The GNOME.org Extensions hosting for GNOME Shell extensions will no longer accept new contributions with AI-generated code. A new rule has been added to their review guidelines to forbid AI-generated code.

I installed Linux Mint for the first time on my personal Laptop just a few months ago, and it ran so well that I didn't want to mess with it to try out different distros.

The topic of the Rust experiment was just discussed at the annual Maintainers Summit. The consensus among the assembled developers is that Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental — it is now a core part of the kernel and is here to stay. So the "experimental" tag will be coming off. Congratulations are in order for all of the Rust for Linux team.

https://system76.com/pop/download/

So it begins.

We're on the road to the release of Wine 11 early next year with the first Release Candidate now available for the Windows compatibility layer. This is what Valve's Proton is originally based on, and so eventually next year we'll see Proton 11 too.

In a notice published on Tuesday, the US Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) said tourists to the US from 42 countries including Australia would have to reveal all of their social media activity over the past five years under the new rule

Warn you if there’s a way you could get a product for cheaper before you purchase it.

The developer team at Discord released a new engineering blog post yesterday (December 8th) detailing lots of fixes, along with some Linux improvements. As one of the most popular chat apps in the world, it's good to see their support of Linux continue to get better over time.

In mid-September, we reported that Nick Wellnhofer, the long-time maintainer of the widely used XML parsing library libxml2, planned to step down from the project. A few days ago, that change became official.

https://system76.com/pop/download/

Diptyx is a new open-source e-reader now crowdfunding on Crowd Supply, positioning itself as a long-term alternative to locked-down commercial devices. Built around an ESP32 microcontroller and a distinctive dual-screen design, the device focuses on ownership, repairability, and offline reading without DRM or cloud dependencies.

A political social stealth narrative game about lying and stealing from the ultra-wealthy? Better Than Us certainly sounds like a game for the times. Sitting somewhere between a point and click adventure and a visual novel, it has a really great style to it.

While the Linux kernel has inclusive terminology guidelines for the past five years to replace phrases like master/slave and blacklist/whitelist, there has surprisingly been a "genocide" function within the kernel that was questioned when it was first submitted for inclusion but now removed in Linux 6.19.

pearOS, a Linux distro that aims to look and behave like Apple’s macOS, is once again in active development with a new base, design, installer, and more.

Absolutely smashing their goals, the KDE team have managed to have a huge success for the 2025 fundraiser that's currently ongoing. 70% of KDE funding comes directly from users, so it's essential to help fund the free and open source software that you love.

Lemmy is a self-hosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top. Thanks to @flamingos-cant for contributing to resolve this.

A year after the previous 6.4 release, the Linux Mint development team has rolled out Cinnamon 6.6, with the desktop environment set to debut in the upcoming Linux Mint 22.3 “Zena” expected around Christmas.

Rust for Linux lead developer Miguel Ojeda posted the patch a short time ago to "conclude the Rust experiment". The "experiment" of Rust programming language code in the Linux kernel is over as it's now accepted to be a success and "Rust is here to stay" in the kernel.

CtrlAssist – an open source project to bring more accessible, collaborative gaming to Linux! Inspired by PC gaming sessions with my own family, where both young and old relish exploring rich stories with immersive worlds (like Witcher 3, RDR3, Hogwarts Legacy, etc) but find coordinated combat or movement control too challenging to play solo, CtrlAssist lets you combine multiple controllers into one virtual gamepad, much like assist features on dedicated game consoles.

I have been getting monitor tearing time to time, even with windows. It wasn't occurring often, and I could fix it by turning the monitor off and on, so I have been sleeping on it.

as seen on steamdeck

Dozens of government and university websites belonging to cities, towns, and public agencies across the country are hosting PDFs promoting AI porn apps, porn sites, and cryptocurrency scams; dozens more have been hit with a website redirection attacks which lead to animal vagina sex toy ecommerce pages, penis enlargement treatments, automatically-downloading Windows program files, and porn.

Rust Coreutils 0.5 is now available as the latest milestone for this Rust-based alternative to GNU Coreutils. Rust Coreutils 0.5 continues moving closer to "full GNU compatibility" with nearly a 90% pass rate on the GNU test suite.

The big set of networking subsystem updates was recently merged for the ongoing Linux 6.19 merge window. There are some enticing core networking improvements like a big performance improvement for heavy transfer workloads, Bluetooth PAST enablement, and more. Plus a lot of wired and wireless networking driver activity and new hardware enablement.

Bringing more classic gaming goodies with the Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 7, D7VK 1.0 is out now for Linux.

TL;DR - About switching from Linux Mint to Qubes OS from among various other options that try to provide security out-of-the-box (also discussed: OpenBSD, SculptOS, Ghaf, GrapheneOS)

Video tutorial of Creative Generalist channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JztSbwWZzsw

With Firefox 146 being released today to the stable channel, Mozilla has promoted the next major version of its open-source, free, and cross-platform web browser, Firefox 147, to the beta channel for public testing.

Merged during this second week of the Linux 6.19 feature merge window were the many x86 platform driver changes. As usual, much of the x86 platform driver activity surrounds bettering Linux hardware laptop support but also a growing number of handheld computers / gaming devices.

Presented by Igalia's Guilherme Piccoli at Linux Plumbers Conference 2025

This is my Gnome desktop right now. Nothing too fancy, just the usual Gnome 49 with extensions (Blur my shell, AutoAccentColour, System Monitor, etc.), a Win11 inspired background and two apps running (Vivaldi browser playing a Youtube video and Kew music player in a terminal).

Hi,

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developers now have a need to set a policy whether AI / Large Language Model (LLM) generated patches will be accepted for this open-source compiler stack.

Today I released a new version of SSH Pilot, a user-friendly SSH connection manager.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system has received a recent port of the Go programming language to the platform. Plus Haiku also saw app improvements and more over the month of November.

The developers of the ParrotOS ethical hacking and penetration testing distribution announced today the general availability of the beta version of the upcoming Parrot 7.0 release with major changes.

In the open-source ecosystem, funding has long been a central challenge, often determining whether a project can grow sustainably or slowly fade away. And while many initiatives continue to struggle for financial support, it’s encouraging to see others, like KDE, not only maintain a stable foundation but even surpass expectations.

A new patch series from an NXP engineer optimizes the secure erase performance for certain Kingston eMMC devices. Currently with the Linux kernel performing a secure erase on 1GB of data can take around ten minutes. With these new patches that 1GB secure erase can be done in around two seconds.

Dungeons of DUSK has been announced from New Blood Interactive. It's a retro dungeon crawler set canonically between the episodes of the classic FPS DUSK. How exactly does it fit in? According to New Blood it "starts right after the end of Episode 1 of DUSK. Literally".

Compare with 2024: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-operating-system

Following last week's Wine 11.0-rc1 release that marked the feature freeze as well in working toward Wine 11.0 in January, out today is Wine 11.0-rc2.

The widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library has merged initial support for JPEG-XS.

The Linux Foundation today announced it's formed another foundation under its growing umbrella that extends well beyond the traditional "Linux" landscape: the Agentic AI Foundation.

In short:

Interview with Oglaf creator.couple, i didn't realise they were Australian!

The artwork looks great, but I can see why Escapist called it "Sarah Contra 3"

The KDE team has announced Plasma 6.5.4, the fourth bugfix update to the major 6.5 series, which follows three weeks after the previous 6.5.3 release. While no new features are introduced, Plasma 6.5.4 focuses on refinement and reliability.

Together with my then-colleague Kalev Lember, I recently added support for pre-installing Flatpak applications. It sounds fancy, but it is conceptually very simple: Flatpak reads configuration files from several directories to determine which applications should be pre-installed. It then installs any missing applications and removes any that are no longer supposed to be pre-installed (with some small caveats).

The development team behind Scribus, an open-source and cross-platform desktop publishing app, released version 1.6.5 today as yet another minor update to the Scribus 1.6 stable series.

The Linux 6.19-rc1 kernel is out to cap off the Linux 6.19 merge window. The kernel release is coming the better part of a day earlier due to Linus Torvalds being in Japan for this past week's Linux Plumbers Conference and Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit.

A lovely blast from the past of 2015, Nuclear Throne from the revived Vlambeer has update #100 out now with some major additions and improvements. Originally founded by Rami Ismail and Jan Willem Nijman, nowadays Nijman owns 100% of the company after Ismail sold their part in it back in 2024.

Edit: I want a graphical window switcher that's fully keyboard controlled, so I can see the windows before switching them.

You can find more details about and discuss this release on the official forums.

Overview

Beginning with the Linux 6.19 kernel, the hung task detector and system lock-up detector are now optionally able to provide greater insight into the issues by dumping additional system information. The new lockup_sys_info and hung_task_sys_info sysctl knobs were merged over as part of the pull requests managed by Andrew Morton.

There's another setback to the open-source driver code around Intel's Gaudi accelerator support on Linux.

Signal only provides a script for .deb based distros on their official website. The flatpak is currently not ideal because it stores encryption keys in plaintext.

No Half-life 3 rule...

Linux containers have made it reasonably easy to develop, distribute, and deploy server applications along with all the distribution dependencies that they need. For example, anyone can deploy and run a Debian-based PostgreSQL container on a Fedora Linux host. Distrobox is a project that is designed to bring the cross-distribution compatibility to the desktop and allow users to mix-and-match Linux distributions without fussing with dual-booting, virtual machines, or multiple computers. It is an ideal way to install additional software on image-based systems, such as Fedora's Atomic Desktops or Bazzite, and also provides a convenient way to move a development environment or favorite applications to a new system.

Stemming from a security researcher and his team proposing a new Linux Security Module (LSM) three years ago and it not being accepted to the mainline kernel, he raised issue over the lack of review/action to Linus Torvalds and the mailing lists. In particular, seeking more guidance for how new LSMs should be introduced and raised the possibility of taking the issue to the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB).