Philip Hazel was 51 when he began the Exim message transfer agent (MTA) project in 1995, which led to the Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions (PRCE) project in 1998. At 80, he's maintained PCRE, and its successor PCRE2, for more than 27 years. For those doing the math, that's a year longer than LWN has been in publication. Exim maintenance was handed off around the time of his retirement in 2007. Now, he is ready to hand off PCRE2 as well, if a successor can be found.

Version 1.28 of the MATE Desktop has been released.

MATE 1.28 has made significant strides in updating the codebase, including the removal of deprecated libraries and ensuring compatibility with the latest GTK versions. One of the most notable improvements is the enhanced support for Wayland, bringing us closer to a fully native MATE-Wayland experience. Several components have been updated to work seamlessly with Wayland, ensuring a more integrated and responsive desktop environment.

See the announcement for a full list of improvements and bug fixes.

Version 1.11.0 of Libgcrypt, a general-purpose library of cryptographic building blocks, has been released by the GnuPG project:

This release starts a new stable branch of Libgcrypt with full API and ABI compatibility to the 1.10 series. Over the last years Jussi Kivilinna put again a lot of work into speeding up the algorithms for many commonly used CPUs. Niibe-san implemented new APIs and algorithms and also integrated quantum-resistant encryption algorithms.

Christian Schaller writes about AI and GPU-related features that are in flight and planned for Fedora 41.

Milan Crha has been working together with Alan Day and Jakub Steiner to come up with a streamlined user experience in GNOME Software to let you install the binary NVIDIA driver and provide you with an integrated graphical user interface help to sign the kernel module for use with secure boot. This is a bit different than what we for instance are doing in RHEL, where we are working with NVIDIA to provide pre-signed kernel modules, but that is a lot harder to do in Fedora due to the rapidly updating kernel versions and which most Fedora users appreciate as a big plus. So instead what we are for opting in Fedora is as I said to make it simple for you to self-sign the kernel module for use with secure boot. We are currently looking at when we can make this feature available, but no later than Fedora Workstation 41 for sure.

KDE developer Nate Graham has announced a new set of KDE Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) for the KDE project. Graham says that the goals for the new HIGs were to reflect how KDE designs software today, make the content 100% actionable, improve navigation, and to improve the guidelines so people feel comfortable contributing:

Like any rewrite, there are bound to be rough edges and omissions compared to the old version. Maybe I missed a piece of useful information in the old HIG that had been buried somewhere but retained some value. Maybe there's low-hanging fruit for improvement. Help out by contributing!

The openSUSE project recently announced the second release candidate (RC2) of its Aeon Desktop, formerly known as MicroOS Desktop GNOME. Aside from the new coat of naming paint, Aeon breaks ground in a few other ways by dabbling with technologies not found in other openSUSE releases. The goal for Aeon is to provide automated system updates using snapshots that can be applied atomically, removing the burden of system maintenance for "lazy developers" who want to focus on their work rather than desktop administration. System-tinkerers need not apply.

The Cockpit project has announced the first release of Cockpit Files, a plugin for Cockpit that allows file management on your server via a web browser:

Cockpit Files was initially started by Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student Mahmoud Hamdy and is now under active development by the Cockpit team. The goal is to replace the functionality of the cockpit-navigator plugin from 45Drives and include automated testing per commit, a standard PatternFly-based interface, and consistency with the rest of Cockpit.

Development builds for Fedora are available via a Copr repository, and packages are expected for Arch, Debian, and Fedora. LWN covered the Cockpit project in March.

CentOS Linux 7 was first released in July 2014, and is due to go end-of-life (EOL) on June 30. By now, anyone who pays attention to such things is aware that Red Hat pulled the plug on CentOS Linux in late 2020 to be replaced by CentOS Stream instead. CentOS Linux 8 support was wound down at the end of 2021 rather than in 2029 as originally stated. CentOS Linux 7 was allowed to serve out its full lifespan—but that EOL is approaching rapidly and there's no direct upgrade path. Users and organizations looking for a lifeline might want to consider AlmaLinux's ELevate utility, which allows CentOS users to migrate to alternate enterprise Linux (EL) operating systems.

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has announced that nominations are open for the PSF Board election through June 25:

Who runs for the board? People who care about the Python community, who want to see it flourish and grow, and also have a few hours a month to attend regular meetings, serve on committees, participate in conversations, and promote the Python community.

The PSF has a video about serving on the board for those who might be interested. PSF members can nominate themselves or another member. Candidates will be announced on June 27. Voting begins on July 2 and will end on July 16.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced another round of stable kernel updates: 6.9.4, 6.6.33, and 6.1.93 have been released. Each contains another set of important fixes, users of these kernels are advised to upgrade right away.

Ladybird is an open-source project aimed at building an independent web browser, rather than yet another browser based on Chrome. It is written in C++ and licensed under a two-clause BSD license. The effort began as part of the SerenityOS project, but developer Andreas Kling announced on June 3 that he was "forking" Ladybird as a separate project and stepping away from SerenityOS to focus his attention on the browser completely. Ladybird is not ready to replace Firefox or Chrome for regular use, but it is showing great promise.

Version 2024.2 of the Kali Linux penetration testing distribution has been released. This release includes an update to GNOME 46, a high-resolution (HiDPI) mode for Xfce, as well as a number of new packages such as the AutoRecon network reconnaissance tool, pspy command-line utility for snooping on Linux processes, and SploitScan tool for fetching and displaying CVE information. Kali Linux is based on Debian testing, and 2024.2 incorporates Debian's work to transition to 64-bit time_t to avoid year 2038 problems. Users with existing Kali systems should be sure to follow the documentation when upgrading.

Version 14.1 of FreeBSD has been released. This is the second release of the 14.x stable branch. Highlights of this release include upgrades to OpenZFS 2.2.4, Clang/LLVM 18.1.5, and OpenSSH 9.7p1. FreeBSD 14.1 also features cloud-init support, sound subsystem improvements, and more. See the what's new blog post from the FreeBSD Foundation, release notes, and errata for more information.

Many years ago, the PostgreSQL project started holding regular CommitFests to help tackle the work of reviewing and committing patches in a more organized fashion. That has served the project well, but some in the project are concerned that CommitFests are no longer meeting the needs of PostgreSQL or its contributors. A lengthy discussion on the pgsql-hackers mailing list turned up a number of complaints, a few suggestions for improvement, but little consensus or momentum toward a solution.

Drew DeVault has published an update about the state of the SourceHut software development platform and its plans for the coming months. This is the first update since the January post-mortem following a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that resulted in a prolonged outage:

As you can imagine, it has been a stressful time for us. However, I wish to stress that everything we've been dealing with is planned for in our models, both technical and financial. There is no existential threat to SourceHut. Nevertheless, we are grateful for your patience and support.

[...] We have been focusing on two things this year: provisioning and managing our infrastructure and getting as much rest as possible. Our situation has calmed down, and while we still have a lot of loose ends to attend to I'm happy to say that we're resuming a sense of normalcy here and preparing to resume our work on the features you need.

Version 2.4.0 of the LyX document processor has been released. LyX is a "What You See Is What You Mean" (WYSIWYM) application that offers GUI editing of LaTeX documents with import and export to PDF, HTML, OpenDocument, Word, and other formats. LyX 2.4.0 is the first major release in six years, and brings support for EPUB, DocBook 5, improved table styles, and now uses Unicode (utf8) as its default encoding. See the full list of new features on the LyX wiki, and release notes for information on known issues and caveats for those upgrading from earlier versions of LyX.