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LWN.net

[$] An alternate path for immutable distributions

LWN has had a number of articles on immutable distributions, such as Bluefin and Bazzite, in recent years. These distributions have taken a variety of approaches, including using rpm-ostree, filesystem snapshots, and bootable container (bootc) images. But those approaches, especially the latter, lead to extra complexity for a user attempting to install new software, instead of just using the existing package manager. AshOS (Any Snapshot Hierarchical OS) is an experimental AGPL-3-licensed "meta-distribution" that tried a different approach more in line with traditional package management. Although the project is no longer updated, it remains usable, and can still shed some light on a potential alternate path for users worried about adopting bootc-based approaches.

Phoronix

Linux 6.19 ATA Fixes Address Power Management Regression For The Past Year

It's typically rare these days for the ATA subsystem updates in the Linux kernel to contain anything really noteworthy. But today some important fixes were merged for the ATA code to deal with a reported power management regression affecting the past number of Linux kernel releases over the last year. ATAPI devices with dummy ports weren't hitting their low-power state and in turn preventing the CPU from reaching low-power C-states but thankfully that is now resolved with this code...

OMG! Ubuntu

Window Shadows Finally Arrive on COSMIC Desktop

System76 has updated the COSMIC Desktop with window shadows and consistent corner sizing across all applications, a change available on Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS right now and coming to users on other Linux distributions soon. Both features apply the effects consistently, meaning that apps in different toolkits (Qt, GTK, Iced, etc) match better (if not perfectly) than they did before. Controls for applying roundness and shadowing in floating and tiled modes is user‑adjustable. Prior, only GTK windows running on COSMIC had drop shadows. Native COSMIC apps, and Qt ones, appeared flat. This often made it hard(er) to tell which app was […]

LWN.net

Security updates for Tuesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gpsd-minimal, jmc, kernel, kernel-rt, and net-snmp), Debian (apache-log4j2 and dcmtk), Fedora (exim, gpsd, mysql8.0, mysql8.4, python-biopython, and rust-lru), Mageia (firefox, nss and thunderbird), Oracle (container-tools:rhel8, gpsd-minimal, jmc, kernel, net-snmp, and uek-kernel), Red Hat (net-snmp), SUSE (chromium, go, harfbuzz-devel, kernel, libsoup, rust1.91, rust1.92, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (apache2, avahi, and python-urllib3).

Phoronix

AMD Making It Easier To Install vLLM For ROCm

Deploying vLLM for LLM inference and serving on NVIDIA hardware can be as easy as pip3 install vllm. Beautifully simple just as many of the AI/LLM Python libraries can deploy straight-away and typically "just work" on NVIDIA. Running vLLM atop AMD Radeon/Instinct hardware though has traditionally meant either compiling vLLM from source yourself or AMD's recommended approach of using Docker containers that contain pre-built versions of vLLM. Finally there is now a blessed Python wheel for making it easier to install vLLM without Docker and leveraging ROCm...

Phoronix

LLVM Adopts "Human In The Loop" Policy For AI/Tool-Assisted Contributions

Following recent discussions over AI contributions to the LLVM open-source compiler project, they have come to an agreement on allowing AI/tool-assisted contributions but that there must be a human involved that is first looking over the code before opening any pull request and similar. Strictly AI-driven contributions without any human vetting will not be permitted...

LPI

DevOps Tools Introduction #01: Getting “Getting Started” Started

In November 2025, Linux Professional Institute (LPI) released version 2.0 of the Linux Professional Institute DevOps Tools Engineer certification. Covering a series of tools used to develop and deliver software in a collaborative manner, the content of this exam extends ... Read more The post DevOps Tools Introduction #01: Getting “Getting Started” Started appeared first on Linux Professional Institute (LPI).

LPI

DevOps Tools Introduction #01: Getting “Getting Started” Started

In November 2025, Linux Professional Institute (LPI) released version 2.0 of the Linux Professional Institute DevOps Tools Engineer certification. Covering a series of tools used to develop and deliver software in a collaborative manner, the content of this exam extends ... Read more The post DevOps Tools Introduction #01: Getting “Getting Started” Started appeared first on Linux Professional Institute (LPI).