All the News that Matters

• The 7.3 kernel has been released
  Linus Torvalds has released the 7.3kernel, as expected.
  It's Sunday afternoon, and this week I somehow kept my wits together long enough to keep track of the day of the week, so the release isn't randomly delayed. Will wonders never cease?
  Anyway, nothing very special seems to have happened this last week, so as expected the final 7.3 is out, and thus tomorrow the merge window for 7.4 opens. Except I'm on my annual family vacation, so instead of merging anything first thing in the morning, I'll spend most of the day on a boat and under water. I'll get back to merging in the afternoon, but I expect my schedule to be a bit unusual for a while.
  This release is a record-breaker on all fronts; it brought in 18,765non-merge commits from 3,021 developers, 807 of whom were first-time kerneldevelopers.
  Significant changes in this release include some significant binfmt_misc extensions, some group-scheduling workaimed at improving performance on large systems, the new failfsfilesystem that fails all operations, the fchroot() system call,global per-CPU data for BPF programs, the completion of the sched_ext subscheduler feature,working-set tracking for virtualmachines,alternativedata-stream support in the ntfs3 filesystem,a longlist of SMB server improvements,and much more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 7.3 pagefor details.

• Introducing GNOME OS Preview
  The GNOME Project has provided GNOME OS for some time; until now, theproject only provided a "Nightly" edition that was built from the latest commitsand was aimed solely at GNOME developers. Adrian Vovk has now announcedthe release of GNOME OS Preview, which is intended for a non-developer audience:
  
  GNOME OS Preview is the current GNOME OS Nightly, but without the "nightly"aspect. Instead, it's built from the latest stable GNOME release (GNOME 51.1, atthe time of writing). GNOME OS Preview lives in the same branches on GitLab asthe stable org.gnome.Platform Flatpak runtimes.
  
  GNOME OS Preview is only a few weeks old, so it has only seen limitedreal-life testing so far. We therefore expect people will uncover some issuesinitially. That said, Preview is significantly more stable than Nightly, whichdozens of people have been daily driving without major issues for over ayear. Thus, we're feeling confident that Preview is going to be reliable enoughfor daily use by non-developer enthusiasts.
  
  While Preview is meant for non-developers, it is not considered complete orstable for the broader public. There are a number of features, listed in Vovk'spost, that need to be implemented before the project is ready to declareGNOME OS "ready for prime time". Adventurous users, who might notmind having to reinstall the OS once a stable version is declared, candownload and start using GNOME OS Preview today.
  
  
  

• [$] Safe self-referential data structures in kernel Rust
  Self-referential structures that can be used without unsafe codehave posed a problem for Rust for years.There are many cases where a self-referential data structure is the elegantalgorithmic choice, but implementing it in accordance with Rust's lifetime rulesis all but impossible. At Kangrejos 2026, Gary Guo presented a clever solutionto the problem in the context of the kernel'spin_init crate, which helps with the creation of immovable data structures,typically for interoperability with C. Guo's changes could help remove most ofthe unsafe code related to lifetimes in theNova driver and, eventually, other Rust components.
  

• [$] Recent and future changes to the Linux NFS server
  The NFS network filesystem protocol has a long history on Unix-likeoperating systems (and beyond). NFS is still evolving, though, andimplementations need to keep up. At the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference, NFS developerJeff Layton gave an overview of recent enhancements to the Linuximplementation, along with some hints for what will be coming in the nearfuture.

• Results from the 2026 TAB election
  The resultsfrom the 2026 election for members of the Linux Foundation TechnicalAdvisory Board (TAB) have been announced. Kees Cook, Dave Hansen, MiguelOjeda, and Shuah Khan have all been re-elected, and Laurent Pinchart willbe joining the board.

• Security updates for Friday
  Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (ghostscript, grafana, hplip, libsoup3, lrzsz, rpcbind, and wireshark), Debian (chromium, cifs-utils, expat, gst-plugins-bad1.0, gst-plugins-good1.0, jpeg-xl, mutt, and spip), Mageia (gpsd, libx11, and roundcubemail), Oracle (389-ds-base, compat-libtiff3, environment-modules, ghostscript, grafana, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, hplip, idm:DL1, kernel, kernel-uek, libsoup, libsoup3, lrzsz, rpcbind, and wireshark), Red Hat (gd), SUSE (alloy, amazon-ecs-init, bind, busybox, chromium, distribution, govulncheck-vulndb, iperf, jackson-annotations, jackson-core, jackson-databind, kernel, libXtst, mutt, openssh, php8, python313-python-multipart, python313-python-rapidjson, python313-python3-saml, python313-pywbem, python313-redis, python313-reportlab, python313-requests, python313-rope, python313-rpyc, python313-rsa, qemu, swtpm, the Java stack, and wpa_supplicant), and Ubuntu (golang-1.23, linux-azure, and rabbitmq-server).

• [$] Vendor hooks in the Android kernel
  Since Android's inception, the kernels it has used have divergedsignificantly from the mainline. While many of those differences have beenresolved over time, and the move to the generickernel image has helped to bring Android closer, current devices stillcarry a lot of out-of-tree changes. The preferred form for such changes isby way of vendorhooks. At the 2026 LinuxPlumbers Conference, Todd Kjos ran a fast-paced session in the Androidtrack to discuss vendor hooks and how they are used.

• KDE releases documentary
  As part of KDE's 30thanniversary celebration, the project has released The KDE Documentary— A Story of Free Software Underdogs (YouTube video):
  
  The story starts in 1996, when Matthias Ettrich, a student at the Universityof Tübingen, posted to a Usenet group asking for programmers to help build adesktop for Linux. What followed became KDE, one of the largest free softwarecommunities in the world. KDE made Linux usable as a desktop for people whoweren't system administrators, giving it a complete, consistent graphicalenvironment at a time when there was none.
  
  The film covers the highs and lows of three decades of KDE: the Qt licensingfight and the rivalry with GNOME; the success of KHTML, the browser engine thatbecame the basis of Apple's WebKit and Google's Chrome; and the contentiousrelease of KDE 4 and the rebuild that followed.
  

• Ubuntu 26.10 released
  Canonical has announcedthe release of Ubuntu 26.10 ("Stonking Stingray"):
  
  Ubuntu 26.10 advances enterprise security features, completes the rollout ofthe Rust-based uutils coreutils, and strengthens integrations for userauthentication using Microsoft Entra ID.
  
  [...] Ubuntu 26.10 also ships with GNOME 51, bringing a smoother, moreresponsive desktop, better display handling, improved accessibility, andrefinements across core applications. In addition, the Ubuntu App Center nowprovides a more consistent experience for managing snaps and debs.
  
  See the release notesfor a list of new features as well as incompatiblechanges between 26.10 and prior Ubuntu releases.
  

• Security updates for Thursday
  Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (environment-modules, flatpak-builder, kernel, kernel-rt, librabbitmq, libreoffice, libsoup, mod_auth_openidc:2.3, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, OpenEXR, opentelemetry-collector, pki-core:10.6, postgresql:12, python-tornado, python36:3.6, ruby:3.3, tftp, and xorg-x11-server), Debian (buildstream, firefox-esr, mariadb, and sogo), Fedora (exim, freerdp, python3-docs, and python3.14), Mageia (drakx-installer-images, kernel, kmod-nvidia-current-wopengpu, kmod-virtualbox), Oracle (curl, emacs, environment-modules, flatpak, flatpak-builder, gd, hplip, kbd, kernel, librabbitmq, libreoffice, libxml2, microcode_ctl, mod_auth_openidc:2.3, nodejs:22, OpenEXR, pcre2, perl-DBI, python-tornado, rsyslog, tftp, thunderbird, and xorg-x11-server), Red Hat (compat-libtiff3, firefox, ghostscript, idm:DL1, ipa, kernel, kernel-rt, libtiff, lrzsz, and mariadb-connector-c), Slackware (libarchive), SUSE (amazon-cloudwatch-agent, bind, container-suseconnect, containerd, glibc, google-osconfig-agent, helm, kernel, python312, python313-oletools, python313-openpyxl, python313-orjson, python313-paramiko, python313-pipreqs, python313-py, python313-pycryptodome, python313-pycryptodomex, python313-pydrive2, python313-python-engineio, webkit2gtk3, and xorg-x11-server), and Ubuntu (apache2, bind9, bluez, curl, openssh, python-urllib3, and u-boot).

• Seven stable kernels for Thursday with fix for critical vulnerability
  Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.11, 6.18.57,6.12.113, 6.6.159, 6.1.190,5.15.223, and 5.10.272 stable kernels. This series includes,among other things, a fix for acritical vulnerability (CVE-2026-99999). Theflaw in skb_checksum_help()would allow an IPv4 packet with bad checksum metadata to "corrupt the networkheader and cause a bunch of mischief" in the words of patch author MichaelS. Tsirkin. As usual, all users are advised to upgrade.
  
  
  

• [$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 15, 2026
  Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:
  Front: 2026 Maintainers Summit; Rust goals; GCC and LLMs; GCC CFI; systemd; C types in Rust; LTTng; Swap showdown; KDE Linux. Briefs: 64-day certificates; Nix and Lix security; Asterinas 0.19.0; LineageOS 24; KDE 6.8; Python 3.15; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

• [$] Collaborating with out-of-tree tracers
  LTTng creator Mathieu Desnoyers seems abit trapped in something of a catch-22.At the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference(LPC), he led a discussion on the problem he is having in trying tocollaborate with other tracing projects (e.g. ftrace, perf) in the kernel. Thefeedback he has gotten, both over the years and more recently, does notshow a path that would allow him to contribute the 21-year-oldGPLv2-licensed LTTng tracing framework, or, incrementally, features fromit, to the mainline kernel.

• Linus Torvalds's first LLM-assisted patch series
  At the recently concluded MaintainersSummit, Linus Torvalds said that he had been using a large languagemodel to work on a patch series addressing a longstanding problem; he hasnow postedthat series for review.
  The fairly short series of ten patches basically enhances folio lookup by noticing when folios are hot, and setting a "delay releasing this folio until after a RCU period", and then using that RCU delay it does not just the folio lookup itself under RCU (which we've done forever), but also the actual folio data accesses themselves under RCU. No refcount taking needed for the fastpath where we can just read the data from the folio entirely in an RCU-protected region when the user copy doesn't cause page faults.
  The end result is an order-of-magnitude speedup for a read()-heavybenchmark. Review has already identified a racecondition in the code, though, so further work will be needed.

• KDE Plasma 6.8 released
  Version 6.8 ofthe KDE Plasma desktop has beenreleased. The The KDE project has timed the release to coincide with the 30thanniversary of Matthias Ettrich's email announcing theproject:
  Unix popularity grows thanks to the free variants, mostly Linux. But still aconsistent, nice looking free desktop-environment is missing. There are severalnice either free or low-priced applications available, so that Linux/X11 wouldalmost fit everybody needs if we could offer a real GUI.
  Notable changes include accessibility improvements, inclusionof the Kup backuptool as part of Plasma, as well as the ability to include system audio andmicrophone input in Spectaclescreen recordings. Plasma 6.8 also drops support for Plasma X11 sessions, as was announcedin November 2025. X11 applications are still supported via XWayland, and KDEapplications will continue to support X11 "for the foreseeablefuture".
  
  See the KDE wiki for alist of major user-facing changes, and the changelogfor all changes since Plasma 6.7.5.
  
  
  

• Linuxiac Weekly Wrap-Up: Week 42, 2026 (October 12 – 18)
  Catch up on the latest Linux news: Ubuntu 26.10, GNOME OS Preview, KDE Plasma 6.8, Firefox 158, Wine 11.20, Linus Torvalds rejects AI coding bans, and more.

• Linux Kernel 7.3 Officially Released, This Is What’s New
  Linux kernel 7.3 is now available for download, as announced today by Linus Torvalds himself, featuring enhanced hardware support, filesystem and networking improvements, security enhancements, new drivers, and many other changes.

• GNOME 51.1 Improves Drag and Drop Between Wayland and Xwayland Clients
  The GNOME project released GNOME 51.1 today as the first point release in the latest GNOME 51 desktop environment series to fix bugs, update translations, and add a few enhancements.

• Fedora Linux 45 Delayed, New Release Date Set for October 27
  Fedora developers have postponed Fedora Linux 45 until October 27 after no suitable final release candidate was available for evaluation.

• This Week in Tech: AI Gets Bigger, Gadgets Get Smarter, and Security Risks Mount
  This Week in Tech: AI Gets Bigger, Gadgets Get Smarter, and Security Risks Mount appeared first on TechRepublic.

• LILYGO T5 e-Paper Basic Adopts 4.7-Inch Display for Embedded Projects
  LILYGO’s latest e-paper development board pairs an ESP32-S3 with a 4.7-inch display offering 960 × 540 resolution and 16-level grayscale. The board also includes battery monitoring, removable storage, and Wi-Fi and BLE connectivity for portable information displays and wireless embedded projects. The board is powered by an ESP32-S3 microcontroller with a dual-core Xtensa LX7 processor […]

• Omarchy 4.0.5 Released with Linux Kernel 7.2.8, Better Hardware Support
  Omarchy 4.0.5 ships with Linux kernel 7.2.8, Qt 6.12 compatibility fixes, desktop performance improvements, and better support for NVIDIA laptops and audio devices.

• Linux 7.4 Features Very Exciting With Radeon HDMI 2.1 By Default, AMD PerfOpt, Apple M4
  The Linux 7.3 kernel is expected to be released as stable later today and with that version there are many exciting changes and improvements. However, the Linux 7.4 kernel merge window will then open up and there are even more exciting changes expected to be merged for this follow-on kernel cycle. Here is a preview of some of the many exciting feature changes expected for Linux 7.4...

• Linus Torvalds Rejects No-AI Rules as the Linux Kernel Drops Its Assisted-by Tag
  The Linux kernel is dropping its Assisted-by tag for AI patches. Linus Torvalds answered the pushback with compilers, assembler and a text editor.

• Linux Lands Fix for Rare, Varying SMP Boot Hangs Affecting Kernels Since 2024
  Among the flurry of last minute patch activity ahead of tomorrow's presumed Linux 7.3 stable kernel release is a fix for addressing some rare hangs at boot time. The reports varied but ultimately tracked down to a kernel change made two years ago...

• GNOME 50.6 Desktop Environment Released with Fixes for Nautilus, GNOME Shell
  The GNOME Project released GNOME 50.6 as the sixth maintenance update to the latest GNOME 50 “Tokyo” desktop environment series to fix more bugs across various core apps and components.

• ZimaOS Is a Linux-Based NAS OS That Makes Self-Hosting Easier
  Meet ZimaOS, a Linux-based NAS operating system that simplifies file storage, backups, Docker apps, and home server management.

• MeshXFS: AI Adapts XFS Into A Clustered File-System
  MeshXFS is a clustered open-source file-system in which "no human wrote any of its own code". Depending upon your views of AI, not necessarily something you want to hear for entrusting your data in an AI-created solution. Instead, Claude Opus was tasked with adapting the XFS file-system driver into a clustered file-system...

• Ubuntu Touch OTA 2.1 Rolls Out with Support for Volla Tablet, Various Updates
  The UBports Foundation released Ubuntu Touch OTA 2.1 today as a minor update to this open-source and free mobile operating system for smartphones and tablets.

• M5Stack PaperDIY Assembly Kit Opens Up 4.7-Inch E-Paper Development
  M5Stack has introduced the PaperDIY Assembly Kit, an ESP32-S3-based development platform featuring a 4.7-inch e-paper display with 960 × 540 resolution and 16-level grayscale. The kit combines Wi-Fi connectivity, battery power management, and expansion interfaces in an open design intended for custom information displays, electronic signage, and embedded development projects. The main control board integrates […]

• AI-Generated Starling Desktop Environment Rolls Out Its Own Office Suite
  Starling, the open-source desktop environment written in Swift and with its own Wayland compositor too and written largely via Claude Code, has now rolled out its own AI-generated office suite...

• First Look at Devario OS: A Modern, Shelly-First Linux Distro Based on Arch Linux
  From the creators of the Shelly package manager for Arch Linux, I am happy to introduce you to Devario OS, a modern Linux distro based on Arch Linux and built around in-house projects.

• The Best Features Of Linux 7.3: Performance Improvements, Lots From Valve
  The Linux 7.3 kernel is slated to be officially released on Sunday, 18 October, barring any last minute issues from coming about. With that said, here's a reminder about some of the most exciting features to look forward to in this next kernel version...

• Join us for the Fedora Linux 45 Release Party!
  Fedora Linux 45 is almost here! Developers, packagers, and quality assurance engineers are hard at work putting the remaining polish on Fedora 45, which means it’s time for our Global Virtual Release Party! It is almost time to celebrate! If all goes according to plan, we will celebrate Fedora 45 just after its actual final […]

• 17 More Security Vulnerabilities Made Public For X.Org Libraries
  Just shy of two weeks since a dozen vulnerabilities were published for the X.Org Server and XWayland, more than one dozen vulnerabilities were made public today affecting multiple X.Org client libraries...

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• Anthropic Announces 'Public Benefit Fund', Committing 5% of Its Shares
  "Anthropic says it's committing 5% of its shares to a 'public benefit fund'," reports TechCrunch, "structured as a wholly-owned entity within the company — with the option to contribute an additional 2% for every 50% increase in Anthropic's value." Important context from CNBC:The timing of Anthropic's public fund announcement is both mandatory to prepare for an initial public offering, and "beneficial from an image perspective," especially as AI reshapes the jobs market, Lise Buyer, partner at IPO advisory firm Class V Group, told CNBC... Anthropic said it will share more about the fund structure and governance in the coming months, including valuation milestones that may increase the stake. It said it will also share progress on the fund in an upcoming public benefit report. In response to Anthropic's announcement, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on X that he "recommend[s] giving the shares directly to the public." Anthropic's announcement hints the fund could address job-market displacements. It says the fund "might" explore "large donations to traditional nonprofits" — or, that it "might" explore "direct distributions to specific populations. One example is labor market impacts." It then argues AI could "cause instability" for many workers. And while Anthropic has already committed $200 million for "studying and addressing" this issue, Sunday's announcement says "bolder" approaches may be needed, and that the Fund "will have the versatility to pursue them." "Combined with its co-founders' pledge to donate 80% of their equity and an employee donation matching program, roughly 20% of Anthropic's shares will be dedicated to public purposes," reports Reuters, "excluding any additional shares added later."
  
  
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• 'Human Vs. Robot' Cage Match Was Illegal, Says California
  "A human defeated two of the three robots he faced in a cage fight recently held in San Francisco," reports the Los Angeles Times, noting that videos of the event drew more than 10 million views on YouTube. But "the humans behind that fight could face a battle of their own — the legal type — if they want to hold another event like 'Human Vs. Robot,' the Sept. 18 competition that placed influencer Frankie LaPenna inside an octagon to battle three humanoid robots that were controlled remotely by a human operator in separate MMA-style fights..."Wearing spiked gloves, a helmet and protective padding, the 5-foot-6, 205-pound LaPenna held his own against all three bots. He dominated his first opponent, referred to at the fight as "the child robot." Next came an imposing "Terminator"-inspired humanoid, which was listed on the fight video as 6-feet and 200 pounds with a kick force of 850 pounds. The robot landed several hard kicks, including one that knocked LaPenna across the mat and another with an impact that brought the humanoid to the ground and caused its head to come off — but the human seemed to gain strength as the match went on and eventually stood triumphantly with his foot on the machine's crumpled body. LaPenna was dominant early in his final match, in which he faced a robot that resembled a "Predator" from the movies of the same name. After landing several punches and kicks and taking his opponent to the ground multiple times, LaPenna eventually became fatigued and called for the match to be ended. "He doesn't get tired. He doesn't stay down," LaPenna said in a postmatch interview. "The crowd of about 100 (humans, not humanoids) was thrilled," writes the New York Times. (After beating his first robot opponent, LaPenna told his interviewer, "Clankers zero, humans one.") But the New York Times adds that "Those who know humanoid robots best highly recommend against fighting them.""It's very unfair to put a human in with a heavily motorized system that's only going to dominate," said Ken Goldberg, a professor who oversees the automation lab at the University of California, Berkeley. "There's nothing surprising about that...." He said he understood the appeal of the fights that Robot Entertainment Kombat (REK) was staging, noting that it tapped "into some of the fear and frustration with robots that people feel.... I mean, they love to see the human kick the robot's gearbox," he said. But the odds of that human fighter getting his gearbox kicked are much greater, Dr. Goldberg said, given that REK's humanoid robots can weigh several hundred pounds and are made of steel. To be fair, it looked like sometimes the robot just fell over. (And the robots were human-controlled, not programmed with split-second reactions...) But "Not everyone is a fan," adds the Los Angeles Times:On Sept. 23, the California State Athletic Commission sent a cease-and-desist order to REK, its CEO Cix Liv and "all persons holding, promoting, advertising or sponsoring unsanctioned human versus humanoid robot cage fight." The letter states that "any boxing or mixed martial arts contest, match, or exhibition, involving any human in the State of California" requires the prior approval of the commission and that it is a misdemeanor to hold such an event without obtaining a license or permit from the state. A spokesperson for the California Department of Consumer Affairs, which oversees the CSAC, said in a statement emailed to The Times that the commission is "committed to protecting the safety of the public and integrity of combat sports." "Unsanctioned activity puts the physical and financial well-being of all those involved at risk and such activity will not be tolerated," the statement said.
  
  
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• New Video Game Law Proposed: 'If You Pay For It, You Own It'
  "When you pay for a game, you should own it," says U.S. Representative Ritchie Torres (D-NY), introducing a new bill to fight the practice of "a rental disguised as a sale". Kotaku reports:The fifth best-selling game of 2024 in the U.S. was NBA 2K25. Every year, fans dump hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars into the grindy NBA basketball sim. But just a little over two years after its release, 2K Games confirmed it's already pulling the plug on it. The game will be delisted from digital storefronts on October 30. By January 1, 2027, online servers will go offline as well, making it impossible to play the most popular modes. A game millions paid $70 for will become mostly useless. Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres wants to change that. "I think there should be a simple rule: if you pay for it, you own it," Torres told Kotaku in a phone interview this week. To make that the law of the land, the U.S. representative for New York's 15th congressional district since 2021 plans to introduce legislation in Congress called the Power To The Players Act. The bill would direct the Federal Trade Commission to create regulations protecting ownership rights for video games. Companies selling digital games would need to grant players more than just a license that can expire at any time, and games with online features would need to provide offline modes that still work even when servers eventually shut down... The Power To The Players Act noticeably leaves out other types of digital media like movies and music, though Terminator 2 and a bunch of other movie purchases were ripped from people's digital libraries earlier this year. Representative Torres "did not confirm if the bill will have any cosponsors," the article acknowledges, "or whether any of his Republican colleagues will sign on to support it." But players will see the bill's importance next month, the article points out, "when Grand Theft Auto 6 releases as just a download code in a box, giving fans no control over a purchase that starts at $80.
  
  
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• Planned UK Data Center Delayed Until 2030s Over Power Grid Delays. Microsoft Pulls Out
  July: Nvidia-backed Nscale is building a £2bn data centre at Loughton in Essex, with Microsoft signed up as its anchor tenant. But it can't get the electricity to switch on, reported The Next Web:Nscale's problem is not really Nscale's. It is Britain's. Grid-connection times have become the single biggest brake on new data centres. Some UK projects face waits stretching close to a decade for enough power. One estimate found more than a quarter of data-centre capacity slipped in 2025 alone. "The data centre was due to receive its power supply at the end of the year," reports the BBC. "But as first reported by the Telegraph on Sunday, Nscale has been told this will not happen until the 2030s." (Though Nscale and Microsoft are still working together on other projects in Norway, Portugal and America.) But now anchor-tenant Microsoft has pulled out of the Essex deal, reports the Telegraph, adding that Microsoft's move "leaves the site in apparent limbo. The company was its only announced customer, having agreed to rent 23,000 Nvidia AI chips at the facility..."Microsoft's decision threatens to undermine Nscale's attempts to push ahead with a Wall Street flotation worth up to $35bn (£26bn), despite a brutal sell-off in AI computing stocks. Rival data centre developers have seen their share prices plunge over the last week on concerns that they will struggle to repay their debts as interest rates and inflation continue to rise.... Tech analyst Gartner said last week that $3.5 trillion could be written off by 2030 if the AI boom fails to deliver on its promises. And "our research indicates that enterprise and consumer AI revenue will be insufficient to support profitable returns on all planned AI capital expenditures during this period," Gartner wrote:"In 2026, AI providers are expected to spend nearly $1 trillion on AI infrastructure, and are forecast to invest an additional $6 trillion between 2027 and 2030," said Will Sommer, Sr Director Analyst at Gartner.... Failure to achieve sustainable return on investment capital (ROIC) on rapidly depreciating assets would almost certainly necessitate write-downs. Based on Gartner projections, a continued AI infrastructure investment trajectory could leave more than $4 trillion in asset value exposed to write-down risk through 2032. In this scenario, Gartner does not expect the 12% ROIC to be achieved until the end of 2032 at earliest... Gartner estimates AI-optimized IaaS spending will grow from $66 billion in 2027 to $174 billion in 2030. "The growth in spending on AI-optimized IaaS will be too low for most AI compute providers to recover their AI investments before the current generation of AI semiconductors is replaced," said Sommer. By 2030, Gartner predicts that cost pressure and a lack of a differentiating business model will force over 80% of neocloud [AI-specialized infrastructure] providers to cease independent operations.
  
  
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• Researchers Discover How To Lead Dying Coral Reefs To a 'Fast And Full Recovery'
  Gizmodo reports:Roughly 84.4% of the world's coral reefs suffered bleaching-levels of heat stress during the last major marine heat wave from January 2023 to September 2025, with over half already lost compared to coral coverage in the 1950s... But there's some good news, thanks to a new study published this Wednesday in the journal Science Advances: Marine ecologists at Stanford have discovered that bleached corals can be revived via contact with a healthy coral neighbor, who (like a good neighbor) shares their photosynthetic, symbiotic algae (Symbiodiniaceae) with their peers. "This incredible new result — that fast and full recovery is possible in bleached coral — can inspire solutions that eventually may be scalable," [Fiorenza Micheli, a marine ecologist with Stanford's Center for Ocean Solutions and study co-author, told the journal Nature]... Unlike their controls, bleached coral in contact with healthy coral recovered in just eight weeks... [T]he surprise discovery of this method alongside the other techniques that marine conservationists are now actively pursuing — including the successful deep-freezing and revival of at-risk coral sampled from Hawaii — could offer threatened reefs the lifeline they need. Coral contact could super-charge other efforts, like the selective breeding of heat-tolerant corals and the cultivation of protected coral nurseries
  
  
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• Websites Are Closing Their Doors to AI Agents
  The Verge reports:OpenAI, Meta, Google, Instinct, and others promise their agents can scour the internet on your behalf, doing anything from booking a dinner reservation and cleaning out your inbox to buying new shoes. But what happens when the rest of the internet won't play nice? In recent weeks, users of services like Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok, OpenAI's Dots, and Instinct have reported blocks preventing their AI agents from performing tasks across top websites. Yelp told TechCrunch that it only allows AI agents that pay for its data licensing program, while Delta Air Lines is preventing them from booking tickets on behalf of users. JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab have also confirmed that they're blocking AI agents from accessing accounts due to security concerns. Some users say sites that previously worked with their AI agent are no longer accessible, including Cars.com and Amtrak, suggesting other companies could be quietly blocking them.... Muse, Meta's deceptively cute AI assistant, most recently faced the wrath of Amazon, which said its "continued access" violates its site policies. There are reports of xAI's Grok, Instinct's AI agent, and OpenAI's Dots being unable to use Amazon as well. xAI owner Elon Musk responded by saying that maybe he "should start a competitor to Amazon." The more places bots struggle to access, the greater the questions about how useful they are.... Instead of trying to fight Amazon, [Meta] has partnered with retailers like Walmart, Gap, Sephora, Best Buy, and others, allowing Muse to shop on their sites. At the same time, Shopify has also opened its network of storefronts to AI agents.
  
  
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• More Details on Arrested Saudi OpenAI Employee, Who is Seeking Release on Bail
  More details are emerging about Saudi OpenAI employee Abdulrahman Alfozan, who was arrested by the FBI for allegedly planting a recording device in an executive conference room. Previously Alfozan "was an engineer at Meta," notes the New York Times, "before joining a start-up that went through Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley start-up accelerator. He gained permanent residency status in the United States in 2020, according to court documents, and was hired by OpenAI in July 2025." 14 months later the conference room recording device was inserted in a USB port on the back of a television, and then concealed in toilet paper, according to a statement from America's Justice Department. (There's even a photo of a device — and a photo of Alfozan entering the executive conference room and appearing to look behind the television where the device was inserted.) The FBI's says a chatbot account associated with Alfozan's spouse showed prompts asking about installing and obfuscating a recording device. And the complaint alleges that OpenAI security personnel also found a bag Alfozan left in a different room which contained his wallet, his ID, and another recording device. Discussions in that room included "highly confidential technical, commercial, and strategic information, including proprietary research," according to the FBI, "as well as nonpublic information about Open AI's technical progress and strategic decisions..." "If convicted, Alfozan faces a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, followed by 3 years of supervised release." Friday Alfozan's lawyersrequested his release from custody, saying Alfozan agrees to wear an ankle monitor, remain at home, surrender his passport and "not possess any covert audio or video recording or surveillance device." They argue that the one-way ticket he'd purchased to Saudi Arabia just continues a long-standing habit of buying one-way tickets over the years for air travel, since his tech career often involves last-minute changes to meeting schedules, and "70% of the airline bookings in his email since January 2021 (96 of 138) were one-way tickets." His lawyers also presented 46 letters of support, including letters from former Meta colleagues, ten company founders and chief executives, and more than a dozen engineers and engineering managers.
  
  
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• LinkedIn Fights AI Slop, Now 40% of Its Long-Form Posts
  "Even LinkedIn is getting tired of your AI-written posts," writes CNN, reporting that the Microsoft-owned, job-oriented social media site "is upping its fight against slop."A report published in July by Pangram, a research firm that tracks AI content online, found that more than 40% of long-form posts on the platform were AI-generated, compared to around 30% on X and Medium and a smaller percentage on Reddit and Substack.... LinkedIn previously offered AI tools to edit or rewrite posts, although it recently scaled the offerings back. But low-quality AI posts are a business problem for LinkedIn. They all start to sound the same, [according to LinkedIn Editor-in-Chief Dan Roth Roth]. If users see too many generic AI posts, instead of content that really teaches them something or gives them a deeper understanding of a professional connection, LinkedIn risks losing them to other platforms. In August, LinkedIn rolled out a button letting users flag when a post "seems like AI slop," which was clicked more than 1 million times within its first two weeks. Now, the company is trying to use its own AI systems to help weed out AI slop on the platform and to remind LinkedIn users how to post like humans. The company built a team largely made up of former journalists and social media experts who have an eye for recognizing generic, sloppy content. These experts help train LinkedIn's AI model on what authentic, useful posts look like. If the model flags a post as low-quality, AI-generated content, it'll be less likely to be distributed beyond that user's direct connections. Also key to the strategy is a creator management team that acts as "content therapists" for executives, subject matter experts and other LinkedIn users, many of whom have gotten accustomed to the convenience of using AI to write what, on the surface, appear to be polished posts, Roth said. "A lot of times now today, they'll run it through Claude or Gemini or wherever, they'll post it on LinkedIn and it will perform poorly. And then they come to the team and they're like, 'Why did this do badly?'" Roth said. "And the best thing you can do is give it back to them and be like, 'Did you enjoy reading this? Do you see yourself in this?" The efforts are showing early signs of success. Improvements to LinkedIn's detection systems have resulted in a 40% decline in views of content classified as AI slop, the platform said last month. That's not to say LinkedIn is entirely opposed to AI, Roth said, adding that "not everyone is a born communicator." But failing to edit or personalize content means it's less likely to reach a wide audience on the platform.
  
  
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• Programming Language Popularity Increases for R, Julia, and Rust (but Not Go)
  TechRepublic reports:The TIOBE Index is a monthly indicator of programming-language popularity based on factors including skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors. The October 2026 rankings show a largely stable top 10, with R overtaking SQL and Julia returning to the top 20 for the first time in three years. [SQL has risen to #9 from #10 in October of 2025 — back when R ranked only #13.] Python remains No. 1, followed by C, C++, Java, C#, and JavaScript, while Rust holds its No. 10 position. [A year ago Rust ranked only #16.] Outside the top 10, Julia climbs from No. 21 to No. 18, and TIOBE introduces Mandarin Chinese search terms into its methodology to broaden the index's geographic representation. Dropping out of the top ten is Go, which fell from #8 in October of 2025 to #11. And Delphi/Object Pascal has plummeted from #9 to #19. TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen argues that Julia's growing popularity "is largely driven by the demand for modern programming languages that combine high performance with ease of learning, particularly for numerical computing." Python offers an accessible, high-level approach to numerical computing, but performance can become a bottleneck. C++, on the other hand, delivers excellent performance but comes with a steeper learning curve and a lower level of abstraction. Julia aims to bridge this gap by combining the best of both worlds... Apart from Julia, two other languages are knocking on the door of the TIOBE top 20: Dart and OCaml. Dart jumps from #41 to #27 this month. Thanks to its popular UI toolkit Flutter, Dart has been hovering around the edge of the top 20 for quite some time. OCaml, on the other hand, might come as a surprise. It jumps from #38 to #26 this month, driven in part by its growing use in real-time trading systems and parsing technology.
  
  
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• Releasing Palm OS Archive, Developer Rediscovers Working Virus After 25 Years
  Long-time Slashdot reader ardiri remembers his days writing applications for the Palm OS. And he's now released approximately 1.5 GB of historical Palm OS development resources, "accumulated during the early days of handheld computing and preserved on hard drive backups for more than 25 years... to preserve the tools and knowledge that helped define an important era of personal computing."The collection includes historical SDKs, developer conference presentations, technical documentation, programming examples, limited source code, and development utilities. (ROM images, commercial applications, and simulator binaries have deliberately been excluded....) Making a broader collection of development resources available to the retrocomputing community, the archive is available at GitHub.com/ardiri/dev-palmos and is intended for historical preservation, education, and research, particularly as enthusiasts continue working to maintain, emulate, and revive the platform... Ardiri has also written an auto-biography and has started explored the engineering principles behind these systems in his books. And somewhere along the way, Ardiri rediscovered the original source code for "The Palm OS Virus That Never Was — Lost for 25 Years, Found in 2026." Lurking on a CompactFlash card containing files dated June 2001, he found the self-replicating Palm OS virus that he'd developed and tested in June 2001, months before the planned PalmSource developer conference in San Jose.Named 'Virii,' the virus intercepted Palm OS system calls to progressively infect legitimate applications while preserving their original functionality. Infected applications could then spread between handheld devices through infrared beaming, potentially allowing an infection to propagate among hundreds of developers exchanging software at the conference. The virus also included a date-triggered payload designed to interfere with system time reporting between October 23 and 27, 2001, potentially causing erratic clocks, unreliable alarms, and missed appointments. He promises the functional source code and binaries will remain private.
  
  
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• FSF Criticizes Raspberry Pi DRM Blocking RAM Upgrades
  The Free Software Foundation "has never supported Raspberry Pi," writes their deputy directory Sean O'Brien, "as it depends on nonfree software for the boot process, leaving an important part of the computer outside the user's control." But they're now decrying "an even more intrusive restriction on user freedom" — the binary-blob bootloader changes that limit your ability to upgrade RAM: The restriction is not new: the relevant checks were introduced in the device firmware around 2024. However, these hardware handcuffs have only recently received wider attention. Though a user can desolder the original memory and install electrically compatible RAM, the nonfree firmware may refuse to recognize the additional memory, or simply decide not to boot the computer at all. Even replacement RAM of the same capacity can be rejected. This is worse than Raspberry Pi's longstanding dependence on nonfree firmware in an important way. It is not only nonfree software, but it is Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), used in this case to prevent the owner of the computer from making a modification that the hardware is otherwise capable of supporting. That distinction matters. Soldered RAM is difficult for most people to replace since it is a physical characteristic of the hardware. In the case of Raspberry Pi boards, users have demonstrated that the hardware itself can be modified successfully.... Raspberry Pi justifies the use of DRM on the basis of being able to identify altered computers. There may be legitimate reasons for wanting to identify such altered computers. Unscrupulous sellers have reportedly replaced memory on lower-capacity boards and resold them as more expensive models, sometimes using unreliable or defective components. But preventing fraud and maintaining quality does not require taking control away from users. A Raspberry Pi could record its original factory configuration in a cryptographically verifiable form. Raspberry Pi could use free software that warns the user when the installed RAM differs from original factory configuration. Raspberry Pi could provide tools allowing buyers to verify what hardware originally shipped with a board. None of those measures requires a software-enforced limit on what an owner may do with the computer... If compatible hardware can be installed successfully, the manufacturer should not create restrictions to prevent the owner from using it. Restrictions on hardware upgrades are deeply troubling from an organization like Raspberry Pi that has stated their commitment to longevity as a guiding principle. Free software is ultimately about who controls the computer. The user should control it, not the manufacturer that sold it.... The people who own these computers must also have the freedom to modify, repair, and upgrade them, without restrictions imposed by nonfree software limiting their potential. Hackaday recently argued the restriction was "no big deal." noting there's ways to bypass the restriction"The bootloader is stored in the SPI flash chip, which can be reflashed using the built-in mask ROM over USB and rpiboot, and you are not prevented from flashing older versions of the bootloader, so far... If you have the skills to upgrade your RAM, you most certainly have the skills to downgrade the Raspberry Pi bootloader... My advice: don't lament Raspberry Pi RAM upgrades, especially given they're only slightly harder to perform now. Very few hackers ever performed them, the main audience for them turned out to be dodgy hardware resellers online... Think of the users that will no longer be fooled by a shady seller on Amazon, especially now that the perverse incentives for board mods and reusing harvested RAM chips are at their highest.
  
  
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• Tech Journalist Robert X Cringely Has Died
  BoingBoing reports:Mark Stephens, better known under the pen name Robert X. Cringely, died last week at 73. Stephens chronicled the tech industry of the late 1980s and early 1990s — the age of Bill Gates' rise, Steve Jobs' repose, the dawn of the world wide web — and produced the famed documetary Triumph of the Nerds, based on his own bestselling Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date. Though not the first InfoWorld columnist to write under the Cringely name, he was responsible for its persona and fought successfully to keep it after he left the magazine in 1995. "I loved the man," writes Darth Technoid (Slashdot reader #83,199):I first met him in the 1990s, while he was still working at InfoWorld, and we became friends immediately. He helped me get a job or two, and he was always filled with crazy (meaning really good) ideas. I'll miss him and his creativity greatly. Cringely answered questions from Slashdot's readers in 2000. And Cringely led an interesting life, as you can tell from Slashdot's January, 2020 story Robert Cringely Attempts an Air-Launching Space Startup:"How does a 67-year-old hack with three minor children recover from going blind, losing his home and business in a horrible fire (like 2,000 others, we are still fighting with insurance companies), while appeasing an angry crowd of Kickstarter supporters armed with pitchforks and shovels?" That crowd still wants long-time tech pundit Robert X. Cringely to deliver on his Kickstarter-funded project to create custom Minecraft servers. So in a new blog post this week, Cringely writes that "I went looking for venture money to recapitalize MineServer and I simultaneously started a satellite launch company to fund my eventual retirement. I am not making this up..." He's now found a Beverly Hills patron who wants to be a co-investor in the Minecraft servers, but "I will have to earn the matching money on my own, which is what I have been trying to do with my other startup, Eldorado Space." Slashdot has often linked to Cringely's commentary over the years, as far back as 1998 and as recently as this summer. ("Tech Pundit Cringely Co-Founds Startup '2Brains Inc' to Solve LLM Hallucinations.")July, 1999: Cringely's take on "Pirates of Silicon Valley" April, 2009: Three Mile Island Memories June, 2011: IBM Did Not Invent the Personal ComputerMarch, 2019: Cringely's Final Predictions: Apple Becomes a Financial Service and Hedge Fund June, 2019: Cringely Predicts The End Of Broadcast TV Within A Decade April, 2020: Not Just 'The Death of IT'. Cringely Also Predicts Layoffs For Many IT Contractors January, 2021: Robert Cringley Predicted 'The Death of IT' in 2020. Was He Right? June, 2023: Cringely Predicts Moore's Law Will Continue — Because of AI But my favorite Cringely memory is Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, the full 70-minute interview from 1995 that a 40-year-old Jobs gave to Cringely during filming for Triumph of the Nerds. ("And they actually sent someone to wake up the Pope....") There's various pirated copies on YouTube and an online transcript, but only 10 minutes made the broadcast — at the time Jobs was still at NeXT after his departure from Apple. But when Cringely rediscovered the videotape, the entirety of the interview was released to theaters in 2012 six months after Steve Jobs' death. Share your own memories of Robert Cringely in the comments...
  
  
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• Saudi OpenAI Employee's Arrest Revives Fears US Tech Companies Are Hiring Spies
  That Saudi national working at OpenAI and arrested by the FBI "has not been charged with foreign espionage," writes the Washington Post, "and the U.S. government has not said whether he was acting alone or as an agent of a foreign government." But "there are signs that the U.S. government is exploring the latter possibility," they add, citing comments from Chris McGuire, a member of the National Security Council during the Biden administration:The Department of Justice's press release about the incident says that the National Security Division's Counterintelligence and Export Control section, whose responsibility includes prosecuting spies, is assisting with the case... A Washington-based Middle East expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid incurring wrath from Saudi Arabia, said he believed the Saudi government was almost certainly involved in some way. "No one does this, not even for patriotism, without getting paid," said the person. And money would not be distributed without agreement by the Saudi royal court, he said. The Saudis lag behind their regional rival, the United Arab Emirates, in artificial intelligence development, he added. Friday America's Director of National Intelligence told CNBC that espionage, "both commercial espionage, and I would say state-sponsored espionage, are realities. It's something that our private sector companies need to be wary of." (And CNBC adds that"An ex-CIA official, who asked not to be named because they were discussing information that is not public, told CNBC this week that the case is 'probably the tip of the iceberg.'") The suspect had recently said he helped advise government agencies in Saudi Arabia on technology, reports the New York Times:In an Arabic podcast interview last month, Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national, said he and other Saudi tech professionals in Silicon Valley had formed a group that advised Saudi organizations, including the kingdom's social insurance agency... "Silicon Valley is ground zero for espionage from a variety of countries around the world," said Amy Zegart, a professor at Stanford University who specializes in national security and intelligence. She added that she was "troubled" by the OpenAI incident and expected more cases "because these companies are so important." The Washington Post says the arrest "has ignited a fierce debate about the potential risks of Silicon Valley's international workforce — employees who often hail from nations seeking to rival the AI superpower status of the U.S."Foreign nationals have long formed the backbone of the American tech industry, helping U.S. companies surpass their would-be international rivals... As recently as April, Katrina Mulligan, a senior member of OpenAI's national security team, called for an "accelerated pathway to citizenship" for such workers, referring to foreign hires as a "national strategic asset" at an event on Capitol Hill. She estimated that a significant number of OpenAI's employees were not U.S. citizens, including Chinese nationals. Just half of the 300 top AI researchers in the world, she said, were American. Other industry leaders — as well as some lawmakers — have long accused top-tier tech companies with many foreign workers of disadvantaging Americans and being breeding grounds for Chinese espionage. Palmer Luckey, CEO of weapons maker Anduril, and venture capitalist Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital took to X on Wednesday to revisit arguments that the industry should focus on hiring U.S. citizens. "Silicon Valley has operated with maximum openness and maximum naivete toward foreign tradecraft," Maguire wrote... At OpenAI on Wednesday, employees continued tense conversations about the political implications of the arrest for immigrant workers, two OpenAI employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions... The arrest triggered a discussion on OpenAI's internal Slack messaging platform among employees about whether the incident might increase pressure from the Trump administration on OpenAI to not hire foreign nationals, said one of the people. In March, Emil Michael, the Pentagon's chief technology officer, wrote in court papers that AI developer Anthropic's reliance on staff with ties to China was among the concerns that fueled the Defense Department's conflict with the AI company.
  
  
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• Woman Arrested After Blocking Delivery Robot to Protest Job Displacements
  A Philadelphia newscast reports on a grey-haired lady who allegedly refused to move out of the path of a delivery robot as a form of protest because "I know they're taking the jobs of human delivery workers." She was arrested, but says her actions were protected speech:According to police, Marvin repeatedly blocked the robot's path and ignored multiple commands from officers to move... Marvin said she was protesting the use of delivery robots because she believes they are replacing human workers.... "I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward," Marvin said... Marvin said she has confronted delivery robots on multiple occasions... Ashley Baldwin of West Philadelphia said she witnessed one of those encounters. "I actually thought the robot hit her, so my original question was, 'Are you OK? Did the robot hit you?' And she said, 'No, I have to stop this. They're taking over the world,'" Baldwin said. Asked whether she plans to continue protesting the robots, Marvin said she does. She was charged with disorderly conduct. Uber did not respond to their request for a comment.
  
  
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• Does a Universal Basic Income Bring Long-Term Changes?
  For more than a year, The New York Times followed recipients of a universal basic income program who received $1,330 a month for an entire year. There were benefits, but also the everyday challenges of being poor, and turning their life around "did not turn out to be quite that simple."Across Silicon Valley, experimental guaranteed income programs have quietly taken off. Google began funding six different initiatives in 2022 as part of a $50 million donation to nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area, saying basic income could be a novel way to prevent homelessness in one of the nation's most expensive locations. Each program has hundreds of participants who receive around $1,000 a month, and academics study the results. State and federal tax laws limit the lengths of the programs and the payment amounts. The studies have found that most basic income programs improve short-term employment and mental health while reducing food insecurity. But while data from these efforts has been closely tracked, less is known about the individual journeys of participants... The Times ultimately shadowed three people... All of the program participants, including the ones The Times followed, were previously homeless and transitioning off a housing stipend that paid for a portion of their rent, and many received the payments on top of other social assistance like food stamps. The Times's findings mirrored the academic studies. For all three recipients, the instant benefits of basic income were clear: They had breathing room for groceries, rent and other expenses. But the success of the payments in another area — giving people more free time and opportunity in the long term — was mixed. "It's a lot to ask of someone to get their life together in 12 months, when a lot of these issues are structural or systemic," said Jennifer Loving, who runs Destination: Home, a nonprofit that administers basic income programs in Silicon Valley. "And the world around them isn't getting cheaper." One recipient began going to community college — but resorted to taking one class at a time while single parenting — and using their monthly payments to help support relatives. In fact, the article notes that a recent study of 3,000 universal basic income participants found that money spent supporting friends and family increased 26%, "the most of any category. That was more than the increases for food (6%) and child care (11%)." Another recipient used the time to get help at a community college to find a higher-paying job. And one recipient died — but his mother used what he'd saved to help put his brother through a drug rehab program.
  
  
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• Security: Why Linux Is Better Than Windows Or Mac OS
  Linux is a free and open source operating system that was released in 1991 developed and released by Linus Torvalds. Since its release it has reached a user base that is greatly widespread worldwide. Linux users swear by the reliability and freedom that this operating system offers, especially when compared to its counterparts, windows and [0]

• Essential Software That Are Not Available On Linux OS
  An operating system is essentially the most important component in a computer. It manages the different hardware and software components of a computer in the most effective way. There are different types of operating system and everything comes with their own set of programs and software. You cannot expect a Linux program to have all [0]

• Things You Never Knew About Your Operating System
  The advent of computers has brought about a revolution in our daily life. From computers that were so huge to fit in a room, we have come a very long way to desktops and even palmtops. These machines have become our virtual lockers, and a life without these network machines have become unimaginable. Sending mails, [0]

• How To Fully Optimize Your Operating System
  Computers and systems are tricky and complicated. If you lack a thorough knowledge or even basic knowledge of computers, you will often find yourself in a bind. You must understand that something as complicated as a computer requires constant care and constant cleaning up of junk files. Unless you put in the time to configure [0]

• The Top Problems With Major Operating Systems
  There is no such system which does not give you any problems. Even if the system and the operating system of your system is easy to understand, there will be some times when certain problems will arise. Most of these problems are easy to handle and easy to get rid of. But you must be [0]

• 8 Benefits Of Linux OS
  Linux is a small and a fast-growing operating system. However, we can’t term it as software yet. As discussed in the article about what can a Linux OS do Linux is a kernel. Now, kernels are used for software and programs. These kernels are used by the computer and can be used with various third-party software [0]

• Things Linux OS Can Do That Other OS Cant
  What Is Linux OS?  Linux, similar to U-bix is an operating system which can be used for various computers, hand held devices, embedded devices, etc. The reason why Linux operated system is preferred by many, is because it is easy to use and re-use. Linux based operating system is technically not an Operating System. Operating [0]

• Packagekit Interview
  Packagekit aims to make the management of applications in the Linux and GNU systems. The main objective to remove the pains it takes to create a system. Along with this in an interview, Richard Hughes, the developer of Packagekit said that he aims to make the Linux systems just as powerful as the Windows or [0]

• What’s New in Ubuntu?
  What Is Ubuntu? Ubuntu is open source software. It is useful for Linux based computers. The software is marketed by the Canonical Ltd., Ubuntu community. Ubuntu was first released in late October in 2004. The Ubuntu program uses Java, Python, C, C++ and C# programming languages. What Is New? The version 17.04 is now available here [0]

• Ext3 Reiserfs Xfs In Windows With Regards To Colinux
  The problem with Windows is that there are various limitations to the computer and there is only so much you can do with it. You can access the Ext3 Reiserfs Xfs by using the coLinux tool. Download the tool from the  official site or from the  sourceforge site. Edit the connection to “TAP Win32 Adapter [0]

• Inside the Intel 8087 chip: floating-point addition and subtraction
  In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087, a chip that made floating-point operations much faster in the IBM PC and other systems. Although the 8087 supports advanced operations such as tangents, square roots, and logarithms, this article focuses on basic arithmetic operations: addition and subtraction. The 8087 provided a spectacular speed improvement over the 8086 processor, speeding up addition by a factor of almost 100, and complicated operations by even more. In this article, I examine the 8087s microcode and circuitry to explain exactly how floating-point addition and subtraction are implemented, including numerous special cases for infinities and other special values. ↫ Ken Shirriff Shirriff took an actual chisel to the 8087 coprocessor to gain access to the insides for highly detailed photographs, taken with a microscope. They look amazing.

• Source code for the Palm OS port of Lemmings
  Only a few day ago I linked to a massive collection of original Palm OS development resources, and today we can take a look at what it was like to put all of those resources into practice: the original source code for the Palm OS port of Lemmings. With these resources combined, theres no excuse to not building any Palm OS applications. Id really like a modern email client, a Fediverse client, and a slightly more modern browser surely wouldnt hurt. Get on it!

• GNOME OS moves to preview stage
  It’s been two years since my initial post about making GNOME OS an end-user general purpose OS. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve hit a major milestone! TL;DR: We’re launching a new edition called “GNOME OS Preview”, which is built from the latest stable GNOME release. This means that GNOME OS is no longer just a nightly OS for GNOME developers and testers! ↫ Aaron Ardiri A number of changes and improvements have made the move from nightly status to preview status possible. Theyve made GNOME OS handle environments with limited amounts of RAM much better  not a luxury, these days  including the ability to dynamically increase the swap space if needed. In addition, the work to make it much easier to install and test daily Flatpak builds of applications is now part of GNOME OS, as is the effort to make command-line utilities manageable in the same way as Flatpaks. As the blog post notes, theres still a ton of work left to do before GNOME OS is ready for everyone. Theyre going to bet heavily on systemd-homed to enable, among other things, per-user disk encryption, and theres a new installer coming, as well. They also want to ship GNOMEs preinstalled applications as Flatpaks, integrate delta updates, and much more. It all looks incredibly appealing, even if I am not the target user for something like GNOME OS.

• Palm OS developer archive: Palm OS development resources, SDKs, documentation, and utilities
  This repository contains approximately 1 GB of historical Palm OS development material, collected over many years of working with the platform. The archive includes a mixture of publicly distributed development resources, personal development material, technical references, and historical artifacts. ↫ Aaron Ardiri An incredible resource for anyone wishing to dive into Palm OS programming and development in this day and age.

• VSI launches how-to portal for OpenVMS
  OpenVMS isnt exactly the easiest platform to get into, with even the first major hurdle  licensing!  being a bit of a complex issue. To address this and other issues people new to OpenVMS might run into, VSI, the company currently developing OpenVMS, launched its new VSI How-to Portal. For now, it covers things like licensing, installing and updating OpenVMS for x86, TCP/IP configuration, and setting up SSH. The company plans to expand the portal with more articles based on customer and user feedback, so hopefully more information will appear soon. Most of us are probably not particularly not particularly experienced with OpenVMS, so having a portal like this can really help get you started.

• Microsoft claims Windows 11 is now up to 20% more responsive!
  Microsofts been claiming for a while now that theyre working on improving performance and responsiveness in Windows, with a particular focus on making more efficient use of memory. This is probably the only positive thing to come out of the RAM crisis Microsoft helped create and is currently still fueling. The companys now claiming that Windows 11 is up to 20% more responsive! thanks to these efforts. The result is a Windows experience that’s up to 20% more responsive, with improvements you can feel as soon as you boot into your PC and extending to Start, File Explorer, Search, Snipping Tool, Microsoft 365, Edge and more. A big part of that work is making smarter use of memory and system resources. We’ve improved memory management and efficiency across Windows to help keep more of your PC’s resources focused on what you’re actively doing. That work can make an especially meaningful difference on PCs with 8GB of memory. Windows can now keep up to 2GB more of your active data in memory instead of moving it to slower storage, helping your PC stay responsive as you open more apps or browser tabs. Windows is also making additional memory-saving improvements that reduce background memory use. For example, on PCs with 8GB of memory or less, Widgets load only when you open them, making more than 200 MB of memory available for your apps and other work. It’s one example of the broader work underway to reduce the Windows memory footprint and deliver a fast, responsive experience across the PCs people use every day, an area we’ve made an explicit focus for Windows. ↫ Navjot Virk on the Windows Blogs If, for a moment, we take these claims at face value, theyre simply good news for every Windows 11 user, and legitimately the only good thing to come out of the RAM crisis. These kind of claims are always hard to measure, especially considering just how varied the Windows software and hardware ecosystem is, but Im sure people good at benchmarking are going to try and find some more definitive answers here. In the same blog post, Microsoft also highlights several other recent improvements its made to Windows 11, like the new search experience we talked about recently, a brand new Photos application, some new whiteboard-like application, and several more things. Considering how complex Windows versioning scheme and various branches have become, I have no idea when these features and improvements actually make their way to your machine. On a slightly related note, Microsoft also unveiled that its bringing Microsoft Defender to Linux, with a particular focus on desktop Linux. Even Microsoft has to face the reality of the rising popularity of Linux on the desktop.

• Costa: a modern, maintained graphical shell for DOS
  Graphical user interfaces for DOS were a dime-a-dozen back in the 90s, but of course faded into irrelevance as time went on. But what if you still run DOS today, and want a maintained graphical shell instead of the rather limited DOS command line? Costa is a small and lightweight application which runs on top of MS-DOS or compatible operating systems. It replaces the DOS-prompt with a clean, user-friendly interface  a so-called GUI (Graphical User Interface). Costa comes packed with a bunch of useful accessories and can be used with or without a mouse. Developed by Jacob Palm, a Danish IT-professional and hobby developer, the first release of Costa came way back in 2004. Over the years  and through several releases  Costa has gradually evolved into what it is today, with new releases still coming out regularly as of 2025. ↫ Costa website Costa comes bundled with a number of useful utilities, a few games, and useful features like a desktop with custom icons, virtual desktop support, a file selector, and much more. The latest release, version 1.8.0, was released in late 2024, and should run on just about any IBM PC-compatible, but a 386 is recommended. Its been tested with a variety of DOS flavours, including FreeDOS ad DOSBox, so it should run pretty much anywhere.

• Ubuntu 26.10 released
  Ubuntu 26.10 has landed. Ubuntu 26.10 brings significant progress for security, and strengthens the platform with the full adoption of Rust-based coreutils, post-quantum-ready package signing, and expanded TPM-backed full-disk encryption support. Enterprise authentication gains deeper integration with Microsoft Entra ID, including password and multi-factor authentication. Linux kernel 7.3 extends support for the latest hardware, alongside new RISC-V desktop images and optimized amd64v3 installation images. ↫ Ubuntu 26.10 release announcement Of course, it comes with the latest version of GNOME, and the whole family of Ubuntu variants focusing on other desktops have also been updated. While I doubt many people here run Ubuntu, its still quite popular, and serves as the base for countless other distributions.

• KDE Plasma 6.8 released
  KDE turns 30 today, and theyre celebrating it with a brand new KDE Plasma release: version 6.8 is here. On the accessibility front, 6.8 brings a new dwell clicker function (meaning a click will register if the pointer is held still for a short while) and support for the Bikram Sambat calendar and the Amharic language. I always love it when I see support for new languages and scripts, especially when, as is the case here, its a language spoken as a first language by 25 million people. The Plasma remote desktop has also been improved with bi-directional copy/paste, performance and quality improvements, and more, and you can now record microphone and audio while screen recording with Spectacle. In System Monitor, you can now assign processes and tasks to specific processors/cores, which is a great feature for people running intensive tasks but who would still like to, you know, do other things while those tasks are running. KDE 6.8 drops support for X11, focusing entirely on Wayland. Of course, X11 applications will remain usable thanks to Xwayland, and KDEs applications will continue to support X11 in case youre using them outside of KDE. This release also further expands the Union theming system, now adding support for styling Qt Widgets. Union is still in beta, so youll have to enable it to test it. Theres a ton more, too, but these are some of the highlights. KDE Plasma 6.8 will find its way to your distribution of choice soon enough.

• Haikus latest activity report contains a ton of smaller fixes and improvements
  You know the drill by now  a new month, a new Haiku activity report. This past month doesnt seem to have any big ticket items, but instead contains a long list of smaller but still welcome fixes. Various filesystem drivers saw some work, a few bugs in virtio drivers were fixed, and NVMM execution is now easily interruptible by signals which should improve performance in various emulators like QEMU. Be sure to comb through the complete list to see if theres anything in there that impacts you.

• ESA targets Anbernic emulation handhelds as “superfake” piracy enablers
  The ESA  not, not the cool one  a lobby group made up of various videogame and entertainment companies, has asked the US Trade Representative (USTR) to add Anbernic to its list of companies that are supposedly notorious for engaging in and facilitating piracy. If youre unaware, Anbernic is one of the bigger names in Android and Linux-based handheld gaming devices targeted at the retrocomputing market. While many online sellers do include an SD card full of ROMs alongside emulation hardware of all types, Anbernic itself does not appear to do the same when selling directly from its website. Regardless, the ESA argues that these ROM-laden Anbernic devices selling through “normal retail channels” help to “normalize hardware-based piracy by delivering illicit catalogues through a polished consumer product.” This, the ESA says, meets the threshold for a “superfake,” an ill-defined designation that applies to “high-quality counterfeit trademark goods … on a commercial scale.” ↫ Kyle Orland at Ars Technica Theres a lot of murkiness surrounding whether or not Anbernic sells their devices with preloaded ROMs or not. The number of reports from people who say they did get a ton of ROMs on their Anbernic devices, bought from Anbernics own store, is large enough that its clearly something they do. However, theres an equal number of people who say their Anbernic devices were completely free of ROMs, and Im one of them  Ive bought like three or so devices from their store over the years, and they never came with any ROMs. My most recent purchase was an RG 35XXPro Linux-based model, and there were no ROMs on it (I replaced the stock operating system with Knulli, which has been a great experience). If Anbernic does indeed ship at least some of their devices with ROMs preinstalled, then its their own damn fault if that lands them in legal trouble. Its not like downloading ROMs is particularly difficult (just do an internet search for your preferred system and something like ROM pack! and youll get the consoles complete library in a single download), so they really have no need to do so. Theres one extra layer here though. Third-party resellers like Amazon offer loads of Anbernic devices preloaded with SD cards full of ROMs, all from third parties not affiliated with Anbernic. And wouldnt you know it  Amazon is a member of the ESA lobby group. In other words, the problem also lies with lax retailers not properly vetting what theyre offering, but instead of going after places like Amazon, theyre going after Anbernic instead. Amazon is a haven for illegal and counterfeit products, but theyre so wealthy and powerful they just get away with it.

• Hardening changes for ReFS volumes on removable media!
  Are you aware of ReFS, Microsofts next-generation file system for Windows? Im sure the average OSNews reader is, but I really wonder how many people are using it out in the wider world, even though Microsoft keeps improving it. Since earlier this year, Windows Server and Windows 11 can boot from ReFS volumes, and its used by Windows Dev Drive feature as well. What Microsoft doesnt seem to want, though, is people using ReFS on removable drives. Starting with Windows updates released on and after October 13, 2026, Microsoft is making hardening changes to the Resilient File System (ReFS). This article describes Windows hardening changes for ReFS volumes that are mounted from removable media. ReFS on removable media, such as a USB disk, is not a supported configuration. The changes add auditing and enforcement controls that help administrators identify these volumes and prevent them from being mounted. ↫ Microsoft Knowledge Base article Im oddly fascinated by this. Apparently, there are enough people out there trying to use ReFS on removable media to warrant the above auditing and enforcement controls, which is fascinating in an of itself. On top of that, using ReFS on removable media is apparently also dangerous enough  which raises the question of why, exactly, its so dangerous in the first place. Microsoft doesnt really explain itself here, other than saying its not a supported configuration!. I wonder if and when Microsoft will move from NTFS to ReFS as the default file system for new Windows installations. Its been around for quite a while now, and theres no denying that competing operating systems, especially in the server space, have file systems that are far superior to NTFS (like Btrfs, ZFS, and others), and Im assuming Microsoft would love to catch up. Its been a long time since Microsoft changed Windows default file system, however, and with the massive number of people using Windows, its not something to take lightly. Then again, Apple migrated hundreds of millions of iPhones, iPads, and Macs to a brand new file system without anybody noticing a thing, and as far as I can recall, without any problems.

• Lotus Improv on the NeXT
  Both NeXT and Improv brought innovative solutions to their respective computing questions of the day. NeXT made UNIX palatable to those scared of the terminal, debuted Display Postscript on a mega-pixel display, and made development for the system a snap. Improv rethought multi-dimensional data modeling, offered English-like formulas, and made it easy to rearrange data views on a whim. The bones of both remain to this day. NeXTs operating system, NeXTSTEP / OPENSTEP, morphed into macOS, and by extension iOS. Lotus abandoned Improv fairly quickly, but a quick survey of todays spreadsheets shows a universal embrace of pivot tables. ↫ Christopher Drum I had never heard of Lotus Improv, so I learned a lot reading this outstanding article by Drum.

• The holy quinity of UNIX workstations
  Many of us are interested in retrocomputing. Theres such a rich history of eras and machines to choose from, and countless niches and nuances to get lost in. Some people make it easy for themselves and are into old computers that are readily available at low prices, like the Commodore 64 or mid-90s Macs, while others make it a bit harder on themselves by focusing on, say, computers from the former Soviet Union or NEC machines from Japan, which are harder to find and probably require a bigger purse, too. And then theres people like me. Im making things incredibly hard on myself, because I am obsessed with a very specific set of computers  just five machines, to be exact. Surely,! I hear you think, collecting a mere five specific machines cant be that hard, no? Thats how many spare Pismos I have in a box in case my primary one needs spare parts!! Sadly for me, the five computers I want to own more than any other are not particularly easy to find, and even when you do find one of them, pricing can easily reach the level of a decent used car. Regular OSNews readers will know: I am infatuated with UNIX workstations, or more specifically, UNIX workstations of the early 2000, and even more specifically, the final five models built by the last commercial UNIX vendors. So far, Ive managed to get my hands on a mere two of them, but before my time on this earth come to an end, I intend to complete my Holy Quinity of UNIX Workstations. Lets go down the list, roughly ordered by attainability. HP c8000: PA-RISC/HP-UX The HP c8000 is the absolute pinnacle of HPs long-running line of workstations based on the PA-RISC architecture. The first PA-RISC workstation was launched in 1986, and HP would continue to improve the architecture and release new workstations all the way up until 2004, when the c8000 would be their last model. For the c8000, HP actually went all-out: it came with two dual-core PA-RISC processors running between 900MHz and 1.1GHz (depending on configuration), a maximum of 24GB of RAM, and a variety of graphics cards to choose from. It was a veritable swan song for the architecture. HPs commercial UNIX operating system, HP-UX, is even older than PA-RISC, with the first version being released in 1982, and its final version, HP-UX 11i v3 (or 11.31) released in 2007. This final version of HP-UX was updated and supported all the way up until 31 December 2025, but things are actually a bit more complicated than that. The last workstation release of HP-UX for PA-RISC was 11i v1 (released in 2000), while the last workstation release for Itanium workstations was 11i v2 (released in 2005). Do note that HP would provide updates, fixes, and patches to these versions long after the mentioned release dates. Speaking of Itanium, HPs final Itanium workstation was the zx6000, released in 2002, which can pack up to two single-core 1.5Ghz Itanium 2 processors. Theres a very real case to be made that the zx6000 should also be part of this list, since its both a little faster than the c8000 (in its dual 1.5GHz configuration) and runs a newer version of HP-UX. However, since Itanium workstations never really had much of an impact in the market (even HP only ever released two models), and since it lacks the decades of pedigree that comes with PA-RISC, I consider them a mere curiosity. A very cool curiosity that Id love to own, but a curiosity nonetheless. Anyway, this is one of the two machines I already own. I have a new-in-box (when I bought it a few years ago) HP c8000 with two dual-core 1.0Ghz PA-RISC processors, 8 GB of RAM, and an ATI FireGL X3 AGP graphics card with 256 MB, the fastest the c8000 will take. Its also got two SCSCI 74 GB hard drives in a striped RAID for better performance, and I added an LTO 4 tape drive so I could create bootable backups that will restore the machine if anything ever goes wrong. Its running HP-UX 11i v1, with as many of the updates, patches, and fixes I could find  which is one of the major roadblocks for anyone trying to get into HP-UX. Installation media are relatively easy to come by if you know where to look (assuming you know which specific version you need), but any updates, patches, and fixes from roughly later than 2005 are almost impossible to find. Some can be discovered through My HPE Software Center, if you have the patience of an angel and the perseverance of a honey badger (its a really terrible website), but most things are all locked away behind expensive support contracts or just gone entirely. Ive contacted HPE several times in several different ways about the preservation of HP-UX, but they never replied  clearly, they just dont care about the preservation of their legendary UNIX platform or the enthusiast community buying PA-RISC hardware on eBay for personal use and experimentation. Sad, but par for the course. The c8000 is quite easy to find on eBay, but do be aware that the cheap! offerings of around €800 are the versions with just one processor. To get the version with two processors, expect to shell out twice as much. Spare parts and upgrades are readily available, too. Sun Ultra 45: SPARC/Solaris The Sun Ultra 45 needs no introduction here on OSNews, as I published an in-depth article about this machine and all the cool things you can do with it late last year. My Ultra 45 was an incredibly generous gift by Adriaan de Groot, who owned this machine as part of his work on porting KDE to Solaris way back in the day. I then ordered various upgrades to the machine to max it out with two UltraSPARC IIIi processors running at 1.6GHz, 8 GB of RAM, and the Sun XVR-2500 with 256MB, the fastest

• Will Linux phones become a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly?
  Amos B. Batto has published an incredibly detailed look at the state of Linux on smartphones. Its an excellent read you really shouldnt skip. Five years ago, Linux phones looked like they were poised to become a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly that has an iron grip on the mobile phone industry. Sadly, after a brief flash of activity and community engagement with the release of the Purism Librem 5 and the PINE64 PinePhone in 2020, the Linux phone market has generally stagnated. This stagnation occurred partly because of the problems at Purism and PINE64, but also because the available Linux SoC’s weren’t up to the task of running a modern smartphone, and the hardware industry wasn’t providing any good alternatives with good free/open source drivers. In addition, Plasma Mobile and Phosh were still inchoate mobile interfaces at the time, and there wasn’t a good distro option to run these interfaces on Android kernels with a normal integrated mobile SoC. The poor performance of the PinePhone and Librem 5 and the problems with the PinePhone Pro and the Librem 5 refunds sapped people’s enthusiasm and willingness to take a chance on the next Linux phone. Fortunately, all of these conditions are changing, and I believe that there is now the possibility that Linux could finally become a viable alternative to Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS in the mobile space, just like desktop Linux has become a viable alternative to Windows and Mac OSX on the PC over the last three decades. This isn’t to say that mobile Linux will fundamentally challenge the business of Google or Apple, but the conditions are ripe for a small market to arise for Linux phones, similar to the way that people can currently buy Linux PCs from a number of small companies, such as TUXEDO, System76, Purism, Slimbook, ThinkPenguin, Ubuntushop.biz, Entroware, Star Labs, Juno, Laptop with Linux, Linux Certified, ArkPC, etc. ↫ Amos B. Batto Im not quite as optimistic as Batto, and thats almost exclusively down to how running Android applications through compatibility layers will remain an absolute necessity for anyone trying to use one of these Linux smartphones today. As long as crucial applications and services required to function in a modern society, like banking, messaging, government services, and so on, require the use of an Android application when using a Linux smartphone, I just dont think any significant number of people will be switching over. Whats needed is something that will force these crucial services to become available on platforms other than Android and iOS, since I dont think any of them will do so of their own volition. The only way I can see this happening is if the European Union, spurred on by our desire to reduce our dependence on adversarial US companies, mandates that several services marked as crucial must make themselves available on platforms other than Android and iOS. I doubt that will happen, but I honestly dont see Linux smartphones becoming anything more than a mere curiosity you fiddle with at home, while carrying an Android phone or iPhone as your actual phone.

• LineageOS 24, based on Android 17, released
  LineageOS has released its first version based on Android 17  earlier than expected. We’ve been hard at work rebasing all of our changes and features since Android 17’s release in June. Android 17’s first release mainly contained iterative improvements and some UI/UX refinements, but due to our previous efforts adapting to Google’s heavy refactoring over the last several versions, we were able to rebase onto Android 17’s code-base faster than anticipated. Yes you read that right: We’re early this year! ↫ LineageOS changelog written by Nolen Johnson This release also includes the latest Android security patches (October 2026), as well as a brand new browser-based USB flash tool to make installation easier. Many of the applications included with LineageOS have also been updated and improved, like its music player, image editor, web browser, and so on. The project also did a full accessibility audit of its installation process and application suite, which has already resulted in severalk accessibility improvements. LineageOS serves as the base for countless custom Android ROMs, so its great to see the project do this well.

• KDE Plasma 6.8 Marks 30 Years With a Major Shift to Wayland and a More Powerful Linux Desktop
  by George Whittaker
  The KDE Project has officially released KDE Plasma 6.8, introducing a substantial collection of desktop improvements while celebrating three decades of open-source software development. Released on October 14, 2026, exactly 30 years after Matthias Ettrich announced the original KDE project, this anniversary edition brings significant changes to display management, accessibility, graphics performance, remote desktop functionality, system monitoring, and application theming.
  
  Perhaps the most consequential development is KDE's decision to retire native X11 desktop sessions in Plasma 6.8, completing its transition toward Wayland as the primary display architecture. The release also introduces NVIDIA triple buffering by default, improved HDR support, a more capable remote desktop server, CPU affinity controls in System Monitor, and expanded capabilities for the experimental Union theming engine. These improvements reflect KDE's effort to modernize the Linux desktop while maintaining the customization and flexibility that have defined Plasma for years.
  
  Plasma 6.8 is therefore more than a commemorative release. It represents an important architectural transition for one of Linux's most widely used desktop environments, with changes that affect both everyday users and developers building applications for the next generation of Linux desktops.
  KDE Celebrates Three Decades of Open-Source Desktop Development
  KDE's history began on October 14, 1996, when Matthias Ettrich proposed creating a consistent graphical desktop environment for Unix-like operating systems. At the time, Linux was becoming increasingly capable as a free operating system, but its graphical experience remained fragmented. Users could choose from several window managers and applications, yet there was no universally integrated desktop environment comparable to the commercial graphical systems available elsewhere.
  
  The original KDE initiative sought to address that limitation by building a cohesive desktop around the Qt application framework. Over the following decades, the project evolved through several major generations, introducing increasingly sophisticated desktop technologies while expanding into applications, development frameworks, mobile interfaces, and other open-source projects.
  
  Plasma 6.8 arrives as KDE marks its 30th anniversary, but its development priorities are focused primarily on the future. Rather than introducing a purely cosmetic anniversary edition, KDE has concentrated on modernizing underlying desktop infrastructure while improving accessibility, usability, and performance. The result is a release that combines immediately visible enhancements with architectural changes intended to support future development.
  Go to Full Article

• Building a Reliable Event-Driven Payment Service With XRP Ledger
  by Emma Clapp
  Receiving a transaction notification is only the first step. Production software still has to decide whether that event is safe to turn into application state.
  
  A WebSocket callback can arrive in milliseconds. What happens afterward is harder. The Go to Full Article

• Linux Moves Closer to Retiring the x32 ABI After Years of Limited Adoption
  by George Whittaker
  Linux kernel developers are renewing efforts to retire the x32 application binary interface (ABI), a little-used compatibility feature that attempted to combine the advantages of 64-bit processors with the smaller memory footprint of 32-bit applications. A revised patch series submitted on October 8, 2026, proposes the first steps toward disabling the interface, potentially ending support for an architecture experiment introduced more than 14 years ago.
  
  The latest proposal comes from Sebastian Andrzej Siewior, a Linux kernel developer at Linutronix who has been working on the removal effort throughout 2026. Rather than immediately deleting every component associated with x32, the proposed approach would first prevent the feature from being enabled through normal kernel configuration. This would give remaining users and distribution maintainers an opportunity to respond before the underlying implementation is removed.
  
  The effort reflects a broader challenge in Linux development: maintaining compatibility with older or rarely used technologies while keeping the kernel manageable, secure, and efficient. Although x32 offered theoretical performance and memory advantages, it never achieved widespread adoption. With conventional x86_64 software dominating modern Linux systems, developers are increasingly questioning whether the additional maintenance burden remains justified.
  Understanding the Linux x32 ABI
  The x32 ABI was introduced with Linux kernel 3.4 in 2012 as an alternative to conventional 32-bit and 64-bit application environments. Its goal was to provide applications with access to the architectural improvements of x86_64 processors while retaining smaller data types and pointers associated with 32-bit software.
  
  Traditional 32-bit x86 applications use the i386 ABI, which operates with a more limited register set and 32-bit execution conventions. Standard x86_64 applications, meanwhile, benefit from additional general-purpose registers, wider registers, and modern calling conventions, but they normally use 64-bit pointers. Those larger pointers can increase memory consumption in applications that maintain large numbers of pointer-heavy data structures.
  
  The x32 ABI attempted to offer a compromise. Applications would execute using the x86_64 instruction set and its larger register file while retaining 32-bit integers, long values, and pointers. This programming model is commonly described as ILP32, meaning that integers, long integers, and pointers are all 32 bits wide.
  
  The distinction can be illustrated by comparing the expected sizes of common C data types:
  Go to Full Article

• Google's Kage Project Rethinks Linux Kernel Security With Isolated Device Drivers
  by George Whittaker
  Google is exploring a new approach to Linux kernel security that could significantly change how device drivers interact with the operating system. The experimental project, known as Kage, uses compiler-based sandboxing to isolate drivers inside the kernel, potentially limiting the damage caused by memory corruption, programming errors, and exploitable vulnerabilities without requiring drivers to run as separate user-space processes.
  
  The research was presented at the Linux Plumbers Conference 2026, held October 5–7, with Stanford University and Google researcher Zachary Yedidia discussing how LLVM's Lightweight Fault Isolation (LFI) technology can create restricted execution environments for native kernel code. Unlike conventional isolation techniques, which often depend on separate processes or virtual machines, Kage attempts to preserve the performance advantages of kernel-space execution while reducing the amount of memory individual drivers can access.
  
  Early prototypes have already demonstrated the concept using NVMe storage, networking, and Wi-Fi drivers. However, Kage remains an experimental research project rather than a feature available in mainstream Linux distributions. Its developers are still investigating performance, hardware access, and compatibility with more complicated drivers, including graphics hardware.
  Why Device Drivers Remain a Major Linux Security Challenge
  Linux device drivers are responsible for connecting the operating system to hardware components, including graphics cards, network adapters, storage controllers, USB devices, and wireless chipsets. Most traditional Linux drivers execute in kernel space, giving them privileged access to system resources and the ability to interact directly with hardware. This architecture is one reason Linux can deliver high performance across such a broad range of devices, but it also creates a significant security challenge.
  
  When an ordinary application encounters a memory error, the operating system can often terminate that process without affecting the rest of the system. Kernel drivers operate under different conditions. Because they typically share the kernel's address space and privileges, an invalid memory access or exploitable vulnerability can affect unrelated kernel components, potentially resulting in a system crash, privilege escalation, or complete compromise of the operating system.
  
  The challenge becomes more complicated when considering the enormous number of drivers supported by Linux. Some are maintained by large organizations with extensive testing infrastructure, while others receive contributions from smaller development teams or individual maintainers. Even carefully reviewed drivers can contain bugs, particularly when they interact with complicated hardware, asynchronous operations, and memory-management mechanisms.
  Go to Full Article

• Speech Synthesis on Linux: Adding a Voice to Scripts and Systems
  by George Whittaker
  Linux users have long had a pragmatic relationship with text-to-speech. The classic open-source engines have been available for years, wired into accessibility tools and the occasional script, dependable but unmistakably robotic. They do the job where the job is simply to convert text to some kind of speech, but the mechanical output has kept them out of anything where the voice actually matters. The arrival of high-quality speech synthesis delivered over an API changes what is possible, letting Linux users add genuinely natural voices to scripts, services, and applications without hosting a heavyweight model themselves.
  The Familiar Trade-Off
  Anyone who has used the traditional Linux speech engines knows the trade-off. They are free, local, and scriptable, which fits the Linux ethos perfectly, but the voices are clearly synthetic. For accessibility and for utilitarian tasks where intelligibility is all that counts, that has been acceptable. For anything user-facing where the quality of the voice shapes the experience, it has not.
  
  The alternative of running a modern, high-quality speech model locally is possible but comes with real costs: significant computational requirements, model management, and the ongoing maintenance of a demanding piece of infrastructure. For many use cases, particularly on servers, embedded systems, or ordinary workstations, that overhead is disproportionate to the need. This is the gap that an API-based approach fills, offering the quality of a large modern model without the burden of hosting one.
  The API Approach on Linux
  Delivering speech synthesis over an API fits naturally into how Linux users already build things. Rather than installing and maintaining a model, you make a request to a service and receive audio back, which you can then play, save, or pipe into whatever comes next. A Go to Full Article

• Archinstall 4.5 Released with AArch64 Support, Real-Time Kernels, and Major Installer Fixes
  by George Whittaker
  The Arch Linux project has released Archinstall 4.5, the latest version of its guided text-based installer, bringing expanded AArch64 support, new real-time Linux kernel options, additional translations, security improvements, and numerous fixes for installation workflows.
  
  Archinstall 4.5 was released on September 29, 2026, roughly three months after Archinstall 4.4. The new version arrives just ahead of Arch Linux's October installation media refresh and has already been packaged as archinstall 4.5-1 for Arch Linux repositories.
  
  While Archinstall remains optional, it provides users with a guided way to configure an Arch Linux installation without manually performing every step described in the Arch installation guide. Version 4.5 concentrates primarily on hardware support, installer reliability, security, and expanding the range of systems that can use the guided installation process.
  AArch64 Support Gets a Major Upgrade
  One of the biggest changes in Archinstall 4.5 is improved support for AArch64, the 64-bit ARM architecture.
  
  The installer can now handle GRUB and Limine EFI installations on AArch64 systems. It also gains support for the proper AArch64 root partition type GUID.
  
  Previously, parts of Archinstall's bootloader configuration were more heavily oriented toward x86_64 installations. The latest changes make its guided installation workflow more useful on ARM64 hardware.
  
  AArch64 has become increasingly important throughout the Linux ecosystem. The architecture can now be found in cloud servers, development boards, laptops, workstations, and specialized computing platforms.
  
  Supporting both GRUB and Limine EFI installations gives Archinstall more flexibility when preparing these systems.
  GRUB Can Now Be Installed on AArch64
  GRUB remains one of the most widely used Linux bootloaders, and Archinstall 4.5 extends its installation logic to AArch64 EFI systems.
  
  This allows ARM64 installations to use a bootloader workflow much closer to what Archinstall already provides on conventional x86_64 UEFI computers.
  
  The change doesn't mean every ARM device will automatically become compatible with Arch Linux. ARM hardware can still have highly platform-specific firmware and boot requirements.
  
  It does, however, remove an important Archinstall limitation for AArch64 machines that provide conventional UEFI environments.
  Limine EFI Support Expands to ARM64
  The same architectural expansion applies to Limine.
  
  Limine is a modern multiprotocol bootloader supported as one of Archinstall's bootloader choices. Archinstall 4.5 extends its EFI installation support to AArch64 as well.
  Go to Full Article

• systemd 262 Released with Static PID 1, Intel TDX, TPM Improvements, and New Container Features
  by George Whittaker
  The systemd project has officially released systemd 262, delivering another substantial update to the system and service manager used by most major Linux distributions. The final release was tagged on September 22, 2026, following three release candidates earlier in the month.
  
  Systemd 262 introduces improvements across service management, containers, virtualization, encrypted storage, TPM security, networking, journal recovery, system updates, and unattended installations. Among the most interesting additions are the ability to build systemd as a single statically linked PID 1 binary, Intel TDX support in systemd-vmspawn, Live Update Orchestrator integration, improved TPM-backed encryption, and new fallback unit files embedded directly into the systemd manager.
  
  The release also contains a rather unusual development safeguard: an AI/LLM canary intended to help identify code contributions generated by AI that haven't been properly reviewed by a human before submission.
  systemd 262 Is Officially Available
  The final systemd 262 source was tagged by systemd developer Luca Boccassi on September 22.
  
  The upstream tag identifies commit 8cc40e0c5e9234bf45084751ac53b1fbfe70b492 as systemd v262, following release candidates published throughout September.
  
  The release has already begun reaching Linux distribution development repositories.
  
  Debian accepted systemd 262-1 into Debian Unstable on September 22, while Fedora has prepared systemd 262 packages for Fedora 45.
  
  As usual, the speed at which systemd 262 reaches ordinary users will depend on each distribution's update policy.
  systemd Can Now Become a Single Static PID 1 Binary
  One of the most interesting changes in systemd 262 is support for building systemd as a single statically linked PID 1 and executor binary.
  
  The feature is primarily intended for extremely small container environments.
  
  Normally, systemd depends on a collection of dynamically linked libraries and supporting components. That architecture makes sense for a complete Linux distribution, but containers sometimes need a much smaller runtime environment.
  
  The new static configuration makes it possible to create a more self-contained systemd executable suitable for minimal container images.
  
  These builds avoid dynamically loading optional libraries and use simplified mechanisms for resolving users and groups rather than relying on the complete Name Service Switch infrastructure.
  
  This doesn't mean normal Linux distributions will suddenly replace their standard systemd packages with a giant static executable. The capability is specifically useful for specialized container and minimal-system deployments.
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• Ubuntu Container Escape Vulnerability Gets Public Exploit Before Kernel Patch Arrives
  by George Whittaker
  Ubuntu administrators running containerized workloads have a new Linux kernel security problem to watch closely. Public exploit code is now available for CVE-2026-80521, a Linux kernel use-after-free vulnerability that can allow an unprivileged process inside a container to escape and obtain root privileges on the underlying host.
  
  Security firm DepthFirst published its research and exploit on September 22, 2026, demonstrating the attack against Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. The underlying Linux kernel vulnerability had already been fixed upstream on August 6, but as of September 23, Ubuntu's security tracker still lists the main kernel package in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS as "Vulnerable, work in progress," while Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is also listed as vulnerable.
  
  The situation is particularly important for Docker, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, and other environments that run potentially untrusted workloads because the vulnerable kernel functionality can be reached through ordinary operations available inside standard containers.
  
  There is currently no confirmed evidence that CVE-2026-80521 is being actively exploited in real-world attacks, and the vulnerability isn't listed in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The availability of working public exploit code nevertheless makes the patch gap considerably more important.
  CVE-2026-80521 Is a Linux Kernel Vulnerability
  Although Ubuntu is receiving much of the attention because the newly published exploit specifically targets it, CVE-2026-80521 is fundamentally a Linux kernel vulnerability.
  
  The problem exists in the kernel's AF_UNIX socket subsystem, specifically within its garbage collection mechanism.
  
  AF_UNIX sockets, commonly called Unix-domain sockets, provide local inter-process communication between applications running on the same system.
  
  Unlike conventional network sockets, they don't need to communicate across a network. They are widely used by Linux applications and services for fast communication between local processes.
  
  They also support passing file descriptors between processes through SCM_RIGHTS messages, and it is the kernel's management of these references that creates the conditions for CVE-2026-80521.
  A Race Condition Leads to Use-After-Free
  At the technical level, CVE-2026-80521 involves a race condition inside the AF_UNIX garbage collector.
  
  The kernel needs to track references between Unix sockets when file descriptors are passed between processes. Circular references can develop, where one socket effectively references another while that socket references something else in the same group.
  
  Linux represents these relationships internally and periodically determines which references can safely be removed.
  Go to Full Article

• Fedora Linux 45 Beta Released with Python 3.15, GCC 16.2, and Major Security Changes
  by George Whittaker
  The Fedora Project has officially released Fedora Linux 45 Beta, giving users an early look at the technologies expected to form the foundation of the final Fedora 45 release. The beta became available on September 15, 2026, after Fedora's Quality team approved Release Candidate 1.3 for publication.
  
  Fedora 45 Beta brings significant changes throughout the operating system, including Python 3.15, GCC 16.2, glibc 2.44, GNU Binutils 2.47, Go 1.27, LLVM 23, Podman 6, stricter RPM signature verification, improved DNF5 protections, a new userspace virtual console, standardized desktop secret storage, and substantial installer improvements.
  
  The release is available across Fedora Workstation, KDE Plasma Desktop, Server, Cloud, IoT, Atomic Desktops, Spins, and Labs, although a few prerelease images are excluded.
  Fedora 45 Beta Is Now Available
  Fedora Linux 45 Beta represents the final major public testing milestone before Fedora 45 reaches stable status.
  
  Fedora describes its beta releases as code-complete previews that closely represent what users should expect from the final version. Development isn't finished, however, and bugs or incomplete migrations can still be discovered during real-world testing.
  
  Fedora 45 Beta is currently available in several major editions:
  Fedora Workstation 45 Beta Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 45 Beta Fedora Server 45 Beta Fedora Cloud 45 Beta Fedora IoT 45 Beta Fedora Atomic Desktops Fedora Spins Fedora Labs
  Existing Fedora installations can also be upgraded to the beta using Fedora's DNF system-upgrade process.
  
  Fedora's official Workstation download page confirms Beta 1.3 images for both x86_64 and AArch64 systems.
  A New Virtual Console with kmscon
  One of Fedora 45's more unusual system-level changes is the replacement of the traditional in-kernel console with kmscon.
  
  Fedora describes kmscon as a modern userspace virtual terminal implementation that provides smoother rendering, better internationalization and font handling, improved visual integration, and security improvements compared with the older console infrastructure.
  
  This affects the virtual terminals users encounter outside their normal graphical desktop session.
  
  Most desktop users spend relatively little time interacting directly with these consoles, but they remain important for troubleshooting, system administration, servers, recovery operations, and systems running without a graphical environment.
  
  Moving that functionality into userspace also gives Fedora more flexibility for future development instead of relying entirely on the legacy kernel console implementation.
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• Thunderbird 156 Released with OAuth Improvements, OpenPGP Updates, and Major Linux Fixes
  by George Whittaker
  The Thunderbird team has officially released Thunderbird 156, bringing another round of new features, security improvements, authentication enhancements, and reliability fixes to the popular open-source email client. Released on September 15, 2026, the update is available for Linux alongside Windows and macOS.
  
  Thunderbird 156 is not a dramatic redesign of the desktop mail client. Instead, it concentrates on improving areas that matter to everyday users and system administrators, including OAuth authentication, OpenPGP, POP3, IMAP, Exchange Web Services, SMTP, attachments, calendars, enterprise policies, and security.
  
  For Linux users in particular, the release delivers several fixes affecting common mail protocols and account configurations while retaining support for Linux environments using GTK+ 3.14 or newer.
  Thunderbird 156 Arrives on Linux
  Thunderbird 156 follows version 154, which arrived in August with features including optional system tray operation and Microsoft Graph support for Microsoft 365.
  
  Version 156 continues the project's monthly release cycle with a more targeted collection of authentication, security, compatibility, and reliability improvements.
  
  According to Thunderbird's official release notes, version 156 requires:
  Linux: GTK+ 3.14 or newer Windows: Windows 10 or newer macOS: macOS 10.15 or newer
  Thunderbird 156 was officially released on September 15.
  
  Linux distribution availability will vary because distributions can package Thunderbird according to their own schedules. Users receiving Thunderbird through another packaging channel may therefore see version 156 at a different time.
  Custom OAuth Support Expands
  One of the most significant areas of development in Thunderbird 156 is OAuth authentication.
  
  Thunderbird now supports custom OAuth configurations containing an issuer ID and client secret for IMAP and POP3 accounts. Custom OAuth support has also been extended specifically to POP3.
  
  OAuth has become increasingly important as email providers move away from conventional username-and-password authentication toward token-based authentication.
  
  For Thunderbird, broader custom OAuth support means users and organizations have greater flexibility when connecting the client to mail services that don't fit Thunderbird's predefined provider configurations.
  
  This can be particularly useful in enterprise environments, self-hosted infrastructure, and organizations operating their own identity systems.
  Exchange Custom OAuth Setup Fixed
  Exchange users receive an important related correction.
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