Feed aggregator

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.

Version:next-20260224 (linux-next) Released:2026-02-24

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).

Recalbox is a dedicated operating system for running video games on emulated retro and console platforms. Recalbox can also be used to run the Kodi media centre. The distribution's interface is primarily navigated with a console game controller, though keyboard support is available for many functions.

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.

Clonezilla Live is a Debian-based live CD containing Clonezilla, a partition and disk cloning software similar to Norton Ghost. It saves and restores only used blocks in hard drive. With Clonezilla, one can clone a 5 GB system to 40 clients in about 10 minutes.

ELEGANCE is a French, general-purpose desktop Linux distribution based on Manjaro Linux. It uses the Cinnamon desktop environment. The distribution offers a rich variety of software for everyday use, including for office work (LibreOffice, Calibre), entertainment (VLC, Rhythmbox, Kodi), graphics (Gimp, Krita), gaming (Steam), audio recording (Audacity, OBS Studio), audio mixing and editing (Ardour, LMMS, Kdenlive), and design (LeoCAD FreeCAD et KiCAD). ELAGANCE is sponsored by Tux N Mix, an organisation created by a group of Linux enthusiasts in 2019.

Linuxfx (also known as Winux or Wubuntu) is a Brazilian Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. It ships with an intuitive Cinnamon desktop user interface designed to facilitate migration of users from Windows. It includes a video management system called Sentinela, a computer vision software with video analytics and software for access control (facial recognition and automatic number plate recognition), object detection, gender, age and mood detection. Other features of the distribution include a new personal assistant, a WX theme for desktop and system applications, and compatibility with software written for Windows (.exe and .msi) through a Wine port. Following the release of Linuxfx 10.6 the distribution became a commercial offering.

Version:next-20260223 (linux-next) Released:2026-02-23

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.

elementary OS is an Ubuntu-based desktop distribution. Some of its more interesting features include a custom desktop environment called Pantheon and many custom apps including Photos, Music, Videos, Calendar, Terminal, Files, and more. It also comes with some familiar apps like the Epiphany web browser and a fork of Geary mail.

DietPi is a Debian-based Linux distribution, primarily developed for single-board computers such as Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi or Odroid. It also supplies builds for 64-bit x86 personal computers and virtual machines, including VMware, VirtualBox, UTM, Hyper-V, Proxmox and Parallels. The base installation of DietPi comes without any desktop, but a desktop option can be activated via the built-in "dietpi-software" program. The distribution ships with a number of menu-driven configuration tools which can be run from the terminal.

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.

Regata OS is a Brazilian Linux distribution based on openSUSE, focusing on desktop and gaming needs. Its main characteristics include a Regata OS store for installing applications and games, out-of-the-box integration with Google Drive, support for a gaming mode via the Vulkan graphics API, an extensive library of games in the Regata OS Game Access portal, support for configuration of hybrid graphics in notebooks, and easy transfer of files between a computer and a smartphone. The distribution's user interface is KDE Plasma.

RebeccaBlackOS is a Debian-based live distribution which can be used to run Wayland desktop sessions. RebeccaBlackOS can run a number of popular open source desktop environments on top of a Wayland graphical session. The distribution was (and remains) one of the only Linux distributions to run a Wayland session from live media. The distribution is available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds for the x86 architecture.