SocialistVibes01

Ubuntu Currently Suffering From Sustained DDoS Attack Those trying to access the Ubuntu website, ISO downloads, and similar Ubuntu resources today are finding the site inoperable amid what’s now confirmed as an ongoing distributed denial of service attack. Unfortunately, Ubuntu is once again facing a distributed denial of service “DDoS” attack against its web infrastructure. This isn’t the first time they have experienced this issue and Canonical’s IT team is currently working to mitigate the attack. Ubuntu down The Canonical status page is currently tracking the incident. Confirmation of the Ubuntu DDoS attack was also posted to the Ubuntu Discourse.

EXT4 Deprecates Its Journaled "data=journal" Mode The EXT4 file-system today deprecated its journaled mode of the “data=journal” mount option. Following its deprecation, this mode is planned for removal in the year 2028. The data=journal mode for EXT4 is where all file data and metadata is written to the file-system’s journal before being committed to the main file-system. In the event of a crash or power loss, the journal can then be replayed to recover the data. The EXT4 data=journal mode is great for those very concerned about data integrity and safety but comes with significant hits to the write performance compared to the default ordered (data=ordered) mode or data=writeback. Using the journaled mode also disables delayed allocation and Direct I/O support. EXT4 journal deprecated Per today’s Git merge for Linux 7.3, the EXT4 data=journal feature is deprecated and support for it will be removed in early 2028 following the 2027 Linux LTS kernel version.

COSMIC 1.10 Adds Support for Mapping Drawing Tablets to Specific Displays Linux hardware vendor System76 released COSMIC 1.10 today as the latest stable version of this Rust-based desktop environment for modern GNU/Linux distributions. COSMIC 1.10 comes two weeks after COSMIC 1.9 with support for mapping drawing tablets to specific displays, support for setting environment variables in ~/.config/environment.d, support for using custom SSH agents, and support for remembering sort options in file open/save dialogs. The COSMIC Term terminal emulator received keyboard shortcuts for moving tabs left (Ctrl+Shift+Left) and right (Ctrl+Shift+Right), COSMIC Store now adds a gallery mode after clicking screenshots and caches screenshots locally, and the cosmic-settings-daemon is now in charge of setting the interface font when syncing font settings with GTK/GNOME. COSMIC Player has been updated as well with support for keeping the controls visible when hovered, COSMIC OSD no longer shows volume OSD when started, COSMIC Monitor now features separate app and process searches, and COSMIC Launcher now uses WGPU for rendering in order to improve performance. COSMIC Greeter display manager was improved as well in this release with kmscon support to systemd service on Fedora Linux, a fix for a panic when the keyboard layouts are empty, and support for cancelling the PAM session when the wrong password is used to ensure that pam_faillock remains functional. On top of that, COSMIC Compositor received fixes for issues with window context menu items being selected when clicking outside the menu, focusing windows on touchscreen events, screen capture using an inefficient pixel format, resizing not working in some cases while tiling, and focus not being removed from unfocused windows. Last but not least, COSMIC Files now ellipsizes the full path in search results to keep it from being truncated and includes trailing … to menu items that open a context drawer, cosmic-idle can now handle system suspending on AC correctly, and COSMIC Initial Setup now only shows the Wi-Fi page if a Wi-Fi device exists. Various smaller issues were fixed as well, so check out the release notes on the project’s GitHub page for more details. Meanwhile, keep an eye on the stable software repositories of your favorite Linux distro for the COSMIC 1.10 update and install it as soon as possible for a more reliable, stable, and bug-free COSMIC desktop experience.

Q4OS 6.10 “Andromeda” Is Out with KDE Plasma 6.3.6 and Trinity Desktop 14.1.5 The Q4OS team announced today the release and general availability of Q4OS 6.10 as the tenth update to the Q4OS 6 “Andromeda” series of this Debian-based Linux distro featuring KDE Plasma and Trinity Desktop Environment. Based on Debian 13.7 “Trixie” and powered by Linux kernel 6.12.111 LTS, Q4OS 6.10 ships with the KDE Plasma 6.3.6 desktop environment for the flagship edition, which is accompanied by the KDE Gear 25.04.3 and KDE Frameworks 6.13 software suites, all compiled against Qt 6.8.2, as well as the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) 14.1.5 desktop environment on the TDE edition. Q4OS 6.10 updates the KDE Plasma edition to no longer include any packages from the Trinity Desktop Environment by default on the live media or when installing the distribution, as the Q4OS tools now come with their own Qt 5 frontends. Of course, the Trinity Desktop Environment remains installable side by side. The live Q4OS media now comes with the basic desktop profile and the live-session extras, which include the installer, web browser, Q4OS Imager, CJK fonts, VirtualBox guest additions, and language packs. The devs removed the old KDE Frameworks libraries on the TDE edition, as well as the QtCurve and old window styles. Q4OS 6.10 introduces a new Q4OS Wi-Fi connect tool that will be displayed during the first login on both KDE Plasma and TDE editions, replacing the old Trinity-only dialog, to make connecting to a Wi-Fi network easier. Also, NumLock is now enabled at first boot on desktops and laptops with a numeric keypad, while it stays disabled on laptops without a numeric keypad. On top of that, this release splits the Q4OS Setup application installer into a Trinity and a Qt 5 frontends, so each Q4OS edition gets the native one, and the fail-safe entry of the live boot menu now starts the graphics in nomodeset mode for machines whose graphics driver fails to start. Among other noteworthy changes, the Q4OS Software Centre no longer offers the Mozilla Firefox web browser on 32-bit (i386) systems, since it’s no longer supported upstream, while Q4OS 5 i386 users are offered Debian’s Firefox ESR instead. Check out the release announcement for more details. Q4OS 6.10 is available for download as KDE Plasma and TDE (Trinity Desktop Environment) editions for 64-bit systems from the official website. Existing Q4OS users can update their installations by running the sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade commands in a terminal emulator.

Gentoo Needs Your Help! Several Sponsors Have Pulled Out Plenty of open source projects keep going on goodwill alone, with contributors putting in the hours and expecting nothing back. While others lean on outside support like cash, donated hardware, or someone else covering the hosting bill. This kind of support rarely gets much attention, but these needs are some of the most foundational aspects of any project that’s serious about growing. Gentoo falls in the second group. The source-based Linux distribution, built around the Portage package manager, runs largely on sponsored infrastructure, as it can only manage to maintain a few vital machines. Sadly, many sponsors that had backed Gentoo all these years have decided to stop making contributions. The project is now looking for replacements and has put out a call for infrastructure sponsors. Currently, its sponsors page lists names such as Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab, CDN77, HP, and Hetzner, but it may not yet reflect the dropouts. There are five ways to help, as laid out on the sponsorship page of Gentoo’s wiki, with preference being given to supporters who share the project’s vision of software that respects choice and stays open to user-driven changes. The first way is to accept donated machines for the project’s hosting locations in the US. They are not asking for much; anything good enough to handle server-focused tasks in today’s time is a good offering for them to use. Next is Colocation, a type of physical hosting. The sponsor would provide rack space, power, and connectivity, while Gentoo finds the hardware to put in it. Capacity outside the US is their most urgent need at the moment, though offers from the US are welcome too. Third are virtual machines, with a minimum of 2 vCPUs, 4GB of RAM, and 25GB of storage. The project says that it is leaning more on the cloud wherever it can, but many of its services are monolithic, and that Kubernetes would suit them poorly. The fourth way is full-package hosted physical servers. The wiki gives two examples: a root server like the ones Hetzner offers, or a sponsor’s older or unused servers with Gentoo getting full remote access. In that second case, the sponsor would still own and manage the hardware, whereas Gentoo would take care of the operating system and remote management, only asking for advance notice before any migration events. The last is plain old money. Any donated funds would go toward paying for colocation and hosting. A call to act Gentoo is far from the only project that needs this kind of backing. Take LVFS, the firmware update service for Linux. It leaned heavily on the Linux Foundation and Red Hat, with Framework and the Open Source Firmware Foundation pitching in $10,000 a year. Then Lenovo and Dell joined at the Premier tier, at $100,000 a year each, along with HP and NVIDIA, who followed soon after. I would call that a win for LVFS and a sign that sponsors are out there for projects that go looking. Maybe your organization has spare rack space, or you have money lying around and want it to do some good. Either way, someone has to host the servers behind projects like this, and Gentoo’s infrastructure team is available at infra@gentoo.org for any infrastructure sponsorship-related queries.

Talk of AI in KDE sets the community ablaze Graham sounds more and more like a grifter. Is KDE slowly doing the walk towards evil? A proposal to make KDE an “AI-native” desktop has gone down like a house on fire: screams, flames, people running for safety. There may be no survivors.* Last weekend was KDE’s annual Akademy conference and it included a presentation proposing an AI-native KDE. We noted that it seemed likely to polarize the audience. It looks like this was a considerable understatement. In the days since, a debate over proposed restrictions on LLM-assisted contributions descended into bans and a deleted thread. An outside campaign called for KDE to prohibit AI altogether, a GNOME developer proposed a similar policy for that project, and KDE developer Nate Graham apologized for his role in the uproar. The Akademy talk was titled “A lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE” and the slide deck [PDF] is now available. It ends by saying: “The question is not whether AI. It is how. You choose how much AI – and which.” It seems almost calculated to provoke an argument rather than invite discussion. We do not know if the authors intended this – we attempted to contact both of them, but they have not yet responded. Graham opened a discussion on Invent, KDE’s GitLab instance, about proposed restrictions on LLM-assisted contributions. Although we are not a member, we watched this with some interest over the weekend. It rapidly became heated. Moderators issued warnings, restricted further comments, and eventually removed the thread. There is an archive of the discussion, but we warn you, it contains some highly offensive language, albeit censored by the member who quoted another member’s tweets on X. As events unfolded, the participant who drew attention to the posts was banned first. The author of the offensive material was banned later after their identity was verified. The discussion is gone, but the argument continues. One response was an outside initiative called KDE for People, which called on the KDE project to adopt a No-AI policy. Around 250 people signed it before its organizers closed it to further signatures. GNOME developer Jordan Petridis has also published The GNOME LLM Policy That I Want, proposing that LLMs be barred from creating or modifying anything submitted to GNOME or hosted on its infrastructure. This mentions the recent ballot on AI usage in Debian. We reported on the developer referendum about a month ago, noting that the broad spread of anti-AI options in the ballot was likely to split the vote. (This likelihood was dismissed in the comments.) Well, as The Register’s Asia-Pacific desk reported a few days later, Debian did not ban AI contributions. Graham subsequently explained his involvement in a post titled KDE and AI, and you, and me. He opens by saying: “So I accidentally triggered an online shitstorm in the process of trying to craft a set of more restrictive LLM usage guidelines for KDE. Sorry about that.” He notes that the Akademy talk met “what I’m told was a fairly chilly reception” and that “the next day, a workshop was held about the topic, also receiving a chilly reception.” Every couple of years, the KDE project sets three goals for the next two years. Earlier this week, after Akademy, it chose its latest three: you can see them in the last column of the goal-setting Kanban board. The ones chosen are: KDE for Enterprise and Deployments (Issue #5) Better documentation (Issue #2) Next Generation Styling for KDE (Issue #3) We see no mention of AI in there. In context, that may come as a relief to parts of the community. Bootnote *A tip of the black Borsalino to the late great Terry Pratchett, for two different “house on fire” references we combined. ®

Solus Linux Adopts Formal AI and LLM Contribution Policy Solus Linux has announced a new policy on using AI and large language model tools in project contributions, explaining where these tools can and cannot be used. The Solus team says developers can use AI to help with contributions, but they must take full responsibility for their work. Anyone submitting code or package changes needs to test them first. If AI was used, the commit should include an ‘Assisted-by LLM’ note. Only developers, not automated bots, can submit contributions. “Contributions to Solus that were made with AI/LLM tools are allowed, as long as they follow our policy.” Solus explains that the policy helps keep the operating system high-quality and easy to maintain. Since many people use Solus every day, contributors need to check and understand their submissions, not just share code made by AI. However, the rules are stricter for written content. Solus does not allow any AI-generated or partly AI-generated material in its blog or official communications. The team warns contributors not to hide their use of AI tools. If someone tries to cover up AI involvement, their work could be rejected, and they might be blocked from future contributions. Solus adds that the goal is to encourage open teamwork, not to watch every detail of how people work. Solus says its new rules are based on the Budgie Desktop AI policy, which itself takes ideas from projects like the Linux kernel and Fedora. Still, they’re leaving the door open as the team also points out that this policy may change as AI tools become more common in software development. For more details, see the official Solus announcement.

Canonical Beefs Up Security for Ubuntu 26.10 with Slimmed-Down GRUB, Linux 7.3 Canonical is about to release its interim version of Ubuntu, the Stonking Stingray, a.k.a. Ubuntu 26.10, and they are doubling down on security with the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel series, a slimmed-down GRUB bootloader, and more. Ubuntu 26.10 (codename Stonking Stingray) is scheduled for release next week, on October 15th, 2026, with the latest and greatest GNOME 51 “A Coruña” desktop environment, the unreleased Linux 7.3 kernel series (yes, Ubuntu 26.10 will ship with an RC (Release Candidate) kernel), OpenSSL 4.0, OpenSSH 10.5, and Rust-based core utilities. To beef up security, Canonical implemented a signed, slimmed-down GRUB bootloader with a reduced attack surface, TPM-backed encryption support on machines that don’t have a hardware root of trust, and dbus-broker as the default message bus with AppArmor mediation intact, using an event-driven architecture with better accounting, reliability, and scalability. On top of that, Ubuntu 26.10 will ship with ntpd-rs, a memory-safe time daemon that will be enabled by default in Ubuntu 27.04, certificate revocation with upki, authd support for MS MFA and identity-provider-based accounts, hardware-token VPN sign-in support in NetworkManager, and on-device speech recognition powered by AI. “Ubuntu 26.10 introduces Myna, a desktop speech-to-text feature. It’s designed to bring cutting-edge accessibility, without compromising security,” said Canonical in a blog post. “Myna performs speech recognition locally through an inference snap. Once the required models are installed, dictation works without an internet connection.” Linux kernel 7.3, which will be released later this month, will also bring numerous updates to the Landlock, AppArmor, SELinux, and Smack security modules for Ubuntu 26.10, along with TPM driver updates and BPF verifier fixes to prevent pointer leaks on speculative execution paths, NTFS3 security hardening, memory-safety fixes, and Rust support for PowerPC. Last but not least, Canonical doubles down on firmware updates via fwupd, which now asks for a recovery key only when the running system uses TPM-backed encryption and a firmware update could affect the measurements used to unlock the disk, instead of prompting unnecessarily on systems where the update doesn’t affect the TPM-backed unlock policy. As mentioned before, Canonical plans to release Ubuntu 26.10 (Stonking Stingray) on October 15th, but if you’re eager to try it right now on your personal computer, you can download the beta release. However, please keep in mind that it’s a pre-release version, not suitable for use in production environments.

Raspberry Pi OS Updated with Battery and Squeekboard Dock Widgets Today, the Raspberry Pi project released today an updated version of its Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS distribution for Raspberry Pi single-board computers with new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Based on the latest Debian 13 “Trixie” operating system series and powered by Linux kernel 6.18.50 LTS, the new Raspberry Pi OS release ships with battery and squeekboard widgets for the new dock, support for automounting encrypted drives, Control Centre debug code, and new, better-quality Raspberry Pi menu icons. The updated Raspberry Pi OS also adds tooltips to indicate the function of widgets in Control Centre’s Widget panel, a new color for inactive window titlebars to match window backgrounds, and a hook to update the list of shortcuts in Control Centre’s Shortcuts panel when the defaults are reloaded. On top of that, the Screens panel in Control Centre has been updated to apply system file changes immediately on confirmation rather than when closed, and setting the size of the taskbar and dock, and the location in Control Centre now automatically sets desktop top and bottom margins appropriately. Furthermore, the Main Menu will now only reload on cache update rather than before opening, the screen lock button was removed from shutdown options, the old source for standalone control panel applications was removed, and switching between taskbar and dock layouts no longer resets the system appearance. Numerous bugs were fixed in this new Raspberry Pi OS release to improve various functionality, such as the PCmanFM right-click option to open a terminal from the file manager, dropping files onto list views in the file manager, menu shortcut keys, panel pop-up windows, and local PCmanFM automount configuration overriding global settings. Also fixed are issues with system tray icons not displaying correctly on scaled screens or being hidden, an icon menu crash, swaybg desktop wallpaper files not loading, panel menus displaying off-screen, icon menu category view crash, a hotplug crash in the panel when no monitors were detected, and a crash when updating notifications. The new Raspberry Pi OS release also fixes possible segfaults on various Control Centre panel initialisation functions, LibreOffice icons in launchbar sticking after close, keyboard activation of top-level menu item not closing the menu, and application pop-up menu text in new window list containing literal markup. Last but not least, the updated Raspberry Pi OS release fixes a GTK4 colour representation manager reporting error, window count digits not shown correctly on new task list in Japanese locale, as well as an issue with opening of windows when mouse forward and back buttons were clicked in the file manager’s list view. You can download the Raspberry Pi OS 2026-10-06 release right now from the official website for all supported Raspberry Pi models, including Raspberry Pi 1A+, 1B+, 2B, 3B, 3B+, 3A+, 4B, 400, CM1, CM3, CM3+, CM4, CM4S, Zero, Zero W, and Zero 2 W. Existing Raspberry Pi OS users can update their installations by running the sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade commands below in a terminal emulator or by using the built-in graphical package updater. If your system is up to date, you’re running the latest Raspberry Pi OS version.

circumstances.run/…/117322654185564343

Good move.

The Lenovo, only because the price is similar to Dell’s with more RAM.

NVIDIA's Results Of Conducting Wayland vs. X.Org Latency Testing In addition to NVIDIA announcing their Display Config Server project at XDC 2026 in Toronto, at this annual developer’s conference they also presented their findings on scientific testing of X.Org vs. Wayland latency. X.Org vs. Wayland latency across different compositors and desktop environments has been a heated topic among passionate Linux desktop enthusiasts. Some argue in favor of classic X.Org delivering the lowest latency while others routinely share their own personal anecdotes and argue in favor of modern Wayland solutions. NVIDIA engineer Kamil Łysik took to a Wayland vs. X.Org latency comparison from key press to presentation. For ensuring accurate measurements, a micro-controller was used along with a light sensor for end-to-end measurements. Paired with software for repeatable and automated testing. Testing with a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 graphics card and using the company’s R610 driver branch, tests were done on KDE KWin 6.7.4 and GNOME Mutter 49.7 and the X.Org Server tests using v1.21.1.24. NVIDIA latency Wayland vs. X.Org results NVIDIA’s findings were that the latency results between X.Org and Wayland are very close with it being hard to conclude a clear winner. Some notable takeaways include that XWayland no longer introduces extra frame delays where it had in the past with an extra frame latency. Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) was also measured to “drastically improve” responsiveness and deliver roughly the same latency between both X.Org and Wayland based sessions. Those interested can find the NVIDIA presentation this X.Org vs. Wayland latency topic embedded above.

Kagi Ends Orion Browser Development for Linux, Will Open-Source It Kagi has announced it will stop developing the Orion Browser for Linux and Windows, ending its direct work on these platforms. The good news is that instead of dropping the project, the company plans to open-source both versions so other developers or organizations can keep them going. For Linux users, this is a big shift for a browser that had just started to show real promise. Orion first came to Linux in early alpha at the start of the year, then officially entered beta in August. Now, only a few months later, Kagi says the current Linux Beta will keep working, but it will stop getting updates from the company after October 2, 2026. Kagi also warns users not to use the beta as their main browser. The main reason is limited resources. Kagi says only a small team of developers works on Orion, and the project is funded entirely by Kagi users. Expanding Orion beyond Apple platforms was always a big challenge, especially since the company chose not to use Chromium as its base. Instead, Orion uses WebKit, which makes it one of the few browsers trying to offer an alternative to the many Chromium-based ones. Kagi says that keeping a browser running on multiple platforms usually requires either a lot of funding or a big open-source community. Since Kagi has neither, it will now focus its limited resources on Orion for macOS and iOS. The work done on Linux and Windows will be released as open source instead. Kagi plans to publish the source code for both versions and share more details within 30 days of the announcement. The company has also reached out to open-source foundations and organizations about possibly taking over the projects in the long term. However, Kagi makes it clear that it does not plan to be the main maintainer of either open-source project. Any future updates will depend on developers or organizations willing to take over the code. In short, Orion for Linux’s future depends on what happens after the source code is released and whether a community forms to maintain it. For now, the current beta still works, but without future security updates or maintenance from Kagi, it likely won’t be a good daily browser for long. For more details, see the official announcement.

Northstar is the free-software web browser of the Nordstjernen projec Northstar is a minimalist web browser written from scratch in C. One window, one page, one process — about 160,000 lines of original C, small enough for one person to read and audit end-to-end. It carries no upstream browser engine: no Gecko, no WebKit, no Blink. It is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later, and it runs on Linux, macOS and Windows — on Windows from the Microsoft Store. Northstar Browser version 1.0.12 released! A sunny ark comic on about:start, a classic Mozilla-style toolbar with address-bar suggestions, relayout and repaint that only redo what changed, popovers per the HTML standard, the Microsoft Store package, an 8 MB engine stack, and a build on Fabrice Bellard’s original QuickJS

Steam On Linux Dives Down To 3.05% For September Steam on Linux use in March hit an all-time high of around 5.33% marketshare. Since then it pulled back to around 4% while for September 2026 the Steam Survey results are now in and it’s clocking in just above 3%. The Steam Survey results for September that were published this evening indicate a rather steep decline of 0.85%, down to 3.05%. Meanwhile macOS is at 1.92% and Microsoft Windows at 95%. As with most months where Steam Survey indicates an abnormally large decline for Linux use, the second stop is checking on the language use… Once again a case of a big spike in Simplified Chinese use. Steam’s Survey reports a 7.42% increase in Chinese use, up to 31.39% overall of the Steam population. Usually with those large month-over-month swings where Steam China use shoots up dramatically is a boost to Windows and a detriment to Linux. Some attribute the large increases in Simplified Chinese use to being a reporting/sampling issue. When diving into the Steam Linux data exclusively, CachyOS has spiked by another 2.65% to now account for 18.12% of the sampled Linux gaming population. That even outperforms SteamOS Holo coming in at 17.37%. Among Linux gamers on Steam, AMD CPUs still account for the high 60 percentage space thanks to the Steam Deck and Steam Machine using AMD APUs and their open-source/Linux support being popular with enthusiasts. Those wanting to dive in to all the Steam Survey stats for September can find the fresh data on SteamPowered.com.

Windows 11 is failing as an operating system Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 00:46 Sponsor: TuxCare Radar 02:23 Windows 11 is failing right now 05:20 What’s the job of an OS? 06:51 Updates break systems. Often. 10:53 You have to adapt to it 15:14 It’s highly intrusive 17:44 Debloating tools don’t make it good 20:19 Windows fails at being an OS 21:33 Alternatives are better, but not perfect 27:23 Windows is a sales platform, not an OS

Firefox Gets (too) Rounded, Flatpak for CLI & Dev tools, Ubuntu does tiling now - Linux Weekly News Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 00:30 Sponsor: Proton Mail 01:23 Ubuntu 26.10 beta released 03:58 Ubuntu 24.04 to 26.04 upgrade now possible 05:14 Toolpak introduced as the Flatpak for dev tools 08:24 F-Droid launches full rewrite of the app 10:00 Firefox 157 adds the new Nova theme 12:33 Igalia working on Firefox for SteamOS 14:35 PostmarketOS changes name 16:11 Dev proposes that GNOME accepts Al contributions 18:10 Ubuntu 26.10 has an image for Snapdragon laptops 19:33 New minimalist FOSS web browser 21:55 Meta found guilty of lying on data protection and moderation 24:15 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers Links Ubuntu 26.10 beta released www.omgubuntu.co.uk/…/ubuntu-2610-beta-released Ubuntu 24.04 to 26.04 upgrade now possible omgubuntu.co.uk/…/ubuntu-2604-upgrades-live-2404 Toolpak introduced as the Flatpak for dev tools blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/…/introducing-toolpak/ F-Droid launches full rewrite of the app arstechnica.com/…/f-droid-gets-its-biggest-update… Firefox 157 adds the new Nova theme linuxiac.com/firefox-157-nova-released-with-its-b… Igalia working on Firefox for SteamOS www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Deck-Better-Firefox PostmarketOS changes name nura.eco/blog/2026/09/27/nura-rename/ Dev proposes that GNOME accepts Al contributions arunraghavan.net/…/on-llms-and-free-software/ Ubuntu 26.10 has an image for Snapdragon laptops www.omgubuntu.co.uk/…/ubuntu-2610-snapdragon-x2 New minimalist FOSS web browser blancbrowser.com Meta found guilty of lying on data protection and moderation www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local news/new-mexico-wins-second-suit-against-meta/articlee4a95a15-5303-473d-9005-fdedb1ebd619.html reuters.com/…/new-mexico-wants-meta-pay-up-40-bil…

Don’t sleep on Dell Latitudes.

Ho boy, found the MAGA

Ubuntu 26.10 ships with a Rust-based OpenPGP - OMG! Ubuntu Surprisingly, it’s LGPL v2. The Sequoia PGP is part of the default seed, with the sq package in the main repo and officially supported. It’s said to provide a “modern, and memory-safe OpenPGP implementation”. Ubuntu isn’t making Sequoia the distribution’s default OpenPGP toolchain. It ships preinstalled, but lives alongside the standard implementation. However, the goal is to make Sequoia PGP Ubuntu’s default in the near future, with sq and sqv replacing gpg and gpgv. For now, gpg will still invoke GnuPG, while sq (or an app configured to use Sequoia’s libraries) calls on Sequoia. Users can run e.g., sq sign or sq verify instead of gpg from the command line to try it too. Canonical says adopting Sequoia will enable Ubuntu to maintain OpenPGP interoperability while benefiting from a “more maintainable and memory-safe foundation”. It’s not the only Rust-related change in the new Ubuntu release, either. Ubuntu 26.10 ships a full set of Rust-based core utilities out-of-the-box, completing work that began in 25.10. GNU-versions of cp, mv, and rm are now provided by uutils. Canonical’s engineers plan to ‘oxidise’ more foundational packages in future releases. A Rust rewrite of the Network Time Protocol (NTP) being eyed for inclusion as the default time sync client in Ubuntu 27.04. The company is also a gold sponsor of the Trifecta Tech Foundation, paying €40,000 a year to help fund work on Rust software.

OpenMandriva ROME 26.09 Released With Linux Kernel 7.2, Plasma 6.7 OpenMandriva has published refreshed installation images for ROME, its rolling-release edition, combining the distro’s current software stack in the new 26.09 snapshot. OpenMandriva ROME 26.09 ships with Linux kernel 7.2 by default, while kernel 7.3-rc4 is also available for users who want to test the upcoming series. The distro also provides kernels in both Clang-compiled and GCC-compiled variants. On the desktop side, KDE Plasma has been updated to 6.7.5, accompanied by KDE Gear 26.08.1 and KDE Frameworks 6.29. GNOME users get version 50.3, while LXQt moves to 2.4. Xfce remains on the 4.20 series, and MATE 1.28 now includes an experimental Wayland session. The repositories also contain newer releases of Hyprland, COSMIC Desktop, Niri, Sway, i3, IceWM, Qtile, and several other window managers and desktop environments. Under the hood, a significant change is the move to RPM 6.1. OpenMandriva has extended it with an optional %pgo section for spec files to simplify Profile-Guided Optimization when building packages. Several packages already use this feature alongside broader Link-Time Optimization. The development toolchain has also moved forward. LLVM/Clang 23.1.2 is now the default compiler, GCC has been updated to 16.2, and the distribution ships glibc 2.44. Graphics support comes with Mesa 26.2.3 and ROCm 10.0, including patches aimed at extending ROCm support to older Radeon GPUs. For NVIDIA hardware, the open NVIDIA kernel module has been moved directly into the kernel, avoiding situations where it becomes out of sync after kernel updates. The proprietary driver has meanwhile been updated to version 610.57. Interestingly, another notable addition is Snap support. OpenMandriva already supports Flatpak with Flathub enabled and AppImage, but users can now install snapd from the repositories. The project stresses that native RPM packages remain its preferred format due to tighter system integration and reduced duplication. The Plasma and LXQt editions have a new default browser. Helium 0.17.2 replaces ungoogled-chromium and is based on that project, restoring selected Chromium functionality without reintroducing Google services. OpenMandriva has adapted Chromium Embedded Framework to use Helium, allowing OBS Studio to use a CEF plugin based on the browser. For gaming, ROME 26.09 includes Wine 11.18 with WoW64 support, Proton 11, DXVK 3.0.2, vkd3d 2.0, and vkd3d-proton. The Steam installer available through the non-free repository has also been updated to version 1.0.0.86. Moreover, the release brings Qt 6.11.2, GTK 4.22.5, PipeWire 1.6.9, FFmpeg 9.0, GStreamer 1.28.6, Firefox 156, Thunderbird 155, LibreOffice 26.8, GIMP 3.2.4, Blender 5.2.2, and Krita 6.0.4, which has now moved to Qt 6. OpenMandriva has also expanded the selection of local AI software available from its repositories, including Ollama, llama.cpp, Whisper.cpp, Stable Diffusion.cpp, ComfyUI, KoboldCpp, Aider, and several other tools. Many use the system-wide GGML library with GPU acceleration through ROCm, Vulkan, or OpenCL. For additional details, see the announcement. The refreshed ROME 26.09 images are available in Plasma X11, Plasma Wayland, and GNOME Wayland editions, with community-maintained LXQt, MATE, and Xfce spins also offered. Plasma and LXQt images are available for regular x86_64 systems as well as optimized znver builds for AMD Ryzen processors. An AArch64 server image is available too. One exception is COSMIC Desktop: a ROME 26.09 COSMIC installation image was held back because of an issue with the login manager. Existing COSMIC users can continue updating normally, while new users can install it from the repositories.

Isn’t it a good point?

Budgie

Flatpak 1.18.4 Released With Fixes for Six Security Vulnerabilities Flatpak 1.18.4 has been released as a security-focused update to the popular application sandboxing and distribution framework for Linux, addressing six newly disclosed vulnerabilities along with several related hardening improvements. Among the most important fixes is CVE-2026-97024, which could allow a malicious Flatpak application during installation to overwrite arbitrary files with either an empty file or a symlink. A related issue, CVE-2026-97023, could be abused to delete arbitrary files with elevated privileges. The release also fixes CVE-2026-97025, an issue affecting authenticated OCI repositories. Flatpak now ensures authentication tokens used when downloading applications or runtimes are not exposed to other local users. CVE-2026-97026 is addressed by restricting permissions on temporary repository directories under /var/tmp/flatpak-cache-*. Another fix, tracked as CVE-2026-97027, introduces stricter filtering of .desktop and D-Bus .service files against an allowlist of permitted fields. According to the developers, this prevents denial-of-service scenarios as well as unintended interactions with services running on the host system. Flatpak 1.18.4 also resolves CVE-2026-97029, which could allow an application to send signals to a process group containing a parent process outside its sandbox. In certain circumstances, this could result in denial of service by terminating the user’s desktop environment. Beyond those six vulnerabilities, the update refreshes the bundled xdg-dbus-proxy fallback to version 0.1.9, fixing CVE-2026-93676 and CVE-2026-94422. Flatpak also received additional protection against symlink traversal related to CVE-2026-97023 and CVE-2026-97024. Finally, given the number and nature of the security fixes included, users are advised to install the update as soon as it becomes available through their Linux distribution’s repositories. For more details, see the changelog.

NVIDIA Developing "Display Config Server" To Improve Linux/Wayland On Display Walls As an initiative from NVIDIA for improving the Linux ecosystem outside the world of AI, they have been developing Display-Config-Server as a new solution to help enhance the Linux capabilities for complex display walls. NVIDIA engineer Austin Shafer presented this morning at XDC 2026 Toronto around Linux on next-generation display walls: complex display setups appearing in TV production, theaters, and more. Many of these complex display walls today run on Microsoft Windows while NVIDIA is looking to improve Linux usage for such video/media walls. The display walls running Linux today are typically on the X.Org Server still and making use of NVIDIA Mosaic display features. Using Wayland on its own for such display walls becomes more challenging due to the different compositors and other complexities. There is a path forward though using Vulkan Direct 2 Display “D2D” with the VK_KHR_display extension to let the Vulkan swapchain drive a physical display without any windowing system. NVIDIA decided to engineer the Display Config Server to improve the Vulkan direct-to-display model by “owning” the displays and then leasing them out to Vulkan clients to avoid the need for every application to contain logic for handling display calibration and configuration. Display Config Server makes for centralized configuration, seamless handoff between clients, and making it easier for applications to implement. The XDC 2026 presentation shared that NVIDIA is working to support the Display Config Server to run nested with a Wayland compositor. They are also working to improve how the Vulkan direct-to-display API can present on display walls. The Display Config Server code is to be open-source via this GitHub repository but as of writing doesn’t appear to be yet publicly available. Those wishing to learn more can see this PDF slide deck and the video embedded above.

Codenotary Expands Its No-Strings-Attached Linux Security Deal - FOSS Force

AlmaLinux Puts Software Certification in the Hands of Users For the first time, there’s a way to carry out software certification on AlmaLinux, and the hardware suite has been rewritten alongside it, with test results from either certification path landing in the same public catalog. Don’t worry about the cost to validate or the uptime of the machine itself. Certifications are free, and the hardware checks no longer require you to install the distro on your setup. Validating, how? In this particular situation, software certification is basically a listing plus the confirmations that follow it. A publisher adds the product and picks which major versions of AlmaLinux it runs on. The confirmations come from the people running software on their own hardware across various AlmaLinux releases, though they will need to sign up for an account if they want to post their findings. Hardware certification is the other half that got some attention. The alma-certify tool has been rewritten, with the developers claiming it can now achieve sub-10 minute certification runs on most hardware. Another improvement is that alma-certify doesn’t require an AlmaLinux installation anymore because it can work off live media or from an installation already on the machine. There’s also a new machine registration flow that makes use of QR codes. If you didn’t know, this tool records what’s in the machine, all the way down to drivers and firmware, then starts up a bunch of short checks that decide whether it passes. Those checks cover a lot of ground, starting from computation and memory errors, storage health, networking drivers, to kernel state, virtualization, GPU, and peripherals. Tracking results Everything ends up in the catalog, and each entry is a result anyone can analyze. It holds the systems, components, and software that have been validated, alongside the benchmark figures from the published test runs. Every major AlmaLinux release is tracked on its own, so provenance can be proved, and everything in the catalog is easily searchable. You can even make use of the free, read-only API to collect data in bulk. Jonathan Wright, the Infrastructure Lead for AlmaLinux, directed his attention toward potential testers, saying that: Two things would make all of this worth it. A lot of people and organizations want proof that AlmaLinux runs on the hardware they already own before they’ll give it a try, and now they can get that proof themselves. Every result that gets submitted makes the case to hardware and software vendors that supporting AlmaLinux officially is a low-effort thing to do. So if you have hardware sitting in front of you, or software you rely on every day, go tell us that it works. Validations stack, so adding yours to something already listed helps just as much as being the first. In the end, this will only work if vendors and individual users take the effort to run tests and manually post them on the portal.

Ubuntu 26.10 stops low memory from killing your desktop session - OMG! Ubuntu Ubuntu 26.10 changes how the system choose which processes are killed when memory runs low, making a rogue browser tab is less likely to punt you back to the login screen. When your system runs out of memory, the kernel’s out-of-memory (OOM) killer kicks in, terminating processes to recover some. The issue is that doesn’t always kill the right things. By default, many apps and critical desktop services share the same priority score. When the OOM killer is choosing its victim target, it looks at their OOM scores, not “what’s using the most memory”. Firefox and GNOME Shell, for example, share the same priority status. If memory pressure increases, the OOM killer may decide to terminate GNOME Shell to free up memory rather than the the process causing runaway memory requirements. I regularly encounter this myself in Ubuntu VMs if I try to do too many things (with too many Firefox tabs open): rather than OOM nuking an app, it kills GNOME Shell instead – but I’d much rather a tab crash than my entire desktop session. Ubuntu 26.10 makes changes to mitigate this. Canonical’s Jean Baptiste Lallement says “the goal is simply to preserve the desktop session where possible” by terminating apps before core session services. To do this, it’s lowered the OOM scores for desktop processes so they’re less likely to be nixed. Ubuntu 26.10 also stops systemd-oomd being able to kill user sessions as it doesn’t use the same OOM priority scores as the kernel, and important desktop services could still be nixed based on memory pressure requirements. These changes will improve how Ubuntu copes when memory runs out, but Lallement calls it “a first step” that “does not make Ubuntu immune to OOM conditions”. More granular OOM policies for desktop services and apps are planned. Ubuntu 26.10 is released on Thursday 15 October, 2026, but if you plan to test drive the beta that’s due on Thursday 24 September, these changes will be there – not that you’ll notice them, hopefully!

Why does everyone from piefed.social have the worst takes on literally everything?

Microsoft Office 365 on Linux, Mint develops their own apps, Steam Frame is here Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 00:42 Sponsor: Internxt 02:26 Microsoft 365 runs on Linux through Wine now 04:44 Mint will ship more of their own application 07:07 Ubuntu completes its move to Rust coreutils 09:37 Steam Frame revealed, up for signups 13:04 GNOME 51 released 14:54 GNOME Shell Mobile seems in a weird place 17:44 Flatpak working on app services 19:47 Improvements for the Linux kernel 21:52 AMDv3 images provide a nice boost to low end hardware 23:48 OpenAI discloses worrying cheating behavior in its models 26:37 A few gaming things 29:15 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers

Tools will bundle all their dependencies. So no Python

I wish the PR was clearer about what kind of bugs were discovered

The original “,btw” ilk 👏

I actually have to ask: what is something that 'works out of the box '?

After Archinstall many derivatives lost their appel.

Nostalgic

Oh, they’re pretty awoken already.

Are you crazy? Stick to some stable or semi stable distro with a mainstream DE and you don’t have to deal with any of those. 🤦‍♂️

It’s only the beginning

Those fascists don’t care about Linux in general.

This. The Israeli society was baked to be fascist from the inception. Zionism was a TERRORIST movement in the West Asia, ffs.

🇵🇸

Here we go again.

What billionaire is pulling your collar today?

The things are so bad that you have fucking Tucker Carlson talking against Israel.

Want to try Ubuntu’s new AI dictation tool, Myna? Here's how Canonical recently added the Myna orchestrator snap and speech-recognition AI models to the Snap Store, and made a new desktop Myna Settings tool available to install from a PPA. Ubuntu 26.10 also comes with another component preinstalled, as the gnome-shell-ubuntu-extensions package has a GNOME Shell extension that triggers an on-screen HUD when the Myna local AI speech-to-text tech is listening or transcribing. While a formal call for testing hasn’t been made, all the pieces needed to test Myna are available – for those who care to put them together. The feature has changed quite a bit since I previewed it back in August. If that includes you, read on for how to do it – but don’t expect things to work perfectly just yet, mind. How to try Myna on Ubuntu To test Myna on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS or Ubuntu 26.10 you need: myna-config desktop app from a PPA myna snap from the Snap Store myna-* AI model from the Snap Store If you’re on Ubuntu 26.10 you also have: Myna Shell extension (preinstalled) As of writing, the Myna Shell extension (which triggers the on-screen HUD) is only packaged for GNOME 51 and 26.10. Desktop notifications are used to convey status on Ubuntu 26.04 instead. The on-screen HUD will only appear after pressing the trigger key to activate Myna, when listening or transcribing, or conveying error states (like ‘background noise is high’ or ‘focus lost’). There are different visual styles available for the HUD: default (a plain bar using the system accent colour); vumeter (think volume) and ribbon (but as animated as the original one, alas). Update: the latest update to Myna Settings only includes 2 options: Default and Vumeter. Here’s how to install each component. Installing the Myna Settings desktop app The Myna Settings app for Ubuntu Install the Myna Settings app by adding the following PPA (maintained by a Canonical engineer working on Myna) which provides packages for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and 26.10: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:charles05/myna-config sudo apt install myna-config Installing the Myna client snap Enable an experimental snap feature Myna requires before it will install: sudo snap set system experimental.user-daemons=true Install the Myna speech-to-text client from the Snap store: sudo snap install myna --edge Installing a text-to-speech AI model snap The first-run wizard doesn’t work (yet) Finally, to tie it all together, you’ll need the “brains” of the operation: an AI model which will actually transcribe your audio to typed text. The Myna Settings (myna-confg) app has a first-run wizard to install the various components, and this suggests a model suitable for your hardware. You’ll can also install your preferred speech recognition model from the Snap Store via the command-line – but which one should you choose? Whisper, Parakeet and Funasr are the AI models on the Snap Store. The models run entirely locally, on your device, but aren’t small. You’ll need 1-2GB of free disk space1, depending on the one you choose. I tested two. Parakeet I found better at accuracy (even spelling my surname correctly, which most don’t), but Whisper seemed faster, if prone to homophone errors. Install Parakeet, NVIDIA’s fast, open-weight ASR model supporting 25 languages and punctuation: sudo snap install myna-parakeet --edge Or install Whisper, OpenAI’s multilingual, open-source model: sudo snap install myna-whisper --edge Or install Funasr: sudo snap install myna-funasr --edge Now, open Myna Settings and it should now skip past the setup screen and show you options. Backend settings You can, via the Myna Settings tool, set a model size (the number of parameters it uses) to favour speed or accuracy: smaller variants process audio faster on low-end hardware, while larger ones reduce transcription errors and handle tricky words better. Checking Myna works With everything in place, you can go ahead and test. First thing: make sure your microphone is enabled and working (check in Settings > Sound > Input). You then need to assigned a hotkey shortcut in the settings app2 which you will press to activate the feature. When ready, open an app and focus a text field (I tend to use Text Editor), and press your hotkey. When activated, the Myna HUD will appear on the desktop (26.10) or in a notification (26.04). Begin to talk and, if Myna says “listening”, continue rambling until you’re done. Press the same hotkey to transcribe your spoken words in to text that will appear in the focused app. If you click out of the text field you began dictating into (or another app opens and steals focus) the HUD will say “focus lost”. You’ll need to repeat the process again. Is Myna any good? Myna is a boon to Ubuntu’s accessibility, for sure. Offline AI-powered dictation that’s more accurate than what’s previously been available. Whether dictation proves popular beyond that, in day-to-day usage, is an open question. Offline speech recognition has shipped on smartphones and smartwatch for years, but most people still type their WhatsApp messages, e-mails and (welp) ChatGPT prompts. Dictation is remains best suited to longer-form text entry than, say, barking “Firefox” at the App Picker. Myna can lose focus easily (an app opens, you press a button, you mouse away), and thus lose any “spiel” it was in the middle of processing. It’s also optional; it only “listens” when you press a button, and recorded clips never leave your device nor get stored on it. It also can’t be triggered with a “hey myna” – not yet anyway. Ubuntu didn’t have any of this before Myna, so it’s great to see Canonical experimenting. Myna is even being developed as a desktop-agnostic tech, even if this first pass focuses on a GNOME/Wayland/Mutter stack. Snap is configured to keep one “good” backup of everything you install, so when it gets updated the only one stays behind, meaning each snap uses twice the amount of space. ↩︎ On one of my laptops Myna defaults to super + j but on another it uses super + t. You can see/change it in the Myna Settings app. ↩︎