Latest Linux and open source news from around the web
Firefox 148 introduced an option called "Block AI enhancements." What does that mean, is it really a "kill switch" for AI, and does Firefox live up to its reputation as a browser that exists beyond corporate control? We decided to start up Wireshark and find out.
If you want to run an app from a different distribution or architecture or one that needs different libraries, we show you some tricks to make this work on your Linux machine.
Git 2.55 adds Linux support for its built-in FSMonitor daemon, helping large repositories avoid costly working-tree scans.
Kali Linux 2026.2 ethical hacking and penetration testing distribution is now available for download with GNOME 50 and KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop offerings, new tools, Kali NetHunter uUpdates, and more.
Wine 11.12 fell off the bi-weekly release rhythm with not making it out last Friday, but it managed to ship today. Wine 11.12 brings fractional scaling support to its Wayland driver and various other enhancements...
Kali Linux 2026.2 arrives with major desktop updates, new tools, faster VM boots, and APT source changes.
Linus Torvalds released 7.2-rc1 and closed the 7.2 merge window on June 28; by that time, 13,412 non-merge commits had found their way into the mainline. That makes this the busiest merge window since the 6.7 development cycle in 2024 (15,418 commits, including 2,800 for the entire bcachefs development history). Just under half of those commits arrived after LWN's summary of the first half of the merge window was written. As usual, the commits in the latter part of the merge window were more heavily focused on fixes, but there were still a lot of new features and significant changes merged as well.
The laptop starts at $2,899 and scales up to an eye-watering $11,944 for a custom config.
The Bcachefs file-system already makes use of the Rust programming language in the user-space tools for this CoW file-system and they have been planning to make use of Rust within the kernel module too. Beginning in the next Bcachefs release, v1.38.7, they are looking at beginning to include Rust code now in their kernel driver...
The xsnow application, which generates an animated snowfall effect (and other pleasant diversions) for X11 desktops, does not seem like an obvious channel for political statements. Nevertheless, xsnow's maintainer seems to have included a political protest in the program: an Easter egg that is triggered when the program's language is set to Russia ("ru"). One user has complained that this functionality should be removed from the Debian xsnow package, but Debian does not seem to have any rules that forbid such a feature outright.
The Kubernetes project has published a blog post explaining its AI policy: The main problem is that AI has made generating code fast but there has been very little improvement in maintaining code bases. In this post, we will highlight the ways the Kubernetes community is adapting to the world of AI assisted coding. The first step of this journey was to develop an AI policy. This seems mundane and bureaucratic but there were many PRs that derailed into discussions around AI usage. The AI policy helps steer the conversation around the project's stance on AI and provides a clear signal to contributors on how to use these tools responsibly. Of note, the project requires disclosure when AI tools have been used to assist in the creation of a contribution but forbids the use of listing AI as a co-author or including "assisted-by" or "co-developed" trailers to attribute work to an LLM tool.
Mageia 10 has been released with the 6.18 Linux kernel, DNF 5.4.0, RPM 4.20.1, and an increase in hardware requirements for x86 32-bit systems; users now need a CPU with SSE2 features. See the release notes for a full list of updates, and the errata page for known problems.
Juno Computers opens preorders for its $989 Juno Tab 4 WiFi, a Linux tablet with a 13-inch 2K display, Intel Core Ultra CPU, and Debian/Ubuntu options.
Git 2.55 is out today as the latest stable update to this distributed version control system...
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (containernetworking-plugins, golang, kernel, libpng, libpng15, nginx, opencryptoki, perl-IO-Compress, thunderbird, and tigervnc), Debian (chromium, gdcm, incus, libhtml-parser-perl, lxd, openvpn, tor, and xorg-server), Fedora (chromium, docker-buildkit, docker-buildx, dotnet10.0, dotnet8.0, dotnet9.0, krita, ldns, libssh2, liferea, lighttpd, mariadb10.11, mariadb11.8, moby-engine, nginx, nginx-mod-brotli, nginx-mod-fancyindex, nginx-mod-headers-more, nginx-mod-js-challenge, nginx-mod-modsecurity, nginx-mod-naxsi, nginx-mod-vts, openbao, pacemaker, pgadmin4, podman-tui, prometheus-podman-exporter, python-jupyter-server, python-mistune, python-postorius, python-pydantic-settings, python3-docs, python3.14, thunderbird, tigervnc, tinyproxy, and util-linux), Mageia (krb5), Oracle (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, bind, dracut, fence-agents, firefox, frr, frr10, glib2, glibc, gnutls, golang, kernel, libpng, libpng15, libreoffice, libxml2, libxslt
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