Linux

Rust Coreutils 0.5 is now available as the latest milestone for this Rust-based alternative to GNU Coreutils. Rust Coreutils 0.5 continues moving closer to "full GNU compatibility" with nearly a 90% pass rate on the GNU test suite.

Rust Coreutils 0.5 is described in today's announcement as "a significant milestone featuring comprehensive platform improvements" There are an additional 22 tests passing now that brings Rust Coreutils 0.5 up to an 87.75% pass rate for the GNU test suite.

For those with fond memories of the original Puppy Linux as a lightweight Linux distribution that used to run well back in the day on systems with less than 1GB of RAM, TrixiePup64 is out with a new release of this Puppy Linux based distribution with Debian GNU/Linux components. The new TrixiePup64 11.2 release is based on the latest Debian Trixie sources while continuing to offer separate builds for either X11 or Wayland usage.

TrixiePup64 11.2 is out today as the newest feature release for this most prominent continuation of the Puppy Linux efforts. This release also comes as a bit of a surprise considering after TrixiePup64 11.1.1 was released, per the Puppy Linux Forums, the development was "discontinued" and encouraged to "please see other distros". Though for this 11.2 release out today, only TrixiePup64 11.2 is out and not the 32-bit TrixiePup32

The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system has received a recent port of the Go programming language to the platform. Plus Haiku also saw app improvements and more over the month of November.

Haiku received a port of Go 1.18 to its open-source operating system. Go 1.18 trails behind Go 1.25 upstream and was released back in 2022. But this Go port to Haiku is much newer than the original Go 1.4 port for that now decade-old state. As part of bringing the newer Go over, Haiku has seen some improvements to its POSIX compliance as well as various fixes.

The Linux 6.19-rc1 kernel is out to cap off the Linux 6.19 merge window. The kernel release is coming the better part of a day earlier due to Linus Torvalds being in Japan for this past week's Linux Plumbers Conference and Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit.

yq is a portable command-line YAML, JSON, XML, CSV, TOML and properties processor

The GNOME.org Extensions hosting for GNOME Shell extensions will no longer accept new contributions with AI-generated code. A new rule has been added to their review guidelines to forbid AI-generated code.

Due to the growing number of GNOME Shell extensions looking to appear on extensions.gnome.org that were generated using AI, it's now prohibited. The new rule in their guidelines note that AI-generated code will be explicitly rejected

Today we're installing a modern Linux... on a single 1.44mb floppy disk!

🍎 Guide: https://github.com/w84death/floppinux

Merged during this second week of the Linux 6.19 feature merge window were the many x86 platform driver changes. As usual, much of the x86 platform driver activity surrounds bettering Linux hardware laptop support but also a growing number of handheld computers / gaming devices.

The x86 platform driver changes for Linux 6.19 include new drivers like for Uniwill OEM laptops as well as improving handheld support for ASUS ROG, Lenovo Legion, and Ayaneo, among other changes

Together with my then-colleague Kalev Lember, I recently added support for pre-installing Flatpak applications. It sounds fancy, but it is conceptually very simple: Flatpak reads configuration files from several directories to determine which applications should be pre-installed. It then installs any missing applications and removes any that are no longer supposed to be pre-installed (with some small caveats).

The LoongArch CPU architecture changes have been merged for the Linux 6.19 merge window. This domestic Chinese CPU architecture inspired by MIPS and RISC-V began with 64-bit LoongArch64 but with Linux 6.19 the foundation is being laid for LoongArch32 as a 32-bit variant.

While most CPU architectures went from a 32-bit to 64-bit world, Loongson is working back from 64-bit to 32-bit. They've been working on the LoongArch32 ABI and with Linux 6.19 that initial kernel port is being wired up.

The Network File-System (NFS) client changes were merged today for the Linux 6.19 kernel with the most notable feature addition being initial support for basic directory delegations.

NFS directory delegations allow for an efficiency win by knowing if nobody else modified the directory on the NFS server then there are some re-validation shortcuts than can be subsequently taken by the NFS client. This work was pursued by Oracle to allow for better NFS efficiency when knowing a particular directory hasn't changed from underneath the client. For Linux 6.19 the directory delegation is hooked up for ACCESS, CREATE, UNLINK, and RENAME operations.

pearOS, a Linux distro that aims to look and behave like Apple’s macOS, is once again in active development with a new base, design, installer, and more.

French developer David Tavares initially created Pear OS back in 2011, based on Ubuntu and featuring the GNOME 3 desktop environment. The initial release, Pear OS 3, was based on Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system and shipped with Linux kernel 3.0.

While Ubuntu was using the Unity interface back then, Pear OS offered a Mac OS X look-alike with a dock. In 2012, David Tavares released a Debian Edition of Pear OS, and a month after that, the developer renamed Pear OS to Comice OS, and the next version was renamed once again to Pear OS Linux a few months later that year.

I am writing POSIX shell scripts quite often, mostly for speed and portability. Though, that might not even be needed, as bash might have gotten a speed increase compared to dash, ash and whatnot.

Here are some tests I plan to run to see if the speed difference is still the case

As my normal user shell I use fish since quite some time. I enjoy

• a simple PS1 that shows the git branch, git status, truncated path where I am
• autocompletion based on history
• autosuggestions from -h or --help even if the tool has no autocompletions in other shells
• abbr instead or alias is quite cool to not forget the actual commands. But I can live without

I dont use more features really. I have a couple of fish functions, and fish might just be a better bash with easier syntax. But bash is the standard, so I never use them anyways.

I wouldnt want to switch to zsh because it is weird permissively licensed. But if it is faster or better than bash, maybe?

I also like that fish is completely rewritten in rust. There is rusty-bash aka. sushi shell, anyone use that? Is is compatible with modules?

Are these extensions just scripts that you run on startup of the shell?

Rust for Linux lead developer Miguel Ojeda posted the patch a short time ago to "conclude the Rust experiment". The "experiment" of Rust programming language code in the Linux kernel is over as it's now accepted to be a success and "Rust is here to stay" in the kernel.

Following discussions at the Linux Plumbers Conference this week in Japan, Miguel Ojeda is now comfortable in declaring Rust for the Linux kernel a success in being able to drop the "experiment" flag on the effort. Ojeda wrote this evening on the kernel mailing list

Edit: I want a graphical window switcher that's fully keyboard controlled, so I can see the windows before switching them.

The screenshot is from hyprland-easymotion which only shows labels for visible windows. I want a switcher that allows for both switching to windows or the same, or from any app, using just the keyboard and no mouse.

Ideally I could go to a window without pressing tab or another key a bunch of times, perhaps select any window (visible or not) with a letter like easymotion.

Following last week's Wine 11.0-rc1 release that marked the feature freeze as well in working toward Wine 11.0 in January, out today is Wine 11.0-rc2.

Wine 11.0-rc2 provides a week's worth of bug fixing. With all the attention on bug/regression hunting ahead of Wine 11.0, there are 28 bug fixes that were collected over the past week.

Wine 11.0-rc2 has game fixes for titles like Indycar Series, Incoming, Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun, Breath of Fire IV, Mario Multiverse, Splinter Cell, Worms Revolution, and various other games.

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week the team made significant progress on KWin’s Wayland screen support. Specifically, better mirroring and custom modes — both items on the “Known Significant Issues” page — have been implemented for Plasma 6.6! The remaining items on that page are areas of active focus, too, as we race towards the Wayland finish line.

Grml, a live bootable Linux distro based on Debian and designed for system administrators and users of text tools, has been updated today to version 2025.12, a release that introduces new and updated tools.

Powered by Linux kernel 6.17 and based on Debian Testing/Forky repositories as of December 11th, 2025, the Grml 2025.12 (codename Postwurfsendung) release updates the grml-live build system for creating Grml (based) Linux live systems with a new TOR class, support for the grml-desktop package, and Debian Bookworm as the minimum host OS.

Grml 2025.12 also updates the grml-scripts console scripts to remove support for old scripts, including grepc, grepedit, iimage, logview, mailhops, notifyd, osd_server, qma, dirvish-setup, grml-iptstate, make_chroot_jail, and grml-swapon, and updates the grml-zshrc Zsh configuration with support for syncing global aliases from zshrc.local

In the open-source ecosystem, funding has long been a central challenge, often determining whether a project can grow sustainably or slowly fade away. And while many initiatives continue to struggle for financial support, it’s encouraging to see others, like KDE, not only maintain a stable foundation but even surpass expectations.

I say this because, according to the latest data, KDE has surpassed its 2025 fundraising goal by a wide margin, reaching €276K—an impressive 276% of the original €100K target. Updated daily, the campaign’s progress bar now stretches far beyond its intended limit, reflecting an exceptional wave of support from users and contributors across the open-source community.

A new patch series from an NXP engineer optimizes the secure erase performance for certain Kingston eMMC devices. Currently with the Linux kernel performing a secure erase on 1GB of data can take around ten minutes. With these new patches that 1GB secure erase can be done in around two seconds.

Some Kingston eMMC devices will consume a fixed two seconds per secure erase operation regardless of the erase size. When the Linux kernel is currently performing a secure erase it is limited by the max discard size and thus will issue around 300 operations to erase 1GB. Today's patches from NXP engineer Luke Wang will drop that secure erase process into a single command and thus consuming just around two seconds of time.