Linux

This week many KDE contributors wound down their activities in preparation for some well-deserved rest. But that didn’t stop the merging of some impactful work anyway!

This will be 2025’s year’s last This Week in Plasma post; I too will take a break next week. Happy holidays for those who celebrate, and I’ll see you all in 2026!

I've recently distro hopped to Bazzite, and saw that it comes preloaded with Waydroid. I'm curious what you fine folk find useful to run that doesn't already have a Linux native version.

The only one I can currently think I'd use would be Symfonium.

In working toward the Wine 11.0 stable release in January, Wine 11.0-rc3 is out today as the latest weekly release candidate.

The code/feature freeze began two weeks ago and thus continuing with just bug/regression fixing until the stable Wine 11.0 release is ready next month.

Some of the new fixes in Wine 11.0-rc3 include fixing the GLX back-end when using the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack, fixing window white/black screen issues for Steam, performance problems for Clickteam games, and a variety of other game and app fixes.

Downloads and more details on the Wine 11.0-rc3 release via WineHQ.org.

If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to try FreeBSD on a laptop, take note – 2025 has brought transformative changes. The Foundation’s ambitious Laptop Support & Usability Project is systematically addressing the gaps that have held FreeBSD back on modern laptop hardware.

The project started in 2024 Q4 and covers areas including Wi-Fi, graphics, audio, installer, and sleep states. 2025 has been its first full year, and with a financial commitment of over $750k to date there has been substantial progress.

I found this to be a particularly excellent and insightful seminar. Scott does a great job of getting you to see UX from a different perspective, and was able to keep me engaged throughout the whole seminar.

Bonus link to Dynamicland, which is mentioned in the talk.

Video description:

This talk focuses on that evil little term “UX/UI,” which is responsible for so much confusion and tension in open-source projects. Not only does it unnecessarily pit programmers against designers, but it also limits our vision of what we could be doing.

In this talk, Scott Jenson gives examples of how focusing on UX -- instead of UI -- frees us to think bigger. This is especially true for the desktop, where the user experience has so much potential to grow well beyond its current interaction models. The desktop UX is certainly not dead, and this talk suggests some future directions we could >take.

About Scott Scott Jenson has been a leader in UX design and strategic planning for over 35 years. He was the first member of Apple’s Human Interface group in the late '80s, and has since held key roles at several major tech companies. He served as Director of Product Design for Symbian in London, managed Mobile UX design at Google, and was Creative Director at frog design in San Francisco. He returned to Google to do UX research for Android and is now a UX strategist in the open-source community for Mastodon and Home Assistant.

Debian developers now have an official way to publish and test add-on package repositories, as the Debusine project has opened its repository feature in public beta.

The new service, available at debusine.debian.net, allows Debian Developers and Debian Maintainers to create APT-compatible repositories that function similarly to the well-known Ubuntu’s PPAs but are built specifically for the Debian ecosystem.

Debusine itself is a relatively new project within Debian’s infrastructure. It was introduced publicly at DebConf and has been developed to modernize and unify Debian’s internal workflows for package building, testing, and quality assurance. Until now, much of this work has taken place behind the scenes. With the launch of repositories in beta, Debusine is becoming directly usable for day-to-day development tasks.

The Mageia development team has outlined its initial plans for Mageia Linux 10, including a tentative release schedule and a review of the status of key software components as the distribution prepares to enter its next development phase.

According to devs, the first alpha release is expected as soon as possible, followed by an initial beta in the first half of January 2026 and a second beta roughly a month later.

A release candidate is planned two weeks after the second beta, with the final stable release currently targeted for April 2026. The goal is to avoid shipping outdated components while maintaining Mageia’s quality standards.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds previously referred to file-systems in user-space as for toys and misguided people. But FUSE has shown a lot of interesting use-cases over the years and has grown more capable in the decade since Torvalds' prior comments. Out today is FUSE 3.18 as the latest release for the FUSE library.

FUSE 3.18 brings support for FUSE-over-IO_uring communication. The code was merged earlier this year and improved in further pull requests landing since then for making use of Linux's modern IO_uring interface for more efficient I/O handling by File-Systems in User-Space. The IO_uring support with FUSE on Linux is optional to retain support still for older versions of the Linux kernel or environments where IO_uring is disabled.

PostmarketOS blog post on the future of helping fund the development of the project through donations.

Cryptsetup 2.8.2 released on Thursday for this open-source utility used for setting up disk encryption with dm-crypt on Linux systems, including for LUKS volumes, TrueCrypt, BitLocker, and other formats.

One of the notable new features with Cryptsetup 2.8.2 is now support for opening devices with Clear Key in BitLocker. Clear Key is for BitLocker devices not yet encrypted and the Clear Key is not protected by a password. Cryptsetup can now handle said devices to let users access the data on them. More details on the BitLocker Clear Key support can be found via the issue ticket and subsequent merge that added the BitLocker Clear Key support.

The Linux Foundation today published their 2025 Annual Report where they offer a glimpse into the finances of the organization for this year.

The Linux Foundation Annual Report is largely used for highlighting their various accomplishments and announcements for the year. In 2025 the Linux Foundation launched the Agentic AI Foundation, the open-source Newton engine was contributed to the Linux Foundation, Essedum 1.0 released for AI-native network apps, The Developer Relations Foundation was formed, the Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers Fund was launched by Google and the Linux Foundation, and more.

The Arch Linux project has reached an important infrastructure milestone by making its official Windows Subsystem for Linux image fully reproducible.

In simple terms, this means that the image is now built so that it produces exactly the same result every time. If the image is rebuilt later using the same source, it will be identical down to the last bit.

For everyday users, the benefit is mainly about trust and reliability. It becomes much easier to verify that the image you download has not been altered, tampered with, or accidentally changed during the build process.

I use arch btw

Announced one year ago was KDE Internet of Things "Kiot" with an emphasis on providing nice integration between the KDE Plasma desktop and Home Assistant for handling open-source home automation. Development on Kiot sadly fell through the cracks for most of the year but development on it recently restarted.

KDE developer David Edmundson shared that Kiot development has recently been restarted thanks to contributions from new developer Odd Østlie. Odd has been working on new features around Bluetooth, audio device handling, battery state handling for different devices, media mplayer / MPRIS connection, and more.

Spectre V1 mitigations in the Linux kernel are coming for RISC-V with newer RISC-V core designs being vulnerable to Spectre Variant One style attacks.

Spectre V1 as a reminder is the variant for Bounds Check Bypass with CPU speculative execution in conditional branches. The Linux kernel RISC-V code hasn't seen Spectre V1 protections since earlier more basic RISC-V core designs have been immune to Variant One and other Spectre vulnerabilities. But newer more complex RISC-V core designs are bringing some of the same challenges exhibited on x86_64 and AArch64 architectures.

NVIDIA released today the NVIDIA 590.48.01 graphics drivers for NVIDIA GPUs on Linux, BSD, and Solaris systems as the first stable release in the NVIDIA 590 series.

The NVIDIA 590.48.01 graphics driver improves support for Wayland users by raising the minimum supported Wayland version to 1.20 and fixes a bug that prevented the PowerMizer preferred mode drop-down menu in the nvidia-settings control panel from functioning correctly on Wayland systems.

It also improves support for Vulkan apps by boosting the performance of recreating Vulkan swapchains, which helps prevent stuttering when resizing Vulkan application windows, and fixes several issues that prevented Vulkan apps from working on the Venus VirtIO virtual GPU.

For no particular reason, i always used this website to read the kernel mailing list. It seems to have gone dark a few weeks ago.

Anyone know what happened?

OpenZFS 2.4 has been tagged today on GitHub as the latest stable version of this open-source advanced file system and volume manager for Linux and FreeBSD systems.

Supporting kernels from Linux 4.18 up to the latest Linux 6.18 LTS, OpenZFS 2.4 introduces many exciting changes, such as support for setting default user/group/project quotas, direct IO fallback to a light-weight uncached IO when unaligned, and a new algorithm designed to reduce vdev fragmentation.

OpenZFS 2.4 also features better encryption performance using AVX2 for AES-GCM, extends special_small_blocks to land ZVOL writes on special vdevs and allows non-power-of-two values, and adds the zfs rewrite -P command to preserve logical birth time when possible for minimizing incremental stream size.

Systemd v259 has been released, delivering one of the most wide-ranging updates in recent cycles while preparing users and distributions for more disruptive changes planned for v260.

Support for legacy System V init scripts has been formally deprecated and scheduled for complete removal in systemd v260. Components such as systemd-sysv-generator and systemd-sysv-install are now on borrowed time, and projects still relying on SysV scripts are explicitly urged to migrate to native systemd units.

Alongside this, systemd has published its intent to raise minimum dependency requirements in v260, including Linux kernel 5.10, glibc 2.34, OpenSSL 3.0, and Python 3.9.

This is your friendly reminder that, as of today, the Linux 6.17 kernel series has reached the end of its supported life, which means that it’s time to start upgrading your installations to Linux kernel 6.18 LTS.

Released on September 28th, 2025, Linux kernel 6.17 introduced new features like support for ARM’s “Branch Record Buffer Extension” (BRBE), support for the AMD hardware feedback interface (HFI), Intel Wildcat Lake and Bartlett Lake-S support, and initial support for the HEVC(H.265) and VP9 codecs in Qualcomm’s Iris decoder.

Since Linux 6.17 is a short-lived kernel branch, supported for a couple of months, it is now marked as EOL (End of Life) on the kernel.org website by Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, who announced today the last maintenance release, Linux kernel 6.17.13, urging users to upgrade to Linux kernel 6.18.

The Linux Mint team has published today the ISO images of the beta version of the upcoming Linux Mint 22.3 release, which can be downloaded (for testing purposes) from the official mirrors.

The biggest change in Linux Mint 22.3 (codename Zena) is the brand-new Cinnamon 6.6 desktop environment, which features a redesigned application menu applet with configurable Places and Bookmarks, support for symbolic category icons, better Wayland support, as well as several other visual changes.

Cinnamon 6.6 also introduces updated Settings with a new Thunderbolt module for managing your Thunderbolt devices, modernized keyboard handling, many enhancements to the virtual keyboard, as well as updates to the Sound, NetworkManager, Workspace Switcher, Printer, and Window List applets.

Here, my summary of key features and decisions of Guix:

1. Guix is a package manager that can (optionally) run on top of Linux distributions or other POSIX systems, like cargo, pip, conda or Conan. In difference to the pip and cargo package managers, it is language-agnostic, supports many different build systems and languages, and features around 29000 packages now.
2. Guix allows to define a fully reproducible system. This works by using a declarative language for immutable version-controlled package descriptions, and by deriving any software from package definitions and a fixed version (commit hash) of the source code. In that, it is similar but much stricter than Nix and NixOS. The key point is that any software built, and all its dependencies, go back to unambigously, immutable versions of source code and build recipes - and all inputs to the system are open source and can be reviewed.
3. Important for programming, this can also define isolated build and development environments, like Python's venv, but also Docker containers. This means that Guix can be used to develop, build, package, and deploy software, very much like Snap packages. And that's independent from the distribution you work in, very much like pip or cargo are independent from the system you work in. (And yes, it supports Rust!).
4. This allows it, and also makes it technically possible, that any software package can be re-built and run years later. To make this legally possible, the official distribution of Guix also demands all components to be open source (FOSS). This is also a key difference to NixOS and non-free forks of Guix, which allow non-free binary packages, but sacrifice reproducibility. (To illustrate: If you have a binary, proprietary scanner driver in NixOS, and the owning company practices planned obselescence and decides that you should buy their new hardware, and pulls that driver, you are out of luck. In Guix, this can't happen.) (Note that as your own private conponents, you can define any package you like, you can also distribute your definitions as a complement to GNU Guix. Non-free packages for Guix do exist, in the same way as you can buy and run Steam Games software for Linux. Such non-free software just can't become part of the official Guix distribution, just like Amazon or Apple can't sell their non-free software via Debian or the Linux kernel project (or, for that matter, Apple has no obligation to market and distribute, say, Oracle products).
5. All inputs being open source also means that any software component can be reviewed, that mis-features such as privacy-invasive behaviour can be removed, and that it is hardly possible to hide malware in the system. Because this also applies recursively to all compilers and build tools, this solves also Thompson's "Trusting Trust" problem. In fact, the whole system can be build from a 512 byte binary root (called MER). (Interestingly, that level of user control gets a lot of hate online -- certain companies don't seem to like it).
6. Because it would take too long to build every user package from source every time, the produced packages are normally cached (while their correct binary content can be easily verified).
7. The declarative description language for the packages is a well-defined, established, minimalist language called Scheme. This is a member of the Lisp family of languages. That Lisp is very well suited for declaratively building and configuring large systems has been proven with GNU Emacs, whose software, but more importantly, whole user configuration, is written in Emacs Lisp.
8. The Scheme implementation used is called Guile. It has especially good support for the POSIX environment and has also much better-than-average interactive debugging capabilities compared to other Scheme implementations.
9. Also worth noting is that the Guix project has superb online documentation. This is a practical advantage compared to Nix.

As example: you are on Debian stable and quickly want to try a recent version of the kakoune editor (as kakoune is in ongoing development): They are available under the Guix package manager. Just

guix install kakoune

and bang you have it!

How it works:

https://codeberg.org/guix/guix#headline-4

Manual:

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Installation.html

Also informative for using Guix just as a package manager:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Guix

OC by @HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org

Qt 6.11 Beta 1 is out on-schedule with the code having entered its feature freeze and code branching earlier this month. This toolkit is working toward the stable Qt 6.11 stable debut in March.

Qt 6.11 Beta 1 is out today with three new modules: Qt Canvas Painter, Qt OpenAPI, and Qt TaskTree. The Qt Canvas Painter module provides accelerated 2D painting for Qt Quick and QRhi render targets. Qt OpenAPI provides an extension of the upstream Open API generator to generate Qt HTTP clients while Qt TraskTree provides a declarative way to compose and execute async task workflows.

Qt 6.11 also adds various new APIs to Qt Core, new features for Qt Graphs, Qt Lottie animations now support path fill rules, new Qt Quick 3D features, Qt Quick 3D XR now supports OPenXR 1.1.49, and Qt Quick VectorImage now supports SVG masks and other SVG features. Qt 6.11 also moves away from direct RDRAND/RDSEED usage.

Qt 6.11 Beta 1 downloads and more details via Qt.io. Next up is a second beta release of Qt 6.11 planned for mid-January. That second beta will be followed by a third and final beta around mid-February and a release candidate to end out February. If all goes well Qt 6.11.0 will be out around 17 March.

Linus Torvalds is famously averse to presenting prepared talks, but the wider community is always interested in what he has to say about the condition of the Linux kernel. So, for some time now, his appearances have been in the form of an informal conversation with Dirk Hohndel. At the 2025 Open Source Summit Japan, the pair followed that tradition for the 29th time. Topics covered include the state of the development process, what Torvalds actually does, and how machine-learning tools might fit into the kernel project.

Hohndel began by noting that Torvalds is now a video star. He was referring to the "Linus x Linus" video that was published at the beginning of December, which is rapidly approaching four-million views. Torvalds said that he enjoys being able to "do these strange things" on occasion. He hastened to add that once was enough, though

EDIT (2025-12-19T09:08Z): Whoops! I totally didn't see that this had already been posted to this community ^[2]^. I didn't mean to repost it. My bad!