Version 2026.08 of the Buildroot embedded Linux system builder has been released. Buildroot 2026.08 includes nearly 1,000 changes from 100 contributors; some of the notable changes include support for Linux 7.1.x, Binutils 2.46.1, GCC 16.2.0, glibc 2.44, as well as adding the M68K and IBM Power 10/11 architectures.
The Asahi Linux project has announced that support for Apple's M3-series chips has been added to the Asahi installer.
Linux support for M3 series SoCs and the machines powered by them is now in a state where almost everything supported on the M1 and M2 series machines just works. This includes the webcam, internal microphones, USB (up to the hardware limit of USB 3 10 Gb/s), hardware accelerated video decoding including support for AV1, WiFi, Bluetooth, and much more! The only major exceptions remain full DCP support and the GPU, which we will have more news on in the coming months. Do not expect performant or power-efficient 3D acceleration right now.
See the blog post for other current limitations of M3 support.
Version 2026.09, code-named "Hättiwaritätti", of the Debian-based Grml live Linux distribution for system administrators has been released. It is based on packages from the upcoming Debian 14 ("forky") release. Notable changes include an update to the Linux 7.1.8 kernel, support for booting from exfat-formatted USB devices, and an update to GNU Screen 5.0.1.
Version 4.0 of the Audacity audio editor has been released. Notable changes in this release include a rewritten interface using Qt, ability to save user-interface layouts as "Workspaces", improvements in working with audio clips, and a new .aup4 project format.
The release is not fully feature-compatible with the Audacity 3.x series; see the compatibility notes for a list of missing features.
Emmanuele Bassi kicked off a project to improve GNOME's technical governance with a presentation about his ideas (video) at GUADEC 2025. His nudging has led the project to, slowly, work on creating more formal structures for technical governance. It is adopting a teams structure and looking toward creating a steering committee, as well as bootstrapping a Request for Comments (RFC) process. If adopted, GNOME would require RFCs for design, user experience, architectural, and other changes that carry a major impact on the project.
Version 7.4 of the Incus container and virtual-machine management system has been released. Notable changes in this release include UEFI Secure Boot key management, "near-live" migration of containers between Incus instances, as well as burst I/O limits for disk and network devices.
In 2024 the Python 3.13 release added an experimental just-in-time (JIT) compiler to optimize the way that CPython executes Python code. Since then, work has proceeded on the JIT, albeit perhaps less formally than some might like. In June, Python's steering council (SC) put out an announcement that no new development on the JIT land (with the exception of bug and security fixes) in Python's main branch, until it accepts a Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) that would make the case for the JIT as a supported part of CPython. That has led to the creation of PEP 836 ("JIT Go Brrr: The Path to a Supported JIT Compiler for CPython"), which is currently under discussion. As it stands, it seems likely that work on JIT will continue, but when that will happen is less certain.
Version 155 of the Firefox web browser has been released. Notable changes include a count in the address bar of how many ad trackers Firefox has blocked, container reordering, and ensuring that mailto: links are only opened by explicit user actions. There is also a change of the domain used for "captive portals" (such as the ones used to sign into hotel WiFI): Firefox now uses "firefox-portal-detection.com" instead of "detectportal.firefox.com", which may require a change in network allow lists.
The release also includes a number of changes that may impact web developers, as well as a number of bug fixes and security fixes.
Version 4.0 of the OpenShot video editor has been released.
OpenShot 4.0 has arrived, bringing some of the biggest creative workflow upgrades in our history. You can now record your screen, webcam, microphone, and system audio directly into a project. You can correct and grade footage with color wheels, curves, LUTs, and professional video scopes. You can also isolate subjects with locally run machine learning models and create everything from animated audio visualizations to cinematic film looks.
See the release notes for a full list of changes.
The Netdev 0x1A conference was held in Rome, Italy from July 13 through July 16. Conference organizer Jami Hadi Salim has let us know that the videos and slides for all sessions are now available. Topics include Linux QUIC, shared memory socket transport, eBPF-based DDoS protection, and more.
Konstantin Ryabitsev has written a blog post with hard numbers about the impact of AI crawlers on the Linux kernel repositories at git.kernel.org:
Today, git.kernel.org receives about 6M daily requests demanding to see random commits. Of these, 66% are still immediately batted away with the Anubis challenge, but 33% are now solving the math and getting through to the main site — because apparently what we have to offer is worth spending a ton of cycles to calculate the Anubis challenge.
It's impossible to tell with certainty which of these are bots and which are real humans — but chances are, if it's asking for an old commit in a random old fork, it's probably not a real developer trying to do their work.
With a bunch of generous assumptions, legitimate requests are only about 2% of git.kernel.org traffic — everything else are scrapers.
Méven Car has written a pair of interesting blog posts (part 1, part 2). The first post is largely about some of the recent new features and performance work that have gone into the Dolphin file manager 26.08 release, as well as the KIO framework. The second looks at the performance improvements and benchmarks for previous, current, and upcoming releases.
Copying many small files is more than twice as fast as it was in April. The gain falls off as files get larger, which is what you would expect: the fix is to the per-file overhead, and once each file carries a megabyte of actual I/O the overhead stops being what you are waiting for.
There is still a gap with cp, discussed at length in the July post. KIO is doing more than cp does, but not five times more, and the batching work that closes most of the rest of that gap is still in progress.
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