Latest Linux and open source news from around the web
Patches sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list today can provide much more efficient Zstd compression and decompression by addressing a very unfortunate oversight in the existing code...
At FOSSY 2026, several people from the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), which organizes the conference, gave a presentation about an ongoing violation of the Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPLv3). Bradley Kühn, Karen Sandler, and Denver Gingerich spoke about different aspects of the violation, which is in regard to 3D-printer software from Bambu Lab, and what is being done to try to provide users with alternatives. One aspect that is particularly interesting is that the circumvention that the company is employing is precisely what the AGPL was written to prevent.
FreeRDP 3.31.0 is out with numerous security and bug fixes, plus faster graphics performance for AVC/H.264 Remote Desktop sessions.
KSMBD as the in-kernel SMB3/CIFS server for higher performance and lower resource usage than user-space SMB/CIFS protocol implementations is becoming even more useful with the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel...
But you probably don't actually need to.
Ubuntu’s Desktop Icons NG (DING) extension has a little-known way to bring order to a chaotic desktop: stacks. Stacks groups multiple files of the same type into a collapsible icon. Images in one stack, PDFs in another and so on. Folders aren’t grouped, and your files don’t get moved anywhere; this is visual grouping, not relocating. If there is only one of a type of file on the desktop, it is not stacked. Expanding a stack by clicking on it reveals all files in the stack (other file icons bump out of the way). Multiple stacks can be expanded or […]
Version 26.8 of the Armbian distribution for Arm hardware has been released. Most releases are a long list of small improvements. This one had three larger pieces landing at roughly the same time, and all three touch parts of Armbian that people use directly rather than parts they only read about in changelogs. The installer was rewritten. Armbian Imager reached 2.0. And our CI moved out of the repository it had outgrown into one built for the job. None of these were planned to coincide; they simply reached the point where postponing them again would have cost more than doing them. The installer rewrite is the one I expect people to notice first. It now ships as an armbian-config module, which means it is unit-tested, the same way the rest of armbian-config is tested, rather than living as a script that everyone was slightly afraid to touch. It can target SPI and MTD, treats eMMC and NVMe as separate flows instead of pretending they are the same thing, can flash a bootloader on its own
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, gstreamer1-plugins-base, kernel, kernel-rt, and sqlite), Debian (freecad, kernel, libvncserver, and openssl), Fedora (apr-util, chromium, nnn, perl-DBI, python-tablib, python3.10, python3.11, python3.12, and sympa), Gentoo (DTrace, GNU screen, UnrealIRCd, and Vinyl Cache), Oracle (389-ds-base, attr, firefox, gegl04, grafana, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, httpd, mod_http2, nginx, pam, python-pyasn1, python-urwid, python3.12, python3.14, sqlite, and xorg-x11-server), SUSE (amazon-ecs-init, containerd, curl, distribution, dracut, ffmpeg-7, fuse-overlayfs, gd, git-lfs, go1.25-openssl, go1.26-openssl, govulncheck-vulndb, hauler, himmelblau, kernel, librest, libssh2_org, open-iscsi, openssh, patch, perl-Date-Manip, podman, postgresql14, postgresql16, python-cryptography, python-Pillow, python311, rmt-server, rootlesskit, rpm, rsync, runc, snpguest, sssd, suseconnect-ng, unbound, and util-linux), and Ubuntu (curl, ff
Version 26.8 of the LibreOffice suite has been released. LibreOffice 26.8 concentrates on three areas: the typographic quality of what the suite produces, the range of writing systems it handles correctly, and the fidelity with which documents survive exchange with other office suites. The largest single body of work in this release addresses bidirectional and complex text. Writer now detects paragraph direction automatically when documents or plain text are opened or pasted. Line wrapping places end-of-line spaces according to the direction of the paragraph rather than that of the adjacent characters. Object resize handles behave correctly in right-to-left and vertical CJK documents. Bidirectional control characters are now visible alongside other formatting marks. In Calc, typing right-to-left text into an empty cell sets the direction of that cell automatically. See the release notes for a full list of changes.
Last week I provided a look at the Intel Xeon 600 series Hyper Threading performance with the Xeon 678X "Granite Rapids WS" processor for HT/SMT on and off. That was interesting while another reader request was to look at the CPU core scaling performance for this high-end workstation processor. Here are those benchmarks for showing the performance, power, and frequency/thermal impact of the Xeon 678X when limited to 6 cores, 12 cores, 24 cores, 48 cores, and then the 48 cores + HT default configuration.
Haiku R1 Beta 5 came out in September 2026 while out today is the long-awaited sixth beta for this open-source operating system inspired by BeOS. This beta release also comes one week ahead of the project's 25th anniversary...
LibreOffice 26.8 is now available with a new Paragraph Composer in Writer, native OpenType variable font support, Calc improvements, and better document compatibility.
ChatGPT becomes a patient guide through ancient man pages, transforming terse entries into usable terminal fixes.
LibreOffice 26.8 open-source office suite is now available for download with numerous new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Here’s what’s new!
AMD's compiler team is proposing a new LLVM Clang compiler option, -fenable-readonly-thp for implementing instruction Transparent Huge Pages "iTHP" at compile and link-time. With -fenable-readonly-thp, they are finding more performance out of SPEC CPU, Geekbench, and other workloads from the arranging of 2MB segment alignment at link time and allowing the executable text range can be promoted to huge pages...
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