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LWN.net

[$] Trying to make sense of package-manager metadata

Package managers for operating systems and programming languages have been around for decades. Each package manager, and its accompanying packaging format, has been shaped by the needs of its respective ecosystem, but there is a growing need to make use of package metadata for more than software management: for example, in vulnerability scans, software bills of materials (SBOMs), and more. On May 19, DamiΓ‘n Vicino spoke at the Open Source Summit North America 2026 about his experiences in the past year trying to make sense of the varied metadata provided by more than 20 package managers.

LWN.net

Vim Classic 8.3 released

Version 8.3 of Vim Classic has been released. This is the first release of the Vim fork since the project was announced in March. This release is based on Vim 8.2.0148, with a number of bug fixes and patches conservatively backported from future versions of Vim upstream. We elected to clean up this version of Vim, prepare it for a release, and imagine an alternate history where Vim 8.3 was released without Vim9 script. The result is Vim Classic 8.3. We chose to take this approach in order to reduce the long-term maintenance burden of Vim Classic, acknowledging that our fork lacks the resources and institutional knowledge available to Vim upstream. However, a consequence is that there are some Vim plugins which are not compatible with Vim Classic. We have made a special effort to assess patches from Vim upstream which mitigate some of the many CVEs affecting Vim which were discovered and fixed between versions 8.2 and modern-day Vim, but we can't be sure we've got all of the security pa

LWN.net

Security updates for Tuesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (php:8.2 and php:8.3), Debian (gst-plugins-good1.0, symfony, and yelp), Fedora (dovecot, freeipa, hplip, libpng, perl-Catalyst-Plugin-Authentication, postfix, samba, unbound, and vim), Mageia (assimp, libcaca, sdl2_sound, and tar), Slackware (kernel), SUSE (alloy, apache-commons-lang3, apache-commons-text,, apache2, bubblewrap, busybox, chromium, cups, docker-stable, ffmpeg-8, google-osconfig-agent, gsasl, ignition, java-26-openjdk, kernel, libsolv-demo, libsoup, libzypp, localsearch, openjpeg2, postgresql-jdbc, putty, python-mistune, python-Pillow, python-python-multipart, python-Twisted, python3-Twisted, re, roundcubemail, vim, wireshark, and xz), and Ubuntu (evolution-data-server, exim4, gsasl, haveged, lcms2, libreoffice, linux-aws, linux-lts-xenial, linux-lowlatency, linux-nvidia-tegra, nginx, nncp, qtdeclarative-opensource-src, sslh, sssd, and xz-utils).

Phoronix

Benchmarking The Different CachyOS Linux Kernel Flavors

CachyOS ships with a good Linux kernel configuration by default balancing the different features as well as performance. But they also ship a variety of other kernel builds for those preferring a more leading-edge kernel or the current LTS series, a hardened kernel configuration, and more. In this article are some fresh benchmarks of the Arch Linux based CachyOS Linux distribution with some of its main kernel flavors.

Phoronix

ASUS ZenVision Laptop Lid Screen Reverse Engineered & Now Able To Work On Linux

ASUS ZenVision is a feature of some ASUS laptops like the Zenbook 14X OLED Space Edition where there is a 3.5-inch monochrome screen embedded into the top lid of the laptop. From this mini display embedded into the top lid of the laptop it's possible to display animated themes, show the current date/time, battery status, or customized messages and the like. The practicality is rather limited as primarily it's for showing off to people around you besides when your laptop lid is closed, but now with experimental code it's now possible to use ZenVision on Linux...

Phoronix

COSMIC Desktop's Frosted Glass Is Giving Windows Aero Vibes

Some of the latest feature work for the Rust and Wayland based COSMIC desktop environment is on creating their new "Frosted Glass" appearance. It's getting closer to release and giving off Windows Aero vibes for that design language from the Windows Vista days...