Linux NewsFOSS Weekly #26.25: AUR Supply Chain Attack, Commodore Phones, SonicDE, Y Server, Kernel 7.1 and More
14 years of It's FOSS thanks you for your support
After the AUR Malware Flood, Yay v13 Lets You Script Your Own Safety Net
The release adds Lua-based hooks alongside a simpler way to see how recently a PKGBUILD was last touched.
The Software Freedom Conservancy's LLM-backed generative AI recommendations
The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has announced the release of its recommendations for using LLM-backed generative AI systems for FOSS contributions. The recommendations were created by the SFC and volunteers from the free-software community. The recommendations reflect the extremely difficult dilemmas that these systems pose for FOSS contributors. SFC and its volunteers understand that FOSS developers are approaching LLM-gen-AI from a variety of perspectives. The recommendations offer practical assistance to minimize the damage caused by using proprietary systems, whether FOSS contributors reject LLM-gen-AI or choose (voluntarily or by employer mandate) to use them. These recommendations are best practices (but not definitions or requirements) that SFC and its volunteers formulated after careful study of the growing LLM-gen-AI use among FOSS contributors. SFC will follow these recommendations with a series of supporting materials, including documents, online tutorials, public Q&A
Mastodon 4.6 Released with Collections and Redesigned Profiles
Mastodon 4.6 brings curated profile Collections, redesigned profiles, email subscriptions, landing page changes, and more to the decentralized social media platform.
Ubuntu flavours now need a beta release to ship
Ubuntu has announced an ‘important policy update’, making beta releases mandatory for all Ubuntu flavours, no exceptions. Most flavours already hit the beta milestone every six months without issue. But until now a flavour that missed the deadline could still be granted a one-off exception. During the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle, that’s what happened with Ubuntu Kylin, the Chinese-orientated spin that uses the UKUI desktop. It missed the Beta window but still made the final release. That won’t happen again. To get an official stable release, a flavour now must have a beta release out the same time as every […]
Mozilla Opens Up Firefox Roadmap with Big Browser Changes Ahead
Mozilla plans native Containers, expanded PDF editing, Quick Answers, Smart Window, and other upcoming Firefox features.
[$] The first half of the 7.2 merge window
The 7.2 merge window started with the 7.1 kernel release on June 14. As of this writing, just over 7,000 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline for the next kernel release. Many of the core subsystems have been pulled at this point, meaning that most of the changes that can be expected in 7.2 have now come into focus.
Mastodon 4.6 released
Version 4.6 of the Mastodon fediverse platform has been released. The headliner of this release is Collections, a way to create and share curated collections of profiles. Part of Mastodon's work ethos is our commitment to trust and safety, so we've put a lot of thought and care into the design of this feature to avoid some of the pitfalls and abuse people have experienced with similar features on other platforms, while focusing on its primary goal: Helping new users discover more of the Fediverse. Other new features include support for subscribing to posts via email, the ability to generate a "year in review" post, accessibility improvements, and more.
[$] Single-hop block replication with RMR and BRMR
How can cloud providers efficiently supply durable virtual block devices? Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) provides a way for servers in a cluster to share chunks of memory, but there still needs to be a protocol that operates on top of RDMA to provide the guarantees expected of a block device. The kernel's RDMA transport library (RTRS) provides a way to send messages via RDMA. I presented about two new components built on top of RTRS at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management and BPF Summit: Reliable Multicast over RTRS (RMR) and Block device over RMR (BRMR). These modules, which I am working on with Jia Li, could be a way for cloud providers to expose durable block devices with as little overhead as possible. To accomplish that, however, we need some discussion and feedback from the community before sending the modules upstream.
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (dracut, podman, postfix, rsync, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Debian (atril, firefox-esr, and nginx), Mageia (libcap, perl, and python-pillow), Oracle (firefox, gstreamer-plugins-base and gstreamer-plugins-good, httpd:2.4, kernel, libpng12, libpng15, libxml2, libxslt, opencryptoki, openssl, postfix, rsync, webkit2gtk3, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Slackware (bind, libidn, mozilla, and openssl), SUSE (alloy, docker, elemental-system-agent, glibc, grafana, helm, LibVNCServer, openssh8.4, perl-GD, perl-HTTP-Daemon, python-WebOb-doc, python311-google-adk, rustup, traefik2, wireshark, and xwayland), and Ubuntu (dolibarr, golang-go.crypto, graphite2, gst-plugins-bad1.0, kitty, libconfig-inifiles-perl, libnginx-mod-js, and webpy).
Commodore's New Flip Phone Skips Android for Linux-Based Sailfish OS
The Callback 8020 still runs apps made for Android, btw.
5 things that are surprisingly easier on Linux than Windows
Windows seems like the easier operating system, until it is not.
Tails 7.9 Anonymous OS Rolls Out with Tor Browser and Firmware Updates
The privacy-focused Tails 7.9 is now available with Tor Browser 15.0.16, updated firmware for newer hardware, and a Secure Boot notification fix.
These 4 alien Linux concepts confused me when I switched from Windows
Linux isn’t harder than Windows—it’s just unfamiliar and works with very different computing concepts.
KDE Plasma 6.7 Release Resurrects Two Themes From the KDE 4 Era
The release also brings per-screen virtual desktops and Union, a new CSS-based theming system.
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