Latest Linux and open source news from around the web
New bidirectional-text tools, better OOXML round-tripping, and no built-in AI show why LibreOffice is accountable to users rather than product-market calculations. The post LibreOffice 26.8 Again Proves Open Source Is About More Than Code appeared first on FOSS Force.
EndeavourOS Titan Nova distribution is now available for download with the KDE Plasma 6.7.4 desktop environment, Linux kernel 7.1.8, and other changes. Here’s what’s new!
More AI features have landed in the latest update to the open-source ebook manager Calibre. Calibre 9.14, released this week If you you find yourself looking at your ebook library in Calibre thinking “this would look better with a different cover”, the latest update lets you generate new ones using AI. A strange feature? Perhaps, and it does require you to plumb in an AI provider (with API key) capable of image generation to use it. But Calibre say it lets you generate book covers using AI “with different cover styles such as romance, sci-fi, pulp fiction etc”. Most ebooks […]
EndeavourOS releases Titan Nova with refreshed hardware support and installer fixes while development continues on the Wayland-based Triton release.
The voting is over and there is a winner now known in the much-debated Debian General Resolution voting over an AI policy for the Linux distribution...
Méven Car has written a pair of interesting blog posts (part 1, part 2). The first post is largely about some of the recent new features and performance work that have gone into the Dolphin file manager 26.08 release, as well as the KIO framework. The second looks at the performance improvements and benchmarks for previous, current, and upcoming releases. Copying many small files is more than twice as fast as it was in April. The gain falls off as files get larger, which is what you would expect: the fix is to the per-file overhead, and once each file carries a megabyte of actual I/O the overhead stops being what you are waiting for. There is still a gap with cp, discussed at length in the July post. KIO is doing more than cp does, but not five times more, and the batching work that closes most of the rest of that gap is still in progress.
Image Toolbox will draw you in with its export presets tailored for Instagram, X, YouTube, and more.
The distro nobody talks about is beating the ones everybody uses.
DXVK 3.1 introduces groundwork for Intel vendor extensions under Proton, alongside fixes for Battlefield 3, The Witcher, and more.
The null block driver (null_blk) is a small driver that is mostly useful for benchmarking block-layer implementations. It accepts all requests and marks them complete as quickly as possible, doing as little work as possible. In June 2026, Andreas Hindborg shared a patch set implementing the same functionality in Rust, in order to show that a simple block driver is now possible to write using the kernel's Rust APIs and to enable comparisons between the C and Rust implementations. A minimal version of the "rnull" driver is already present in the mainline kernel, but Hindborg's patch set brings it up to feature parity with the C version.
Premiering in KDE Plasma 6.7 was Union as the new CSS-based style/theming engine for Plasma. Union ultimately aims to address KDE's fragmented ways of styling apps. As a step closer to that goal, there is now the initial release of Union for QtWidgets support...
DXVK 3.1 Vulkan-based implementation of D3D9, D3D10, and D3D11 for Linux / Wine is now available for download with new features and various improvements for several games.
Artix Linux is discontinuing XLibre support only months after adopting it as the default X server, alongside refreshed August 2026 ISOs.
The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) subsystem changes for the Linux 7.3 kernel are centered around code clean-ups and improvements being made as a precursor toward TrenchBoot support...
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.2, 7.1.12, 6.18.48, 6.12.107, 6.6.155, 6.1.186, 5.15.219, and 5.10.268 stable kernels. Each of these contains a single fix for a vulnerability (CVE-2026-80590) that allows marking IPv4 or IPv6 fragments as GSO, which can allow an unprivileged user to cause a kernel panic. This vulnerability has been present since Linux 2.6.27. Users are advised to upgrade.
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