Latest Linux and open source news from around the web

Keychron V3 Mechanical Keyboard Sponsored · View on Amazon → Beelink EQ14 Mini PC Sponsored · View on Amazon →
Phoronix

AI Helped Create A DirectX 11 Driver For QEMU VMs

Thanks in part to the power of Claude Opus 5 and Claude Fable 5, a new Windows DirectX 11 driver for QEMU has been created to help improve graphics acceleration for Microsoft Windows guests running under QEMU virtual machines...

Phoronix

Linux 7.2-rc7 Adding Support For The Most Unique Or Very Funky Gaming Controller

The input subsystem fixes for the week include a number of AI-driven patches to address various information leaks, out-of-bounds accesses, validation fixes, and other coding issues that have turned up recently. Plus some device quirks and also adding support for a rather funky gaming controller to the common XPad Linux driver used by many different gaming controllers...

OMG! Ubuntu

Dynamic Music Pill adds word-by-word lyrics highlighting

An updated version of Dynamic Music Pill, the GNOME Shell extension that shows track info and lyrics in your panel or dock with more animated flourishes than your average now-playing applet, is out. If you’re prone to a bit of desk-side crooning, Dynamic Music Pill v1.3.0 adds two new lyrics provider APIs, BetterLyrics and BiniLyrics with TTML parsing to provide word-by-word karaoke-style highlighting. If one of these new lyrics providers has word-level timing for the track you’re listening to, you get it, but, if not, it falls back to line-by-line as before (or plain static text if nothing synced is […]

LWN.net

[$] Changes in shadow-utils password-expiration features

The shadow-utils project provides the tools that handle /etc/shadow, /etc/passwd, and other related databases; in general, manages users and groups on many Linux systems. While most software releases are notable for what is added, the recent shadow-utils 4.20.0 release is most noteworthy for what has been removed. Specifically, several utilities and functionality related to periodic password expiry, which were deprecated in the December 2025 4.19.0 release, have been removed as planned. It is still possible to manage some aspects of password aging with shadow-utils, but organizations that depend on such features should start planning for their complete removal within a few years.

OMG! Ubuntu

Calibre 9.13 fixes ebook search that wasn’t working in the content server

A new bug-fix release of Calibre, the open-source e-book manger, view and converter, is available for download. Calibre 9.13 resolves a number of PDF-related issues, including one for Linux distributions that ship an ‘ancient’ version of the libxml2 library. To avoid errors that could cause when converting PDFs on Linux, Calibre now preloads its html5-parser library. A comment in the file explains: “QtWebEngineProcess on some ancient Linux systems probes for GPU backends which loads swrast_dri.so which links against system libxml2, which overwrites or global libxml2 symbols. So we preload lxml and html5_parser as a workaround. Thankfully this is basically only […]

LWN.net

The Software Stewardship Lab launches

The Software Stewardship Lab, a nonprofit organization based in Scotland, has announced its existence. Our current research focuses are: Software supply chain security — We're working on an observatory that allows users to identify and monitor the world's critical Open Source packages in real time, including previously hidden parts of the dependency graph. Maintainer burnout — Our report on burnout in Open Source has been well-received. We're working on yearly follow-ups, plus a companion report on how AI is affecting maintainer burnout. Moving forward, the Lab's experts will direct funding to and supervise Open Source sustainability researchers doing critical work. We are already working with universities to teach the next generations of software supply chain experts.

LWN.net

LightDM lives: version 1.33.0 released

Version 1.33.0 of the LightDM display manager has been released. This is the first release in four years: the project had been sponsored by Canonical but was effectively unmaintained in recent years. It has been transferred to a new community repository and is now maintained by Joshua Peisach and Neal Gompa. The new release includes Qt6 support, code optimizations, and a list of other fixes that had been in limbo pending a new release.