Linux

22 Things to Do After Installing Ubuntu 26.10 Stonking Stingray

Make Ubuntu 26.10 yours by following these tweaks and tips.

Firefox 159 released with Wayland Linux fixes

Firefox 159 is out, with a fresh set of improvements and some Linux-specific fixes. Now that Mozilla’s browser hews to a faster release cadence, with two releases a month rather than one, some changelogs may look minor on their own, as they’re smaller, if more frequent slices. So what’s changed? The Passwords tool in the browser sidebar (added as an option in Firefox 145) is now shown by default. This lets you find credentials in the same window as a web page, no mousing through menus or juggling with floating dialogs. It’s also a smidgen easier to search your open […] You're reading Firefox 159 released with Wayland Linux fixes, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Initial Support For The Apple M4 & Apple A18 Pro Make It Into Linux 7.4

The many SoC patches have landed within the Linux 7.4 kernel providing support for dozens of new boards as well as a number of new SoCs like the Apple M4 and the A18 Pro as found in the MacBook Neo. The Google Tensor 5 was also finally mainlined along with Pixel 10 devices. Plus some unreleased Qualcomm SoC support rounds out the bunch...

Steam Frame VR Headset Sees Mainline Support With Linux 7.4

The mainline Linux 7.4 kernel will be capable of running on the Steam Frame VR headset...

Trash talking Ubuntu’s confusing British bin labels

Every operating systems needs somewhere to put the files you delete (and give you chance to rummage through to find the ones you want to keep). But, if you’re a Brit using Ubuntu, the name of that place varies based on where you look. It seems Ubuntu’s UK English translation team don’t agree on what to call a bin. The dock hover label says Trash. That opens a Rubbish Bin in the file manager, and that show an action bar button to Empty Wastebasket… Right-click on a file in the tr… Er, file holding area, and you have the choice […] You're reading Trash talking Ubuntu’s confusing British bin labels, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Linux 7.4 Preps CXL For Very Neat Dynamic Capacity Devices "DCD"

The Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem changes were merged today for the Linux 7.4 kernel. The fun work this cycle is preparing to support Dynamic Capacity Devices...

KMSCON 10.1 Released With Support For Per-Monitor Configurations

KMSCON as the user-space terminal emulator targeting Linux DRM/KMS interfaces as an alternative to the in-kernel VT now is able to individually configure monitors in multi-monitor setups. Plus a variety of other improvements with today's KMSCON 10.1 release...

Intel IPU8 Support Upstreamed In Linux 7.4 For Nova Lake Laptops

The media subsystem changes have been merged for the Linux 7.4 kernel. Most notable is Intel IPU8 support being introduced for the next-gen image processing unit in high-end Nova Lake laptops..

BSD Users Can Now Enjoy Omarchy Flavor

Daemonarchy keeps Omarchy’s installer and look, with FreeBSD handling the system underneath.

KWin-Type Introduced To Address KDE Wayland Usability Gap For Auto-Typing Text

Open-source developer Jason Donenfeld known for his work on WireGuard announced today the release of kwin-type. KWin-type is a new Wayland-compatible program for auto-typing text from the standard input under the KWin Wayland compositor...

[$] Python's experimental JIT to be removed

Python's experimental just-in-time (JIT) compiler, which was added to CPython in 2024 for the 3.13 release, is on its way out. In June, the Python steering council announced that it was pausing work on the JIT in CPython's main branch until there was an accepted Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) that addressed concerns about maintenance, compatibility, and set clear success metrics as well as a timeline for completion. After creating PEP 836 ("JIT Go Brrr: The Path to a Supported JIT Compiler for CPython") to try to meet the council's request, and after months of discussion, the JIT maintainers have withdrawn the PEP. For now, it appears that development on the once-promising project has come to an end.

Two stable kernels for Monday

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.13 and 6.18.59 stable kernels. Each contains a number of fixes throughout the tree. Users are advised to upgrade.

Systemd adds support for components written in Rust

Christian Brauner has announced that he has merged support for writing leaf components of systemd in Rust. Rust will be used only for new leaf components, existing code is not being ported to Rust and nothing that other components depend on is written in Rust. Brauner said that the project would like to move forward with Rust support in core systemd, "but there are several blockers in Rust's support for dynamic libraries which prevents us from doing that without massively bloating every binary we build". Assuming all goes well, it seems likely this work will appear in the systemd v263 release expected in December.

Mesa 27.0 Switching To Kraid Compiler By Default For Arm Mali GPUs

In development for a number of months now has been Kraid as a modern graphics compiler for recent Arm Mali GPUs. Kraid was merged for Mesa 26.2 back in June while in Mesa 27.0 due out in Q1 it will be switching to this new shader compiler by default...

Snapdragon X1 Elite / Acer Swift 14 AI Performance On The Ubuntu 26.10 X1E Concept

For those curious about the Snapdragon X1 Elite performance on the recently released Ubuntu 26.10 Concept X1E ISO, here are some benchmarks showing the performance relative to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS X1E state on the same hardware.

Security updates for Monday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (ca-certificates, cockpit-machines, container-tools:4.0, expat, flute, libbase, libfonts, libformula, liblayout, libloader, libreoffice, librepository, libserializer, pentaho-libxml, pentaho-reporting-flow-engine, and sac, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana-pcp, hplip, kernel, nodejs:14, nodejs:18, openssl, php:7.2, php:7.3, php:8.0, php:8.1, podman, postgresql16-pgvector, postgresql18-pgvector, and python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9), Debian (brotli, caddy, imagemagick, libdatetime-timezone-perl, libheif, openjdk-17, openssl, thunderbird, tzdata, varnish, and xdg-dbus-proxy), Fedora (btrfs-backup-ng, chromium, dotnet10.0, dotnet8.0, dotnet9.0, firefox, gegl04, GitPython, ImageMagick, jfrog-cli, libindi, mingw-libpng, mingw-LibRaw, mingw-python-lxml, mupdf, nix, openssh, perl-Badger, perl-CLI-Simple, perl-Cpanel-JSON-XS, perl-CSS-Inliner, perl-Encoding-FixLatin, perl-HTML-Query, perl-Markdown-Render, perl-Text-CSV_XS, perl-Text-Markdown-Discount, pgbouncer, php-pecl-mongodb2, podofo, rt, and thunderbird), Mageia (bind, bluez, iperf, kernel-linus, and nss, rootcerts), Oracle (ca-certificates, cockpit-machines, expat, go-tools…

Linux 7.4 EFI Brings Improvement For Helping Systemd When Kernel Booted Directly

The EFI updates have been merged for the Linux 7.4 kernel and include an improvement for when the system was booted directly into the kernel on EFI-based systems without using a bootloader like GRUB or systemd-boot...

Nouveau-DKMS Aims For Better NVIDIA Open-Source Experience On Old GPUs

Nouveau-DKMS is in development as an out-of-tree spin-off of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver focused on providing better support for NVIDIA GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" series graphics processors and potentially other generations too pre-Turing where the modern Nova driver is in development by NVIDIA...

Linux 7.4 Begins Employing New "Core MM" Tree

Core memory management patches to the Linux kernel have typically been routed to mainline via Andrew Morton's "MM" branch, which is where also a variety of broader memory management related patches are also queued like all the ongoing work to DAMON/DAMOS. Kernel maintainers have now agreed to a new "Core MM" tree as the home for all of the core memory management changes moving forward...

Linux Fixes AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Regression Due To Cache Aware Scheduling

Merged for Linux 7.4 Git and marked for back-porting to Linux 7.2/7.3 stable is a regression fix affecting at least the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 "Strix Point" laptop SoC when making use of Cache Aware Scheduling...

Moxnox: NT-Like, POSIX-Compatible Hobby OS Running Atop Btrfs

Open-source developer Mark Harmstone who is known for his work on developing a Btrfs file-system driver for Windows has spent the past few years working on a new hobby operating system. Moxnox is an HT-like, POSIX-compatible operating system...

EXT4 Lands Optional Buffered IOmap For Significant Performance Win With Large Writes

The EXT4 file-system changes were merged Sunday night for the ongoing Linux 7.4 merge window. The headline feature of EXT4 in this new kernel version is opt-in support for buffered IOmap usage that can lead to "significant" performance improvements for large writes...

Redox OS Landed Nice Performance Improvements In September

The Rust-based open-source operating system Redox OS had a very eventful September as they outlined in a status update published this weekend...

Canonical’s Launchpad adds bug tracking for PPAs

Launchpad now offers bug tracking for personal package archives (PPAs), making it easier for users to report issues specific to software within a PPA. Why does that matter? Well, not all PPAs are maintained by their upstream counterparts – folks who, frankly, aren’t always minded to care about quirks in their software that might be down to someone else’s packaging methods. Plus, PPAs are often used to provide newer or experimental versions of software that the version in the standard Ubuntu repositories, and different PPAs can distribute different versions of the same software. With the new tracking support, users can […] You're reading Canonical’s Launchpad adds bug tracking for PPAs, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

New Wayland Protocol Proposed For VNC/Remote Software

Prominent Wayland developer Simon Ser sent out a merge request today for introducing the new ext-transient-output protocol. With ext-transient-output, it's intent is for helping remoting software like VNC servers in a Wayland world...

Linux 7.4 Sound Changes Merged: "The AI Flood Continues"

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE began the Linux 7.4 sound pull request by noting that "the AI flood continues" with there continuing to be a lot of new patches coming as a result of AI/LLM agents devising patches as well as uncovering new kernel bugs...

AV2 Video Codec Adoption Talked Up, SVT-AV2 Being Developed

Back in May the AV2 v1.0 specification was released for this next-generaton, royalty-free video codec. This week the Alliance For Open Media issued a press release talking up the early adoption of AV2...

Realtek rtl8723bs Driver Deleted From Staging Area In Linux 7.4

After nearly a decade in the Linux kernel's staging area and being worked on by many different kernel developer newcomers, the Realtek rtl8723bs was deleted from the staging area. This comes as Realtek rtl8723bs was added onto the more mature RTW88 driver in the Linux networking subsystem...

AMD 600 Series Chipsets Now Have Temperature Monitoring Support On Linux

With the Linux 7.4 kernel and also marked for back-porting to the v7.2 and v7.3 series is finally the ability to monitor temperature sensors on AMD 600 Series chipsets that launched alongside the Ryzen 7000 series processors...

Bottles Creator Mirko Brombin Wants Microsoft Office on Linux, Not Its Clones

Mirko Brombin is working to get Microsoft Office running reliably on Linux. He also thinks the apps cloning Office and Photoshop pixel for pixel cross a line. We talked about both, plus AI agents, Vanilla OS and his new Sinty OS.