GNOME 50 has been released. Notable changes in this release include enhancements to the Orca screen-reader application, interface and performance improvements for GNOME's file manager (Files), a "massive set of stability and performance updates" for its display-handling technologies, and much more. See also the "What's new for developers" article that covers changes of interest to GNOME and GNOME application developers.

Qualys has discovered a local-privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability affecting Ubuntu Desktop 24.04 and later:

This flaw (CVE-2026-3888) allows an unprivileged local attacker to escalate privileges to full root access through the interaction of two standard system components: snap-confine and systemd-tmpfiles.

More details are available in the security advisory. Canonical has published updated packages as well as instructions for verifying if a system is vulnerable and how to upgrade if so.

Fedora Asahi Remix 43 is now available:

This release incorporates all the exciting improvements brought by Fedora Linux 43. Notably, package management is significantly upgraded with RPM 6.0 and the new DNF5 backend for PackageKit for Plasma Discover and GNOME Software ahead of Fedora Linux 44. It also continues to provide extensive device support. This includes newly added support for the Mac Pro, microphones in M2 Pro/Max MacBooks, and 120Hz refresh rate for the built-in displays for MacBook Pro 14/16 models.

The kernel's asynchronous io_uring interface maintains two shared ring buffers: a submission queue for sending requests to the kernel, and a completion queue containing the results of those requests. Even with shared memory removing much of the overhead of communicating with user space, there is still some overhead whenever the kernel must switch to user space to give it the opportunity to process completion requests and queue up any subsequent work items. A patch set from Pavel Begunkov minimizes this overhead by letting programmers extend the io_uring event loop with a BPF program that can enqueue additional work in response to completion events. The patch set has been in development for a long time, but has finally been accepted.