News from the Planet

The Software Freedom Conservancy has announced that Mark J. Wielaard has been honored with the second annual Distinguished Service Award in Software Freedom for his many years of service to software freedom. Mark is one of many key FOSS developers who has designed his career so that his employers…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, bind, dracut, freerdp, gnome-remote-desktop, kernel, and nghttp2), Debian (apr-util, docker.io, ironic, neutron, postgresql-15, unzip, and util-linux), Fedora (chromium, jfrog-cli, jrnl, libgsasl, libsoup3, pdns, pdns-recursor,…

Rhombus version 1.1 is now available! We are pleased to announce Rhombus 1.1 is now available from https://rhombus-lang.org/. Rhombus is a general-purpose programming language that is easy to use and uniquely customizable. As of this release: Add annot and annot.def as ways to define an…

In early February 2011 Egypt was in the middle of a political revolution. One morning, everyone's phones suddenly pinged with an alert. The Armed Forces asks Egypt's honest and loyal men to confront the traitors and criminals and protect our people and honour and our precious Egypt. A series of…

Most of GNOME 51 is now packaged for Fedora 45. Starting today and running through the end of the week, we will be running our traditional Fedora Test Day for GNOME. If you are a Fedora user, you can help us find last-minute integration issues and iron out what’s going to become the stable Fedora 45…

GSoC 2026 • digiKam • Post 3: The Benchmark, and the Fine-Tuning Decision At the end of my last post I promised a comparison: Qwen2.5 against TinyLlama on real digiKam queries. This is that post. It grew a third model along the way, and the result surprised me enough that I want to walk through it…

A bug comes in, or someone shows me a page doing something surprising, and the question is always the same one. Is that what the spec says? Not what we all assume it says, and not what Gecko happens to do, but what the algorithm actually does when you follow it step by step. So I open…

I'm excited to introduce a new beta version of LIPS Scheme. The most important features of this version are full continuations and TCO (Tail Call Optimization). They were inspired by JS-Scheme by Alex Yakovlev. see the rest of the article

The 7.2 kernel has been released. Linus said: Well, this last week of the release was - once again - bigger than I would have wished for, but hey, with the whole "new normal" thing, if I delayed releases for that reason we'd probably never have a release at all. Significant features in this…

It has now been thirty-three years since the Debian project was announced to the world by Ian Murdock, on August 16, 1993. This anniversary is an opportunity to reaffirm the goals, characteristics, and qualities of the Debian project: it’s an association of individuals who have made common cause to…

LLM assisted development, vibing, agentic coding – many names for the same thing. The technology has taken huge strides forward and it is interesting to see what it can do. In my mind, one-offs where a solved problem a while ago, and thin vertical applications without too much complexity is another…

This was my first ever time at The Fringe™. Here are some scattered thoughts looking at the good, the bad, and the annoying aspects of this madly extravagant exhibition of talent. We saw 23 shows together, and one separate show each. There were more hits than misses, but the frustration of wasting…

I made another minor release with several enhancements: handling non-Debian origin vulnerabilities, improving data caching, and sharing the cache between the debvulns CLI and the exporter. Additionally, there are a few improvements on the dashboard front. Here is a breakdown of what…

Not a screenshot of despair. But only because it’s not a screenshot.

This is a weekly update from my Google Summer of Code 2026 project with KDE, improving effect widgets in Kdenlive, a free and open source video editor. Real usability feedback on MR !928Julius and Bernd both tested the Speed Ramp changes and raised a genuine concern: the panel currently mixes two…

I wholeheartedly dislike GMail (ethically, technically, and UX), and for my personal email I have always run my own server. But for work email I don’t have a choice. I am using isync/mbsync to make it usable for me and mutt. Until now I’ve used a Google app password to authenticate, but they are a…

For the past few months, we’ve been developing all kinds of features for the future GIMP 3.4 release. We noticed recently that our changelog was getting quite long - a good problem to have! While there’s been a lot going on internally, it’s been a while since we made a public progress report. So we…

Introduction This challenge felt tough. Even though I was the only person who solved this challenge, it's also the case that this is the only challenge I was able to solve in 8 hours. Since there were special protections against the use of AI and LLMs, it felt especially good after solving this…

Info: German content only, sorry. I was pondering for the past three years if I should give some sort of TLS basics talk at FrOSCon. I finally stepped up this year and gave that talk today, with the title "TLS, mTLS, SNI, ECH, CAA, HTTPS, PKI, Zertifikate und ein bisschen PQC". I was too optimistic…

I'm really not sure what to make of this book. It was recommended by my book club as something between tragedy and comedy. The characters are excruciatingly well written - if you (or your friends) shoplifted Impulse body-spray back in the 1990s, you'll be hit by a terrifying wave of nostalgia. It…

What Happened On 2026/08/10 at 2:11 am Australian eastern standard time (2026/08/09 16:11 UTC) someone created a post titled “Hacked by Chinafans” on my documents blog [1]. The person in question created an account named “67965e42a3c3” on that site with the email address 67965e42a3c3@google.com…

The AMD GPU Problem For a while I’ve been having issues with AMD GPUs, video locking up periodically. I blogged about this late last year but I first had noticeable problems early last year [1]. The problems hadn’t only concerned my workstation but also my home server which is also used as a…

Following the recent look at the state of GNSS API on Linux Mobile, I did a similar exploration of where we are with the Near Field Communication (NFC) stack. Use cases Around NFC there’s a whole bunch of interleaved standards and protocols. Trading simplicity for accuracy here there’s basically…

It has been an incredible 12-week journey contributing to the KDE Community for Google Summer of Code 2026! The guidance and support from my mentors, Benson Muite and Srisharan VS was incredible. Lots of contributions and conversation over this happy period. Here is a comprehensive summary of what…

--> --> Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma! This week was full of user interface improvements and performance enhancements, and we snuck in a few features as well: Notable new features Plasma 6.8 Remote desktop sessions now offer a fully shared clipboard, rather than only sending the…