Linux

OQB @marighost@piefed.social

Over five months after its previous 2025.3 version, the Rhino Linux team has unveiled its latest release, 2025.4, on its Ubuntu-based rolling-release distribution, which features a custom desktop environment (Unicorn) built around the Pacstall package manager.

According to the announcement, over the past months, much of the team’s effort has gone into advancing Lomiri upstream, a mobile-first desktop environment created for Ubuntu Touch, and integrating it more deeply into Rhino Linux, particularly for PINE64 hardware.

As part of this work, the distribution now ships two new packages: rhino-pine-lomiri-core and ubxi-lomiri-desktop. The latter is not limited to PINE64 devices and is also compatible with Rhino Linux generic images.

Longtime Red Hat engineer Hans de Goede who worked on many Intel/AMD laptop enhancements over the years left Red Hat and ended up joining Qualcomm. Now it turns out one of his projects at Qualcomm is enhancing the Fedora Linux support for running nicely out-of-the-box on Snapdragon-powered Windows on ARM laptops.

Hans de Goede filed a change proposal for providing automatic DTB selection on AArch64 EFI systems. The change proposal still needs to be voted on by FESCo but given it's rather straight-forward, it will presumably fly without objections.

Emmabuntüs is a Linux distribution based on Debian (previously on Ubuntu) that focuses on refurbishing and extending the life of older computers, while making Linux usable for beginners, nonprofits, schools, and people with disabilities, particularly visually impaired users.

Today, nearly two years after the release of version 5.0, the Emmabuntüs Collective has rolled out Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 6. It is based on Debian 13.2 and comes as a 64-bit edition with Xfce and LXQt desktop environments.

According to the announcement, this version is the result of a close collaboration with A.S.I. YOVOTOGO and the Togolese Federation of Associations of Persons with Disabilities (FETAPH).

Stemming from a security researcher and his team proposing a new Linux Security Module (LSM) three years ago and it not being accepted to the mainline kernel, he raised issue over the lack of review/action to Linus Torvalds and the mailing lists. In particular, seeking more guidance for how new LSMs should be introduced and raised the possibility of taking the issue to the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB).

This mailing list post today laid out that a proposed TSEM LSM for a framework for generic security modeling was proposed but saw little review activity in the past three years or specific guidance on getting that LSM accepted to the Linux kernel. Thus seeking documented guidance on new Linux Security Module submissions for how they should be optimally introduced otherwise the developers are "prepared to pursue this through the [Technical Advisory Board] if necessary."

Back in November Flatpak 1.17 released with support for sideloading from OCI images and other improvements in working toward the Flatpak 1.18 stable release. Out today is Flatpak 1.17.1 and was then followed quickly by Flatpak 1.17.2 to fix a mistake in the release artifacts.

Flatpak 1.17.1 introduces support for building OCI bundles with Zstd compressed layers. Leveraging Zstd rather than the default Gzip is said to speed-up compression by "several times" and result in about a 20% smaller size. But Gzip is still being kept the default compression format rather than Zstandard in order to ensure maximum compatibility. This OCI layer Zstd compression support stems from a two year old pull request for adding --oci-layer-compress=zstd support.

A short review of openBSD 7.8.

Lobsters

The development team behind Scribus, an open-source and cross-platform desktop publishing app, released version 1.6.5 today as yet another minor update to the Scribus 1.6 stable series.

Coming almost eight months after Scribus 1.6.4, the Scribus 1.6.5 release is here to improve the color eyedropper, update the PDF export functionality by fixing issues related to font rendering and exporting via Python, improve light/dark mode capabilities, and update the scripter functions.

On top of that, Scribus 1.6.5 updates dependencies, including later releases of poppler and podofo, updates various translation files, and removes the ability to allow remote SVG image data loading due to a security vulnerability that has yet to be disclosed. Check out the release notes for more details.

The Sparky team has rolled out the latest ISO images, 2025.12, its third semi-rolling update of the year—for all enthusiasts of this lightweight Linux distro, based on Debian’s upcoming “Forky” testing branch.

The release pulls in packages from the Debian and Sparky testing repositories as of December 14, 2025. It ships with the Linux kernel 6.17 by default, while long-term-supported kernels, 6.18 LTS, 6.12 LTS, and 6.6 LTS, are available through the Sparky repositories.

Core system components have also been updated, including Firefox 140.5 ESR, Thunderbird 140.5 ESR, and GRUB 2.14 from a recent development snapshot.

Fresh is a newly released open-source TUI text editor written in Rust, designed to combine modern usability features with a command-line workflow. What sets it apart from similar applications is that it targets developers who want IDE-style functionality while remaining entirely inside the terminal.

The editor runs entirely in a terminal emulator and does not use graphical toolkits such as GTK or Qt. Menus, panels, split views, the file explorer, and the integrated terminal are all built using terminal features. Even so, the editor offers a structured, GUI-like experience with mouse support, a command palette, and contextual menus.

With Linux 6.19-rc1 released, the merge window for Linux 6.19 has now concluded. Here is a summary of the interesting Linux 6.19 new features and changes with this kernel version.

Linux 6.19-rc1 was released on Sunday and will see weekly release candidates until Linux 6.19 stable is ready to debut around early February. Linux 6.19 introduces the Live update Orchestrator, adds PCIe link encryption and device authentication infrastructure, new drivers like ASUS Armoury and for Uniwill laptops, the DRM Color Pipeline API, a new console font, AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 GPus now default to the AMDGPU driver, initial support for the Tenstorrent Blackhole SoC, initial Intel Xe3P graphics enablement for Nova Lake and Crescent Island, a lot of ongoing Rust work, the constant catch-up around Apple Silicon hardware support, enabling of Microsoft C Extensions support in the kernel build by default, and Intel Xe VFIO driver merged. Plus a lot more.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developers now have a need to set a policy whether AI / Large Language Model (LLM) generated patches will be accepted for this open-source compiler stack.

The GCC compiler doesn't currently have a policy in place whether to permit AI/LLM-generated patches. But within a bug report today there is a patch posted by a user in trying to fix a GCC 16 compiler regression.

Following the Color Management protocol introduced in Wayland Protocols 1.41, out today is Wayland Protocols 1.47 with various revisions to that color management and HDR support.

The Wayland color management protocol has now loosened restrictions on maxCLL and maxFALL since it isn't mandated by the ANSI/CTA-861-H specification and some movies having a maxCLL rather than the Mastering Display Luminance. Thus the prior behavior was determined to be too strict and is now loosened.

Another shortcoming of color-management-v1 is that the description identity is a 32-bit number when it should have been a 64-bit number. As a 32-bit image description identity number if allocated 100 times per second it could theoretically wrap around in 1.4 years... For anyone running a Wayland compositor and keeping an uptime of more than 1.4 years, the ready2 event now mandates a 64-bit image description ID number.

Vojtěch Polášek has announced an unofficial effort to create a Fedora-based distribution designed for visually impaired users:

My ultimate vision for this project is "NO VOJTUX NEEDED!" because I believe Fedora should eventually be fully accessible out of the box. We aren't there yet, which is where Vojtux comes in to fill the gap. [...]

Key Features:
-Speaks out of the box: When the live desktop is ready, Orca starts automatically. After installation, it is configured so that it starts on the login screen and also after logging in.
-Batteries included: Comes with LIOS , Ocrdesktop, Tesseract, Audacity, and command-line tools like Git and Curl. There are also many preconfigured keyboard shortcuts.

Video tutorial of Creative Generalist channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JztSbwWZzsw

Not as convenient as the Gimp patch but still a detailed step-by-step tutorial for Photoshop Style Settings, Hotkeys and User Interface for Krita beginners.

Other useful links:

Introduction to Krita coming from Photoshop

Smart Patch Tool

How to Use Lasso and Other Selection Tools in Krita

Color Adjustment Curves

How to Use Layer Styles in Krita

Signal only provides a script for .deb based distros on their official website. The flatpak is currently not ideal because it stores encryption keys in plaintext.

The provided link suggests an automated installation in a Ubuntu Distrobox including automated updates. Useful for every distro that does not natively support .deb packages.

CtrlAssist – an open source project to bring more accessible, collaborative gaming to Linux! Inspired by PC gaming sessions with my own family, where both young and old relish exploring rich stories with immersive worlds (like Witcher 3, RDR3, Hogwarts Legacy, etc) but find coordinated combat or movement control too challenging to play solo, CtrlAssist lets you combine multiple controllers into one virtual gamepad, much like assist features on dedicated game consoles.

Whether your helping grandparents through tough boss fights, or co-oping with nieces and nephews to level age gaps, CtrlAssist aims to make PC gaming on Linux fun and accessible for everyone. While I’m certain similar utilities exist, I also just wanted a holiday hobby project to practice Rust development while scratching a personal itch.

Please give it a try, share your feedback in the relevant discussion categories, or check out the open issues if you’d like to contribute, help is always welcome!

• User Feedback and Accessibility Community Discussion
  • https://github.com/ruffsl/CtrlAssist/discussions/15
• Developer Feedback and Rust Community Discussion
  • https://github.com/ruffsl/CtrlAssist/discussions/14

#RustLang #LinuxGaming #Accessibility #OpenSource #CtrlAssist

The FamFS file-system being developed by Micron hopes to go upstream for Linux in "early-ish 2026".

For around two years already Micron has been working on FamFS as a new file-system that is special purpose and designed for fabric-attached memory (FAM) needs such as with CXL servers. FamFS over the past year was ported to FUSE for largely operating in user-space but some kernel changes remain.

A patch for optimizing GIMP 3.0+ for Adobe Photoshop users, including features like:

• Tool organization to mimic the position of Adobe Photoshop;
• New Splash Screen;
• New default settings to maximize space on the canvas;
• Shortcuts similar to the ones in Photoshop for Windows, following Adobe's Documentation;
• New icon and Name from custom .desktop file.

https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP/blob/master/screenshots/photogimp_3_-_diolinux.png

https://photogimp.com/

Flatpak (Linux)

In order to install the newest version of PhotoGIMP on your Linux operating system using Flatpak, just follow this simple steps:

• Make sure you already have GIMP installed from Flathub; (for Ubuntu/Mint user just select Flatpak below the install button in the manager)

• Start and quit GIMP after you installed before you continue!

• Download the files from this repository or just click here - > https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP/releases/download/3.0/PhotoGIMP-linux.zip

• Extract the content of the zip file on your home folder (.config and .local - they are the important ones) and overwrite the files if needed; (if you can't see the file click Ctrl+H to see hidden files)

-You're done, enjoy it! 😄

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.

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 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.