Linux

In mid-September, we reported that Nick Wellnhofer, the long-time maintainer of the widely used XML parsing library libxml2, planned to step down from the project. A few days ago, that change became official.

When looking at one of the latest commits in the project’s GitLab repository, you can now see the following notice:

“This project is unmaintained and has known security issues (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/346). It is foolish to use this software to process untrusted data.”

The Linux Foundation today announced it's formed another foundation under its growing umbrella that extends well beyond the traditional "Linux" landscape: the Agentic AI Foundation.

The Agentic AI Foundation "AAIF" has been formed with Anthropic contributing the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Block's goose, and OpenAI contributing their AGENTS.md specification for guiding coding agents.

The Agentic AI Foundation aims for "a neutral, open foundation to ensure agentic AI evolves transparently and collaboratively."

[TL;DR: I'm looking for resources on Linux so I can catch up and become reacquainted with it. Are there any all-encompassing media about Linux itself, and stuff like backing up, snapshots, file systems, dual-booting, customization, etc. I can use as a reference/ learning material?]

Some background: I used Linux Mint a small bit about 10 or so years ago to save some old hard drives. (Windows 7 era)

I braved Windows 10 but played in Linux VMs as I started to self-teach programming. Things changed when I got my hands on a Steam Deck a few months ago and I fell back in love with Linux. I had no idea how much progress got made. It runs so well and I like the ecosystem.

Last month, I built a new computer. Right before the RAM and SSD shortage (I'm talking mere days). Because of some programs I use, I put Windows 11 LTSC on it, but I want to downgrade back to 10 because it's just so awful. And I'm sick of M$ antics and performance, so I want to dual boot.

All that being said, if there are resources for learning Linux from the ground up or anyone I can approach with questions, I would appreciate some direction there. Many thanks!

Yesterday I noted some early performance regressions I've found on the Linux 6.19 kernel compared to Linux 6.18 LTS stable. Those initial benchmarks were on an AMD EPYC server. Since then I've seen many of the same workloads regressing similarly on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation between Linux 6.18 and Linux 6.19 Git. Given the significant impact and AMD Threadripper processors always helping out to speed-up Linux kernel build times to make for a quicker and more manageable kernel bisecting experience, here is a look at some of the results for the Linux 6.19 performance regressions.

With Firefox 146 being released today to the stable channel, Mozilla has promoted the next major version of its open-source, free, and cross-platform web browser, Firefox 147, to the beta channel for public testing.

Firefox 147 promises support for the Freedesktop.org XDG Base Directory Specification, zero-copy hardware-decoded video support on AMD GPUs to improve video playback performance, support for the Safe Browsing V5 protocol, and WebGPU support for all Apple Silicon Macs.

Firefox 147 also promises to improve the Picture-in-Picture feature by adding support to automatically open a new player window for a playing video in a tab if that tab is ever backgrounded, which was previously in Firefox Labs, as well as support for Compression Dictionaries, IETF RFC 9842.

The developer team at Discord released a new engineering blog post yesterday (December 8th) detailing lots of fixes, along with some Linux improvements. As one of the most popular chat apps in the world, it's good to see their support of Linux continue to get better over time.

For the past 15 years the Smatch static analysis tool has been routinely run for uncovering countless bugs within the Linux kernel. Dan Carpenter who authored Smatch and has been routinely analyzing the Linux kernel with it has authored more than 5,568 patches over the years to become one of the top bug fixers for the kernel. But his funding at Linaro has been cut and the project's future now in question.

The Smatch static analysis on the kernel in recent years has been led by Dan Carpenter while working for Linaro. It's fallen under a "Linux kernel quality" project but now that Linaro project is surprisingly ending

The KDE team has announced Plasma 6.5.4, the fourth bugfix update to the major 6.5 series, which follows three weeks after the previous 6.5.3 release. While no new features are introduced, Plasma 6.5.4 focuses on refinement and reliability.

The release adds updated translations and a long list of targeted fixes. Discover receives several corrections to its Flatpak handling, improving installation management, notifier behavior, and support on aarch64 systems. Headless update scenarios are also addressed, and UI actions now behave consistently across desktop and mobile interfaces.

KWin, the window manager, includes numerous improvements. These range from better handling of input methods and tablet devices to corrections for HiDPI rendering and transformed item painting.

Today I released a new version of SSH Pilot, a user-friendly SSH connection manager.

collapsed inline media

SSH Pilot packs some useful features:

• Built-in terminal
• Dual-pane SFTP file manager
• SCP file transfers
• SSH Key generation and transfer
• Secure storage for SSH secrets using libsecret and automatic login
• Server grouping and color taggings
• and more

It is available for major linux distributions, and there is a Flatpak that should run on any distro with Flatpak support.

Developer @mfat@lemmy.ml

The Non-Volatile Memory Device (NVDIMM) subsystem updates were merged today for the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel. Most notable this cycle for the NVDIMM code is a new open-source driver addition courtesy of Microsoft.

As talked about on Phoronix one month ago, a Microsoft Linux engineer working in official capacity at Microsoft has contributed a "RAMDAX" driver for Linux to allow carving out regions of memory to create persistent memory interfaces exposed as NVDIMM devices.

Since Showtime replaced Totem as the default video player of GNOME, the desktop has lacked thumbnail capabilities for audio and video files. But to address that defect, the Rust-based gst-thumbnailers project has been in development to leverage GStreamer and paired with Rust to provide safe thumbnail generation capabilities for audio and video content.

This past week marked the release of gst-thumbnailers 1.0 Alpha 1 as the inaugural tagged release for this audio/video thumbnailer. Development on this audio/video thumbnailer for GNOME has been led by Sophie Herold.

Beginning with the Linux 6.19 kernel, the hung task detector and system lock-up detector are now optionally able to provide greater insight into the issues by dumping additional system information. The new lockup_sys_info and hung_task_sys_info sysctl knobs were merged over as part of the pull requests managed by Andrew Morton.

Andrew Morton first sent in the memory management "MM" updates for Linux 6.19. Overall a number of low-level kernel code clean-ups and various minor optimizations

Not Linux but I figured a review of a Unix system would also be of interest here.

The Bcachefs project has just released version 1.33 as the “biggest new feature in the past ~2 years” for this modern copy‑on‑write Linux filesystem that supports encryption, snapshots, compression, and more, offering advanced features aimed at rivalling filesystems like Btrfs or ZFS.

The new version brings a major new “reconcile” engine that unifies data and metadata handling, automates replication and recovery, and substantially improves performance, logging, and error reporting under heavy load. But before we get to what’s new in this version, let’s quickly revisit the background.

As we informed you earlier, Bcachefs is undergoing a big transition in how it’s distributed and maintained upstream. In mid-2025, Linus Torvalds dropped Bcachefs from the official Linux kernel 6.17 merge window after a public dispute with lead developer Kent Overstreet.

Manjaro has pushed the first stable-branch update in the upcoming “Anh-Linh” cycle, serving as a preview of the 25.1 release and introducing major changes to the desktop, kernel, and system components. However, the team is issuing a warning to users: do not update yet.

The reason is that several parts of the update require manual intervention, and in some cases, applying them without preparation may break existing systems (more on this below).

The release brings major upgrades such as Plasma 6.5.3, GNOME 49.2, (eventually) COSMIC Beta 9, LXQt 2.3, updated NVIDIA drivers, Blender 5.0, LibreOffice 25.8.3, a refreshed Mesa stack, and the first build of the Manjaro Control Panel.

Earlier this year, LWN featured an excellent article titled “Linux’s missing CRL infrastructure”. The article highlighted a number of key issues surrounding traditional Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), but critically noted how even the available measures are effectively ignored by the majority of system-level software on Linux.

One of the motivators for the discussion is that the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) will cease to be supported by Let’s Encrypt. The remaining alternative is to use Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs), yet there is little or no support for managing (or even querying) these lists in most Linux system utilities.

To solve this, I’m happy to share that in partnership with rustls maintainers Dirkjan Ochtman and Joe Birr-Pixton, we’re starting the development of upki: a universal PKI tool. This project initially aims to close the revocation gap through the combination of a new system utility and eventual library support for common TLS/SSL libraries such as OpenSSL, GnuTLS and rustls.

The Mozilla Firefox 146.0 release binaries are now available with a very exciting improvement for Linux users relying on Wayland.

With Firefox 146, the most exciting change for this last browser release before the holidays is: "Firefox now natively supports fractional scaled displays on Linux(Wayland), making rendering more effective."

Yes, Firefox on Linux is now natively supporting fractional scaling on Wayland!

Hi, everyone!

I've been using openSUSE Tumbleweed for a year now, and have had a very good experience with it, with a few minor hiccups happening along the way. I recently got a new M.2 SSD that I want to replace my 6 year old 2.5in SSD (the one currently running openSUSE Tumbleweed) with.

I have used Rescuezilla before so I gave the Clone option on it a try, and it failed about as soon as it started cloning the BTRFS partition. I decided I would try Clonezilla, as maybe it was more updated and could handle it where Rescuezilla could not. I was wrong. they both give out practically as soon as they start partclone on the BTRFS partition. Before I start doing any console commands, basically all I could find were forum posts from 3-4 years back, and besides that, I'm not always too comfortable just blindly putting commands into the terminal when I don't fully know what they are doing, I wanted to reach out to the community and maybe someone can point me in the right direction or tell me what worked for them?

I would like to clone the old 2.5in SSD to the new M.2 SSD, and have everything exactly as it was, just with more space now. Is this possible with any GUI, or if not, can someone please help point me or talk to me about my options? Thank you! :)

Edit: I'm now enlightened and use mpv, I really like the ModernZ OSC (on-screen controls), and uses config files.

IINA is only on macOS. I looked up linux alternatives but none of them seem to have similar looking UIs, at least out of the box. I want the player UI to float on top of the video + with a blurred background, it as shown in the image; or at least the ability to theme it like so.

Catch up on the latest Linux news: Kernel 6.18, Alpine 3.23, NVIDIA Display Driver v590 Beta, VLC 3.0.22, When Linus met Linus, Linux Mint 22.3 nears release, Jolla Linux phone, and more.

Welcome to the 49th week of Linuxiac’s 2025 Weekly Roundup — your go-to source for all things Linux & Open Source. Here’s a look at the biggest Linux and FOSS highlights from the past week (Dec 1 – 7).

Thinkpad P15v gen 3 running arch. I played around with fedora a bit but it was boring. I got a working gentoo install running but that was too complicated, so I settled on arch.

The set of six branches containing SoC and platform updates/additions for the Linux 6.19 kernel have been merged for enabling a lot of new RISC-V and ARM 64-bit hardware as well as enhancing some existing SoCs/platforms.

Arnd Bergmann sent out all of the SoC updates/additions on Friday for the ongoing Linux 6.19 merge window. There is some exciting new hardware, Device Trees for some new ARM machines, and more