Linux NewsZorin OS 18 Hits 2 Million Downloads as Windows Users Drive Growth
Zorin OS 18 has surpassed 2 million downloads in under three months, with more than three-quarters coming from former Windows users.
Microsoft Open-Sources XAML Studio
After 8 years, Microsoft's tool for designing Windows apps is now open source.
auto-cpufreq 3.0 Arrives for Linux with Better Battery Handling and CPU Turbo Control
New release gives Linux laptop users more control over CPU performance while fixing battery detection issues.
GCC 16 Compiler Steps Closer To Release With Algol 68 Frontend, AMD Zen 6, C++20 Default
GCC 16 as this year's major feature release of the GNU Compiler Collection should be out in the typical March~April timeframe if all goes well. Today the GCC 16 compiler transitioned to its final stage "stage 4" of development with a focus exclusively on documentation and regression fixing...
[$] Asciinema: making movies at the command-line
In open-source circles there are many situations, such as bug reports, demos, and tutorials, when one might want to provide a play-by-play of a session in one's terminal. The asciinema project provides a set of tools to do just that. Its tools let users record, edit, and share terminal sessions in a text-based format that has quite a few advantages compared to making and sharing videos of terminal sessions. For example, it is easy to use, offers the ability to search text from recorded sessions, and allows users to copy and paste directly from the recording.
Linux Mint 22.3 has arrived, complete with Cinnamon 6.6
Another great update for the Ubuntu Linux spinoff.
BTW, Arch Users! Pacman Might Be Getting a Rust Replacement
The Rust-based ALPM project is looking suspiciously like Pacman's replacement.
Parrot 7.1 Through 7.3 Planned for 2026 as Focus Moves to AI Security
Parrot Linux plans versions 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 throughout 2026, shifting its security research toward AI systems and real-world attack surfaces.
Firefox 147 Arrives with XDG Support on Linux, Auto-PiP + More
Firefox 147 released with XDG directory support ending a 20-year Linux bug, auto Picture-in-Picture, better AMD video performance, and new web standards.
Wine 11.0 Planned For Release Tomorrow With NTSync Support, Better WoW64
Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard relayed on the mailing list today that the plan is to release Wine 11.0 stable tomorrow, 13 January...
Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and sogo), Fedora (chromium, foomuuri, libpng, libsodium, mariadb10.11, musescore, nginx, python-pdfminer, python-urllib3, python3.12, seamonkey, wasmedge, and wget2), Mageia (curl, libpcap, sodium, wget2, and zlib), Slackware (lcms2), SUSE (chromedriver, chromium, noopenh264, coredns, curl, dcmtk, fontforge, gdk-pixbuf-loader-libheif, gimp, kernel, libheif, libpng16, libsoup-2_4-1, libvirt, mariadb, php8, poppler, python-filelock, python-tornado6, python311-aiohttp, qemu, sssd, and traefik), and Ubuntu (libheif, libtasn1-6, linux-azure-nvidia, linux-kvm, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-realtime, and php7.2, php7.4, php8.1, php8.3, php8.4).
Firefox 147 Now Available for Download, Here’s What’s New
Mozilla Firefox 147 enables WebGPU on Apple Silicon Macs and improves hardware-decoded video playback on supported AMD GPUs.
Firefox 147 Is Now Available for Download, Here’s What’s New
Firefox 147 open-source web browser is now available for download with support for Freedesktop.org's XDG Base Directory Specification and other changes.
The Surprising Spectre BHI Mitigation Performance Impact On Meteor Lake
When recently carrying out performance benchmarks of Intel Meteor Lake performance on Linux since launch day two years ago, the geo mean came in at 93% the original performance. Finding the performance trending clearly lower with an up-to-date Linux software stack compared to in December 2023 was quite surprising considering the rather nice gains we have seen over time on other Intel/AMD hardware. As noted in that article though, one of the possible explanations there is the Spectre BHI "Branch History Injection" vulnerability and microcode plus Linux kernel mitigations having come out post-launch and affecting Meteor Lake CPUs. Sure enough, follow-up tests looking at the Spectre BHI impact have revealed a measurable cost in a number of workloads for the Core Ultra processor.
Europe Has a New Plan to Break Free from US Tech Dominance
This four-week consultation on open source software tackles the cloud, AI, cybersecurity, and automotive sectors.