The Alpine Linux project has announced plans to change its base filesystem hierarchy:

In the future, /lib, /bin, and /sbin will be symbolic links to their /usr counterparts, and every package shall be installed under the /usr paths. For now, /usr/bin and /usr/sbin will continue to be independent paths, but that might change if the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) gets updated.

The merge will take place in the upcoming Alpine 3.23 release planned for November; non-merged systems will be considered unsupported when 3.22 is at its end of life in May 2027.

The Fedora Council began a process to create a policy on AI-assisted contributions in 2024, starting with a survey to ask the community its opinions about AI and using AI technologies in Fedora. On September 25, Jason Brooks published a draft policy for discussion; so far, in keeping with the spirit of compromise, it has something to make everyone unhappy. For some it is too AI-friendly, while others have complained that it holds Fedora back from experimenting with AI tooling.

The previous output would differentiate "updates", where the original author creates a new revision, and "revisions", where another author creates a revision. This could be confusing since updates are also revisions. Instead, the output shows a timeline of the root of the patch and each new revision, without any differentiation. The revision identifiers, head commit of the revision, and author are still printed as per usual.

LWN covered Radicle in March 2024.

The openSUSE project is nearing the release of Leap 16, its first major release since openSUSE Leap 15 in May 2018. This release brings some changes to the core of the distribution aside from the usual software upgrades; YaST has been retired, SELinux has replaced AppArmor as the default mandatory access control (MAC) system, and more. If all goes according to plan, Leap 16 final should be released in early October, with planned support through 2031.

Version 18 of the PostgreSQL database has been released. Notable improvements in this release include "skip scan" lookups for multicolumn B-tree indexes, virtual generated columns, better text processing, oauth authentication, and a new asynchronous I/O (AIO) subsystem to improve performance:

AIO lets PostgreSQL issue multiple I/O requests concurrently instead of waiting for each to finish in sequence. This expands existing readahead and improves overall throughput. AIO operations supported in PostgreSQL 18 include sequential scans, bitmap heap scans, and vacuum. Benchmarking has demonstrated performance gains of up to 3x in certain scenarios.

There are, of course, many other improvements and changes; see the release notes for full details.

A bug in a recent release of systemd's network manager caused headaches for people managing systems that have a virtual LAN (VLAN) interface on a bridge; something one might want to do, for example, when configuring network interfaces for virtual machines. The bug affected several Debian users when upgrading the systemd package from v257.7-1 to v257.8-1. The updated package is part of the Debian 13.1 release, and the bug has snared enough users to cause a minor stir—due in no small part to the maintainer's response as much as the bug itself.

Version 6.0.0 of the RPM Package Manager has been released. Notable changes in this release include support for multiple OpenPGP signatures per package, the ability to update previously installed PGP keys, as well as support for RPM v4 and v6 packages. See the release notes for full details.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.16.8, 6.12.48, 6.6.107, and 6.1.153 stable kernels; each contains an important set of fixes.

Blender 4.5 LTS was released on July 15, 2025, and will be supported through 2027. This is the last feature release of the 3D graphics-creation suite's 4.x series; it includes quality-of-life improvements, including work to bring the Vulkan backend up to par with the default OpenGL backend. With 4.5 released, Blender developers are turning their attention toward Blender 5.0, planned for release later this year. It will introduce substantial changes, particularly in the Geometry Nodes system, a central feature of Blender's procedural workflows.

The Universal Blue project has announced the release of Bluefin LTS, an image-based distribution similar to Bluefin that uses CentOS Stream 10 and EPEL instead of Fedora as its base:

Bluefin LTS ships with Linux 6.12.0, which is the kernel for the lifetime of release. An optional hwe branch with new kernels is available, offering the same modern kernel you'll find in Bluefin and Bluefin GTS. Both vanilla and HWE ISOs are available, and you can always choose to switch back and forth after installation. [...]

Bluefin LTS provides a backported GNOME desktop so that you are not left behind. This is an important thing for us. James has been diligently working on GNOME backports with the upstream CentOS community, and we feel bringing modern GNOME desktops to an LTS makes sense.

Version 7.0 of the Tails portable operating system has been released. This is the first version of Tails based on Linux 6.12.43, Debian 13 ("trixie") and GNOME 48. It uses zstd instead of xz to compress the USB and ISO images to deliver a faster start time on most computers. The release is dedicated to the memory of Lunar, "a traveling companion for Tails, a Tor volunteer, Free Software hacker, and community organizer":

Lunar has always been by our side throughout Tails' history. From the first baby steps of the project that eventually became Tails, to the merge with Tor, he's provided sensible technical suggestions, out-of-the-box product design ideas, outreach support, and caring organizational advice.

Outside of Tor, Lunar worked on highly successful Free Software projects such as the Debian project, the Linux distribution on which Tails is based, and the Reproducible Builds project, which helps us verify the integrity of Tails releases.

See the changelog for a full list of fixes, upgraded applications, and removals. LWN covered Tails Project team leader intrigeri's DebConf25 talk in July.

Ian Jackson has published a blog post summarizing the tag2upload service's first month of handling uploads for the upcoming Debian 14 ("forky") release:

We announced tag2upload's open beta in mid-July. That was in the middle of the the freeze for trixie, so usage was fairly light until the forky floodgates opened.

Since then the service has successfully performed 637 uploads, of which 420 were in the last 32 days. That's an average of about 13 per day. For comparison, during the first half of September up to today there have been 2475 uploads to unstable. That's about 176/day.

So, tag2upload is already handling around 7.5% of uploads. This is very gratifying for a service which is advertised as still being in beta!

LWN covered tag2upload in July 2024.

Version 2.15.0 of libxml2 has been released. Notable changes include the disabling of Python bindings by default, using Doxygen to generate API documentation, as well as bringing HTML serialization and handling of character encodings more in line with the HTML5 specification.

Nick Wellnhofer has also announced that he is stepping down as libxml2 maintainer, and Iván Chavero has volunteered to take over. LWN covered libxml2 in June.

Systemd v258 has been released with a long list of new features and changes; slice units now have basic workload management features, quotas for tmpfs have been added, the "systemctl start" command now has a verbose (-v) option, and more. This release also, finally, completely removes support for control groups v1 support. LWN covered some of systemd v258's features and changes in August.

In October, consumer versions of Windows 10 will stop receiving security updates. Many users who would ordinarily move to the next version are blocked by Windows 11's hardware requirements unless they are willing to buy a newer PC. The "End of 10" campaign is an effort to convince those users to switch to Linux rather than sticking with an end-of-life operating system or buying a new Windows system. At Akademy 2025, Dr. Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss, Bettina Louis, Carolina Silva Rodé, and Nicole Teale discussed their work on the campaign, its progress so far, and what's next.

The move also comes with a name change due to legal difficulties in securing the Varnish Cache name:

The new association and the new project will be named "The Vinyl Cache Project", and this release 8.0.0, will be the last under the "Varnish Cache" name. The next release, in March will be under the new name, and will include compatility scripts, to make the transition as smooth as possible for everybody.

I want to make it absolutely clear that this is 100% a mess of my making: I should have insisted on a firm written agreement about the name sharing, but I did not.

I will also state for the record, that there are no hard feelings between Varnish Software and the FOSS project.

Varnish Software has always been, and still is, an important and valued contributor to the FOSS project, but sometimes even friends can make a mess of a situation.