As expected, the recently released Linux 6.18 kernel series has been officially marked as LTS (Long Term Support) on the kernel.org website with a predicted life expectancy of at least two years.

This month, we’re unveiling Home Assistant Labs, a brand-new space
where you can preview features before they go mainstream. And what
better way to kick it off than with Winter mode? ❄️ Enable it and
watch snowflakes drift across your dashboard. It’s completely
unnecessary, utterly delightful, and exactly the kind of thing we
love to build. ❄️

But that’s just the beginning. We’ve been working on making
automations more intuitive over the past releases, and this release
finally delivers purpose-specific triggers and conditions. Instead
of thinking in (numeric) states, you can now simply say “When a
light turns on” or “If the climate is heating”. It’s automation
building the way our mind works, as it should be.

Let’s Encrypt begins a multi-year transition to shorter certificate validity, moving from 90-day to 45-day certificates.

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.

The Django Python web
framework project has announced
the release of Django 6.0 including many new features, as can be seen in
the release
notes. Some highlights include template partials for modularizing
templates, a flexible task framework for running background tasks, a
modernized email API, and a Content
Security Policy (CSP) feature that provides the ability to “easily configure and enforce browser-level security policies to protect against content injection“.

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…

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.

Hammerspace maximizes your GPU usage using your existing NVMe storagePartner content As AI computing expands across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, infrastructure teams are under pressure to accelerate time-to-insight while maximizing GPU investments. But too often, storage becomes the bottleneck.…

Not exactly a big surprise but the recently released Linux 6.18 kernel is now officially promoted to being this year’s Long Term Support “LTS” kernel…

The pull requests landing the power management subsystem updates for Linux 6.19 along with the ACPI and thermal control code have landed. There is new hardware support, Microsoft ACPI Fan Extensions support, and other new features for Linux power management in this new kernel…

The first alpha release of the LibreOffice 26.2 open-source and cross platform office suite is now available for testing ahead of its official release in February…

Rocky Linux 9.7 introduces post-quantum cryptography policies, toolchain updates, a refreshed Cockpit UI, and expanded image creation options for developers.

Sound Open Firmware is one of the projects started originally by Intel but has grown into a multi-vendor initiative for open-source audio digital signal processing (DSP) firmware and development tooling for a variety of platforms under the Linux Foundation umbrella…

Merged yesterday to the Linux 6.19 Git codebase was the “core/uaccess” pull that introduces new scoped user-mode access with auto-cleanup functionality. This can reduce the number of speculation barriers encountered when needing to access user-mode memory and thereby avoiding some of the performance penalties incurred by speculation barriers…

Google engineer Eric Biggers who is known for his many Linux crypto subsystem performance optimizations has seen his latest pull requests land in Linux 6.19. Notable among them are some AES-GCM optimizations benefiting AMD Zen 3 processors and separately AVX-512 processors also benefit too from this latest round of optimization work…

Docker container images often contain security vulnerabilities inherited from their base operating system packages. Rather than rebuilding images from scratch, you can use Trivy to scan for vulnerabilities and Copa to patch them directly. This tutorial demonstrates how to identify and fix container vulnerabilities on Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora systems using these two powerful open-source tools.

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…

Via the openSUSE Innovator Initiative, packaging of the Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) driver for the openSUSE ecosystem has begun. This is helping to jump-start the Intel NPU support within the openSUSE space although user-space applications ready to leverage the Intel NPU still remains very limited…

Mission-Center offers a single interface for tracking resource usage and managing processes and services, making routine system checks easier from the desktop.

The post Mission-Center Delivers a Polished System Monitor for Linux Power Users appeared first on FOSS Force.

Whether you want a studio rig or a featherweight desktop, MX Linux spins have you coveredAV Linux and MX Moksha are a pair of distros tweaked for audio and music production, each using a different branch of the Enlightenment family of desktops.…