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IPFire is a Linux distribution that focuses on easy setup, good handling and high level of security. It is operated via an intuitive web-based interface which offers many configuration options for beginning and experienced system administrators. IPFire is maintained by developers who are concerned about security and who update the product regularly to keep it secure. IPFire ships with a custom package manager called Pakfire and the system can be expanded with various add-ons.

Android Authority reports that Google will be reducing the frequency of releases of code to the Android Open Source Project to only twice per year.

A spokesperson for Google offered some additional context on this decision, stating that it helps simplify development, eliminates the complexity of managing multiple code branches, and allows them to deliver more stable and secure code to Android platform developers. The spokesperson also reiterated that Google's commitment to AOSP is unchanged and that this new release schedule helps the company build a more robust and secure foundation for the Android ecosystem.

The release schedule for security patches is unchanged.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (resource-agents, ruby:3.3, thunderbird, and xorg-x11-server), Fedora (libpcap), Red Hat (brotli), Slackware (libsodium), SUSE (dcmtk, govulncheck-vulndb, libpcap, mozjs60, qemu, rsync, and usbmuxd), and Ubuntu (glib2.0 and linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4).

Version:next-20260107 (linux-next) Released:2026-01-07

Nitrux is a desktop Linux distribution built from Debian, but with an immutable base system, the OpenRC init system, and without any traditional Debian package management tools. It uses the Calamares system installer and includes the Hyprland window manager, Hypr utilities, the greetd+QtGreet login manager, and the Waybar Wayland bar. Nitrux emphasizes the use of AppBox to manage end-user software and it also supports AppImage and Flatpak package formats.

The nature and role of the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board (TAB) is not well-understood, though a recent LWN article shed some light on its role and history. At the 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), the TAB held a question and answer session to address whatever it was the community wanted to know (video). Those questions ended up covering the role of large language models in kernel development, what it is like to be on the TAB, how the TAB can help grease the wheels of corporate bureaucracy, and more.

Aleksa Sarai, as the maintainer of the runc container runtime, faces a constant battle against security problems. Recently, runc has seen another instance of a security vulnerability that can be traced back to the difficulty of handling file paths on Linux. Sarai spoke at the 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference (slides; video) about some of the problems runc has had with path-traversal vulnerabilities, and to ask people to please use libpathrs, the library that he has been developing for safe path traversal.

Version 26.0 ("Anh-Linh") of the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution has been released. Manjaro 26.0 includes Linux 6.18, GNOME 49, KDE Plasma 6.5, Xfce 4.20, and more.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, ruby, and thunderbird), Debian (libsodium and ruby-rmagick), Fedora (gnupg2 and proxychains-ng), Oracle (gcc-toolset-14-binutils, rsync, tar, and thunderbird), Red Hat (buildah, mariadb, mariadb10.11, podman, and tar), SUSE (alloy, apache2, buildah, erlang26, glib2, ImageMagick, kernel, libsoup, pgadmin4, python-tornado6, python3, python312, python313, qemu, webkit2gtk3, and xen), and Ubuntu (webkit2gtk).

LainOS is a lightweight, Arch Linux-based desktop distribution aimed at developers, tinkerers and hackers. As a choice of graphical environments, it offers the Hyprland Wayland compositor and the Openbox window manager. The distribution also features the Calamares system installer, personalised yet functional visual aesthetics, and a selection of useful software. LainOS is intended for users who share the admiration of Serial Experiments Lain, a Japanese anime television series.

Version:next-20260106 (linux-next) Released:2026-01-06

CentOS as a group is a community of open source contributors and users which started in 2003 and has been sponsored by Red Hat since 2014. CentOS Linux versions up to CentOS Linux 8 are 100% compatible rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in full compliance with Red Hat's redistribution requirements. In 2020 it was announced CentOS Linux is being discontinued and replaced with CentOS Stream, a developer-focused distribution which acts as a middle-stream between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The calendar has flipped over to 2026; a new year has begun. That means the moment we all dread has arrived: it is time for LWN to put out a set of lame predictions for what may happen in the coming year. Needless to say, we do not know any more than anybody else, but that doesn't stop us from making authoritative-sounding pronouncements anyway.

AnduinOS is an Ubuntu-based distribution which provides a GNOME desktop which has been themed and styled to resemble Windows 11. The project provides a smaller ISO file than its parent with each supported language split into a separate ISO. Snap support, which is included in Ubuntu, has been removed from AnduinOS.

Talos is a specialist Linux-based operating system for running Kubernetes, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerised applications. Minimal, immutable and hardened, it does not offer any shell or interactive console; instead, all system management is done via remote Application Programming Interface (API) calls, where messages sent from a client application are protected with mutual Transport Layer Security TLS (mTLS) authentication. Talos also delivers atomic updates, thus maintaining the Linux and Kubernetes versions up-to-date. Talos is developed in the USA by Sidero Labs, Inc.

Version 1.30 of the GNU ddrescue data recovery tool has been released. Notable changes in this release include improvements to automatic recovery of a drive with a dead head, addition of a --no-sweep option to disable reading of skipped areas, and more.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (tar), Debian (curl and gimp), Fedora (doctl, gitleaks, gnupg2, grpcurl, nginx, nginx-mod-brotli, nginx-mod-fancyindex, nginx-mod-headers-more, nginx-mod-modsecurity, nginx-mod-naxsi, nginx-mod-vts, and usd), Mageia (cups), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8, go-toolset:rhel8, grafana, and skopeo), and SUSE (dirmngr, fluidsynth, gnu-recutils, libmatio-devel, python311-marshmallow, python312-Django6, rsync, and thunderbird).

Version:next-20260105 (linux-next) Released:2026-01-05

openmamba GNU/Linux is a distribution for personal computers that can be used on notebooks, desktops, servers and Raspberry Pi computers. It works as an installable live DVD/USB images, offering one of two desktop environments: KDE Plasma or LXQt. The distribution uses RPM packages managed through the DNF package manager. Software can also be fetched and installed from Flatpak repositories.

The 6.19-rc4 kernel prepatch is out for testing.

So this rc is still a bit smaller than usual, but it's not _much_ smaller, and I think next week is likely going to be more or less back to normal.

Which is all exactly as expected, and nothing here looks particularly odd. I'll make an rc8 this release just because of the time lost to the holidays, not because it looks like we'd have any particular issues pending (knock wood).