KDE Linux developers have been experimenting with a build of their Linux distribution based on BuildStream to ship as an OS image rather than a set of Arch Linux packages. They are nearing a point soon where they will decide if they will officially ship this BuildStream-based KDE Linux image…

Rust 1.99 adds support for defining C-compatible variadic functions, expands raw pointer layout APIs, and stabilizes a new batch of standard library features.

Nitrux 7.0 immutable, systemd-free GNU/Linux distribution is now available for download with Linux kernel 7.2, Hyprland 0.55.4, Maui Apps 4.0.4, an updated Calamares installer, and other changes.

While there have been a number of Ubuntu 26.10 development benchmarks in recent weeks and more on the way, some Phoronix readers have asked about the lack of any early Fedora 45 tests given its recent beta. For good reason, it’s largely boring but here are some to illustrate.

In this article, you will learn how to install Go (Golang) on your preferred Linux distribution via the package manager or source code, with practical examples.

As a major disappointment to the open-source community, Siemens has decided to end — and close-up access — to the OpenRadioss project as the open-source version opened up by Altair Engineering under the GNU AGPL License back in 2022. This was an open-source version of the industry-leading finite element solver that Altair developed. Siemens acquired Altair Engineering last year and have now completely shut the door on OpenRadioss…

As a major disappointment to the open-source community, Siemens has decided to end — and close-up access — to the OpenRadioss project as the open-source version opened up by Altair Engineering under the GNU AGPL License back in 2022. This was an open-source version of the industry-leading finite element solver that Altair developed. Siemens acquired Altair Engineering last year and have now completely shut the door on OpenRadioss…

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%…

While there have been a number of Ubuntu 26.10 development benchmarks in recent weeks and more on the way, some Phoronix readers have asked about the lack of any early Fedora 45 tests given its recent beta. For good reason, it’s largely boring but here are some to illustrate.

AI technologies, such as smart speakers or streaming recommendations, are becoming part of everyday life for children and teenagers. It’s therefore increasingly important to help young people understand not just how these systems work, but how to question them.

When AI systems generate outputs such as a recommendation, these outputs are often accompanied by an explanation. In our latest research seminar, Professor Dr. Dan Verständig (Goethe University Frankfurt, Center for Critical Computational Studies) spoke about how explanations are shaped by the people who write them, and only become meaningful when someone else makes sense of them. Dan introduced us to Social Explainable AI (Social XAI) and Critical Computational Literacy (CCL), and asked us to consider not just what an AI system explains, but for whom, why, and who benefits.

Why do we need explanations?

Dan opened with a deceptively simple question: why do we need explanations in the first place? His answer was that explanations provide orientation. They reduce uncertainty, and in doing so, they make our shared social world liveable. Explanations have evolved from Socratic dialogue, to the printed book, to the classroom, to today’s digital interfaces, and now to AI-generated explanations. But explanations have never been neutral conveyors of information. Dan illustrated this with a simple demonstration: he showed the seminar participants an aerial photo of a beach and asked what they noticed.

The aerial photo Dan shared during his seminar. What do you notice about this picture?

Seminar participants pointed to the coastline, the sandy beach, and a tiny figure in the frame. Dan then revealed that the photo was taken by him, using a drone at Montara State Beach in California on a specific afternoon in April 2024. He asked how a climate researcher, a surfer, or an artist might each describe the very same image differently.

This demonstration highlighted that an explanation is always for someone, for some purpose, in some context. That framing carries straight through into how we should think about AI explanations too. An explanation that satisfies a data scientist debugging a model is not the same as one that satisfies a patient asking why an algorithm flagged their scan, or a citizen asking why they were denied a loan. In other words, explanations are never technical.

From delivering explanations to co-constructing them

Drawing on Rohlfing and Lim’s 2026 work, Dan described Social XAI as an approach that puts interaction, rather than output, at the centre of explainability. Dan illustrated this with a simple but effective diagram: an AI explanation starts as a system output, is filtered through a person’s interpretation, and only then becomes meaning through construction. A one-size-fits-all output, however technically accurate, isn’t yet an explanation until someone has made sense of it in their own terms.

To explore this further, Dan’s research group has developed co-construction workshops, bringing people together to interrogate AI explanations collaboratively rather than receive them passively. In these workshops, participants are asked questions such as: “What counts as evidence? What is missing? What are the alternatives? Who benefits from this? Do we agree?”

To answer these questions, participants do not examine an AI model to find out how it generates a decision. Instead, participants scrutinise its outputs in the same way that they would critically evaluate a politician’s promise or a newspaper’s headline. 

Dimensions for engaging critically with explanations

Critical Computational Literacy (CCL) is a framework that describes what people need to engage with AI explanations critically. Dan presented CCL as consisting of four interlocking dimensions:

• Attitude — a critical stance and value awareness: approaching computational systems not as neutral tools but as artefacts that embed particular values and assumptions
• Biography — recognising that people’s relationships with technology are shaped by subjectivity, by the varied encounters they’ve had with computational systems, and by the diverse pathways that brought them to this point
• Capacity — the analytical, creative, and ethical skills needed to actually work with and through computational systems, not just talk about them
• Critique — the capacity that ties the other three dimensions together: asking what matters, and why

Taken together, these dimensions push back against a narrow, purely technical notion of ‘AI literacy’ as knowing how a model works. Instead, CCL treats literacy as something biographical and value-laden. Dan explained that individuals bring their own history and stance to any encounter with computational systems, and genuine literacy means being able to interrogate these systems’ explanations rather than simply accept or operate them.

Using these ideas in your classroom

Although Dan’s research took place with adult participants, Social XAI and Critical Computational Literacy are ideas that could also be used in the K-12 classroom. For example, if students interact with AI explanations through smart speakers or streaming recommendations in their everyday lives, this presents an opportunity to teach them how to engage critically with AI outputs. Students might explore why a smart speaker suggested a particular recipe, or investigate the explanation for why a streaming service recommended a particular show. 

Explainability is also a key part of our own Experience AI resources. When training a model, students write their own model cards to document who built a model, what training data was used, how accurate the model’s predictions were, and any known limitations. In this activity, explainability is traceable, and students use their analytical skills to create transparent, fair, and accountable model cards.

Social XAI suggests an extension to this activity. Students could ask what matters about the explanation they have written and why this is important. Through this critique, students can consider who will read these model cards and how the cards might be interpreted. In this way, AI explanations become more than a technical output, and become artefacts whose meaning is co-constructed by the author and the reader. 

This seminar was part of our ongoing series on teaching about AI in the arts, humanities, and sciences. You can watch the full recording of Dan’s talk, including the Q&A discussion, here:

Join our next seminar

Our research seminar series continues to explore how AI is taught across the curriculum. In our next seminar on Tuesday, 6 October at 19:00–20:30 BST, we welcome Eleni Petraki and Damith Herath (University of Canberra) who will present an engineering and robotics curriculum aimed at equipping future engineers with the diverse skills demanded by a growing workforce. To take part in the seminar, click the button below to register. We hope to see you there.

The schedule of our upcoming seminars is available online. You can catch up on past seminars on the blog and on the previous seminars and recordings page.

The post Not all explanations are equal: Social Explainable AI and Critical Computational Literacy appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (corosync, gawk, gdb, nodejs24, and thunderbird), Debian (expat, firefox-esr, libsmpp34, mkvtoolnix, network-manager-l2tp, pgextwlist, python-django, ruby-oj, and tor), Fedora (apptainer, ckermit, ffmpeg, freerdp, librabbitmq, openbao, php, python-cssselect2, python-uv-build, ruff, rust-libcst, rust-libcst_derive, rust-salsa, rust-salsa-macro-rules, rust-salsa-macros, sos, ty, uv, weasyprint, and xdg-dbus-proxy), Mageia (python-pillow), Red Hat (acl, glib2, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, libxml2, mingw-sqlite, nodejs-nodemon, nodejs22, nodejs24, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, sqlite, tesseract, and vim), Slackware (libpng and mozilla-thunderbird), SUSE (alloy, chromedriver, emacs, gdb, gimp, gpsd, jawn, libpoppler-cpp3, libtesseract5, multipath-tools, netty, ntfs-3g_ntfsprogs, pcapplusplus-devel, pi-coding-agent, python-PyYAML, python-tornado, python-tornado6, python311, python313, and wicked2nm), and Ubuntu (designate, gst-plugins-bad1.0, gvfs, imagemagick, kdenlive, mlt, keystone, libauthen-sasl-perl, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.8, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, linux-oracle-7.0, opensbi, openvpn, and python-django).

OpenMandriva Lx 26.09 ROME has been officially released today, October 1st, 2026, as the rolling-release version of OpenMandriva Lx, the successor of the Mandriva Linux operating system.

In addition to the very nice AMDGPU IOMMU optimization for iGPUs set to debut in the Linux 7.4 kernel, over on the AMD EPYC server side for servers running SEV-SNP virtual machines is a separate, nice optimization also expected for this next kernel version…

Longtime ARM Linux maintainer Arnd Bergmann over the past year has been working to clear out a number of old ARM platforms from the mainline kernel tree. With Linux 7.3 many older 32-bit ARM platforms were deprecated and in turn hundreds of kernel drivers orphaned. Now it’s on to removing that actual code, which given the amount of entangled code, is itself a challenge…

qBittorrent 5.2.4 has been released today as the fourth maintenance update to the latest qBittorrent 5.2 series of this open-source, cross-platform, and free BitTorrent client for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Earlier this year Intel announced the “Optimization Zone” as their new initiative to provide a centralized place to collect all their resources for maximizing performance and software tuning on Intel hardware platforms. They’ve continued building out more resources for the Intel Optimization Zone and yesterday released v1.2 with more tuning guides and best practices for optimal performance on Intel hardware…

Back in August I wrote about NVIDIA working on Linux scheduler improvements for helping the SMT performance on their new Vera CPU with Olympus cores. That work remains ongoing but is looking fairly beneficial for performance especially for knocking it out in less than one hundred lines of code…

Rob Clark, who originally started working on the reverse-engineering Freedreno and MSM DRM graphics driver projects prior to even being employed by Qualcomm, presented this week at XDC 2026 Toronto around all the recent efforts they have been pursuing at Qualcomm for this upstream open-source graphics driver stack…

The Renesas SH7305 isn’t a new processor and is well known for powering various Casio graphing calculators over the past decde and a half. But finally the mainline Linux kernel may end up seeing support for this 32-bit SH-4a RISC core…