Version 26.8 of the Armbian distribution for Arm hardware has been released.

Most releases are a long list of small improvements. This one had three larger pieces landing at roughly the same time, and all three touch parts of Armbian that people use directly rather than parts they only read about in changelogs.

The installer was rewritten. Armbian Imager reached 2.0. And our CI moved out of the repository it had outgrown into one built for the job. None of these were planned to coincide; they simply reached the point where postponing them again would have cost more than doing them.

The installer rewrite is the one I expect people to notice first. It now ships as an armbian-config module, which means it is unit-tested, the same way the rest of armbian-config is tested, rather than living as a script that everyone was slightly afraid to touch. It can target SPI and MTD, treats eMMC and NVMe as separate flows instead of pretending they are the same thing, can flash a bootloader on its own, and — this one is overdue — reports when a bootloader write fails instead of printing "Done." and leaving you to find out at the next boot.

See the release notes for a full list of changes.

Version 26.8 of the LibreOffice suite has been released.

LibreOffice 26.8 concentrates on three areas: the typographic quality of what the suite produces, the range of writing systems it handles correctly, and the fidelity with which documents survive exchange with other office suites.

The largest single body of work in this release addresses bidirectional and complex text. Writer now detects paragraph direction automatically when documents or plain text are opened or pasted. Line wrapping places end-of-line spaces according to the direction of the paragraph rather than that of the adjacent characters. Object resize handles behave correctly in right-to-left and vertical CJK documents. Bidirectional control characters are now visible alongside other formatting marks. In Calc, typing right-to-left text into an empty cell sets the direction of that cell automatically.

See the release notes for a full list of changes.

Remind is a command-line calendar and alarm program, with an optional Tk-based graphical interface, for Linux and Unix-like operating systems. It has its own scripting language that allows users to create reminders that are difficult (if not impossible) to specify in other calendaring programs. It is wholly unsuitable for use in corporate environments that require calendar sharing and exchanging meeting invitations; however, it may be precisely the calendaring tool for users who prefer the command line and fast, flexible tools that can help keep track of messy schedules.

Vanilla OS 3, an immutable desktop Linux distribution, has been released. Notable changes in this release include support for Arm64, introduction of a Vanilla OS SDK, a rewrite of the Apx package manager using the new SDK, and much more. LWN covered Vanilla OS 2 in 2024.

Version 31.1 of the Emacs editor has been released. There is a long list of changes including the removal of the Emacs dumper, a new user Lisp directory feature, a "Send to..." menu item in context-menu-mode, and many other changes; see the NEWS file for more information. Mickey Petersen, author of Mastering Emacs, also has a rundown of some of the quality-of-life features appearing in this release.

Quickshell is a toolkit for building desktop components, such as toolbars or menus. It uses QML, which is a declarative language for designing GUI applications. Quickshell helps developers create graphical tools for common desktop use cases with a focus on ease of development. It offers a convenient method for writing user interfaces and has been adopted by a number of projects, such as caelestia-shell and DankMaterialShell, that provide desktop environments for minimal window managers like Sway and niri.

Version 26.08 of the KDE Gear collection of applications has been released. Notable changes in this release include improvements in the signing features of Okular, improved file-grouping features in the Dolphin file manager, and a number of enhancements to the Kdenlive video editor. See the changelog for a full list of updates, enhancements, and bug fixes.

Version 6.1.0 of the RPM Package Manager has been released. Notable changes include the ability to provide modifiers to RPM macros at definition time, improved build and verification error handling, support for signing files with PKCS11 tokens using rpmsign, as well as the addition of several new man pages. The 6.1.0 release also debuts a new release model inspired by the Linux kernel's.

• Front: Debian AI GR; Python pathlib; bootstrappable builds; Fedora and AF_ALG; Arm 128-bit PTEs; BPF CI; 7.2 statistics.
• Briefs: Brief news items from throughout the community.
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Go 1.27, the most recent version of the Go programming language, has been released with a number of new tools, the addition of support for the ML-DSA post-quantum algorithm, new JSON-processing packages, language updates, and more.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.9, 6.18.45, 6.12.104, 6.6.152, 6.1.183, 5.15.216, and 5.10.265 stable kernels. Each contains important fixes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.

The Debian Project is voting on the usage of large language models (LLMs) to make contributions to the project. The first proposal, sent in late July by Matthias Geiger, would expressly forbid any contributions to Debian that are created by or with the assistance of LLMs. That kicked off a firestorm of discussion and a flood of alternate proposals. Debian developers are now voting on eight proposals in total that range from banning LLM-assisted contributions to explicitly approving them, as well as the standard "none of the above" option that would leave Debian with no agreed policy.

Version 0.11 of the Tuba fediverse client has been released. Notable changes in this release include support for Mastodon collections and quotes, ability to create custom thumbnails for attachments, a new emoji picker, a build for Android, as well as many other enhancements.

The Linux kernel's user-space interface (AF_ALG) to the Crypto API has been linked to a number of recent high-profile security problems, including Copy Fail and successor vulnerabilities. It was deprecated earlier this year. Eric Biggers, and other kernel developers, have been working to remove it from the kernel. With that in mind, the Fedora Project is planning to restrict use of AF_ALG in the next Fedora release in the hopes of nudging remaining users of the API to prepare for its eventual removal.