 1.20 and fixing a bug that prevented the PowerMizer preferred mode drop-down menu in the nvidia-settings control panel from functioning correctly on Wayland systems.

The NVIDIA 590 series also promises better support for Vulkan apps by improving the performance of recreating Vulkan swapchains, which helps prevent stuttering when resizing Vulkan application windows, and fixing several issues that prevented Vulkan apps from working on the Venus VirtIO virtual GPU.

TLP, an advanced command-line power-management tool for Linux that improves battery life and optimizes system power usage, released v1.9, focusing on enhanced power-saving capabilities, more flexible profile switching, and stronger battery-care support across a wider range of hardware.

The highlight is the new tlp-pd daemon, which implements the same D-Bus API used by power-profiles-daemon, allowing GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, and other desktop environments to interact with TLP’s profiles through their existing interfaces.

Via the openSUSE Innovator Initiative, packaging of the Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) driver for the openSUSE ecosystem has begun. This is helping to jump-start the Intel NPU support within the openSUSE space although user-space applications ready to leverage the Intel NPU still remains very limited.

The Intel NPU driver support is now available via -- current "experimental" -- packages across openSUSE Tumbleweed, openSUSE Slowroll, openSUSE Leap 15.6, and openSUSE Leap 16.0. This Intel NPU driver is available as the linux-npu-driver. Yes, the name is rather poor considering it's Intel-specific and the "linux-" rather redundant given it's within the confines of openSUSE.

Linux has maintained a default 4MB minimum writeback chunk size but with the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel it will allow file-systems to override that minimum value. This in turn can help avoid fragmentation and yield a better experience for zoned rotation media and other uses.

Merged yesterday alongside other pull requests submitted by Microsoft engineer Christian Brauner was the feature of allowing file-systems to increase the minimum writeback chunk size.

After AlmaLinux 9.7 appeared two weeks ago, followed by Oracle Linux 9.7, the Rocky team now announced the general availability of Rocky Linux 9.7 (Blue Onyx), as the seventh refresh to the 9.x series for this RHEL-based replacement, with refreshed installation media, cloud, container, WSL, and live images now available via the project’s downloads page.

Powered by Linux kernel 5.14, the update introduces new system-wide cryptographic policy improvements, including support for post-quantum cryptography. Dynamic language stacks receive updates such as Node.js 24 and Valkey 8, while system toolchain components such as Glibc 2.34 and Annobin 12.98 receive maintenance improvements.

KDE Connect is a popular cross-platform app that allows you to send files across devices and more - with a security advisory being sent out due to a woops. Noted as CVE-2025-66270, that woops could allow an attacker to entirely skip proper authentication.

An overview of the issue:

Versions of KDE Connect released after March 2025 implement version 8 of the KDE Connect protocol. In this version, the discovery of other devices with KDE Connect on your network involves an additional packet exchange between the two devices. While the first packet is used to determine if a device is paired or not, this additional packet is used to identify the device that is connecting.

The vulnerable implementations of KDE Connect were not checking that the device ID in the first packet and the device ID in the second packet were the same. This could be abused by first sending a device ID of an unpaired device which doesn't require authentication, followed by sending the device ID of a paired device in order to impersonate it.

The vulnerable versions they list are:

KDE Connect desktop >= 25.04 and < 25.12
KDE Connect iOS >= v0.5.2 and < 0.5.4
KDE Connect Android >= v1.33.0 and < 1.34.4
GSConnect >= 59 and < 68
Valent >= v1.0.0.alpha.47 and < v1.0.0.alpha.49

The KDE developers are suggesting you stop using KDE Connect until your Linux distribution releases an update for it, or to manually patch it yourself if you're able to.

See more in the security advisory.

As someone who grew up using windows, is there a series of tutorials or videos y'all recommend to learn Linux? I find myself running into issues, trying to find solutions online, and not even understanding the instructions. I'm sure most of this comes from not knowing bash (which I've started to learn using https://labex.io/linuxjourney).

Background: I'm a very competent windows user. I've built my own PC, etc. I mostly use it for gaming and Internet now but want to start self hosting some things. Oh, and I'm running bazzite.

Anyway, just trying to get out from Microsoft's thumb.

Cheers.

Edit: thanks for the replies everyone. I haven't had a chance to read through them all yet; the whole family is suddenly sick.