KDE Linux, the KDE Project's second stab at creating its own distribution, was first introduced as "Project Banana" at the Akademy conference in 2024 by Harald Sitter. Nate Graham announced the first alpha-quality release during Akademy 2025. Graham and Sitter paired up at Akademy 2026 to provide an update on its progress, lay out plans for refining the distribution to address user feedback, and discuss some of the problems that still need to be dealt with. KDE Linux is still not-quite-ready for prime time, but Graham hopes that it will be suitable for widespread use soonβfor an undefined value of "soon".
The Lix and Nix projects have jointly disclosed a set of vulnerabilities that can be used to escalate privileges to root on systems running the Lix or Nix daemons. "All systems that build untrusted derivations are affected." Releases with fixes from each project are available today. CVE IDs have not yet been requested. See the announcement for more details on the vulnerabilities.
Rust's system of ownership and borrowed references is convenient when it can correctly model a program's needs. The Rust for Linux project has worked to provide adapters between Rust's semantics and the existing C code in the kernel. At Kangrejos 2026, Andreas Hindborg spoke about a patch series implementing the next such adaptor: an Ownable trait for representing objects that are allocated in C code, but which Rust code is responsible for cleaning up (if not necessarily deallocating) when it is done with them. He hoped to finally reach a consensus on the patch series, after months of discussion on the mailing list.
PostgreSQL core team member Peter Eisentraut has written a blog post reflecting on the "unusually high number of features" that have been taken out of the upcoming PostgreSQL 19 release since the beta period began. Some of the reverted features had significant architectural defects that would have been hard to fix quickly and during beta. But there was also a long tail of relatively harmless issues involving various edge cases. In past times, many of these would not have surfaced until much later and we would have fixed them bit by bit over the subsequent five years. But with LLM-assisted code review, these kinds of things can get found much faster, and then you're staring at a list of like forty defect reports. And even if each of them requires only a three-line fix on average, there is a fixed overhead to dealing with each of these, and then you run out of time. Most if not all of the affected reverted features were written a long time ago when LLM-assisted code review was not as use
Asterinas is a project to build a new operating-system kernel in Rust; it was covered here in 2025. Version 0.19.0 of the Asterinas kernel has been released; changes include a new graphics subsystem capable of running X.org, "minimal but usable" 64-bit Arm support, better virtualization support, and more.
The Maintainers Summit is a one-day, invitation-only gathering of about 30 kernel developers; it is held once each year to discuss policy-related issues that are not always amenable to resolution via email. The 2026 event was scheduled for October 8 in Prague, Czechia. Unsurprisingly, the discussion there was dominated by large language models (LLMs) and their effect on the development community, but some time was also found to talk about security bugs and long-term succession planning.
The LineageOS project, which produces an Android-based distribution for mobile devices, has announced the release of LineageOS 24.0. We're a bit sentimental about this release, as it precedes a really fun upcoming milestone. On December 24, 2026, LineageOS will celebrate 10 years. It's a remarkable milestone for a project built by a passionate community of developers, maintainers, contributors, and users who have kept so many devices alive along the way. [...] We've been hard at work rebasing all of our changes and features since Android 17's release in June. Android 17's first release mainly contained iterative improvements and some UI/UX refinements, but due to our previous efforts adapting to Google's heavy refactoring over the last several versions, we were able to rebase onto Android 17's code-base faster than anticipated. Yes you read that right: We're early this year!
The 7.3-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing. According to Linus: "As always, I would have preferred to see a smaller rc, but it's not like anything in here looks like a reason to delay the final release. So that's still set for next weekend unless something new comes up." One notable change that slipped into the mainline this week is the deprecation of the ext4 data=journal mode; it will be removed entirely at the beginning of 2028.
Version 3.15 of the Python programming language has been released. Notable changes in this release include the addition of the sentinel and frozendict built-in types, the use of UTF-8 encoding by default, package start-up configuration files, as well as improvements in the experimental JIT compiler. See the "What's new in Python 3.15" article for an in-depth look at new features in this release, and the changelog for a full list of changes.
While many developers are struggling to keep up with the flood of vulnerability reports, others are still focused on preventing those reports from happening in the first place. Control-flow integrity (CFI) is the term for preventing (or at least detecting) exploits that divert the flow of control from its intended paths. At the 2026 GNU Tools Cauldron, Kees Cook presented his changes to the GCC compiler suite to support forward-edge CFI for the kernel.
At the 2026 All Systems Go! conference, systemd maintainers Luca Boccassi and Zbigniew JΔdrzejewski-Szmek delivered the traditional "state of the project" session with an overview of the systemd project's accomplishments in the past year. That was followed by a maintainer round table where Boccassi, JΔdrzejewski-Szmek, Daan De Meyer, and project leader Lennart Poettering fielded questions about systemd's size, health, and if it might replace Kubernetes. (It will not.)
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