Latest Linux and open source news from around the web
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...
Wireshark 4.6.2 open-source network protocol analyzer is now available to download with various bug fixes and updated protocols. Here’s what’s changed!
Last month I reported on Linux 6.19 looking to enable Microsoft C Extensions support throughout the Linux kernel with setting the -fms-extensions compiler option to allow Microsoft C Extensions when building the kernel. Linus Torvalds today merged that support without objections...
Version 2025.12 of the Home Assistant home-automation system has been released. This month, we're unveiling Home Assistant Labs, a brand-new space where you can preview features before they go mainstream. And what better way to kick it off than with Winter mode? ❄️ Enable it and watch snowflakes drift across your dashboard. It's completely unnecessary, utterly delightful, and exactly the kind of thing we love to build. ❄️ But that's just the beginning. We've been working on making automations more intuitive over the past releases, and this release finally delivers purpose-specific triggers and conditions. Instead of thinking in (numeric) states, you can now simply say "When a light turns on" or "If the climate is heating". It's automation building the way our mind works, as it should be.
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...
The Django Python web framework project has announced the release of Django 6.0 including many new features, as can be seen in the release notes. Some highlights include template partials for modularizing templates, a flexible task framework for running background tasks, a modernized email API, and a Content Security Policy (CSP) feature that provides the ability to "easily configure and enforce browser-level security policies to protect against content injection".
Linux 6.18 is now listed as the new long-term support kernel, officially joining the LTS line on kernel.org for extended maintenance.
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.
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...
AlmaLinux forms a Media & Entertainment SIG to address ecosystem disruptions and deliver a reliable Linux base for modern studio pipelines.
It's not just a Pi 5 Model B in a keyboard.
Linux kernel 6.18 is now officially marked as LTS (Long-Term Support) on the kernel.org website and it will be supported until December 2027.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (containerd, mako, and xen), Fedora (forgejo, nextcloud, openbao, rclone, restic, and tigervnc), Oracle (firefox, kernel, libtiff, libxml2, and postgresql), SUSE (libecpg6, lightdm-kde-greeter, python-cbor2, python-mistralclient-doc, python315, and python39), and Ubuntu (kdeconnect, linux, linux-aws, linux-realtime, python-django, and unbound).
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 5.4.302 stable kernel: This is the LAST 5.4.y release. It is now end-of-life and should not be used by anyone, anymore. As of this point in time, there are 1539 documented unfixed CVEs for this kernel branch, and that number will only increase over time as more CVEs get assigned for kernel bugs. For the curious, Kroah-Hartman has also provided a list of the unfixed CVEs for 5.5.302.
Linux 5.4 LTS kernel series has reached end of life after being maintained for more than six years, receiving a total of 302 point releases.
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