The F-Droid project has announced
the release of F-Droid 2.0, which is a complete redesign of the official
app. Notable changes in the release include making it easier to discover and
install applications, more useful app categories, improved search, and
much more.

For more than a decade, F-Droid has helped people discover and install free
and open source Android apps. F-Droid 2.0 builds on that foundation with a
modern interface, better app discovery, improved search, and a simpler
experience that works well, whether you’re new to F-Droid or have been using it
for years.

This isn’t just a visual refresh. The user experience was redesigned to
integrate smoothly with current Android patterns, like Material Design, while
keeping familiar F-Droid interactions in place. Key components were reworked and
rewritten using Kotlin Compose, the standard toolkit these days, creating a
foundation that will help us deliver improvements more quickly in the years
ahead.

Sudheendra Raghav Neela, a member of a group of researchers from Graz University of Technology, has announced the
release of research into file-notification attacks that would allow spying on
user activity on Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows. The group has published a paper with
details on the research as well as a web site
with demonstrations of the vulnerabilities.

On Linux, an attacker can use inotifywatch to
monitor a directory to conduct an inter-keystroke timing attack—even if
they do not have read access to the files within a directory. The group also
discovered a method to conduct a UI-redress
attack (or “clickjacking” attack) on
KDE 5 and KDE 6 by monitoring /usr/bin/pkexec to detect when Polkit spawns an authentication
prompt. An attacker could draw a fake password window on top of the real window
to collect a user’s credentials.

Both of these flaws are still present today,
though the Linux kernel did partially mitigate the issue with a
fix that was included in the 5.10.248, 5.15.198, 6.1.160, 6.6.120, 6.12.65,
and 6.18.3 kernels shipped in January. See the web site for more information and
a mitigation to prevent password-prompt windows from losing focus.

One of the livelist Fedora Discourse community discussions in recent days — or even in quite a period of time for that matter — comes down to a user having suggested that Fedora replace LibreOffice by default with the downstream Collabora Office…

Many of the transmissions sent over the radio spectrum can
be decoded with a relatively cheap hardware dongle. Thomas Eckert presented at

RustConf 2026 in Montreal about his hobby:
decoding radio transmissions with Rust.
In his presentation, he
covered all of the math necessary to get started with

software-defined radio,
and gave demonstrations of listening to AM and FM radio, as well as decoding
transmissions from
aircraft transponders. His slides and example code are

available on GitHub.

After a two-year hiatus, LWN’s Jonathan Corbet presented an updated edition
of his Kernel
Report at the Kernel
Recipes conference. Corbet looked at what is happening in the kernel
community, how it’s dealing with a period of accelerated change, and where
things might go in the future. Video of the talk is
available on YouTube for those who’d like to tune in.

HarfBuzz is the open-source text shaping engine originally born out of the FreeType project and now widely-used by GNOME, KDE, Java, Flutter, Godot, Chromium, LibreOffice, and countless other applications. HarfBuzz 14.0 released today and making this release quite exciting is introducing a GPU-accelerated text rendering library…

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee “FESCo” this week rejected a change proposal for Fedora 45 that would use systemd’s environment generator functionality for managing per-user environment variables…

Following the DRM Color Pipeline API making it into the Linux 6.19 kernel, NVIDIA today released a preview Linux driver with their support for the DRM per-plane color pipeline API that will benefit the broader Linux/Wayland desktop HDR ambitions…

Michael Meeks has posted an
angry missive about changes at the Document Foundation. What has
really happened is not entirely clear, but it seems to involve, at a
minimum, the forced removal of all Collabora staff from the foundation.
There has been a set of “thank you” notes to the people involved posted in the
foundation’s forums. The Document Foundation’s decision to restart LibreOffice Online almost
certainly plays into this as well.

Details are fuzzy at best; we will be working at providing a clearer
picture, but that will take some time.

Pandoc is a document-conversion program
that can translate among a myriad of formats, including LaTeX, HTML, Office Open XML
(docx), plain text, and Markdown. It is also
extensible by writing Lua
filters that can manipulate the document structure and perform arbitrary
computations.
Pandoc has appeared in various LWN articles over the years, such as my look at Typst and at the importance of free software to science in
2025, but we have missed providing an overview of the tool. The February release of Pandoc
3.9, which comes with the ability to compile the program to WebAssembly (Wasm), allowing Pandoc
to run in web browsers, will likely also be of interest.

Version
0.0.6 of the Rust-based Servo web
browser rendering engine has been released. This release boasts a long
list of new features, performance enhancements, improvements, and bug
fixes. Some of the notable changes include layout
performance improvements, a servo:config page for setting
any preference, and developer
tools enhancements.

Today, the AerynOS project released AerynOS 2026.03 as the ISO snapshot for March 2026 of this independent Linux distro previously known as Serpent OS.

Last month Dell upstreamed the firmware needed for their XPS 13 935 Snapdragon X1 Elite laptop. This makes the Linux outlook for this ARM-based Dell XPS laptop much better than before in not having to worry about extracting necessary firmware blobs from Windows 11. Now another step forward for the Dell XPS 13 9345 is being made with a new EC driver being posted to enhance the hardware support…

Longtime Linux developer David Woodhouse sent out a patch series today to “deprecate legacy IP” support within the Linux kernel. While some of his commentary his April 1st-esque, he does acknowledge much of this work has merit. Ultimately it can allow for building a Linux kernel with IPv6-only support and working on allowing “legacy” IPv4 support to be disabled as part of the kernel build…

From ricing to hyprctl, this window manager rewards tinkerers with a sleek, efficient desktop while reminding casual users that convenience isn’t always part of the deal.

The post Hyprland WM’s Eye Candy and Efficiency Ship With a Learning Curve appeared first on FOSS Force.

Raspberry Pi prices are going up yet again due to the continued memory squeeze on the industry. To help offset the memory prices for some use-cases, Raspberry Pi also announced the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 3GB model at $83 to help fill the void between the 2GB and 4GB options…

The GNOME Project released GNOME 49.5 today as the fourth point release of the latest GNOME 49 “Brescia” desktop environment series with more bug fixes and improvements.

Here’s what people were reading the most on FOSS Force during the month of March, 2026.

The post FOSS Force’s Top Ten for March appeared first on FOSS Force.

Apertis v2026 is here, bringing a significantly modernized foundation for industrial embedded development. Based on Debian 13 (Trixie), this release delivers updated system libraries, development tools, compilers, and core services, alongside a new default Wayland compositor, a reworked SDK, and smarter packaging pipelines. The result is a more capable, maintainable platform designed to meet the long-term stability and security requirements of industrial products.

The chvt command is an essential Linux built-in utility to help you switch between different TTY screens (or virtual consoles) from the command line interface.