It's crazy to realize it has been ten years already since Red Hat abandoned their Btrfs plans for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and dropped it, which was a technology preview feature since RHEL6. In its place Red Hat engineers began developing Stratis for next-gen Linux storage with ZFS/Btrfs-like features but instead building atop XFS, LUKS, Device Mapper, and Clevis. After a while since the last major release, Stratis Storage 3.9 released today...
Version 26.1 of the pip package installer for Python has been released. Richard Si has published a blog post that looks at some of the highlights of 26.1 including dependency cooldowns, experimental support for pylock (pylock.toml) files, and resolver improvements that will move pip closer to the goal of removing its legacy resolver. The release also includes several security fixes and drops support for Python 3.9.
By the time Linus Torvalds released 7.1-rc1 and closed the 7.1 merge window, 12,996 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline repository; just over 9,000 of those arrived after the first-half summary was written. These changes were more driver-oriented than those seen earlier, but still also included many new features across the kernel as a whole.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.2, 6.18.25, 6.12.84, and 6.6.136 stable kernels. As usual, each contains important fixes throughout; users are advised to upgrade.
The newest Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" feature enabled by AMD engineers is protected memory support using the Trusted Memory Zone (TMZ) support on newer GPUs...
AI features are coming to Ubuntu this year, Canonical has announced – though it adds that the distro is not becoming an AI product. In a community post, Jon Seager, VP of engineering at Canonical, says the company will be “ramping up its use of AI tools in a focused and principled manner” in 2026, with a bias toward local inference and open-weight models whose licence terms vibe with Canonical’s values. AI features in Ubuntu will introduced in to the desktop, but taking one of two forms. Ubuntu aims to become a context-aware OS, with agentic workflow integrations and endpoints […]
David Steele, maintainer of the popular pgBackRest backup and restore project for PostgreSQL, has archived the project and announced that it is no longer being maintained. After a lot of thought, I have decided to stop working on pgBackRest. I did not come to this decision lightly. pgBackRest has been my passion project for the last thirteen years, and I was fortunate to have corporate sponsorship for much of this time, but there were also many late nights and weekends as I worked to make pgBackRest the project it is today, aided by numerous contributors. Every open-source developer knows exactly what I mean and how much of your life gets devoted to a special project. Since Crunchy Data was sold, I have been maintaining pgBackRest and looking for a position that would allow me to continue the work, but so far I have not been successful. Likewise, my efforts to secure sponsorship have also fallen far short of what I need to make the project viable.
Version 0.16.0 of the Zig programming language was recently announced, and with it an expanded version of the new Io interface that we covered in December. The new interface is based on an idea called structured concurrency that makes writing correct concurrent applications easier. Zig's implementation of the idea is more explicit and verbose than other languages, however, which could offer an opportunity to explore the consequences of different designs.
Jon Seager, VP engineering for Canonical, has posted an update on "what Canonical and Ubuntu will do (or not) to incorporate AI" that explains what part AI will play in the future of the company and its distribution. The bottom line is that Canonical is ramping up its use of AI tools in a focused and principled manner that favours open weight models with license terms that feel most compatible with our values, combined with open source harnesses. AI features will be landing in Ubuntu throughout the next year as we feel that they're of sufficient maturity and quality, with a bias toward local inference by default. AI features in Ubuntu features will come in two forms: first as a means of enhancing existing OS functionality with AI models in the background, and latterly in the form of "AI native" features and workflows for those who want them. This year Canonical has begun a more deliberate push toward education and developing competence with AI tools. We are not setting shallow metrics
Version 26.04 of the niri scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor has been released. The most notable change in this release, as the "most requested niri feature by far", is support for the blur effect using the Wayland protocol's ext-background-effect. This release also features optional configuration includes, screencasting support enhancements, and a number of improvements for input devices. In short, background blur turned out to be a massive undertaking. Not because of the blur algorithm itself (by the way, if you want to learn about different blurs, including the widely used Dual Kawase, I highly recommend this blog post), but because window background effects in general required a lot of thinking and additions to the code, especially to make them as efficient as possible. This is one of the most complex niri features thus far. LWN covered niri in July 2025.
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