Budgie 10.10 Will Only Retain Wayland Support: 07/01/2025 The annual report on the development of the Budgie desktop environment has been published, in which, in addition to the achievements for 2024, plans for 2025 are mentioned. Work in 2024 was focused on the development of a session using the Wayland protocol, the development of the Magpie composite manager, the creation of the Budgie Daemon v2 control process and its porting to Qt6. In the next release of Budgie 10.10, which is intended to be published during the first quarter of 2025, it was decided to completely abandon support for X11 and leave only the ability to work in environments based on the Wayland protocol. In the Budgie git repository, the complete transition to Wayland was completed in July 2024. The tasks that need to be completed before the release of Budgie 10.10 include achieving parity in the functionality of applets with the old X11-based environment, finalizing MenuManager, and stabilizing the new interface for configuring screen settings. Packages with Budgie 10.10 are planned to be included in the fall releases of Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10. After the release of Budgie 10.10, the 10.x branch will be transferred to maintenance mode, in which only bug fixes are allowed. In the future, all resources will be thrown into the development of the Budgie 11 branch, notable for separating the desktop functionality from the layer that provides visualization and output of information. https://buddiesofbudgie.org/blog/state-of-the-budgie-2024

Release of fheroes2 1.1.5: 08/01/2025 Still going strong with lots of development is the fheroes2 1.1.5, which recreates the Heroes of Might and Magic II game engine from scratch. The project code is written in C++ and is distributed under the GPLv2 license. To run the game, you need files with game resources, which can be obtained from the original Heroes of Might and Magic II. The project includes a script for automatically downloading and extracting resources from the demo version of the game, which are enough for full operation. https://github.com/ihhub/fheroes2/releases/tag/1.1.5

AlmaLinux Kitten 10 update: 08/01/2025 The AlmaLinux project has released an update Kitten 10, based on CentOS Stream 10, which is used as the basis for the upcoming release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10. Kitten 10 is presented as a test distribution that allows you to get acquainted with the capabilities being developed for RHEL 10, and complements CentOS Stream with its own changes. The installation builds of the distribution are formed for x86_64, x86_64_v2, aarch64, ppc64le and s390x architectures. The Kitten repository uses a rolling release model, with installation builds updated every three months. The Kitten repositories act as an upstream for the AlmaLinux 10 branch - fixes and new features are first tested in the Kitten repositories and then pushed to AlmaLinux. The Kitten repositories also act as a platform for integration and collaboration with upstream projects such as CentOS Stream and Fedora. The new build marks the move to the Linux 6.12 kernel and the addition of packages with Qt 6.8, allowing the use of KDE from the EPEL repository. https://almalinux.org/blog/2025-01-07-almalinux-os-kitten-10-updates/

SeaMonkey 2.5 Suite 3.20 Released: 08/01/2025 The SeaMonkey 2.53.20 suite of Internet applications has been released. It combines a web browser, mail client, NNTP conference client, news feed aggregation system (RSS/Atom) and WYSIWYG HTML page editor Composer in one product. The ChatZilla IRC client, DOM Inspector set of web developer tools and Lightning calendar-scheduler are offered as pre-installed add-ons. The new release includes fixes and changes from the current Firefox code base (SeaMonkey 2.53 is based on the Firefox 60.8 browser engine with porting of security-related fixes and some improvements from the current Firefox branches). Version 2.53.20 introduces a new implementation of the bookmark manager based on the Firefox Library interface. The configurator now includes an interface for setting the colour scheme, changing the browser.display.prefers_color_scheme parameter. The installer now registers MIME types processed by SeaMonkey in the system. A major cleanup of the ChatZilla IRC client codebase was performed and the identified shortcomings were fixed. For example, instead of the arrayContains, arrayIndexOf, arrayRemoveAt and arrayInsertA handlers, ChatZilla uses the standard Array object , instead of the stringTrim handler - the Trim method from the JavaScript String object, instead of the fopen handler - the LocalFile API. Problems with using the IRC protocol over TLS were resolved. https://blog.seamonkey-project.org/2025/01/07/seamonkey-2-53-20-is-out/

OrangePi Neo Gaming Console Comes with Manjaro Linux: 08/01/2025 The OrangePi Neo gaming console, jointly developed by Orange Pi and the Manjaro Linux distribution developer community, is scheduled to go on sale in Q1 2025. The device is equipped with a 7-inch screen (1920 x 1200, 120Hz), AMD Ryzen 7 7840U or 8840U CPU, 16GB or 32GB of RAM, 512GB to 2TB NVMe SSD, two USB 4.0 ports, a 3.5mm sound port, a TF card slot, a touchpad, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, 2-watt speakers, a Hall Rocker joystick, and RGB backlighting. Dimensions are 259mm × 107mm × 19.9mm. The device will run an atomically updated Manjaro Gaming Edition distribution as its operating system. The Gamescope composite server based on the Wayland protocol is used for rendering. The interface for managing the device and launching games is built on the OpenGamepadUI shell, which runs on top of the Godot game engine. Interaction with input devices is built on the InputPlumber background process. To launch games from the Steam catalog, the Steam Client is included in the package. Compatibility with games compiled for Windows is achieved using Proton. In addition to a specialized shell, the ability to use a full-fledged KDE Plasma 6.2 desktop environment will be provided. The console with an AMD Ryzen 7 7840U processor, 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of SDD will cost $499, while the version with an AMD Ryzen 7 8840U processor will cost $100 more. https://neo.manjaro.org/

Scribus 1.6.3 Update: 09/01/2025 The free document layout package Scribus 1.6.3 has been released. The package provides tools for professional layout of printed materials, includes tools for generating PDF's and supports working with separate colour profiles, CMYK, spot colours and ICC. The program is written using the Qt toolkit and is licensed under the GPLv2+ license. Ready-made binary assemblies are prepared for Linux (AppImage), macOS and Windows. The new version improves import of images with the CMYK colour model. New functions for converting units of measurement and text styling are offered for automation scripts. Image export quality settings have been improved. GUI bugs have been fixed and problems with opening and generating PDF, shortcuts, external storage detection, image update function, and rollback of changes have been corrected. They added support for building with new versions of the poppler library . In parallel, the experimental branch Scribus 1.7 is being developed, which includes porting to Qt 6, converting icons to SVG format, adding a new palette implementation, and offering a new system of dockable panels. https://www.scribus.net/scribus-1-6-3-released/

Tails 6.11 release with fixes for issues identified by security audit: 09/01/2025 The release of the specialized distribution Tails 6.11 (The Amnesic Incognito Live System), developed as part of the Tor project, is presented. The distribution is based on Debian 12, comes with the GNOME 43 desktop and is designed for anonymous network access using the Tor toolkit. All connections, except for traffic through the Tor network, are blocked by default by the packet filter. Encryption is used to store user data in the mode of saving user data between launches. An iso image capable of working in Live mode, 1 GB in size, has been prepared for downloading. The new version fixes vulnerabilities identified during an external security audit. To exploit these vulnerabilities, an attacker must gain access to the local environment, for example, by exploiting an unpatched vulnerability in one of the applications. https://tails.net/news/version_6.11/index.en.html

January release of openSUSE Slowroll: 09/01/2025 The openSUSE project developers have released the January update of the experimental openSUSE Slowroll distribution, which develops a modified version of the continuously updated openSUSE Tumbleweed distribution, that is additionally stabilized for users who do not want to wait for the conservative openSUSE Leap release, but are concerned about stability issues due to insufficient testing of new versions of programs. openSUSE Slowroll can be considered as an intermediate option between openSUSE Tumbleweed and openSUSE Leap, allowing access to fresh versions of programs after passing an additional stabilization stage. Compared to Tumbleweed, packages get to the Slowroll repository with a 5-10 day delay for stabilization. Unlike openSUSE Leap, system components are formed not on the basis of conservative releases of SUSE Enterprise Linux, but using a fresh package base. Changes in the January release of openSUSE Slowroll include the inclusion of advanced features to ensure repeatable package builds. Bug fixes related to improved dependency handling, parallel builds, and race conditions in large packages such as Python and Qt have been backported. Package versions have been updated to: Linux kernel 6.12.6, Xfce 4.20, KDE Gears 24.12, KDE Frameworks 6.9.0, QEMU 9.2.0, SQLite 3.47.2, Flatpak 1.15.12, systemd 256.10, LLVM 19.1.6, GStreamer 1.24.10, vim 9.1.0908, and AppStream 1.0.4. GPG has been updated to version 2.5.2 with the ability to generate ECC+Kyber keys and improved smartcard support. https://news.opensuse.org/2025/01/09/ny-starts-with-slowroll-vb/

Fifth alpha release of the COSMIC desktop environment: 10/01/2025 System76, the developer of the Linux distribution Pop!_OS, has released the fifth alpha version of the COSMIC desktop environment, written in Rust (not to be confused with the old COSMIC , which was based on GNOME Shell). ISO images with the latest version of COSMIC, built on top of alpha builds of the future Pop!_OS 24.04 distribution for systems with NVIDIA ( 2.9 GB ) and Intel/AMD ( 2.5 GB ) GPUs, are available for testing. Ready-made packages for Fedora, NixOS, Arch Linux, openSUSE, Serpent OS, Redox and CachyOS are also being created. COSMIC is being developed as a universal project, not tied to a specific distribution and corresponding to the Freedesktop specifications. To build the interface, COSMIC uses the Iced library, which uses safe types, a modular architecture and a reactive programming model, and also offers an architecture familiar to developers familiar with the Elm declarative interface language. Several rendering engines are provided, supporting Vulkan, Metal, DX12, OpenGL 2.1+ and OpenGL ES 2.0+. Developers are offered a ready-made set of widgets, the ability to create asynchronous handlers and use adaptive layout of interface elements depending on the window and screen size. In addition to using the Rust language, COSMIC features include hybrid window tiling and stacked window pinning (window grouping similar to browser tabs), which can be enabled in conjunction with virtual desktops. The project is also developing a Wayland-based cosmic-comp composite server. The first stable release of COSMIC is scheduled for Q1 2025. https://blog.system76.com/post/cosmic-alpha-5-released

Debian 12.9 Released: 11/01/2025 The ninth corrective update of the Debian 12 distribution has been generated, which includes accumulated package updates and fixes to the installer. The release includes 72 updates with fixes for stability issues and 38 updates with fixes for vulnerabilities. Among the changes in Debian 12.9, we can note the update to the latest stable versions of the ansible, intel-microcode, nvidia-graphics-drivers, qemu, systemd, tzdata packages. The criu packages (problems with assembly on the arm64 architecture) and tk-html3 (main project maintenance has ceased) have been removed. For downloading and installing “from scratch” installation builds of Debian 12.9 are prepared. Systems installed earlier and maintained in the current state receive updates present in Debian 12.9 through the standard update installation system. Security fixes included in new Debian releases are available to users as updates are released through the security.debian.org service. https://www.debian.org/News/2025/20250111

Release of Enlightenment 0.27 and EFL 1.28 libraries: 12/01/2025 After a year of development, the Enlightenment 0.27 user environment was released, which is based on the EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Library) set of libraries and Elementary widgets. The release is available in source code without publishing ready builds. The list of changes for the 0.27 release is not formed, only the list of commits are available, which mainly lists bug fixes and minor improvements in widgets. The desktop in Enlightenment is formed by components such as a file manager, a set of widgets, an application launcher, and graphical configurators. Graphic configurators provide both high-level customization tools (changing the design, setting up virtual desktops, managing fonts, screen resolution, keyboard layout, localization, etc.) and low-level tuning capabilities (for example, you can configure caching parameters, graphic acceleration, power consumption, change the logic of the window manager). To expand functionality, they suggest that one use modules (gadgets), and to redesign the appearance - design themes. Modules are available for displaying a calendar-planner, weather forecast, monitoring data, volume control, and a widget for assessing the battery charge on the desktop. The components of Enlightenment are not strictly tied to each other and can be used in other projects or to create specialized environments, such as shells for mobile devices. The required dependencies include EFL, libexif, and libpam (Linux only). The recommended dependencies for full functionality include: connman for network configuration; bluez5 for working with Bluetooth; bc for the built-in calculator; pulseaudio for managing sound devices; acpid for handling various hardware events; packagekit for tracking system updates; udisks2 for mounting external drives; ddcutil for managing the screen backlight; gdb for tracing crashes. https://www.enlightenment.org/news/2025-01-11-enlightenment-0.27.0

Linus Torvalds to Give Away a Guitar Pedal of His Own Design Among Kernel Developers: 13/01/2025 Linus Torvalds announced the seventh release candidate of the Linux kernel 6.13 and in the afterword offered to send a guitar pedal he had personally built to one of the kernel developers. Linus noted that he has a hobby - soldering small electronic devices, not too complicated, but not very simple either. Pedals for applying effects while playing an electric guitar are ideal for this hobby, but Linus does not play guitar, and there is no point in keeping the assembled devices for himself. He has already given away the previously assembled pedals to his friends and now decided to send his product as a gift to one of the kernel developers. The recipient of the pedal will be chosen randomly. To enter the giveaway, send Linus an email with the message “I want a guitar pedal” and choose a commercially available pedal assembly kit. Linus will purchase the chosen kit at his own expense, assemble it, and mail it to you. Applications are only accepted from kernel developers whose email addresses are mentioned in commits accepted into the kernel in 2024. https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/1/12/429

MX Linux 23.5 Released: 14/01/2025 The lightweight MX Linux 23.5 distribution has been released. It was created as a result of the collaboration between the communities formed around the antiX and MEPIS projects. The release is based on Debia with improvements from the antiX project and packages from its own repository. The distribution uses the sysVinit initialization system and its own tools for configuring and deploying the system. 32- and 64-bit builds with the XFCE desktop (2.4 GB), as well as 64-bit builds with the KDE desktop (2.7 GB) and builds with the Fluxbox (1.8 GB) window manager are available for download. https://mxlinux.org/blog/mx-23-5-now-available/

OpenZFS 2.3.0 Release: 14/01/2025 After more than a year of development, the OpenZFS 2.3.0 project has been released. The project develops the ZFS file system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD. The project became known as “ZFS on Linux” and was previously limited to developing a module for the Linux kernel, but after merging with the code from FreeBSD, it was recognized as the main implementation of OpenZFS and renamed. OpenZFS has been tested with Linux kernels from 4.18 to 6.12 and all FreeBSD branches starting with 13.3. The code is distributed under the free CDDL license. OpenZFS is already used in FreeBSD and is included in Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, NixOS and ALT Linux distributions. Packages with this new version will soon be prepared for the main Linux distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL/CentOS. OpenZFS provides an implementation of ZFS components related to both the file system and the volume manager. The implemented components are: SPA (Storage Pool Allocator), DMU (Data Management Unit), ZVOL (ZFS Emulated Volume) and ZPL (ZFS POSIX Layer). The project also allows using ZFS as a backend for the Lustre cluster file system. OpenZFS developments are based on the original ZFS code imported from the OpenSolaris project and extended with improvements and fixes from the Illumos community. The project is being developed with the participation of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory employees under a contract with the US Department of Energy. The code is distributed under the free CDDL license, which is incompatible with GPLv2, which prevents OpenZFS from being integrated into the main Linux kernel branch, since mixing code under GPLv2 and CDDL licenses not compatible. To circumvent the license incompatibility, it was decided to distribute the product for Linux entirely under the CDDL license as a separately loadable module, delivered separately from the kernel. The stability of the OpenZFS code base is estimated to be comparable to other file systems for Linux. https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases/tag/zfs-2.3.0

Linux 6.13 kernel has a bug caused by code from a Microsoft employee: 15/01/2025 Linus Torvalds had intended to publish the Linux kernel 6.13 release this Sunday, but the 6.13 branch testing will likely be extended by a week due to stability issues with changes prepared by a Microsoft employee and accepted into the 6.13 branch in November. It is also noted that the patch that caused the crash was submitted in a non-standard way - but was accepted despite not receiving a single acknowledgement (ACK) from the x86 maintainers, which is a violation of generally accepted practices. The patch added the ability to use large memory pages in ROX (Read Only Execute) mode when allocating memory intended for executable code. ROX allows using memory with executable code in read-only mode, which complicates the exploitation of some vulnerabilities. In the 6.13 kernel, the use of a cache of large executable memory pages, reflected as ROX, was enabled by default for executable code of modules on x86_64 systems. The change solved the problem with mapping in ROX mode of pages for executable code that was not yet fully formed and made it possible to do without temporary remapping of ROX pages to write mode until the kernel modules were ready for operation. During the final testing of the 6.13 kernel, an engineer from Intel found a bug that prevented the kernel from correctly waking up from sleep mode on some laptops with Intel processors (for example, CPUs based on the Alderlake microarchitecture). The bug occurred when building the kernel with the Clang compiler with the CFI (Control Flow Integrity) protection mode enabled, which blocks violations of the normal execution order (control flow) as a result of using exploits that modify function pointers stored in memory. As a temporary solution, the maintainers from Intel and AMD, responsible for the x86 architecture, proposed disabling the use of EXECMEM_ROX in the 6.13 kernel until a full patch is prepared and tested that solves the problem (the first version of the fix did not solve the problem). https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id%3D2e45474ab14f0f17c1091c503a13ff2fe2a84486

Decibels Music Player Accepted into Mainstream GNOME: 15/01/2025 The GNOME project developers have accepted the minimalist music player Decibels into the core GNOME desktop environment. Decibels will be shipped in the spring release of GNOME 48 under the name “Audio Player”. Last year, the player was already accepted into the basic distribution of Endless OS and was also included by default in the GNOME editions of the postmarketOS smartphone distribution. Decibels is written in TypeScript using JavaScript bindings over GStreamer, Libadwaita, Gio, GObject and GTK4, and is distributed under the AGPLv3 license. Ready-made packages are available in Flatpak format. The program has a very simple interface optimized for playing individual audio files when trying to open them in other applications, such as a file manager or email client. The window visualizes the sound waveform, has a slider for quickly changing the position, a playback speed switch, a volume control, and buttons for fast forwarding and rewinding by 5 and 10 seconds. Dark and light modes are supported. The interface is universal and adapts to both large PC and laptop screens and narrow touch screens of smartphones https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta/-/merge_requests/3354

CudaText Code Editor Update 1.220.6: 15/01/2025 The release of the cross-platform free code editor CudaText 1.220.6, written using Free Pascal and Lazarus, has been published. The editor supports Python extensions and has a number of advantages over say, Sublime Text. There are some features of the integrated development environment, implemented as plugins. More than 300 syntax lexers have been prepared for programmers. The code is distributed under the MPL 2.0 license. Builds are available for Linux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD, Solaris and Haiku platforms https://cudatext.github.io/download.html

Release of Linux Mint 22.1: 16/01/2025 The release of Linux Mint 22.1 is been presented, continuing the development of the branch on the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base. The distribution is fully compatible with Ubuntu, but differs significantly in its approach to organizing the user interface and the selection of default applications. The Linux Mint developers provide a desktop environment that corresponds to the classic canons of organizing the desktop, which is more familiar to users who do not accept the new methods of building the GNOME 3 interface. DVD builds based on the MATE (3 GB), Cinnamon (3 GB) and Xfce (3 GB) are available for download. The Linux Mint 22 branch is classified as a long-term support (LTS) release, meaning updates will be generated until 2029. https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p%3D4793

Cozystack 0.22 Released: 17/01/2025 The release of the free PaaS platform Cozystack 0.22.0, built on Kubernetes, is available . The project aims to provide a ready-made platform for hosting providers and a framework for building private and public clouds. The platform is installed directly on servers and covers all aspects of preparing the infrastructure for providing managed services. Cozystack allows you to launch and provide Kubernetes clusters, databases, and virtual machines. The platform code is available on GitHub and is distributed under the Apache-2.0 license. Talos Linux and Flux CD are used as the base technology stack. Images with the system, kernel and necessary modules are generated in advance and updated atomically, which allows one to do without such components as dkms and a package manager, and guarantee stable operation. A simple installation method is provided in an empty data center using PXE and a debian-like installer talos-bootstrap. The platform includes a free implementation of the network infrastructure (fabric) based on Kube-OVN, and uses Cilium for the service network and MetalLB to announce services to the outside. The storage is implemented on LINSTOR, which suggests using ZFS as a base layer for storage and DRBD for replication. There is a pre-configured monitoring stack based on VictoriaMetrics and Grafana. To launch virtual machines, KubeVirt technology is used, which allows you to launch classic virtual machines directly in Kubernetes containers and already has all the necessary integrations with the Cluster API to launch managed Kubernetes clusters inside a “hardware” Kubernetes cluster. The new version adds cozystack-controller and new entities: Workload and WorkloadMonitor — which allow you to monitor the state of pods managed by operators and evaluate the service level according to predefined rules. Applications in Cozystack are managed by different operators, so it was decided to create a single format for displaying the status of each service. How it works: When deploying an application, WorkloadMonitor is also installed, which monitors the state of pods by selector. As soon as one of the pods falls under the selector, a new Workload entity is created for it, which displays the role for each pod and its state. In the WorkloadMonitor status, you can see the number of existing replicas and the minimum number of replicas required to service the service. As soon as the workload becomes less than the minReplicas value for WorkloadMonitor, the service is marked as non-operational. For applications that cannot specify an exact minReplicas value (for example, Kubernetes workers can scale automatically), it is now possible to not specify this value in WorkloadMonitor at all. In this case, WorkloadMonitor will simply count the total number of running instances. This mechanism allows you to use any operators and pod management mechanisms in Kubernetes and easily extend the platform by providing a single interface for displaying the current state of the service. WorkloadMonitor, for collecting information about replicas and their health, has been added to Kubernetes, Postgres, Monitoring, VirtualMachine, VMInstance, Redis, etcd, and SeaweedFS applications. Cozystack Dashboard now displays the number of application replicas and the service level for each Workload group. https://github.com/aenix-io/cozystack/releases/tag/v0.22.0

Haiku to restrict UK access over Online Safety Act concerns: 18/01/2025 Alexander von Gluck, a board member of Haiku Inc, a non-profit company that oversees the development of the Haiku operating system, announced plans to block UK users from accessing the project's forum and other platforms where community interaction occurs until March 16. The decision is explained by the legal and financial risks arising from the Online Safety Act, which comes into force in the UK on March 16. It is noted that the project does not have the resources for legal analysis and bringing the infrastructure into compliance with the requirements of the law. Compliance with the requirements is complicated by the need to carry out a large volume of bureaucratic procedures associated with the preparation of documentation describing the processes and assessing the existing risks (the list of risks takes up 84 pages with confusing and ambiguous wording). Haiku Inc is registered in the US, and the Online Safety Act was adopted in the UK, but is extraterritorial, i.e. it applies to websites operating outside the UK if they are considered “UK-related”, i.e. used by UK residents. It is assumed that without the involvement of lawyers, it is difficult to correctly fill out all the documents and comply with the requirements of the law. Ignoring the law creates significant risks, for example, the fine for violating the law reaches 22 million dollars. In order to remove Haiku from the scope of the Online Safety Act, it has been decided to completely block access from the UK to the community interaction platforms, at least until another solution is found. In addition to the forum, the block will probably extend to the Gerrit and Haiku Depot services, where comments are allowed. The Haiku website and the project repositories will not be blocked. The requirements of the Online Safety Act are related to moderating user-submitted content, removing content that violates UK laws, and restricting children's access to adult content. Sites with more than 700,000 users are required to monitor, filter, and scan user-submitted content (links, text, images) at the publishing stage. The requirements for others are limited to responding to complaints, but may also require conducting a risk analysis, appointing responsible parties, and creating a complaint handling policy. The law applies to sites that have a significant number of UK users (what is considered significant is not specified) or that provide services to UK citizens where there is a risk of harm to such citizens. An exception is provided for services that allow the publication of comments on author's articles and their own content, but it does not specify whether sites that allow the publication of responses to other comments fall under the exception. https://russ.garrett.co.uk/2024/12/17/online-safety-act-guide/

Release of uutils 0.0.29, a variant of GNU Coreutils in Rust: 19/01/2025 The release of the uutils coreutils 0.0.29 project has been published. The project develops an analogue of the GNU Coreutils package written in the Rust language. Coreutils includes more than a hundred utilities, including sort, cat, chmod, chown, chroot, cp, date, dd, echo, hostname, id, ln and ls, etc. The goal of the project is to create a cross-platform alternative implementation of Coreutils, capable of working on Windows, Redox and Fuchsia platforms. Unlike GNU Coreutils, the Rust implementation is distributed under the permissive MIT license, instead of the copyleft GPL license. In addition, the same team of developers is developing analogues of the util-linux , diffutils , findutils and bsdutils utility sets written in Rust. https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/releases/tag/0.0.29

Dillo 3.2.0 released: 19/01/2025 The Dillo 3.2.0 web browser has been released. The browser provides a tabbed graphical interface and supports HTML 4.01, CSS, and HTTPS (no JavaScript support). Dillo's functionality can be extended through plugins, for example, there are plugins for the IPFS and Gemini protocols. When opening the start page, Dillo uses 12 MB of RAM, and the installation deb package takes up about 600 KB. The graphical interface is built using the FLTK library. The project code is distributed under the GPLv3 license. https://dillo-browser.github.io/release/3.2.0/

Linux kernel 6.13 released: 20/01/2025 After two months of development, Linus Torvalds released the Linux kernel 6.13. Among the most notable changes are: lazy preemption mode in the task scheduler, support for atomic writes in XFS and Ext4, the “multigrain timestamps” mechanism, adaptive mode for enabling polling in the network subsystem, the ability to build with AutoFDO optimizations, support for the ARM65 Guarded Control Stack protection mechanism, isolation of virtual machines using the ARM CCA extension, separate stacks in BPF, removal of ReiserFS, the virtual-cpufreq driver, netlink API net-shaper, case-sensitive tmpfs mount mode, support for POSIX extensions in SMB3, the AMD Cache Optimizer driver. The new version includes 14172 fixes from 2086 developers, the patch size is 46 MB (the changes affected 15375 files, 598707 lines of code were added, 406294 lines were deleted). The previous release had 14607 fixes from 2167 developers, the patch size was 37 MB. About 52% of all changes presented in 6.13 are related to device drivers, about 13% of changes are related to updating code specific to hardware architectures, 11% are related to the network stack, 4% - to file systems and 3% to internal kernel subsystems. https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/1/19/281

Mesa adopts amdgpu_virtio: 20/01/2025 The code base used to form the Mesa 25.0 release includes the amdgpu_virtio layer, which allows the guest system to use the OpenGL and Vulkan drivers radeonsi, radeonsi_drv_video and radv provided by the host environment. Access is provided via VirtIO, which provides high performance 3D acceleration in a virtual machine. At the moment, the driver can only be used in the QEMU+KVM bundle. The performance of amdgpu_virtio is claimed to be better than the virgl and venus drivers previously developed for accessing Vulkan and OpenGL from guests. When running the Unigine Heaven and Superposition tests, guest performance was approximately 99% of the performance when running the tests on the host side. Another advantage of the new method is its ease of maintenance, since the guest system uses the same drivers as when working without virtualization, except that instead of directly accessing libdrm (amdgpu), an additional layer based on VirtIO is used. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/21658

Linux libre kernel 6.13: 21/01/2025 The Latin American Free Software Foundation has published a completely free version of the Linux 6.13 kernel - Linux-libre 6.13-gnu, cleared of firmware and driver elements containing non-free components or code sections whose scope of application is limited by the manufacturer. Linux-libre also disables kernel functions for loading external non-free components that are not included in the kernel distribution, and references to the use of non-free components have been removed from the documentation. To clean the kernel from non-free parts, the Linux-libre project has created a universal shell script that contains thousands of patterns for detecting binary inserts and eliminating false positives. Ready-made patches created using the above-mentioned script are also available for download. The Linux-libre kernel is recommended for use in distributions that meet the Free Software Foundation's criteria for building completely free GNU/Linux distributions. For example, Linux-libre is used in distributions such as GNU Guix, Dragora, Trisquel, Dyne:Bolic, gNewSense, Parabola, Musix and Kongoni. Linux-libre 6.13-gnu adds code to clean blobs in new rtw8812a, rtw8821a, bmi270, aw88081, ntp8835, ntp8918 drivers. Cleaned blob names in dts files (devicetree) for Aarch64 architecture. Updated code for removing blobs in wilc1000, rt1320, sh4-siu, ivpu, btnxpuart, adreno and r8169 drivers, as well as in code related to touchscreen support on x86 systems. They stopped cleaning rtl8192e, rtl8712, vt6656 and ti-st drivers, which were removed from the kernel. https://www.fsfla.org/pipermail/linux-libre/2025-January/003569.html

Release of Toybox 0.8.12: 21/01/2025 The release of the Toybox 0.8.12 system utilities set, optimized for minimal consumption of system resources, has been published. Comparable to BusyBox, all utilities of the set are available through a single executable file. The project is being developed by the former BusyBox maintainer, written in C and distributed under the 0BSD license. The purpose of Toybox is to provide manufacturers with the ability to use a minimalistic set of standard utilities without opening the source code of modified components. In terms of capabilities, Toybox is still behind BusyBox, but 316 basic commands (235 completely and 81 partially) out of 392 planned have already been implemented. Since 2015, Toybox has been offered as part of the main Android platform. https://landley.net/toybox/news.html

9front release 10931: 21/01/2025 Release of the 9front operating system 10931, published under the code name “THIS TIME DEFINITELY”, has taken place. The 9front project has been developing a fork of the Plan 9 distributed operating system independent of Bell Labs since 2011. Ready-to-use installation builds are generated for the i386, x86_64 architectures and Raspberry Pi 1-4 boards. The code is distributed under the MIT license. A musical composition dedicated to the release is also available. The main idea of ​​Plan 9 is to erase the distinction between local and remote resources. The system is a distributed environment based on three basic principles: all resources can be viewed as a hierarchical set of files; there is no distinction in access to local and external resources; each process has its own mutable namespace. The 9P protocol is used to create a single distributed hierarchy of resource files. The 9front fork is notable for its implementation of additional protection mechanisms, expanded hardware support, improved wireless networking, addition of new file systems, implementation of a sound subsystem and audio format encoders/decoders, USB support, creation of the Mothra web browser, replacement of the bootloader and initialization system, use of disk data encryption, Unicode support, presence of a real address mode emulator, support for AMD64 architecture and 64-bit address space. http://9front.org/releases/2025/01/19/0/

**Wine 10.0 Stable Release: 21/01/2025

After a year of development and 29 experimental versions, a stable release of the open implementation of Win32 API - Wine 10.0 - has been released , which has absorbed more than 6,000 changes. Key achievements in the new version include full support for the ARM64EC architecture, scaling on high-density pixel screens, enabling the Wayland driver by default, implementing panels for customizing the screen and joystick, an alternative multimedia backend based on FFmpeg, a Bluetooth driver, support for Vulkan 1.4, and the ability to emulate switching video modes.

Wine has confirmed full functionality of 5372 Windows programs (5336 a year ago, 5266 two years ago, 5156 three years ago), other 4435 programs (4397 a year ago, 4370 two years ago, 4312 three years ago) work fine with additional settings and external DLLs. 4020 programs (3943 a year ago, 3888 two years ago, 3813 three years ago) have minor problems in their operation, which do not interfere with the use of the main functions of the applications.

https://www.winehq.org/news/2025012101

Release of VeraCrypt 1.26.18: 22/01/2025

VeraCrypt 1.26.18 has been released. It is a fork of the defunct TrueCrypt disk partition encryption system. VeraCrypt is notable for replacing the RIPEMD-160 algorithm used in TrueCrypt with SHA-512 and SHA-256, increasing the number of hashing iterations, simplifying the build process for Linux and macOS, and eliminating issues identified during the audit of TrueCrypt source code. The code developed by the VeraCrypt project is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, while borrowings from TrueCrypt continue to be distributed under the TrueCrypt License 3.0. Ready-made builds are generated for Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, and macOS.

https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Release%2520Notes.html

SDL 3 Released: 22/01/2025

The release of SDL 3.2.0 (Simple DirectMedia Layer) library is presented, which is marked as the first official stable release of the SDL 3 branch. The library is aimed at simplifying the writing of games and multimedia applications, and provides features such as hardware-accelerated output of 2D and 3D graphics, input processing, audio playback, and 3D output via OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Metal, Direct3D or Vulkan. The code is written in C and distributed under the Zlib license. Bindings are provided for using SDL in projects in various programming languages.

https://discourse.libsdl.org/t/announcing-the-sdl-3-official-release/57149

Release of Ventoy 1.1.0: 22/01/2025

The release of the Ventoy 1.1.0 toolkit has been published. It is designed to create bootable USB drives that include several operating systems. The program allows you to boot an OS from an unchanged ISO, WIM, IMG, VHD and EFI images, without requiring image unpacking or media reformatting. Simply copy the desired set of ISO images to a USB Flash drive with the Ventoy bootloader, and it will boot the operating systems located inside the images. At any time, you can replace or add new ISO images by simply copying new files, which is convenient for testing and preliminary familiarization with various distributions and operating systems. The project code is written in C and is distributed under the GPLv3 license.

Ventoy supports booting on systems with BIOS, IA32 UEFI, x86_64 UEFI, ARM64 UEFI, UEFI Secure Boot and MIPS64EL UEFI with MBR or GPT partition tables. It supports booting various versions of Windows, WinPE, Linux, BSD, ChromeOS, as well as images of VMware and Xen virtual machines. The developers have tested the functioning of more than 1200 iso images with Ventoy, including various versions of Windows and Windows Server, several hundred Linux distributions, more than a dozen BSD systems (FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, pfSense, FreeNAS, etc.).

In addition to USB drives, the Ventoy bootloader can be installed on a local drive, SSD, NVMe, SD cards and other types of storage devices that use the FAT32, exFAT, NTFS, UDF, XFS or Ext2/3/4 file systems. There is a mode for automated installation of the operating system in one file on a portable medium with the ability to add your own files to the created environment (for example, to create images with Windows or Linux distributions that do not support Live mode).

The new version supports more than 1200 ISO images. They added support for ISO images of the eweOS distribution (uses dinit, musl, busybox, clang, pacman and wayland). Fixed issues with loading SystemRescue 11.02+, updated the Shim boot layer (solved the problem with checking SBAT data).

https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_news.html

Debian 13 Packages Freeze Plan: 23/01/2025

Debian developers have published a plan to freeze the package base of Debian 13 “Trixie”. Debian 13 is expected to be released in the second half of 2025. On March 15, 2025, the first stage of the package freeze will begin, during which “transitions” (package updates that require dependency adjustments in other packages, which results in temporary removal of packages from Testing) will be stopped, and updates of build -essential packages will be stopped. On April 15, 2025, a soft freeze of the package database will occur, during which the acceptance of new source packages will be stopped and the possibility of re-enabling previously removed packages will be closed. On May 15, 2025, a hard freeze will be applied before the release, where the process of moving key packages and packages without autopkgtests from the unstable branch to testing will be completely stopped and a phase of intensive testing and fixing of release-blocking issues will begin.

Some time after the hard freeze, a full freeze will be carried out, covering all packages. The date of the full freeze has not yet been determined.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2025/01/msg00004.html

MySQL 9.2.0 Released: 23/01/2025

Oracle has formed a new branch of the MySQL 9.2.0 DBMS. MySQL Community Server 9.2.0 builds are available for all major Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, and Windows distributions. As part of the new release model introduced in 2023, MySQL 9.2 is assigned to the “Innovation” branches, which will also include the next major release of MySQL 9.3. Innovation branches are recommended for those who want to get access to new functionality earlier, are published every 3 months and are supported only until the next major release is published (for example, after the appearance of branch 9.2, support for branch 9.1 was discontinued). In the summer, they plan to form an LTS release, recommended for implementations that require predictability and long-term preservation of unchanged behavior. Following the LTS branch, a new Innovation branch will be formed - MySQL 10.0.

https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/

Release of Midnight Commander 4.8.33: 23/01/2025

After five months of development, the Midnight Commander 4.8.33 console file manager has been released . It has been developed since 1994 and provides a two-panel interface in the style of Norton Commander. Midnight Commander has features such as mouse support, a built-in file viewer and text editor with syntax highlighting, the use of virtual FS for navigation inside archives, packages and network storage (SFTP, SSH), connection of handlers of various file types, a mode for quickly switching to terminal mode for running commands, the use of bookmarks for switching to frequently used places in the FS and flexible search tools. The project code is written in C and is distributed under the GPLv3+ license.

https://github.com/MidnightCommander/mc/releases/tag/4.8.33

Facebook scamming everyone again: 24/01/2025

The Free Software Foundation has published the results of its analysis of the Llama 3.1 license, under which Meta's machine learning models are distributed. The FOSS Foundation has found the Llama 3.1 license to be non-free and has recommended against using products distributed under it. It is noted that Meta misleads users by presenting the Llama 3.1 license as providing certain freedoms. In fact, the Llama 3.1 license deprives users of freedom, transfers additional powers to licensors, and imposes an acceptable use policy.

In particular, the Llama 3.1 license limits the scope of use to certain applications, such as prohibiting military use, creating products that may cause harm, or being used to generate illegal or objectionable content such as spam, and requiring compliance with any applicable trade laws and regulations, even if the user's country of jurisdiction does not apply those laws and regulations.

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/llama-3-1-community-license-is-not-a-free-software-license

Dovecot 2.4.0 Available: 24/01/2025

Seven years after the formation of version 2.3.0, a new branch of the multi-platform IMAP server Dovecot 2.4.0 was presented, supporting POP3 and IMAP4rev1 protocols with popular extensions such as SORT, THREAD, MULTIAPPEND, QUOTA, ACL, COMPRESS, NOTIFY, METADATA and IDLE, and authentication and encryption mechanisms (SASL, TLS, SCRAM, XOAUTH2). Dovecot maintains full compatibility with classic mbox and Maildir, using external indexes to improve performance. To expand the functionality, plugins can be used, features such as quotas, ACL, Push notifications, full-text search and virtual mailboxes are implemented. The project code is distributed under the LGPL and MIT licenses.

https://dovecot.org/mailman3/archives/list/dovecot-news@dovecot.org/thread/UYNR6GBP25XEGFCS633SWPR4HXV3NSS3/

openSUSE alternative installer for Agama 11: 25/01/2025

The openSUSE project developers have introduced the Agama 11 installer, which is being developed to replace the classic SUSE and openSUSE installation interface, and is notable for separating the user interface from the internal YaST components. Agama supports the use of various frontends, such as a frontend for managing the installation via a web interface. The code of the installer components is distributed under the GPLv2 license and is written in Ruby, Rust, and JavaScript/TypeScript.

The new installer can be tested in the openSUSE 16 alpha release and the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16 beta release. In addition, live builds for x86_64, ppc64le, s390x, and ARM64 architectures have been created for testing the new installer, supporting the installation of the openSUSE Leap 16 alpha release, the continuously updated openSUSE Tumbleweed and openSUSE Slowroll builds and container-based MicroOS editions.

The goals of Agama development are to: eliminate the existing limitations of the graphical interface; expand the possibilities for using YaST functionality in other applications; move away from being tied to a single programming language; and encourage the creation of alternative settings by community members.

The installer provides functions such as selecting the initial set of applications, setting up the network connection, language, keyboard, time zone and localization settings, preparing the storage device and dividing partitions, adding users to the system.

For installing packages, checking hardware, partitioning disks and other functions required during installation, Agama continues to use YaST libraries, on top of which layer services are implemented, abstracting access to libraries via a unified communication protocol based on HTTP. The installer uses a multi-process architecture, where the user interface is not blocked during other work.

The basic interface for managing the installation is built using web technologies. The web interface is written in JavaScript using the React framework and PatternFly components. The messaging service, as well as the built-in http server, is written in Ruby.

https://agama-project.github.io/blog/2025/01/21/Agama-11

Shotcut Video Editor Released: 25/01/2025

The release of the Shotcut 25.01 video editor, developed by the author of the MLT project and using this framework for editing video, has been published. Support for video and audio formats is implemented via FFmpeg. You can use plugins with the implementation of video and audio effects compatible with Frei0r and LADSPA. Shotcut features include: the ability to multi-track editing with the composition of video from fragments in various source formats, without the need for their preliminary import or re-coding. There are built-in tools for creating screencasts, processing images from a web camera and receiving streaming video. The code is written in C++ using the Qt framework and is distributed under the GPLv3 license. Ready-made builds are available for Linux ( AppImage , flatpak and snap ), macOS and Windows.

https://shotcut.org/blog/new-release-250125/

Solus 4.7 released: 26/01/2025

The release of the independent Linux distribution Solus 4.7 was published. It is not based on packages of other distributions and develops its own installer, package manager and configurator. Previously, the Budgie desktop was developed as part of the distribution , but now it has been separated into an independent project. It was decided to develop the next branch of Solus 5 using the technologies of the SerpentOS distribution. The code of the project is distributed under the GPLv2 license, the C and Vala languages ​​are used for development. Builds with the Budgie, GNOME, KDE Plasma and Xfce desktops are provided. The size of the iso images is 2.6-2.9 GB (x86_64).

The eopkg package manager (a fork of PiSi from Pardus Linux) is used to manage packages, providing the usual tools for installing/removing packages, searching the repository, and managing repositories. Packages can be allocated to thematic components, which in turn form categories and subcategories. For example, Firefox is assigned to the network.web.browser component, which is included in the network applications category and the Web applications subcategory. Only about 2,000 packages are offered for installation from the repository.

The distribution follows a hybrid development model, whereby major releases are released periodically, introducing new technologies and significant improvements, and in between major releases the distribution evolves using a rolling package update model.

The Budgie environment is based on GNOME technologies and its own implementation of the GNOME Shell (in the next branch of Budgie 11, they plan to separate the desktop functionality from the layer that provides visualization and output of information). The Budgie Window Manager (BWM) is used to manage windows, which is an extended modification of the basic Mutter plugin. The basis of Budgie is a panel, close in its layout to the classic desktop panels. All elements of the panel are applets, which allows you to flexibly customize the composition, change the placement and replace the implementations of the main elements of the panel to your taste.

Among the available applets are the classic application menu, task switching system, area with the list of open windows, viewing virtual desktops, power management indicator, volume control applet, system status indicator and clock. For music playback in the editions with the Budgie and GNOME desktops, the Rhythmbox player is offered with the Alternate Toolbar extension , offering an interface with a compact panel implemented using client-side window decoration (CSD). For video playback in the Budgie and GNOME editions, Celluloid is used. In the KDE edition, Elisa is available for music playback and Haruna is available for video. In the Xfce edition, the Parole player is used for playing multimedia files.

https://getsol.us/2025/01/26/solus-4-7-released/