Reuters is reporting that private-equity firm EQT may be looking to sell SUSE:

EQT has hired investment bank Arma Partners to sound out a group of private equity investors for a possible sale of the company, said the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss confidential matters. The ​deliberations are at an early stage and there is no certainty that EQT will ​proceed with a transaction, the sources said.

SUSE has traded hands a number of times over the years. Most recently it was acquired by EQT in 2018, was listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2021, and then taken private again by EQT in August 2023.

Debian is the latest in an ever-growing list of projects to wrestle (again) with the question of LLM-generated contributions; the latest debate stared in mid-February, after Lucas Nussbaum opened a discussion with a draft general resolution (GR) on whether Debian should accept AI-assisted contributions. It seems to have, mostly, subsided without a GR being put forward or any decisions being made, but the conversation was illuminating nonetheless.

Version 9.0.0 of the digiKam photo-management system has been released. "This major version introduces groundbreaking improvements in performance, usability, and workflow efficiency, with a strong focus on modernizing the user interface, enhancing metadata management, and expanding support for new camera models and file formats." Some of the changes include a new survey tool, more advanced search and sorting options, as well as bulk editing of geolocation coordinates.

In early February, members of the Fedora Council met in Tirana, Albania to discuss and set the strategic direction for the Fedora Project. The council has published summaries from its strategy summit, and Fedora Project Leader (FPL) Jef Spaleta, as well as some of the council members, held a video meeting to discuss outcomes from the summit on February 25. Topics included a plan to experiment with Open Collective to raise funds for specific Fedora projects, tools to build image-based editions, and more. Spaleta also explained his model for Fedora governance.

Peter Korsgaard has announced version 2026.02 of Buildroot, a tool for generating embedded Linux systems through cross-compilation. Notable changes include added support for HPPA, use of the 6.19.x kernel headers by default, better SBOM generation, and more.

Again a very active cycle with more than 1500 changes from 97 unique contributors. I'm once again very happy to see so many "new" people next to the "oldtimers".

See the changelog for full details. Thanks to Julien Olivain for pointing us to the announcement.

Sasha Levin has announced the release of the 6.12.76, 6.6.129, and 6.1.166 stable kernels. These releases address a regression reported by Peter Schneider; Levin said that an upgrade is only necessary for those who have observed a build failure with the 6.12.75, 6.6.128, or 6.1.165 kernels.

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Sasha Levin has announced the release of the 6.19.6, 6.18.16, 6.12.75, 6.6.128, 6.1.165, 5.15.202, and 5.10.252 stable kernels. Each contains important fixes throughout the tree; users of these kernels are advised to upgrade.

One of the contradictions of the modern open-source movement is that projects which respect user freedoms often rely on proprietary tools that do not: communities often turn to non-free software for code hosting, communication, and more. At Configuration Management Camp (CfgMgmtCamp) 2026, Jan Ainali spoke about the need for open-source projects to adopt open tools; he hoped to persuade new and mature projects to switch to open alternatives, even if just one tool, to reduce their dependencies on tech giants and support community-driven infrastructure.

Version 7.3 of Texinfo, the GNU documentation-formatting system, has been released. It contains a number of new features, performance improvements, and enhancements.

The free and open-source software (FOSS) movements have always been about giving freedom and power to individuals and organizations; throughout that history, though, there have also been actors trying to exploit FOSS to their own advantage. At Configuration Management Camp (CfgMgmtCamp) 2026 in Ghent, Belgium, Richard Fontana described the "exploitation paradox" of open source: the recurring pattern of crises when actors exploit loopholes to restrict freedoms or gain the upper hand over others in the community. He also talked about the attempts to close those loopholes as well as the need to look beyond licenses as a means of keeping freedom alive.

Version 1.0 of Gram, an "opinionated fork of the Zed code editor", has been released. Gram removes telemetry, AI features, collaboration features, and more. It adds built-in documentation, support for additional languages, and tab-completion features similar to the Supertab plugin for Vim. The mission statement for the project explains:

At first, I tried to build some other efforts I found online to make Zed work without the AI features just so I could check it out, but didn't manage to get them to work. At some point, the curiosity turned into spite. I became determined to not only get the editor to run without all of the misfeatures, but to make it a full-blown fork of the project. Independent of corporate control, in the spirit of Vim and the late Bram Moolenaar who could have added subscription fees and abusive license agreements had he so wanted, but instead gave his work as a gift to the world and asked only for donations to a good cause close to his heart in return.

This is the result. Feel free to build it and see if it works for you. There is no license agreement or subscription beyond the open source license of the code (GPLv3). It is yours now, to do with as you please.

According to a blog post on the site, the plan for the editor is to diverge from Zed and proceed slowly.

Update: Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.19.5 and 6.18.15 kernels with a fix for the regression in 6.19.4 and 6.18.14. All users of netfilter are advised to upgrade to those versions.