nakeDeb is a minimalist desktop Linux distribution based on Debian's "Stable" branch and designed for more advanced Linux users. By default it uses the Fluxbox window manager, although an alternative session with i3 is also available. The distribution provides a simple text-mode system installer and custom repositories with extra software, including various utilities and themes. It comes with the w3m web browser and a script to download and install the latest Tor Browser, and it also includes the PCManFM file manager and mpv media player. makeDeb offers support for French and English languages.
Debian Edu/Skolelinux is the Debian-edu's Debian Pure Blend distribution. It is aiming to provide an out-of-the-box localised environment tailored for schools and universities. The out-of-the-box environment comes with 75 applications aimed at schools, as well as 17 network services pre-configured for a school environment. The simple, three-question installation requires minimal technical knowledge. Skolelinux is Debian, which means, among other things, that there are no license costs or worries, and that upgrade and maintenance of the software can be done over the Internet with the power of Debian's apt-get. The core goals of Skolelinux are localisation and ease of system administration.
The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system. This operating system is called Debian. Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel. Linux is a completely free piece of software started by Linus Torvalds and supported by thousands of programmers worldwide. Of course, the thing that people want is application software: programs to help them get what they want to do done, from editing documents to running a business to playing games to writing more software. Debian comes with over 50,000 packages (precompiled software that is bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine) - all of it free. It's a bit like a tower. At the base is the kernel. On top of that are all the basic tools. Next is all the software that you run on the computer. At the top of the tower is Debian -- carefully organizing and fitting everything so it all works together.
ObsidianOS is a set of Linux distribution based primarily on Arch Linux. Its main feature is an A/B partition style (as used by Android or Chrome OS) so if an update causes some issues, it is possible to reboot into the first partition and restore the second one. It uses the ext4 filesystem exclusively. ObsidianOS offers three variants of the product - "Base", "KDE Plasma" and "COSMIC".
Mageia is a fork of Mandriva Linux formed in September 2010 by former employees and contributors to the popular French Linux distribution. Unlike Mandriva, which is a commercial entity, Mageia is a community project and a non-profit organisation whose goal is to develop a free Linux-based operating system.
ArchBang Linux is a lightweight distribution based on Arch Linux. Using the labwc Wayland compositor, it is fast, up-to-date and suitable for both desktop and portable systems. Besides GreenBANG, the project also develops a distribution called SwayBang featuring the Sway Wayland compositor.
Noid Linux is a Void-based minimalist Linux distribution with Xfce as the preferred desktop. It includes a long-term supported Linux kernel, the Calamares system installer, the Brave web browser, support for Flatpak packages, and a custom Welcome screen. The project also provides its own repository for Void's XBPS packages with additional software.
On her blog, Julia Evans
writes about
improving Git documentation, including a new
data
model man page she wrote with Marie
LeBlanc Flanagan, and updates to the pages for several other Git sub-commands
(add, checkout, push, and pull). As
part of the process, she asked Git users to describe problems they had run into
in the documentation, which helped guide the changes that she made.
I'm excited about this because understanding how Git organizes its commit and branch data has really helped me reason about how Git works over the years, and I think it's important to have a short (1600 words!) version of the data model that's accurate.
The "accurate" part turned out to not be that easy: I knew the basics of how Git's data model worked, but during the review process I learned some new details and had to make quite a few changes (for example how merge conflicts are stored in the staging area).
The READ_ONCE() and WRITE_ONCE() macros are heavily used
within the kernel; there are nearly 8,000 call sites for
READ_ONCE(). They are key to the implementation of many
lockless algorithms and can be necessary for some
types of device-memory access. So one might think that, as the
amount of Rust code in the kernel increases, there would be a place for
Rust versions of these macros as well. The truth of the matter, though, is
that the Rust community seems to want to take a different approach to
concurrent data access.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (pdfminer and vlc), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, and microcode_ctl), Slackware (libtasn1), SUSE (apptainer, curl, ImageMagick, libpcap, libvirt, libwget4, php8, podman, python311-cbor2, qemu, and rsync), and Ubuntu (gnupg, gnupg2, gpsd, libsodium, and python-tornado).
XIVA Studio is a multimedia-oriented Linux distribution derived from Manjaro Linux and BigLinux. It's main goal is to cater to the needs of professional creators in the area of video, audio, graphics and animation production. XIVA Studio provides optimised Linux kernels built for a number of popular processor and graphics cards configurations. It uses KDE Plasma as the default desktop environment.
Version:next-20260109 (linux-next)
Released:2026-01-09
Gentoo Linux has published a 2025
project retrospective that looks at how the community has evolved,
changes to the distribution, infrastructure, and finances for the
Gentoo Foundation.
Gentoo currently consists of 31663 ebuilds for 19174 different
packages. For amd64 (x86-64), there are 89 GBytes of binary packages
available on the mirrors. Gentoo each week builds 154 distinct installation stages for
different processor architectures and system configurations, with an
overwhelming part of these fully up-to-date.
The number of commits to the main ::gentoo
repository has remained at an overall high level in 2025, with a
slight decrease from 123942 to 112927. The number of commits by
external contributors was 9396, now across 377 unique external
authors.
The
Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) is
suing
VIZIO over smart TVs that
include software licensed under the GPL and LGPL (including the Linux kernel,
FFmpeg, systemd, and others).
VIZIO didn't provide the source code along with the device, and on request they
only provided some of it. Unlike a typical lawsuit about enforcing the GPL, the
SFC isn't suing as a copyright holder; it's suing as
a normal owner of the TV
in question. This approach opens some important legal questions, and after years
of pre-trial maneuvering (most recently resulting in
a ruling related to signing keys that
is the subject of a separate article),
we might finally obtain some answers when the case goes
to trial on January 12. As things stand, it seems likely that the judge in
the case will rule that that the GPL-enforcement lawsuits can be a matter of
contract law, not just copyright law, which would be a major change to how GPL
enforcement works.
On December 24 2025, Linus Torvalds posted
a strongly
worded message celebrating a
ruling in
the ongoing
GPL-compliance lawsuit filed
against VIZIO by the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC). This case and
Torvalds's response have put a spotlight on an old debate over the extent
to which the source-code requirements of the
GNU
General Public License (version 2) extend to keys and other data
needed to successfully install modified software on a device. It is worth
looking at whether this requirement exists, the subtleties in
interpretation that cloud the issue, and the extent to which, if any, the
SFC is demanding that information.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the
6.18.4 and
6.12.64 stable kernels. As always, each
contains important fixes throughout the tree. Users are advised to
upgrade.
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gcc-toolset-14-binutils, gcc-toolset-15-binutils, httpd, kernel, libpng, mariadb, mingw-libpng, poppler, python3.12, and ruby:3.3), Debian (foomuuri and libsodium), Fedora (python-pdfminer and wget2), Oracle (audiofile, bind, gcc-toolset-15-binutils, libpng, mariadb, mariadb10.11, mariadb:10.11, mariadb:10.5, mingw-libpng, poppler, and python3.12), Red Hat (git-lfs, kernel, libpng, libpq, mariadb:10.3, osbuild-composer, postgresql, postgresql:13, and postgresql:15), Slackware (curl), SUSE (c-ares-devel, capstone, curl, gpsd, ImageMagick, libpcap, log4j, python311-filelock, and python314), and Ubuntu (libcaca, libxslt, and net-snmp).
SmartOS is an open-source UNIX-like operating system based on illumos, a community fork of OpenSolaris. It features four technologies - ZFS (a combined file system and logical volume manager), DTrace (a dynamic tracing framework for troubleshooting kernel and application problems), Zones (a lightweight virtualisation solution), KVM and bhyve (two full virtualisation solutions for running a variety of guest operating systems, including Linux, Windows, BSD and Plan9). SmartOS is designed to be particularly suitable for building clouds and generating appliances.
Pentoo is a Gentoo-based Linux live CD with a selection of applications and tools designed to perform penetration testing.
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