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MagOS Linux is a Russian desktop-oriented distribution based on ROSA, a distribution that was forked from Mandriva Linux in 2011. It uses the RPM package management. MagOS Linux comes with KDE Plasma desktop by default, but it also ships the lightweight LXQt desktop for older and low-specification computers. Besides the standard upstream packages from ROSA, the project also provides its own RPM package repository (with various network and NVIDIA display drivers), as well as separate modules (in XZM format) with extra hardware drivers, server tools, MATE desktop, Wine emulator, Java software and additional web browsers, including Chromium and Yandex.

Version 26.1 of the pip package installer for Python has been released. Richard Si has published a blog post that looks at some of the highlights of 26.1 including dependency cooldowns, experimental support for pylock (pylock.toml) files, and resolver improvements that will move pip closer to the goal of removing its legacy resolver. The release also includes several security fixes and drops support for Python 3.9.

Drauger OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux desktop gaming distribution that ships with many modifications and optimizations over stock Ubuntu; these are intended to improve gaming performance and the gaming experience. From simple changes such as swapping GNOME out for KDE Plasma and using a dark Qt theme by default, to more complex changes such as using a kernel compiled in-house and replacing PulseAudio with Pipewire. Drauger OS is built from the ground up with a focus on performance.

By the time Linus Torvalds released 7.1-rc1 and closed the 7.1 merge window, 12,996 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline repository; just over 9,000 of those arrived after the first-half summary was written. These changes were more driver-oriented than those seen earlier, but still also included many new features across the kernel as a whole.

umbrelOS is a Debian-based Linux distribution for home servers. It is available for standard 64-bit and Raspberry Pi computers. The distribution features a web-based user interface and an online app store with a large range of applications, anything from web hosting, productivity and finance to media streaming, networking, automation, artificial intelligence, development and Bitcoin mining. umbrelOS is developed by the US-based Umbrel, Inc., which also sells palm-sized personal home computers with up to 4 terabytes of storage.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.2, 6.18.25, 6.12.84, and 6.6.136 stable kernels. As usual, each contains important fixes throughout; users are advised to upgrade.

Flatcar Container Linux is a container-optimized operating system based on Gentoo Linux. It is a minimal operating system image which includes only the tools needed to run containers and it supports all of the popular methods for running containers. The distribution ships an immutable filesystem and includes automatic atomic updates. Flatcar Container Linux runs on most cloud providers, virtualization platforms and bare metal servers.

David Steele, maintainer of the popular pgBackRest backup and restore project for PostgreSQL, has archived the project and announced that it is no longer being maintained.

After a lot of thought, I have decided to stop working on pgBackRest. I did not come to this decision lightly. pgBackRest has been my passion project for the last thirteen years, and I was fortunate to have corporate sponsorship for much of this time, but there were also many late nights and weekends as I worked to make pgBackRest the project it is today, aided by numerous contributors. Every open-source developer knows exactly what I mean and how much of your life gets devoted to a special project.

Since Crunchy Data was sold, I have been maintaining pgBackRest and looking for a position that would allow me to continue the work, but so far I have not been successful. Likewise, my efforts to secure sponsorship have also fallen far short of what I need to make the project viable.

Version:next-20260427 (linux-next) Released:2026-04-27

Version 0.16.0 of the Zig programming language was recently announced, and with it an expanded version of the new Io interface that we covered in December. The new interface is based on an idea called structured concurrency that makes writing correct concurrent applications easier. Zig's implementation of the idea is more explicit and verbose than other languages, however, which could offer an opportunity to explore the consequences of different designs.

Jon Seager, VP engineering for Canonical, has posted an update on "what Canonical and Ubuntu will do (or not) to incorporate AI" that explains what part AI will play in the future of the company and its distribution.

The bottom line is that Canonical is ramping up its use of AI tools in a focused and principled manner that favours open weight models with license terms that feel most compatible with our values, combined with open source harnesses. AI features will be landing in Ubuntu throughout the next year as we feel that they're of sufficient maturity and quality, with a bias toward local inference by default.

AI features in Ubuntu features will come in two forms: first as a means of enhancing existing OS functionality with AI models in the background, and latterly in the form of "AI native" features and workflows for those who want them.

This year Canonical has begun a more deliberate push toward education and developing competence with AI tools. We are not setting shallow metrics on token usage, or percentages of code written with AI, but rather incentivising engineers to experiment and understand where AI tools add value. Rather than force a single early-choice AI stack, we're incentivising teams to each pick 'something different' and go deep, so we learn more as an org in the next six months.

Version 26.04 of the niri scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor has been released. The most notable change in this release, as the "most requested niri feature by far", is support for the blur effect using the Wayland protocol's ext-background-effect. This release also features optional configuration includes, screencasting support enhancements, and a number of improvements for input devices.

In short, background blur turned out to be a massive undertaking. Not because of the blur algorithm itself (by the way, if you want to learn about different blurs, including the widely used Dual Kawase, I highly recommend this blog post), but because window background effects in general required a lot of thinking and additions to the code, especially to make them as efficient as possible. This is one of the most complex niri features thus far.

LWN covered niri in July 2025.

Version:7.0.2 (stable) Released:2026-04-27 Source:linux-7.0.2.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.0.2.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-7.0.2

Version:6.18.25 (longterm) Released:2026-04-27 Source:linux-6.18.25.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.18.25.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.18.25

Version:6.12.84 (longterm) Released:2026-04-27 Source:linux-6.12.84.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.12.84.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.12.84

Version:6.6.136 (longterm) Released:2026-04-27 Source:linux-6.6.136.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.6.136.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.6.136

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (java-25-openjdk, kernel, osbuild-composer, thunderbird, webkit2gtk3, and wireshark), Debian (chromium, distro-info-data, libde265, mbedtls, and thunderbird), Fedora (awstats, bind9-next, bpfman, buildah, calibre, cef, chromium, composer, corosync, coturn, cups, curl, dnsdist, doctl, erlang, fido-device-onboard, flatpak-builder, freetype, glab, goose, jq, kea, libarchive, libcap, libcgif, libgsasl, libinput, libmicrohttpd, libpng, libpng12, libpng15, mapserver, mbedtls, micropython, minetest, mingw-exiv2, mingw-libpng, mingw-LibRaw, mingw-openexr, mingw-python3, moby-engine, mupdf, nginx, nginx-mod-brotli, nginx-mod-fancyindex, nginx-mod-headers-more, nginx-mod-modsecurity, nginx-mod-naxsi, nginx-mod-vts, opam, openbao, opensc, openssh, openssl, opkssh, perl-Net-CIDR-Lite, pgadmin4, pie, podman, pspp, pypy, python-biopython, python-cairosvg, python-cbor2, python-cryptography, python-flask-httpauth, python-msal, python-pillow, python-pydicom, python-tomli, python3-docs, python3.13, python3.14, python3.15, python3.9, rauc, roundcubemail, rpki-client, rust-sccache, skopeo, smb4k, stb, sudo, tcpflow, thunderbird, tigervnc, tinyproxy, trafficserver, trivy, usd, util-linux, vim, xdg-dbus-proxy, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, and yarnpkg), Oracle (buildah, golang, grafana, java-17-openjdk, and java-25-openjdk), and SUSE (chromium, cockpit-podman, coredns, corosync, cups, dnsdist, flatpak, freerdp2, frr, gdk-pixbuf, golang-github-prometheus-alertmanager, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, google-guest-agent, haproxy, ignition, ImageMagick, kernel, kyverno, libcap, libminizip1, libpng16, librsvg, libXpm-devel, Mesa, opensc, openssl-3, ovmf-202602, PackageKit, podman, python-ecdsa, python-pillow, python311-Mako, sudo, thunderbird, tomcat, tomcat10, and vim).

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.

Live Raizo is a live Linux distribution based on Debian "Stable". It's purpose is to experiment with system administration on simulated networks and real devices; it contains simulators of networks and systems (GNS3, QEmu, Docker, VPCS) and also Debian virtual machines already integrated into GNS3. Live Raizo also includes tools to interact with real devices, such as minicom, Putty, Wireshark, as well as DHCP, DNS, FTP, TFTP and SSH servers. The distribution uses the Fluxbox window manager and can optionally be installed to a hard drive.

EasyOS is an experimental Linux distribution which uses many of the technologies and package formats pioneered by Puppy Linux. The distribution features custom container technology called Easy Containers which can run applications or the entire desktop environment in a container. Packages, desktop settings, networking and sharing resources over the network can all be controlled through graphical utilities.