Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.18.3 stable kernel. As always, this update contains important fixes; users of this kernel are advised to upgrade.

Version 4.19.0 of the shadow-utils project has been released. Notable changes in this release include disallowing some usernames that were previously accepted with the --badname option, and removing support for escaped newlines in configuration files. Possibly more interesting is the announcement that the project is deprecating a number of programs, hashing algorithms, and the ability to periodically expire passwords:

Scientific research shows that periodic password expiration leads to predictable password patterns, and that even in a theoretical scenario where that wouldn't happen the gains in security are mathematically negligible (paper link).

Modern security standards, such as NIST SP 800-63B-4 in the USA, prohibit periodic password expiration. [...]

To align with these, we're deprecating the ability to periodically expire passwords. The specifics and long-term roadmap are currently being discussed, and we invite feedback from users, particularly from those in regulated environments. See #1432.

The release announcement notes that the features will remain functional "for a significant period" to minimize disruption.

Daniel Stenberg has written a blog post about the decision to ban the use strcpy() in curl:

The main challenge with strcpy is that when using it we do not specify the length of the target buffer nor of the source string. [...]

To make sure that the size checks cannot be separated from the copy itself we introduced a string copy replacement function the other day that takes the target buffer, target size, source buffer and source string length as arguments and only if the copy can be made and the null terminator also fits there, the operation is done.

Graphite is an effort to unify illustration, raster editing, desktop publishing, and animation in one browser-based application. The project has been in development since 2021 and announced its first alpha release in 2022. According to creator Keavon Chambers, the project's mission is to become "the 2D counterpart to Blender", by bringing a node-based, non-destructive workflow to 2D graphics. The project, currently still in alpha, is a long way from complete; but it is worth testing for anyone involved with open-source-graphics production. Current builds, from September 2025, include vector-illustration tools, a node-based compositor, and early brush tooling, with broader pixel-based- and photo-editing work still in progress.

Once again there is a brand-new release under the tree from the Ruby programming-language project: Ruby 4.0 has been released with many new features and improvements. Notable changes include the experimental Ruby Box feature for in-process isolation of classes and modules, a new just-in-time compiler called ZJIT, and improvements to Ruby's parallel-execution mechanism (Ractor). There are a number of language changes as well. See the documentation for Ruby 4.0 for more.

• Front: 2025 retrospective; Dirk and Linus talk; successful open-source documentation projects; verifier-state pruning in BPF; Linux 32-bit timeline; BPF state visualizer; systemd v259.
• Briefs: linux-next maintainer; 2025 TAB; Git in Debian; Elementary OS 8.1; Qubes OS 4.3.0; GDB 17.1; Incus 6.20; systemd v259; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The systemd v259 release was announced on December 17, just three months after v258. It is a more modest release but still includes a number of important changes such as a new option for the run0 command (an alternative to sudo), ability to mount user home directories from the host in virtual machines, as well as under-the-hood changes with dlopen() for library linking, the ability to compile systemd with musl libc, and more.

Version 8.1 of elementary OS has been released. Notable changes in this release include making the Wayland session the default, changes to window management and multitasking, as well as a number of accessibility improvements. The 8.1 release is the first to be made available for Arm64 devices, which should allow users to run elementary on Apple M-series hardware or other Arm devices that can load UEFI-supporting firmware, such as some Raspberry Pi models. See the blog post for a full list of changes.

Version 6.20 of the Incus container and virtual-machine management system has been released. Notable changes in this release include a new standalone command to add IncusOS servers to a cluster, qcow2-formatted volumes for clustered LVM, and reverse DNS records in OVN. See the announcement for a full list of changes.

So far, we have manually built and imported an initial set of 112 packages with the help of the packages in Debian Ports. This was enough to create an initial chroot and set up the first buildd which is now churning through the build queue. Over night, the currently single buildd instance already built and uploaded 300 new packages.