Linux

For Linux 6.19 as what will be the first stable kernel release of 2026, the IEEE-1394 Firewire stack continues dealing with device quirks and improving support for different Firewire-connected devices. In 2026 is also when the Linux Firewire maintainer plans to begin recommending users migrate away from the IEEE-1394 bus followed by closing the Linux Firewire efforts in 2029.

As anticipated the first release candidate of Wine 11.0 is now available in working toward the annual stable release in January.

Alexandre Julliard just released Wine 11.0-rc1 that caps off the Wine 10.xx bi-weekly development releases and also marks the start of the code freeze until Wine 11.0 stable releases sometime in January. Until then it's the weekly release candidates to iron out any lingering bugs.

There was some last minute changes to land this week for Wine 11.0-rc1, including an updated Mono engine:

• Mono engine updated to version 10.4.0.
• Locale data updated to Unicode CLDR 48.
• TWAINDSM module for scanner support on 64-bit.
• Various bug fixes.

And, yes, very interesting as we get ready for this Wine 11.0 release with NTSYNC support, many other Windows gaming support, and other big enhancements, there is now... A TWAINDSM module for scanners on 64-bit Wine. TWAIN is the API and communication protocol for interfacing between applications and digital imaging devices such as image scanners. TWAINDSM is the library for the TWAIN Data Source Manager. A flatbed image scanner

There are also 17 known bug fixes with Wine 11.0-rc1 fixing games like Mass Effect Legendary to apps like Photoshop CS 2.

Wine 11.0-rc1 downloads and more details via WineHQ.org

Mitchell Hashimoto, one of the founders of HashiCorp and lead developer behind Ghostty, a GPU-accelerated open-source terminal emulator launched in 2023, announced that the app has formally become a non-profit project through fiscal sponsorship by Hack Club, a registered 501(c)(3) organization.

In Ghostty’s case, Hack Club now manages compliance, donations, accounting, and public financial transparency. Hashimoto says this structure reinforces Ghostty’s commitment to remaining free and open source, provides legal assurances to users and contributors, and establishes a sustainable foundation beyond any single individual’s involvement.

Finnish company Jolla started out 14 years ago where Nokia left off with MeeGo and developed Sailfish OS as a new Linux smartphone platform. Jolla released their first smartphone in 2013 after crowdfunding but ultimately the Sailfish OS focus the past number of years now has been offering their software stack for use on other smartphone devices. But now it seems they are trying again with a new crowd-funded smartphone.

Sailfish OS has supported a number of Sony Xperia smartphones and a variety of OnePlus / Samsung / Google / Xiaomi devices and more maintained by the community. Last year Jolla also announced an "AI computer" as part of the AI hardware craze. Now though they are apparently trying again at their own in-house smartphone.

While NTFSPLUS continues to be developed as a new and modern NTFS open-source driver for Linux systems, at the moment NTFS3 from Paragon Software remains the most capable NTFS file-system driver within the mainline kernel. For the Linux 6.19 merge window a variety of fixes have landed for this driver.

While likely to not see too much use in practice, the NTFS3 driver with Linux 6.19 can now support timestamps prior to the year 1970. The first change noted for NTFS3 in the new kernel is pre-Epoch timestamps support for handling dates prior to the start of Unix time on 1 January 1970. NTFS3 had been relying on an unsigned 64-bit type but has now switched to a signed 64-bit type for coping with pre-epoch timestamps. The issue was raised by the xfstests program testing the file-system. But for anyone that may happen to have pre-1970 timestamps, Linux 6.19 fixes things up for NTFS3.

After launching Gemini 17 Gen3 in September 2024, TUXEDO has now introduced the next generation of their powerful Linux laptop line, Gemini 17 Gen4 INTEL, a new 17-inch Linux notebook positioned as an affordable desktop replacement.

Combining Intel’s Core i9-14900HX processor with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, the device targets users who need workstation-class performance in a portable form factor.

The Gemini 17 Gen4 retains the classic characteristics of a desktop-replacement system: a large display, high-end components, and an expanded cooling system capable of handling demanding workloads.

The many hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem updates were merged today for Linux 6.19 that is predominantly around delivering new hardware support.

There are several new HWMON drivers with Linux 6.19 including the Apple Silicon SMC, TSC1641 I2C power monitor, MPS MP9945, MAX17616, and MP2925 and MP2929. Of those the Apple Silicon SMC is quite notable.

Linus Torvalds doesn’t usually seek the spotlight, so it was a pleasant surprise to see him appear a few days ago as a guest on another well-known Linus’s show—Canadian YouTube star Linus Sebastian from the Linus Tech Tips (LTT) channel.

Depending on who you ask, the two have very different kinds of fame. One is the creator of the operating system that reshaped modern computing. The other has more than 16 million followers, and it’s hard to find a tech enthusiast who hasn’t seen his videos. But as Torvalds joked at the start of the video, when signing a book about himself, “To fake Linus from the real one.”

The premise of the video—building the “perfect” Linux PC, as the title “Building the PERFECT Linux PC with Linus Torvalds” suggests—is mostly just a vehicle for the conversation. The focus isn’t really on assembling the machine but on the dialogue between the two and Torvalds’ answers to questions that many Linux users have long been curious about.

The merged EXT4 changes for Linux 6.19 bring some of the most prominent feature changes in recent times for this mature and widely-used Linux file-system.

It's not too often seeing multiple new EXT4 features land for a single kernel merge window, but that's the case this round with Linux 6.19. First up, EXT4 has optimized its online defragmentation process by leveraging folios rather than individual buffer heads. Secondly, there is now support for file-systems with a block size greater than the page size. This follows other file-systems also recently adapting to support block sizes larger than the kernel page size, such as the infrastructure in Linux 6.15 and then used by Btrfs and friends already. EXT4 is seeing some nice performance results with the large block size support.

Linux's Integrity Policy Enforcement "IPE" module is gaining a useful addition with the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel.

The Linux Integrity Policy Enforcement now honors the "AT_EXECVE_CHECK" flag so user-space interpreters can signal to the kernel to perform IPE security checks on script files before execution. This functionality with AT_EXECVE_CHECK extends IPE enforcement now to indirectly-executed scripts on the system.

The Linux kernel's printk code for logging kernel messages has some useful improvements with the Linux 6.19 kernel.

First up is the possibility to "significantly" speed up the Linux boot process for some systems by releasing the console lock between reach record in the KThread used for legacy consoles on real-time (RT) kernels. If you are using a legacy console on a Linux RT system, the boot time can be much better with Linux 6.19.

The out-of-tree Bcachefs file-system is ready with its reconcile feature, which previously was known as "rebalance_v2", and what lead developer Kent Overstreet calls the biggest feature to this copy-on-write file-system in the last two years.

Overstreet announced today that the Bcachefs reconcile feature is ready:

"Biggest new feature in the past ~2 years, I believe. The user facing stuff may be short and sweet - but so much going on under the hood to make all this smooth and polished."

Less than two weeks after the November release, Raspberry Pi OS received its December update with a collection of usability improvements, desktop refinements, and important stability fixes.

The release introduces a safe-eject mechanism for USB-connected HDD and NVMe drives, allowing users to remove external storage without risking data corruption. The Labwc desktop also gains a new Alt-F2 shortcut for opening the run dialog, extending its keyboard-driven workflow.

Moreover, the update adjusts how the Screens control panel behaves by no longer generating a default kanshi configuration file on launch, ensuring that existing user configurations are not unintentionally overwritten.

Developers behind Redox OS, the original open-source operating system written from scratch in the Rust programming language, have ported Wayland to it with initially getting the Smallvil Wayland compositor up and running along with the Smithay framework and the Wayland version of the GTK toolkit.

The Redox OS project published their November 2025 status update where one of their main accomplishments for the past month is getting these initial Wayland components up and running on it. Before getting too excited though, they note that the Wayland compositor's performance is "not adequate" and thus more work to do on their Wayland support but an exciting first milestone

The Linux kernel's innovative sched_ext code for being able to easily write extensible task schedulers using eBPF programs has some nice enhancements merged for Linux 6.19.

With Linux 6.19 the extensible scheduler class brings improved recovery for misbehaving (e)BPF schedulers. The pull request explains:

"Improve recovery from misbehaving BPF schedulers. When a scheduler puts many tasks with varying affinity restrictions on a shared DSQ, CPUs scanning through tasks they cannot run can overwhelm the system, causing lockups. Bypass mode now uses per-CPU DSQs with a load balancer to avoid this, and hooks into the hardlockup detector to attempt recovery. Add scx_cpu0 example scheduler to demonstrate this scenario."

Alpine, a lightweight, musl-based and systemd-free (OpenRC is the default init system) Linux distribution, has just released version 3.23 as the distro moves to the brand-new Linux kernel 6.18, which was promoted to an LTS release today.

Core developer tools receive major upgrades, including GCC 15, LLVM 21, Go 1.25, Rust 1.91, PHP 8.5, and PostgreSQL 18. The release also updates a long list of user-facing components, including GNOME 49, KDE Plasma 6.5.3, LXQt 2.3, Sway 1.11, and Qt 6.10.

Another highlight is that this version introduces APK-Tools v3. The new package manager version is designed to be a seamless in-place upgrade for most users, retaining the v2 package format while preparing the system for future changes.

ReactOS as the open-source operating system aiming to be an "open-source Windows" by striving for binary compatibility with Windows programs and device drivers is now slightly better with its USB support.

ReactOS developers shared news today that a number of bug fixes for USB drivers have been merged. In particular, it should fix various Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) issues reported when running ReactOS on real hardware with USB. They remarked, "USB stack is now reported to be a bit more stable ;)"

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/39776658

Bazzite is seeing an insane amount of growth right now

Alpine Linux 3.23 is out today as the newest feature release for this lightweight Linux distribution built around musl libc and BusyBox that has become quite popular for containers and embedded uses.

With Alpine Linux 3.23 it's powered by the new Linux 6.18 LTS kernel as well as moving to the GCC 15 compiler and having LLVM 21 available. Plus a variety of other software updates like Rust 1.91, Valkey 9.0, OpenZFS 2.4.0-rc4, Docker 29, OpenJDK Java 25, PHP 8.5, Perl 5.42, PostgreSQL 18, and many other key package updates. On the desktop side there is GNOME 49, KDE Plasma 6.5.3, LXQt 2.3, and Sway 1.11.

It’s time to finally build the ticket to my well-deserved freedom from Windows! Join me as I desperately try to make this new Linux PC work, and who knows, it might even end up amazing!

Over time, many Linux users wind up with a collection of aliases, shell scripts, and makefiles to run simple commands (or a series of commands) that are often used, but challenging to remember and annoying to type out at length. The just command runner is a Rust-based utility that just does one thing and does it well: it reads recipes from a text file (aptly called a "justfile"), and runs the commands from an invoked recipe. Rather than accumulating a library of one-off shell scripts over time, just provides a cross-platform tool with a framework and well-documented syntax for collecting and documenting tasks that makes it useful for solo users and collaborative projects.

just what it is

Using just has a few advantages over a collection of scripts or bending make to uses it may not be intended for. It's certainly easier to get started with than make for newer Linux users who haven't had the need to learn make previously. Generally, just is more ergonomic for what it does; it isn't a complete replacement for shell scripts or scripting, but it provides a better framework, organization, and user experience.

Last week I provided a look at how Intel's GPU compute performance on Battlemage evolved in 2025. In today's article is a similar Intel Arc A-Series "Alchemist" and B-Series "Battlemage" look at how the OpenGL and Vulkan graphics performance has evolved over the past year. Simply put, the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack has evolved immensely this year... Not just for Vulkan but even the OpenGL support continues moving in the right direction too.

A proposal was raised a month ago for Fedora Linux 44 to replace the kernel's frame-buffer console "FBCON" with KMSCON in user-space. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now granted approval for making this change in Fedora 44 as part of a larger foal to eventually deprecate FBCON/FBDEV emulation in the kernel.

There is some apprehension if all the proper fall-backs will be in place and robust enough in the event of any problems with this user-space console solution, but ultimately there was unanimous approval in the FESCo ticket for going ahead with these KMSCON plans for Fedora 44.

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer announced the release today of xkbcomp 1.5, the CLI utility used for compiling X Keyboard Extension (XBD) keyboard descriptions for the X.Org Server. Driving this new xkbcomp release are fixes for four security issues.

These four security issues originate from within code originally inside the libxkbcommon library and back in 2018 was flagged with four CVEs. Those security issues included endless recursion resulting in a crash and three null pointer dereference issues leading to possible crashes.