News from the Planet

GNOME and KDE have started to consider LLM policies, and we should talk about what this is really about. KDE caught everyone's attention first by igniting a flame war with an LLM-friendly draft that ended up being deleted, causing a few bans, and having a bunch of people go full "Some of you may…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, perl-DBI:1.641, and unbound), Debian (jq, libreoffice, openssl, and redis), Fedora (389-ds-base, bcm283x-firmware, cockpit, flatpak-builder, mingw-gdk-pixbuf, openssl3, pcs, rust-cryptoki, squid, uboot-tools, and webkitgtk), Mageia…

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 331. This version includes the following changes: [ Chris Lamb ] * Support radare2 >= 5.9.0. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#432) * Update debian/tests/control. * Update copyright years. [ Christopher…

Hi everyone. In this blog post I want to take you in an adventure of parsing Org mode with Parsing Expression Grammars (PEG) in Guile Scheme (ice-9 peg) and converting to HTML (via SXML): OrgWebAlchemy. I wanted to share something with you all that I’ve been working on for a while. It all…

My experiences at Akademy It's been a hot minute since my last blog post, mostly because I was focusing on finally finishing my studies - while I'm not quite done yet (still missing one exam), I have a good reason to come out of hiding: KDE Akademy 2026 just happened and I was…

A new release 0.0.5 of the RcppFastAD package is now on CRAN, has been built for r2u, and updated at r-universe. This comes (to the day) two years after the preceding 0.0.4 release. RcppFastAD wraps the FastAD header-only C++ library by James which provides a C++ implementation of both forward and…

The F-Droid project has announced the release of F-Droid 2.0, which is a complete redesign of the official app. Notable changes in the release include making it easier to discover and install applications, more useful app categories, improved search, and much more. For more than a decade, F-Droid…

Sudheendra Raghav Neela, a member of a group of researchers from Graz University of Technology, has announced the release of research into file-notification attacks that would allow spying on user activity on Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows. The group has published a paper with details on the…

We spend a lot of time browsing online. Whether you are researching for work, planning a trip, paying your bills, or scrolling through social media, your browser is there for it all.While all these tasks are very different in nature, a lot of people still tend to stick to the same window type for…

DnD Release I am very happy to announce a new version of Casilda! A simple Wayland compositor widget for Gtk 4 originally created for Cambalache This new version brings Drag&Drop and clipboard support / integration with the host compositor which means you can drag something from a host application…

Thanks to Zachary DeBottis what3words’ 2025 accounts I am fascinated by what3words, it defies the laws of finance that apply to most businesses and shows how little my old fashioned understanding of business models is relevant in the modern tech economy. The idea of a verbal description of…

Many of the transmissions sent over the radio spectrum can be decoded with a relatively cheap hardware dongle. Thomas Eckert presented at RustConf 2026 in Montreal about his hobby: decoding radio transmissions with Rust. In his presentation, he covered all of the math necessary to get started…

After a two-year hiatus, LWN's Jonathan Corbet presented an updated edition of his Kernel Report at the Kernel Recipes conference. Corbet looked at what is happening in the kernel community, how it's dealing with a period of accelerated change, and where things might go in the future. Video of the…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, containernetworking-plugins, firefox, kernel, kernel-rt, openexr, perl-DBI, podman, postgresql, postgresql16, postgresql:15, runc, skopeo, and tar), Debian (libdatetime-timezone-perl, tzdata, xdg-dbus-proxy, and znc), Fedora (chromium,…

One of the great things about modern HTML is that it tries to standardise stuff that developers are already doing. If there are a myriad ways of, for example, loading video onto a page - then browsers and other interested parties should work out how to make a standard <video> element. An…

Bjorn Stahl of the Arcan project wrote an insightful blog post The Day of a new Command-Line Interface: Shell [1]. He does a really good job of identifying problems and strategies for dealing with them, the UI of the results isn’t suitable to what I do though. Using sqlite as an executable format…

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Git 2.56; gccrs; NetBSD and compat_linux; io_uring; Desktop UX. Briefs: WordPress vulnerability; Radicle vulnerability; Systemtap 5.6; GNOME 51; Systemd v262; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters,…

I got pissed off with the current situation occurring on social media regarding multiple topics, so I decided to make a FAQ explaining the situation. The topics include the mentions of AI at Akademy, the policy proposal, and some moderation shenanigans. Does this count as damage control? Probably.…

During this year's Akademy, while celebrating KDE's 30th birthday, I found some time to do some hacking on a beloved old toy widget: the Bouncy Ball I used to maintain for a while, and which Filip recently made available for Plasma 6 again. The all-new Bouncy Ball 3D - find it on the KDE Store (and…

Here are the new modules available in the Plasma 6.8 beta: kup: Backup scheduler for the Plasma desktop Some important features and changes included in 6.8 beta are highlighted on KDE community wiki page. Help stress-test the Union theming system This releases marks the second half of the Union…

Greetings once more from the Thunderbird development team! As the Northern hemisphere summer comes to an end and a slew of PTO, company holidays and projects have wrapped up, what better time to share progress and next steps on the work the Thunderbird Desktop Engineering team has on their…

Who? Fre(i)e Software GmbH is looking for a senior Golang + fullstack developer who can handwrite code and act as meticulous code review partner for another senior developer in the company. What? Most of your work would result in Open Source contributions to the Voxit project [1], an online civic…

So I accidentally triggered an online shitstorm in the process of trying to craft a set of more restrictive LLM usage guidelines for KDE. Sorry about that. I’m going to leave the comments on this post open, but I will request that everyone who wants to comment read and understand the entire post…