Our Larry Cafiero takes a look at Solus and its homegrown desktop Budgie, and discovers why it’s one of the most popular scratch-built distros.

The post Solus 4.8 ‘Opportunity’: An Independent Distro Struts Its Stuff appeared first on FOSS Force.

Version
1.92.0 of Rust has been released. This release includes a number
of stabilized APIs, emits unwind tables by default on Linux, validates
input to #[macro_export], and much more. See the separate
release notes for Rust,
Cargo,
and Clippy.

Back in October System76 announced a planned release date for Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS and the COSMIC Desktop… And they’ve made it! The new Pop!_OS 24.04 is now available for download as the long-awaited update atop an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base while using their Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment…

The first topic of discussion at the 2025 Maintainers Summit has been in
the air for a while: what role — if any — should machine-learning-based
tools have in the kernel development process? While there has been a fair
amount of controversy around these tools, and concerns remain, it seems
that the kernel community, or at least its high-level maintainership, is
comfortable with these tools becoming a significant part of the development
process.

The D7VK project recently started as the Direct3D 7 API implemented atop the Vulkan API akin to DXVK and VKD3D-Proton with newer versions of Microsoft Direct3D. Today marks the D7VK 1.0 release for this project in now declaring itself “production ready” for Linux gamers…

With the NVIDIA 590 Linux driver series removing GeForce 900 series “Maxwell” and GeForce 10 series “Pascal” as part of punting it off to the latest legacy driver branch, it’s time for a last look at how the mainline NVIDIA Linux driver is performing with these aging graphics cards relative to the current state of the upstream open-source NVIDIA Linux drivers. In this article is a look at how the open-source and upstream Nouveau kernel driver with Nouveau/NVK Mesa drivers are performing relative to the NVIDIA 580 series with its Maxwell and Pascal support. For further perspective is also tossing in newer graphics cards too for providing a end-of-year GeForce 980 / 1080 / 2080 / 3080 / 4080 / 5080 series comparison between these different Linux drivers.

Tails 7.3.1 has been released today as the third minor update in the Tails 7.x series of this portable Linux distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux and designed to protect you against surveillance and censorship.

Early this year AMD announced the open-source GAIA project for “Generative AI Is Awesome” as a showcase of AI support atop their Ryzen AI NPUs and other hardware. That began as a Windows-only project but in September AMD added Linux support to GAIA but only using Vulkan acceleration for AI on Radeon GPUs. Now today GAIA 0.14 is available with “native” support for both macOS and Linux…

It was just at the end of month that Ubuntu 26.04 Snapshot 1 ISOs were published for the first “Resolute Raccoon” milestone. Out already is now Snapshot 2 with Canonical releasing these images ahead of their engineers having time off for end-of-year holidays…

OpenTofu 1.11 introduces ephemeral resources, safer temporary data handling, and language updates for more secure, flexible infrastructure automation.

KDE Gear 25.12 is out today as the collection of the latest KDE desktop/mobile applications for running nicely on the Plasma 6 desktop…

Earlier in the year Microsoft proposed the “Hornet” Linux security module to provide signature verification capabilities for eBPF programs to provide for better system security. It’s been months since hearing anything more about it and not being merged, but yesterday they “reintroduced” it to the Linux kernel community…

Last month the Vulkan VK_EXT_present_timing extension was merged after 5+ years in development. VK_EXT_present_timing ended up debuting at the end of November within the Vulkan 1.4.335 spec update to much excitement for providing functionality to obtain information on the presentation engine’s display for accurate timing information and to assist in scheduling a present to happen no earlier than a desired time. This is a big win for helping avoid game stuttering and more while now the Mesa support for it is nearly complete and could be merged soon…

Linus Torvalds merged the Device Mapper “DM” changes overnight that include one stand-out change for Linux 6.19…

Following yesterday’s release of a new llm-scaler-omni beta there is now a new beta feature release of llm-scaler-vllm that provides the Intel-optimized version of vLLM within a Docker container that is set and ready to go for AI on modern Arc Graphics hardware. With today’s llm-scaler-vllm 1.2 beta release there is support for a variety of additional large language models (LLMs) and other improvements…

We love hearing from members of the community and sharing the stories of amazing young people, volunteers, and educators who are using their passion for technology to create positive change in the world around them.

In our latest story, we’re meeting a group of inspiring young innovators from Belfast — Michelle, 15, Inilouwa, 18, Jedidiah, 14 — and Irioluwa, 11, who are using their creativity and technical skills to tackle an issue that impacts millions of young women across the UK: period poverty.

The power of community

The group first connected through Diverse Youth, a community space that gave them the chance to collaborate, learn, and grow.

At the youth centre, the girls were introduced to Code Club through mentor, and Jedidiah’s mum, Tiwa. When Tiwa offered them the opportunity to travel to Coolest Projects UK and showcase projects they had been working on, they knew they wanted to make something special…

Tackling taboo topics

The idea for Flow Body began when Inilouwa was inspired by her sister’s experience at school.

“So, for me, it was my sister actually, that really inspired this project because she would tell me, her school at the time, they run out of period products very frequently, so not a lot of girls could access it.” 

Wanting to make a difference, the team created Flow Body, a website connecting young women to period charities in the UK and providing reliable information about periods, puberty, and related health issues.

Playing to their strengths

The technical side of the project was led by Inilouwa, with the rest of her teammates supporting her with research and content creation.

“So, alongside Michelle, I researched the diseases and what can come from period poverty and how different people get by with the lack of period products around,” Jedidiah said.

Their research highlighted just how widespread period-related health issues are.

The team discovered that one of the biggest challenges is access to accurate information, given the stigma around discussing menstruation, and using technology to solve this issue seemed like the perfect fit to them.

Inilouwa explained, “Having that access to information that’s tailored to young women, to young parents, to everyone all across the board would be really helpful, you know, in order to make periods less of a strange topic to discuss.”

Celebrating teamwork

After taking home judges’ favourite in the web category, the girls could not recommend the experience enough. When asked what advice they would give to other young people thinking of taking the leap and entering Coolest Projects, the answer was simple…

“Do it. Don’t be afraid. Even if tech is not your thing, it’s not a lot of people’s things. But like you learn so much, you grow so much and it’s very fun. It is. It really is,” said Inilouwa.

If you are interested in getting involved in Coolest Projects, keep an eye on the website for exciting announcements for 2026 plans.

Want support on your coding journey? Find a Code Club near you to learn alongside a likeminded community.

The post Celebrating the community: Irioluwa, Michelle, Jedidiah and Inioluwa appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

One of the most widely deployed Linux kernels has officially reached the end of its lifecycle. The maintainers of the Linux kernel have confirmed that Linux 5.4, once a cornerstone of countless servers, desktops, and embedded devices, is now end-of-life (EOL). After years of long-term support, the branch has been retired and will no longer receive upstream fixes or security updates.

RPM 6.0.1 package manager addresses crashes, crypto issues, and build problems introduced in RPM 6.0.

The Linux Mint team released today the Cinnamon 6.6 desktop environment, which will be the default in the upcoming Linux Mint 22.3 (Zena) release expected in late December 2025 or in early 2026.

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…