OpenVPN 2.7.1 has been released today as the first maintenance update to the latest OpenVPN 2.7 series of this open-source software for connecting to virtual private networks (VPN).

Gaim! Any desktop Linux users from 20+ years ago likely remember the Gaim instant messaging app that was commonly shipped by desktop Linux distributions for interfacing with different instant messaging platforms like AIM, MSN, ICQ, etc. About twenty years ago Gaim was renamed to Pidgin though due to the AOL Instant Messenger trademark. But with the AIM trademark since expired and wanting to take a differing approach from the latest Pidgin, Gaim 3 is under development…

AerynOS 2026.03 is now available as the newest release of this from-scratch Linux distribution originally known as Serpent OS. With this month’s update comes GNOME 50, KDE Plasma 6.6.3, and various Wayland compositor updates alongside other software improvements…

Seeed Studio has launched an 8-inch HMI device combining a touch display, wireless connectivity, and multimedia hardware in a single platform. The reTerminal D1001 pairs an ESP32-P4 with an ESP32-C6 for networking, along with a 6-axis IMU for motion sensing. The system is powered by the ESP32-P4NRW32, a dual-core RISC-V processor operating at up to […]

MidnightBSD 4.0.4 is out today as the newest update to this desktop-minded BSD operating system. Notable with this update is introducing the Aged daemon and Agectl program for handling age verification and age attestation given the increasing number of US states pursuing laws around age verification at the OS user level…

A merge request for Wayland Protocols was opened today for introducing “xx-fractional-scale-v2” as an experimental protocol to address current shortcomings with current Wayland fractional scaling. There is also a KDE KWin compositor merge request already out for review that implements this xx-fractional-scale-v2 protocol…

Servo 0.0.6 is out today to round out the month with many great improvements made in recent weeks to this Rust-based browser engine advancing with its servoshell implementation and many prospects around using it for embedded browser use cases…

The Document Foundation, creator of LibreOffice, urges Europeans to adopt open source solutions and reduce dependence on proprietary software and major technology platforms.

After KDBUS failed to make it into the mainline Linux kernel more than one decade ago as an in-kernel version of D-Bus, BUS1 was proposed as a clean sheet design for in-kernel, capability-based inter-process communication (IPC). BUS1 didn’t gain enough traction to make it to the mainline kernel and then many of the same developers devised Dbus-Broker as a more performant D-Bus user-space implementation. Well, as a big surprise now, a new version of BUS1 is being worked on for the Linux kernel…

Oopsy-doodle: Did someone forget to check their build pipeline?Would you like a closer look at Claude? Someone at Anthropic has some explaining to do, as the official npm package for Claude Code shipped with a map file exposing what appears to be the popular AI coding tool’s entire source code.…

Discussion of

a memory-management patch set intended to clean up a helper function for
handling huge pages spiraled into something else entirely after it was posted on March 19.
Memory-management maintainer Andrew Morton

proposed making changes to the subsystem’s review process, to require
patch authors to respond to feedback from Sashiko,
the

recently released LLM-based kernel patch review system. Other
sub-maintainers, particularly Lorenzo Stoakes, objected. The
resulting discussion about how and when to adopt Sashiko is potentially relevant
to many other parts of the kernel.

When models can audit firmware and legacy binaries at scale, hiding vulnerabilities stops working. Open, patchable code becomes a core security requirement.

Sent out yesterday were the DRM Rust feature changes for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window coming in April. The Rust graphics/display driver code for Linux 7.1 includes more programming language abstractions and other Rust infrastructure work to make graphics drivers written in Rust more capable…

In early March, Dylan M. Taylor submitted a pull request to add a field
to store a user’s birth date in systemd’s JSON user records. This was done to allow
applications to store the date to facilitate compliance with age-attestation and
-verification laws. It was to be expected that some members of the community would
object; the actual response, however, has been shockingly hostile. Some of this has
been fueled by a misinformation campaign that has targeted the systemd project and
Taylor specifically, resulting in Taylor being doxxed and receiving death
threats. Such behavior is not just problematic; it is also deeply misguided given the
actual nature of the changes.

With Q1 wrapping up, here is a look back at the most popular news and reviews for the quarter that excited Linux readers the most. During this quarter on Phoronix were 881 original news articles thus far and 61 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles…

GIMP 3.2.2 open-source image editor is now available for download with various improvements, bug fixes, and UI/UX updates.

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is just three weeks out for release with many great features in tow from the GNOME 50 desktop to the very leading-edge Linux 7.0 kernel and many other package updates. One feature that many had been looking forward to is Canonical’s plans to ship AMD ROCm directly in the Ubuntu archive for a much cleaner experience for those wanting to make use of AMD’s open-source GPU compute stack. As a common question in recent weeks from readers, it remains to be seen if that milestone will be achieved for the Ubuntu 26.04 launch day…

Last year the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) announced plans for major vendors to pay or contribute code to this project that makes it easy for deploying new system and device firmware on Linux systems. They are asking those with less than 99 employees to contribute $10k USD annually or those larger organizations to contribute $100k USD annually or to be employing engineer(s) to work full-time on LVFS/Fwupd. Beginning tomorrow the next phase of their transition to encourage vendors to support the open-source project goes into effect…

In addition to the MediaTek MT7902 WiFI Linux support emerging in recent months, the Linux support for the MediaTek MT7927 is also coming together for WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 support for the upstream Linux kernel…

Elive 3.8.50 LTS has been released today for this nostalgic, yet fancy GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian and featuring the lightweight and modern Enlightenment graphical environment.