Version 25.0 ("Zetar") of the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution is now available. This release includes Linux kernel 6.12, GNOME 48, KDE 6.3, Xfce 4.18, and more.

The Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora Linux 42, with "what's new" articles for Fedora Workstation and Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop. There is also a last-minute warning about the live media for the release:

We discovered a problem with the Live boot media at the last minute, and since the release was already out of the airlock, we can't do much about it. It doesn't damage anything, but is annoying: just booting the Live media adds an unexpected entry to the UEFI boot loader even when Fedora Linux 42 is not installed to the local system.

This is primarily a concern when you are dual-booting with a different operating system, or if you're just running the Live image and not intending to actually install.

See the release notes for more information, and LWN's coverage of Fedora 42.

Fedora Linux 42 has been released with many incremental improvements and updates. In this development cycle, the KDE Plasma Desktop has finally gotten a promotion from a spin to an edition, the new web-based user interface for the Anaconda installer makes its debut, and the Wayland-ification of Fedora continues apace. In all it is a solid release with lots of polish.

Version 3.0 of the Pinta image editor has been released. The most notable change in this release is that Pinta has been ported to GTK 4.0 and libadwaita. It also includes a number of improvements, new effects, and bug fixes.

BPF is, famously, not part of the kernel's promises of user-space stability. New kernels can and do break existing BPF programs; the BPF developers try to fix unintentional regressions as they happen, but the whole thing can be something of a bumpy ride for users trying to deploy BPF programs across multiple kernel versions. Shung-Hsi Yu and Daniel Xu had two different approaches to fixing the problem that they presented at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit.

Eduard Zingerman presented a daring proposal that "makes sense if you think about it a bit" at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. He wants to inline performance-sensitive kernel functions into the BPF programs that call them. His prototype does not yet address all of the design problems inherent in that idea, but it did spark a lengthy discussion about the feasibility of his proposal.

GCC will use color when emitting its text messages on stderr at a suitably modern terminal, using a few colors that seem to work well in a number of different terminal themes—but the exact rules for choosing which color to use for each aspect of the output have been rather arbitrary.

For GCC 15, I've gone through C and C++'s errors, looking for places where two different things in the source are being contrasted, such as type mismatches. These diagnostics now use color to visually highlight and distinguish the differences.

• Front: Debian project leader election; 6.15 Merge window; Lots of LSFMM coverage; Joplin.
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