News from the Planet

Hi everyone! This week we added voice chat for Mankala.For Mankala, our goal was to elevate the player experience by adding real-time voice chat. We have already added text chat using XMPP, and to make this experience better, voice chat is a much better option to add. Mankala relies on the XMPP…

The GNOME Shell user interface has mostly seen minor refinements and quality of life updates in recent cycles, but on the design side we’ve explored a lot of longer-term things we’d like to do. Some of these we have relatively complete plans for, others are more vague ideas that need more research…

About 95% of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay or GitHub Sponsors. OpenSSH Now that Ubuntu 26.04 LTS has been released, I’ve been getting back to the GSS-API key exchange package split in our OpenSSH packaging. Once I…

My account on FLOSS.social, @strk, has been suspended. Not for writing toots with an LLM, but for writing toots about LLMs - mostly. One of the thirteen cited toots was not mine at all: it was my boost of a toot written by my AI minion. This is how it happened, and why I think the whole thing…

I honestly wasn’t sure I was going to make it to GUADEC. For months, the travel committee and I had been going back and forth trying to get all the documents needed for my visa application. The visa took longer than expected. I even lost hope at some point, and eventually got it just four days…

Debian Contributions: 2026-07 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian’s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services. DebConf 26…

The timeline for Google Summer of Code is coming to an end, and us interns are piecing together the final touches to our projects for submission. Thanks to the help of my mentors, and the duck sitting on my monitor, the algorithm that beats the heart of Vocab Crosswords in GNOME Crosswords has been…

On Saturday 25 July 2026, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close. The Debian Press team would now like to share this personal and beautiful message from the Santa Fe Local Team. Words from DC26 Local Team DebConf26 is over, and those of us who were part of the…

Hello, Thunderbird community and followers of the blog! This is Jesse from the design team. Today’s post is about our recent journey in redesigning the calendar portion of Thunderbird, and what you can expect us to deliver in the near future. The calendar is a key part of any productivity…

Today, we moved to a new GPG signing subkey used to sign certain Firefox and Thunderbird artifacts (namely Linux tarballs, RPM packages, checksums files) after an unencrypted copy of the previous subkey was inadvertently committed to a private GitHub repository. Our review of available audit records…

The latest version of the Firefox Profiler is now live! Check out the full changelog below to see what’s changed: Highlights: [fatadel] Improve discoverability of downloading a local profile (#6216) [Nazım Can Altınova] Add the ability to apply source maps from the CLI (#6229) Other…

I enjoy reading The Guardian's monthly round-up of new SF novels, which can be found in their Science Fiction Books section, and can also be read via feed. Since the round-up is of new books, at the time the round-up is published they're usually only available in hardback. When it comes to choosing…

I'm going to this year's LPC and Open Source Summit Europe 🥳. I will organize sessions on two days after the conference program to exchange PGP fingerprints for keysigning to improve the kernel's web-of-trust (but of course everyone is welcome). For details see my announcement on LKML. Note the…

Lately I’ve been thinking about cyclic trait implementations. This is a problem that I’ve been trying to understand for years and years and I finally feel like I’m geting somewhere. I’m going to try to write out a series of blog posts documenting those explorations and, hopefully, culminating in a…

 I have been accessing, using the internet since probably around 1991, using my dad's academic account and then schools and then home. I've used the internet before the web existed, sending emails, downloading freeware and sharewares from "huge" ftp repository. Sharing ftp site, using Usenet to find…

TorchGeo 0.9.0 Release Notes TorchGeo 0.9 includes 13 new datasets and a number of improvements required for better time series support, encompassing 3 months of hard work by 15 contributors from around the world. We are now trying to make more frequent releases to get exciting new features out to…

I’m happy to announce that the SparkleShare project will receive a grant from the NLnet Foundation’s NGI0 Commons fund! SparkleShare and NGI0 Commons Sync files with Git SparkleShare is a Free and Open Source collaboration app. It allows people who are not software developers or otherwise…

The Skrooge Team announces the release 26.8.0 version of its popular Personal Finances Manager based on KDE Frameworks. Changelog Correction bug 518796: skrooge-boursorama.py stop to work for some values Correction bug 520749: Skrooge can't load skg file after org.kde.Platform update Correction:…

We’ve overhauled the project creation flow in QFieldCloud to make getting your field data campaigns off the ground faster than ever. Along with a clean new web interface, we are introducing two highly requested features to boost your team’s productivity: more advanced project creation, with native…

The PostGIS Team is pleased to release PostGIS 3.7.0beta2! Best Served with PostgreSQL 19 Beta2 and GEOS 3.15.0beta2. This version requires PostgreSQL 14 - 19beta2, GEOS 3.10 or higher, and Proj 6.1+. To take advantage of all features, GEOS 3.15+ is needed. To take advantage of all SFCGAL features…

Maps in the Wild Mappery has been my side project for 8 years, for the last 5 or 6 years Arnaud Ferrand has been my co-editor and the tech brain that keeps the site running. Mappery is a large WordPress site with 2,500 posts and 3,500 images of Maps in the Wild (pictures of maps in the street, on…

In these turbulent times, one frequently needs to run some tooling in a sandbox. The goal is mainly to reduce the blast radius: make it so programs within the sandbox cannot damage the host system (e.g. delete or overwrite something unintended), but also, to a lesser extent, to hide most of the…

The new MovingPandas release 0.23 has just landed in pypi and conda-forge and I want to share with you two highlights: New HTML representations The new HTML representations for Trajectory & TrajectoryCollection objects aim to make interactive data exploration in notebooks more convenient by…

KStars v3.8.4 is released on 2026.08.09 for Windows, Linux, and MacOS. For Linux users, it's highly recommended to use the official KStars Flatpak hosted at Flathub. This release brings major improvements including the World's First AI powered Guider! Furthermore, KStars now ships with an MCP…

Another missing Oxygen icon, this time KTimer. The idea was simple enough… its a timer, lets make a digital watch. And having grown up in the 80's my brain obviously went directly to those old Casio watches we all had, wanted, lost, or somehow managed to keep alive for 20 years…