The Debian GNOME team would like to remove the GTK 2 graphics toolkit, which has been unmaintained upstream for more than five years, and ship Debian 14 ("forky") without it. As one might expect, however, there are those who would like to find a way to keep it. Despite its age and declared obsolescence, quite a few Debian packages still depend on GTK 2. Many of those applications are unlikely to be updated, and users are not eager to give them up. Discussion about how to handle this is ongoing; it seems likely that Debian developers will find some way to continue supporting applications that require GTK 2, but users may have to look outside official Debian repositories.

Version 1.6.0 of the Radicle peer-to-peer, local-first code collaboration stack has been released. Notable changes in this release include support for systemd credentials, use of Rust's clap crate for parsing command-line arguments, and more. LWN covered the project in March 2024.

Version 147.0 of the Firefox web browser has been released. Notable changes in this release include support for the XDG Base Directory specification, enabling local network access restrictions for users with enhanced tracking protection (ETP) set to "Strict", and a fix that improves Firefox's rendering with GNOME on fractionally scaled displays. Firefox 147 also includes a number of security fixes, including several sandbox-escape vulnerabilities.

In open-source circles there are many situations, such as bug reports, demos, and tutorials, when one might want to provide a play-by-play of a session in one's terminal. The asciinema project provides a set of tools to do just that. Its tools let users record, edit, and share terminal sessions in a text-based format that has quite a few advantages compared to making and sharing videos of terminal sessions. For example, it is easy to use, offers the ability to search text from recorded sessions, and allows users to copy and paste directly from the recording.

The Fedora Project has announced the results of the Fedora 43 election cycle. Five seats were open on the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), and the winners are Kevin Fenzi, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek, Timothée Ravier, Dave Cantrell, and Máirín Duffy.

Gentoo Linux has published a 2025 project retrospective that looks at how the community has evolved, changes to the distribution, infrastructure, and finances for the Gentoo Foundation.

Gentoo currently consists of 31663 ebuilds for 19174 different packages. For amd64 (x86-64), there are 89 GBytes of binary packages available on the mirrors. Gentoo each week builds 154 distinct installation stages for different processor architectures and system configurations, with an overwhelming part of these fully up-to-date.

The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has remained at an overall high level in 2025, with a slight decrease from 123942 to 112927. The number of commits by external contributors was 9396, now across 377 unique external authors.

The European Commission has opened a "call for evidence" to help shape its European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy. The commission is looking to reduce its dependence on software from non-EU countries:

The EU faces a significant problem of dependence on non-EU countries in the digital sphere. This reduces users' choice, hampers EU companies' competitiveness and can raise supply chain security issues as it makes it difficult to control our digital infrastructure (both physical and software components), potentially creating vulnerabilities including in critical sectors. In the last few years, it has been widely acknowledged that open source – which is a public good to be freely used, modified, and redistributed – has the strong potential to underpin a diverse portfolio of high-quality and secure digital solutions that are valid alternatives to proprietary ones. By doing so, it increases user agency, helps regain control and boost the resilience of our digital infrastructure.

The feedback period runs until midnight (Brussels time) February 3, 2026. The commission seeks input from all interested stakeholders, "in particular the European open-source community (including individual contributors, open-source companies and foundations), public administrations, specialised business sectors, the ICT industry, academia and research institutions".

Last year we revived the tradition of publishing a timeline of notable events from the previous year. Since that seemed to go over well, we decided we should continue the practice and look back on some of the most noteworthy events and releases of 2025.

The IPFire project, an open-source firewall Linux distribution, has released version 2.29 - Core Update 199. Notable changes in this release include an update to Linux 6.12.58, support for WiFi 6 and 7 features on wireless access points, as well as native support for link-local discovery protocol (LLDP) and Cisco discovery protocol (CDP).

Version 26.0 ("Anh-Linh") of the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution has been released. Manjaro 26.0 includes Linux 6.18, GNOME 49, KDE Plasma 6.5, Xfce 4.20, and more.

Version 1.30 of the GNU ddrescue data recovery tool has been released. Notable changes in this release include improvements to automatic recovery of a drive with a dead head, addition of a --no-sweep option to disable reading of skipped areas, and more.