Linux

Over the years, I’ve often thought that, despite how fast-moving the desktop Linux ecosystem is, there’s not much left that could truly surprise me. Yet I keep being proven wrong, and that’s a good thing. Winux, one of the newest additions to the scene, is a clear example.

Whether I like it or not, this distribution brings back memories of about 20 years ago, when Lindows, later renamed Linspire under legal (and fully justified) pressure from Microsoft, first tried to take the path of a Linux distribution built entirely to be as close as possible to the Windows experience.

Today, several Linux distributions aim to position themselves as an easy starting point, and even a replacement for Windows users looking to switch without friction. Zorin OS is a well-known example. Even so, these projects keep their own Linux identity, with similarities to Windows being more indirect than literal.

The This Week In Plasma series written by KDE developer Nate Graham has been a great way to keep-up with all of the interesting KDE Plasma desktop developments over the past eight years. This Week In Plasma is regularly featured on Phoronix and always provides an interesting weekend look at the very newest innovations to land in Plasma. Unfortunately, This Week In Plasma will become less frequent or even go on hiatus without new volunteer contributors.

There was no This Week In Plasma edition this week and Nate Graham today put out a blog post explaining the situation. Long story short, due to work and family responsibilities, Nate has less time to invest in This Week In Plasma and thus is looking for new contributors to take over.

OC by @bpt11@reddthat.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40849372

I'm looking at starting a small local Linux Users Group (LUG).

What are good easy ways to get started?

Seems like meetup.com is kinda anti-foss.

Are there better alternatives?

QNX, a real-time operating system for embedded systems, has released the initial version of its Self-Hosted Developer Desktop, introducing a native development environment that runs directly on QNX 8.0. The new setup is designed to eliminate the long-standing reliance on cross-compilation by enabling developers to build and test software entirely within QNX.

At the core of the release is a full desktop environment based on XFCE running on Wayland. The desktop is intended to lower the entry barrier for new QNX developers while also simplifying the process of porting existing Linux applications and libraries to QNX 8.0.

The environment comes preloaded with a broad set of development tools, including GCC, Clang, Python, Make, CMake, and Git, as well as a selection of commonly used editors and IDEs such as Geany, Emacs, Neovim, and Vim.

Fedora Linux this year continued in punctually shipping the very latest upstream Linux innovations from the freshest Wayland components to Linux kernel features and continuing to leverage other improvements in the open-source world.

Fedora enjoyed the successful Fedora 42 and Fedora 43 releases this year, including going with Wayland-noly GNOME and further phasing of 32-bit packages. Fedora's KDE spin continued improving too and the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution enjoyed a wealth of other improvements this year.

Fish, a popular user-friendly command-line shell, has announced version 4.3, a new release that builds on the 4.0 series.

One of the most notable changes affects how Fish handles configuration defaults. Universal variables are no longer set automatically. Instead, commonly used variables such as fish_color_, fish_pager_color_, and fish_key_bindings are now defined in the global scope.

On first startup after upgrading, Fish performs a one-time migration, freezing the current theme and key bindings into files under ~/.config/fish/conf.d/. Upstream recommends removing those generated files and managing themes directly in config.fish to keep configurations clean and predictable. Users can still opt into universal variables if needed, though this comes with limitations for dynamic theme switching.

https://github.com/ublue-os/countme/blob/main/growth_global.svg

Graphs can be found here on their github. Since around mid November the active user count for Bazzite has gone up by around 16k active users.

Sober is exclusively available on Flathub, whom published these figures in their Year In Review: https://flathub.org/en/year-in-review/2025

Similar to AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs where there was product overlap between the Radeon and AMDGPU kernel drivers (and now using AMDGPU by default for those aging Radeon GPUs with Linux 6.19), the Intel Arc A-Series "Alchenist" graphics cards are in a similar boat. By default the Alchemist and Meteor Lake graphics use the i915 kernel driver by default but they can optionally use the Xe kernel driver instead as what is Intel's modern open-source kernel graphics driver. As part of our various year end 2025 benchmarks, today is a look at the current i915 vs. Xe driver performance for the Intel Arc Graphics A580.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.19-rc3 to ship this week's fixes. Linux 6.19-rc3 is coming in light as expected due to the Christmas week with many corporate developers getting paid time off and others taking part in year-end festivities.

Linux 6.19-rc3 ships the latest batch of bug/regression fixes in working toward the Linux 6.19 stable release around early February. Among the fixes new to Linux 6.19-rc3 is a fix for ARM64 EFI systems crashing at boot on Linux 6.19 due to a bad change from the v6.19 merge window.

A GitHub repository maintained by Rockchip has been disabled following a DMCA takedown request filed by a contributor to the FFmpeg project. The company was informed about the problem nearly two years ago, but despite repeated assurances, it has still taken no action to resolve it. In the end, the expected happened.

The complaint alleges that Rockchip’s Media Process Platform (MPP) repository contains multiple files derived directly from FFmpeg’s libavcodec codebase and that the reuse violates the terms of the LGPL license under which FFmpeg is distributed.

For those unfamiliar, Rockchip is a Chinese semiconductor company best known for designing system-on-chip platforms widely used in single-board computers, Android devices, media players, and embedded Linux systems.

GNOME developer Sophie Herold has shared some interesting end-of-year code stats for the GNOME project. The "GNOME" codebase is up to 6,692,516 lines of code at the end of 2025 with 1,611,526 lines of that being from GNOME apps. Where the data gets interesting is on the programming language breakdown in different areas.

Of the official GNOME Core apps, Sophie found that 44.8% of them are written in the C programming language. That's followed by Vala with 20.7% and then JavaScript at 13.8%. Following JS is Rust with 10.3% of the GNOME Cores apps codebase being in Rust. Trailing Rust is Python at 6.9% and C++ at 3.45%.

Within the mainline Linux kernel already is the SteelSeries HID driver for supporting basic battery monitoring on the Arctis 1 and Arctis 9 gaming headsets. But a new patch series posted this morning to the Linux kernel mailing list overhaul this SteelSeries HID driver support. The patches take the support to 25+ different Arctis headset models and provide more comprehensive driver support.

Open-source developer Sriman Achanta posted the set of patches to greatly expand the supported Arctis headset line-up for the upstream hid-steelseries driver.

am regularly amazed that we pretend folders are the right way to organise files. They’re entirely arbitrary. Every competent file system ignores them to its best ability. Why can’t I have a file in two folders? Why does one have to be a “reference”? Why can’t I filter for files that exist in 3 folders with X extension?

We’ve been played for absolute fools.

Happy holidays to all in the KDE universe who celebrate them! As 2025 draws to a close, I thought it would be a good time to take stock.

“This Week in Plasma” began 8 years ago as a development report for KDE’s Usability & Productivity goal, which had just been democratically selected by the community in the very first round of the new KDE Goals process.

Back then it wasn’t called “This Week in Plasma” (or “TWiP” for short), but eventually it would gain and change names, and move off my personal blog and onto KDE’s infrastructure.

During these past 8 years, I’ve done my best to keep the wider KDE community informed about what’s going on almost every week! And I’m constantly amazed and humbled by the positive feedback it’s generated.

It was a very interesting year for Ubuntu Linux. Ahead of the important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release due out this coming April, Ubuntu Linux this year was expeditiously migrating to new Rust-based system tools like sudo-rs and Rust Coreutils, new performance optimizations continued to be explored for bettering the out-of-the-box Ubuntu performance, better ARM64 support with its desktop ISO, and enhancing the Snapdragon X Elite laptop support were among the Ubuntu highlights in 2025.

Out of the 120+ original Ubuntu Linux news articles on Phoronix -- and not counting the hundreds of reviews / featured benchmark articles using Ubuntu -- below is a look at the most popular Ubuntu news on Phoronix for this calendar year. It will be interesting to see what more Canonical rolls out in the coming months for the all-important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release. Also if we hear anything more in 2026 about a potential Canonical IPO.

Debian has officially promoted loong64 to a supported architecture, following more than 2 years of development in Debian Ports. With this change, loong64 is expected to ship as a fully supported architecture in the upcoming Debian 14 release, codenamed Forky, provided the remaining integration work proceeds as planned.

The announcement was made on the debian-devel-announce mailing list, as official status means loong64 will follow the same build, release, and security processes as Debian’s other primary architectures.

The initial bootstrap phase has already made substantial progress. An initial set of 112 packages was manually built and imported from Debian Ports, which was sufficient to create a working chroot environment and bring the first build daemon online.

Here is some news that both excited me and gave me pause. In its annual 2025 retrospective, published today, Arch-based CachyOS, widely popular among Linux gamers and heavily focused on performance optimization, reveals plans I did not expect: an expansion into the server space.

“In addition to our ongoing PGO and AutoFDO optimizations, we are developing a specialized ‘Server’ Edition for NAS, workstations, and server environments. We intend to provide a verified image that hosting providers can easily deploy for their customers. This edition will ship with a hardened configuration, pre-tuned settings, and performance-optimized packages for web servers, databases and more!”

Wine 11.0-rc4 is out today as the latest weekly release candidate in working toward the stable Wine 11.0 release in January.

With Wine 11.0 having been under a code/feature freeze since early December, it's strictly bug fixes the past four weeks. For this week's Wine 11.0-rc4 release there are 22 known fixes.

The fixes include taking care of gaming problems with Myst Masterpiece Edition, Heroes of Might and Magic 4, Dungeon Siege, eRaser, Wing Commander, and other games. Wine 11.0-rc4 also has fixes for Bitwarden and other apps.

Downloads and more details on today's Wine 11.0-rc4 release via WineHQ.org GitLab.