Linux Weekly News

LibreOffice online is a web-based version of the LibreOffice suite that can be hosted on anybody's infrastructure. This project was put into stasis back in 2022, a move marked by some tension with Collabora, a major LibreOffice developer that has its own online offering. Now, the Document Foundation has announced a new effort to breathe life into this project.

We plan to reopen the repository for LibreOffice Online at The Document Foundation for contributions, but provide warnings about the state of the repository until TDF's team agrees that it's safe and usable – while at the same time encourage the community to join in with code, technologies and other contributions that can be used to move forward.

Meanwhile, this post from Michael Meeks suggests that the tension around online versions of LibreOffice has not abated.

Version 5.4.0 of GNU awk (gawk) has been released. This is a major release with a change in gawk's default regular-expression matcher: it now uses MinRX as the default regular-expression engine.

This matcher is fully POSIX compliant, which the current GNU matchers are not. In particular it follows POSIX rules for finding the longest leftmost submatches. It is also more strict as to regular expression syntax, but primarily in a few corner cases that normal, correct, regular expression usage should not encounter.

Because regular expression matching is such a fundamental part of awk/gawk, the original GNU matchers are still included in gawk. In order to use them, give a value to the GAWK_GNU_MATCHERS environment variable before invoking gawk.

[...] The original GNU matchers will eventually be removed from gawk. So, please take the time to notice and report any issues in the MinRX matcher, so that they can be ironed out sooner rather than later.

See the release announcement for additional changes.

Version 148 of Firefox has been released. The most notable change in this release is the addition of a "Block AI enhancements" option that allows turning off "new or current AI enhancements in Firefox, or pop-ups about them" with a single toggle.

With this release, Firefox now supports the Trusted Types API to help prevent cross-site scripting attacks as well as the Sanitizer API that provides new methods for HTML manipulation. See the release notes for developers for changes that may affect web developers or those who create Firefox add-ons.

The facilities provided by the kernel for the management of processes have evolved considerably in the last few years, driven mostly by the advent of the pidfd API. A pidfd is a file descriptor that refers to a process; unlike a process ID, a pidfd is an unambiguous handle for a process; that makes it a safer, more deterministic way of operating on processes. Christian Brauner, who has driven much of the pidfd-related work, is proposing two new flags for the clone3() system call, one of which changes the kernel's security model in a somewhat controversial way.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, and munge), Debian (openssl), Mageia (gegl), Oracle (firefox, freerdp, gnupg2, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana, grafana-pcp, java-11-openjdk, kernel, libpng15, munge, nodejs:20, nodejs:22, protobuf, and uek-kernel), SUSE (libpng12, libpng16, and openQA, openQA-devel-container, os-autoinst), and Ubuntu (gimp, libssh, and linux-azure).

Version 11.1.0 of the GNU Octave scientific programming language has been released.

This major release contains many new and improved functions. Among other things, it brings better support for classdef objects and arrays, broadcasting for special matrix types (like sparse, diagonal, or permutation matrices), updates for Matlab compatibility (notably support for the nanflag, vecdim and other parameters for many basic math and statistics functions), and performance improvements in many functions.

See the release notes for details.

The 7.0 merge window closed on February 22 with 11,588 non-merge commits total, 3,893 of which came in after the article covering the first half of the merge window. The changes in the second half were weighted toward bug fixes over new features, which is usual. There were still a handful of surprises, however, including 89 separate tiny code-cleanup changes from different people for the rtl8723bs driver, a number that surprised Greg Kroah-Hartman. It's unusual for a WiFi-chip driver to receive that much attention, especially a staging driver that is not yet ready for general use.

Over on the Collabora blog, Marius Vlad has an overview of Weston 15.0, which was released on February 19. Weston is the reference implementation of a Wayland compositor. The new release comes with a new shell that can be programmed using the Lua language, a new, experimental Vulkan renderer, smoother media playback, color-management additions, and more. One of Weston's fundamental pillars has always been making the most efficient use of display hardware. Over time, all the work we did to track and offload as much work as possible to this efficient fixed-function hardware has come at the cost of eating CPU time. In the last couple of release cycles, we've focused really hard on improving performance on even the most low-end of devices, so not only do we make the most efficient use of the GPU and display hardware, but we're also really kind on your CPU now. As part of that and to improve our tooling, Weston 15 now comes with support for the Perfetto profiler.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel-rt and openssl), Debian (ca-certificates, chromium, gegl, glib2.0, libvpx, modsecurity-crs, nova, and pillow), Fedora (chromium, mingw-libpng, mupdf, python-pyasn1, python-PyMuPDF, python-uv-build, python3.13, qpdfview, rust-ambient-id, uv, and zathura-pdf-mupdf), Mageia (freerdp, gnutls, and libvpx), Red Hat (butane and grafana-pcp), SUSE (chromedriver, chromium, cockpit-repos, firefox, kernel, libpng16, postgresql16, postgresql17, postgresql18, python, python311-nltk, snpguest, ucode-intel-20260210, vexctl, and xen), and Ubuntu (djvulibre, evolution-data-server, linux-lowlatency, linux-xilinx, and u-boot).

The Ladybird browser project has announced a move to the Rust programming language:

When we originally evaluated Rust back in 2024, we rejected it because it's not great at C++ style OOP. The web platform object model inherits a lot of 1990s OOP flavor, with garbage collection, deep inheritance hierarchies, and so on. Rust's ownership model is not a natural fit for that.

But after another year of treading water, it's time to make the pragmatic choice. Rust has the ecosystem and the safety guarantees we need. Both Firefox and Chromium have already begun introducing Rust into their codebases, and we think it's the right choice for Ladybird too.

Large language models are being used to translate existing code.

The PostgreSQL project has been chugging along for decades; in that time, it has become a thriving open-source project, and its participants have learned a thing or two about what works in attracting new contributors. At FOSDEM 2026, PostgreSQL contributor Claire Giordano shared some of the lessons learned and where the project is still struggling. The lessons might be of interest to others who are thinking about how their own projects can evolve.

Linus has released 7.0-rc1 and closed the merge window for this development cycle. "You all know the drill by now: two weeks have passed, and the kernel merge window is closed."

The closed-source chat platform Discord announced on February 9 that it would soon require some users to verify their ages in order to access some content — although the company quickly added that the "vast majority" of users would not have to. That reassurance has to contend with the fact that the UK and other countries are implementing increasingly strict age requirements for social media. Discord's age verification would be done with an AI age-judging model or with a government photo ID. A surprising number of open-source projects use Discord for support or project communications, and some of those projects are now looking for open-source alternatives. Mastodon, for example, has moved discussion to Zulip. There are some alternatives out there, all with their own pros and cons, that communities may want to consider if they want to switch away from Discord.

Dianne Skoll, creator and maintainer of the command-line calendar and alarm program Remind, has announced the release of The Book of Remind. As the name suggests, it is a step-by-step guide to learning how to use Remind, and a useful supplement to the extensive remind(1) man page. The book is free to download.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (grafana), Debian (gegl, inetutils, libvpx, nova, and python-django), Fedora (azure-cli, chromium, microcode_ctl, python-azure-core, python3.14, and roundcubemail), Red Hat (grafana and osbuild-composer), SUSE (apptainer, dnsdist, istioctl, libsoup, openCryptoki, python-nltk, python311, python313, rclone, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (libvpx, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fips, and linux-intel-iotg).

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the 6.19.3, 6.18.13, 6.12.74, 6.6.127, 6.1.164, 5.15.201, and 5.10.251 stable kernels. As usual, each includes important fixes and users are advised to upgrade.

The kernel's unloved but performance-critical swapping subsystem has been undergoing multiple rounds of improvement in recent times. Recent articles have described the addition of the swap table as a new way of representing the state of the swap cache, and the removal of the swap map as the way of tracking swap space. Work in this area is not done, though; this series from Nhat Pham addresses a number of swap-related problems by replacing the new swap table structures with a single, virtual swap space.

Douglas DeMaio has announced that Jeff Mahoney's new governance proposal for openSUSE, which was published in January, is moving forward. The new structure would have three governance bodies: a new technical steering committee (TSC), a community and marketing committee (CMC), as well as the existing openSUSE board.

The discussions during the meeting proposed that the Technical Steering Committee should begin with five members with a chair elected by the committee. The group would establish clear processes for reviewing and approving technical changes, drawing inspiration from Fedora's FESCo model. Decisions for the TSC would use a voting system of +1 to approve, 0 for neutral, or -1 to block. A proposal passes without objection. A -1 vote would require a dedicated meeting, where a majority of attendees would decide the outcome. Objections must include a clear, documented rationale.

Discussions related to the Community and Marketing Committee would focus on outreach, advocacy, and community growth. It could also serve as an initial escalation point for disputes. If consensus cannot be reached at that level, matters would advance to the Board.

[...] No timeline for final adoption was announced. Project contributors will continue discussions through the GitLab repository and future community meetings.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (edk2, glibc, gnupg2, golang, grafana, nodejs:24, and php), Debian (gimp and kernel), Fedora (fvwm3), Mageia (microcode and vim), Oracle (edk2, glibc, kernel, nodejs:24, and php), Red Hat (python-s3transfer), SUSE (abseil-cpp, avahi, azure-cli-core, fontforge, go1.24, go1.25, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, libpcap, libsoup2, libxml2-16, mupdf, nodejs22, openCryptoki, openjpeg2, patch, python-aiohttp, python-Brotli, python-pip, python311-asgiref, rust1.93, and traefik), and Ubuntu (inetutils, libssh, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux-lowlatency, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, and trafficserver).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: AI agent goes rogue; debuginfo; iocaine; revocable resource-management patches; 7.0 merge window; AccECN; LLMs and security; Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team.
• Briefs: upki; Asahi Linux progress; DFSG processes; Fedora in Syria; Plasma 6.6.0; Vim 9.2; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.