The next release of systemd has been percolating for an unusually long time. Systemd releases are usually about six months apart, but v257 came out in December 2024, and v258 just now seems to be nearing the finish line; the third release candidate for v258 was published on August 20 (release notes). Now is a good time to dig in and take a look at some of the new features, enhancements, and removals coming soon to systemd. These include new workload-management features, a concept for multiple home-directory environments, and the final, once-and-for-all removal of support for control groups version 1.

Attendees at EuroPython had the chance to preview part of Python: The Documentary during a keynote panel. The full film, created by CultRepo, is now available on YouTube:

This is the story of the world's most beloved programming language: Python. What began as a side project in Amsterdam during the 1990s became the software powering artificial intelligence, data science and some of the world's biggest companies. But Python's future wasn't certain; at one point it almost disappeared.

This 90-minute documentary features Guido van Rossum, Travis Oliphant, Barry Warsaw, and many more, and they tell the story of Python's rise, its community-driven evolution, the conflicts that almost tore it apart, and the language's impact on... well... everything.

The video of the keynote is also available.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.16.4, 6.12.44, 6.6.103, 6.1.149, 5.15.190, 5.10.241, and 5.4.297 stable Linux kernels. Each one contains important fixes.

Alyssa Rosenzweig has written a blog post about her work to help ship a "great driver" for the Apple M1 GPU that supports OpenGL, Vulkan, and enables gaming with Proton.

We've succeeded beyond my dreams. The challenges I chased, I have tackled. The drivers are fully upstream in Mesa. Performance isn't too bad. With the Vulkan on Apple myth busted, conformant Vulkan is now coming to macOS via LunarG's KosmicKrisp project building on my work.

Satisfied, I am now stepping away from the Apple ecosystem. My friends in the Asahi Linux orbit will carry the torch from here.

Rosenzweig indicates her next project will be working on Intel's X^e-HPG graphics architecture. LWN covered her talk on Apple M1/M2 GPU drivers in October 2024.

The Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) language is used by web browsers to style XML content to make it easily readable; XSLT is part of the HTML living standard that is maintained by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG). Only a small fraction of web sites serve content that requires web browsers to support XSLT, in part because major browser implementations have neglected the technology over the past 25 years. Now, it seems, they would like to rid themselves of it entirely. A plan to disable XSLT in Blink (Chrome's rendering engine) and a pull request by a Google Chrome developer to remove mentions of the specification from the HTML standard have been met with opposition, but arguments in favor of XSLT have proven ineffective.

The GhostBSD project has released version 25.02 of the FreeBSD-based desktop operating system. This release brings GhostBSD up to date with FreeBSD 14.3, includes enhancements for the Software Station package management application, and introduces an "OS X-like" desktop environment based on GNUstep called Gershwin:

This early preview includes:

• GNUstep-based desktop environment with familiar OS X-style interface
• Seamless integration with GhostBSD tools through wrappers for installer, Software Station, Backup Station, and Update Station
• Support for running non-GNUstep applications alongside GNUstep apps
• Several included GNUstep applications to get you started

LWN covered GhostBSD in June 2024.

The PyCon team has announced that all PyCon US 2025 recordings are now available on its YouTube channel.

We had an amazing and diverse group of community members join us for PyCon US 2025, attending from 58 different countries! By the numbers, we welcomed a total attendance of 2,225 Pythonistas to the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. We couldn't be more grateful for all who supported the Python ecosystem and helped make PyCon US 2025 a huge success.

See the LWN conference index for coverage of some of the talks from PyCon US 2025.

The Arch Linux project has posted an update about recent service outages that have affected its infrastructure:

The Arch Linux Project is currently experiencing an ongoing denial of service attack that primarily impacts our main webpage, the Arch User Repository (AUR), and the Forums.

We are aware of the problems that this creates for our end users and will continue to actively work with our hosting provider to mitigate the attack. We are also evaluating DDoS protection providers while carefully considering factors including cost, security, and ethical standards.

The post contains information on workarounds to use during the service disruption, and notes that Arch is not sharing technical details about the attack or mitigation while the attack is still ongoing.

Tobias Heider has written an article that explains changes that are coming for Ubuntu's generic Arm64 desktop ISO images in the 25.10 release. The current solution, Heider says, depends on GRUB features that are unavailable in secure boot mode and require adding device-specific logic to multiple packages. The new solution, called stubble, is derived from systemd-stub:

A bundled stubble image contains stubble itself, a Linux kernel, a HWID lookup table to map devices to device trees and multiple device trees. When grub loads this "kernel", stubble executes first, reads the SMBIOS table to generate HWIDs, looks for a match in the embeeded lookup table and loads a matching device tree before passing control to the actual Linux kernel.

The elegance in this approach lies in how it interacts with the rest of the system. Integrating stubble happens entirely at build time in the kernel package. The stubble package is a build dependency for the kernel. After building the kernel itself, we bundle it with stubble and our DTBs and ship the combined binary instead. The resulting stubble + kernel + dtb bundle can be loaded by grub like any other Ubuntu kernel. No further changes in grub or other packages are necessary to make it work.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.16.2, 6.15.11, and 6.12.43 stable kernels. He notes that this is the last release in the 6.15.y series, and recommends that users move to the 6.16.y kernel branch at this time.

Version 25.8 of the LibreOffice open-source office suite has been released. Notable changes include several new functions in the Calc spreadsheet application, ability to export to the PDF 2.0 format, better PowerPoint font compatibility with Impress, and significant performance improvements. For a full list of changes, see the release notes on the Document Foundation wiki.

After more than two years of development, the Debian Project has released its new stable version, Debian 13 ("trixie"). The release comes with the usual bounty of upgraded packages and more than 14,000 new packages; it also debuts Advanced Package Tool (APT) 3.0 as the default package manager and makes 64-bit RISC-V a supported architecture. There are few surprises with trixie, which is exactly what many Linux users are hoping for—a free operating system that just works as expected.

The Python Package Index (PyPI) has announced that it is now checking for expired domains to try to prevent domain-resurrection attacks. In this type of attack, a malicious user buys an expired domain and uses it to take over an account by resetting the password associated with the email used with PyPI. Since June, PyPI has unverified more than 1,800 email addresses after their associated domains entered expiration phases.

After an initial bulk check period that took place in April 2025, PyPI will check daily for any domains in use for status changes, and update its internal database with the most recent status.

If a domain registration enters the redemption period, that's an indicator to PyPI that the previously verified email destinations may not be trusted, and will un-verify a previously-verified email address. PyPI will not issue a password reset request to addresses that have become unverified.

PyPI recommends that users add a second verified email address "from another notable domain (e.g. Gmail)" to their account, if they do not have one already.

Mitchell Hashimoto has written a blog post about "fully embracing the GObject type system" with a rewrite of the GTK version of Ghostty:

In addition to memory management [improvements], we can now more easily create custom GTK widgets. This let us fully embrace modern GTK UI technologies such as Blueprint. For example, here is our terminal window Blueprint file. This has already led to more easily introducing GUI features like a new GTK titlebar tabs option, an animated border on bell, etc.

The rewrite is now the default if one builds Ghostty from source, and will be included in the 1.2 release that is expected in the next few weeks. LWN covered Ghostty in January.

The purpose of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) is to provide a specification for filesystem layout; it specifies the location for files and directories on a Linux system to simplify application development for multiple distributions. In its heyday it had some success at this, but the standard has been frozen in time since 2015, and much has changed since then. There is a slow-moving effort to revive the FHS and create a FHS 4.0, but a recent discussion among Fedora developers also raised the possibility of standardizing on the suggestions in systemd's file-hierarchy documentation, which has now been added to the Linux Userspace API (UAPI) Group's specifications.

NGINX has announced the preview release of the nginx-acme module, which adds native support to NGINX for the Automatic Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol:

NGINX's native support for ACME brings a variety of benefits that simplify and enhance the overall SSL/TLS certificate management process. Being able to configure ACME directly using NGINX directives drastically reduces manual errors and eliminates much of the ongoing overhead traditionally associated with managing SSL/TLS certificates. It also reduces reliance on external tools like Certbot, creating a more secure and streamlined workflow with fewer vulnerabilities and a smaller attack surface.

Version 1.25 of Go has been released. Notable changes include support for generating debug information in the DWARF 5 format, "container awareness" when setting the maximum number of CPUs to be used, and a new testing/synctest package with support for testing concurrent code. See the release notes for a comprehensive list of changes in 1.25.

Version 2.0 of Syncthing, a continuous file synchronization utility, has been released. Notable changes in 2.0 include multiple connections for synchronizing metadata and file data, a new logging format, as well as a switch from LevelDB to SQLite for Syncthing's backend. This the first release in the 2.0 series, and the release notes advise users to "expect some rough edges and keep a sense of adventure".