Linux NewsIt’s Official: Linux Kernel 6.18 Will Be LTS, Supported Until December 2027
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 for Wednesday
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).
A final stable kernel update for 5.4
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 Kernel 5.4 Reaches End of Life After More Than Six Years of Maintenance
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.
Intel's Open-Source Linux Graphics Driver Delivered Significant Improvements In 2025
Last week I provided a look at how Intel's GPU compute performance on Battlemage evolved in 2025. In today's article is a similar Intel Arc A-Series "Alchemist" and B-Series "Battlemage" look at how the OpenGL and Vulkan graphics performance has evolved over the past year. Simply put, the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack has evolved immensely this year... Not just for Vulkan but even the OpenGL support continues moving in the right direction too.
Fedora 44 Cleared To Replace Kernel Console With User-Space KMSCON
A proposal was raised a month ago for Fedora Linux 44 to replace the kernel's frame-buffer console "FBCON" with KMSCON in user-space. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now granted approval for making this change in Fedora 44 as part of a larger foal to eventually deprecate FBCON/FBDEV emulation in the kernel...
Let’s Encrypt to Cut Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days by 2028
Let’s Encrypt begins a multi-year transition to shorter certificate validity, moving from 90-day to 45-day certificates.
Linux 6.18 Officially Promoted To Being An LTS Kernel
Not exactly a big surprise but the recently released Linux 6.18 kernel is now officially promoted to being this year's Long Term Support "LTS" kernel...
Raspberry Pi 5 1GB Variant: Is It Worth $45?
Other SBCs offer more RAM at this price point. So, should you still pay $45 for a 1 GB Pi?
Microsoft ACPI Fan Extensions & Configurable Hibernation Threads For Linux 6.19
The pull requests landing the power management subsystem updates for Linux 6.19 along with the ACPI and thermal control code have landed. There is new hardware support, Microsoft ACPI Fan Extensions support, and other new features for Linux power management in this new kernel...
LibreOffice 26.2 Alpha 1 Released For Testing
The first alpha release of the LibreOffice 26.2 open-source and cross platform office suite is now available for testing ahead of its official release in February...
Mission-Center Delivers a Polished System Monitor for Linux Power Users
Mission-Center offers a single interface for tracking resource usage and managing processes and services, making routine system checks easier from the desktop. The post Mission-Center Delivers a Polished System Monitor for Linux Power Users appeared first on FOSS Force.
Swiss Data Protection Group Says US Cloud Giants Can't Meet Privacy Standards
Lack of end-to-end encryption makes international cloud services unsuitable, privatim says.
Sound Open Firmware 2.14 Released With Intel Wildcat Lake & Nova Lake Support
Sound Open Firmware is one of the projects started originally by Intel but has grown into a multi-vendor initiative for open-source audio digital signal processing (DSP) firmware and development tooling for a variety of platforms under the Linux Foundation umbrella...
Scoped User Access In Linux 6.19 To Reduce Speculation Barriers & Its Performance Hit
Merged yesterday to the Linux 6.19 Git codebase was the "core/uaccess" pull that introduces new scoped user-mode access with auto-cleanup functionality. This can reduce the number of speculation barriers encountered when needing to access user-mode memory and thereby avoiding some of the performance penalties incurred by speculation barriers...