The GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) project decided to break from the OpenPGP standard for email encryption in 2023, and instead adopted its own homegrown LibrePGP specification. The GPG 2.4 branch, the last one to adhere to OpenPGP, will be reaching the end of life in mid-2026. The Fedora project is currently having a discussion about how that affects the distribution, its users, and what to offer once 2.4 is no longer receiving updates.

Curl creator Daniel Stenberg has written a blog post explaining why the project is ending its bug-bounty program, which started in April 2019:

The never-ending slop submissions take a serious mental toll to manage and sometimes also a long time to debunk. Time and energy that is completely wasted while also hampering our will to live.

I have also started to get the feeling that a lot of the security reporters submit reports with a bad faith attitude. These "helpers" try too hard to twist whatever they find into something horribly bad and a critical vulnerability, but they rarely actively contribute to actually improve curl. They can go to extreme efforts to argue and insist on their specific current finding, but not to write a fix or work with the team on improving curl long-term etc. I don't think we need more of that.

There are these three bad trends combined that makes us take this step: the mind-numbing AI slop, humans doing worse than ever and the apparent will to poke holes rather than to help.

Stenberg writes that he still expects "the best and our most valued security reporters" to continue informing the project when security vulnerabilities are discovered. The program will officially end on January 31, 2026.

Version 1.5.0 of the GNU Guix package manager and the Guix System have been released. Notable improvements include the ability to run the Guix daemon without root privileges, support for 64-bit RISC-V, and experimental support for the GNU Hurd kernel.

The release comes with ISO-9660 installation images, virtual machine images, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of your GNU/Linux distro, either from source or from binaries—check out the download page. Guix users can update by running guix pull.

It's been 3 years since the previous release. That's a lot of time, reflecting both the fact that, as a rolling release, users continuously get new features and update by running guix pull; but it also shows a lack of processes, something that we had to address before another release could be made.

During that time, Guix received about 71,338 commits by 744 people, which include many new features.

LWN last looked at Guix in February 2024.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.18.7 and 6.12.67 stable kernels. As always, each contains important fixes throughout the tree. Users are advised to upgrade.

ReactOS, an open-source project to develop an operating system that is compatible with Microsoft Windows NT applications and drivers, is celebrating 30 years since the first commit to its source tree. In that time there have been more than 88,000 commits from 301 contributors, for a total of 14,929,578 lines of code. There is, of course, much left to do.

It's been such a long journey that many of our contributors today, including myself, were not alive during this event. Yet our mission to deliver "your favorite Windows apps and drivers in an open-source environment you can trust" continues to bring people together. [...]

We're continuing to move ReactOS forward. Behind the scenes there are several out-of-tree projects in development. Some of these exciting projects include a new build environment for developers (RosBE), a new NTFS driver, a new ATA driver, multi-processor (SMP) support, support for class 3 UEFI systems, kernel and usermode address space layout randomization (ASLR), and support for modern GPU drivers built on WDDM.

Version 3.0.0 of the pandas data analysis and manipulation library for Python has been released. Notable changes include a dedicated string type (str), new "copy-on-write" behavior, and much more. This release also removes a number of features that were deprecated in prior versions of pandas; developers are advised to upgrade to pandas 2.3 and ensure code is working without warnings before moving to 3.0. See the release notes for the full changelog.

At the 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3) in December, researchers Lexi Groves ("49016") and Liam Wachter said that they had discovered a number of flaws in popular implementations of OpenPGP email-encryption standard. They also released an accompanying web site, gpg.fail, with descriptions of the discoveries. Most of those presented were found in GNU Privacy Guard (GPG), though the pair also discussed problems in age, Minisign, Sequoia, and the OpenPGP standard (RFC 9580) itself. The discoveries have spurred some interesting discussions and as well as responses from GPG and Sequoia developers.

Mozilla has announced a repository with Firefox Nightly channel packages for RPM-based Linux distributions such as CentOS Stream, Fedora, and openSUSE. Mozilla has provided a Debian repository since 2023.

Note that this repository only includes the nightly builds of The firefox-nightly package. Mozilla is not providing stable builds as RPMs at this time. However, the package will not conflict with a distribution's regular firefox package; both packages can be installed at the same time for those who wish to test the nightly builds. See the blog post for instructions on setting up the repository.

PostgreSQL contributor Robert Haas has published a blog post that breaks down code contributions to PostgreSQL in 2025.

I calculate that, in 2025, there were 266 people who were the principal author of at least one PostgreSQL commit. 66% of the new lines of code where contributed by one of 26 people, and 90% of the lines of new code were contributed by one of 67 people.

Contributions to the project seem to be on the upswing; in his analysis of development in 2024, there were 229 people who were the primary authors of a commit, and 66% of new lines of code were contributed by one of 18 people. The raw data is also available.

Version 11.0 of the Wine Windows compatibility layer is out. "This release represents a year of development effort, around 6,300 individual changes, and more than 600 bug fixes." The most notable changes in this release are support for the NTSync Linux kernel module (when available), and the completion of the Windows 32-bit on Windows 64-bit (WoW64) architecture that was announced as experimental in Wine 9.0.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.18.6, 6.12.66, 6.6.121, and 6.1.161 stable kernels. As usual, each has important fixes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.

Sjoerd Simons has published a blog post about running Debian on the OpenWrt One router hardware:

With openwrt-one-debian, you can now install and run a full Debian system leveraging the OpenWrt One's NVMe storage, enabling everything from custom services and containers to development tools and lightweight server workloads, all on open hardware.

This project provides a rust-based flasher to install Debian on the OpenWrt One, opening the door to standard Debian tooling, packages, and workflows. For developers and power users, it transforms the OpenWrt One from a network appliance into a compact, general-purpose Linux system.

See the GitHub repository for the code and latest build. LWN reviewed the device in November 2024, and covered Denver Gingerich's talk at SCALE 22x about the making of the router in March 2025.