Linux Mint has announced version 22 of the distribution in three editions: Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce. Mint 22 is based on Ubuntu 24.04 and uses kernel version 6.8.0:

Linux Mint 22 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2029. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

LWN covered the Linux Mint 22 beta in early July. See the new features page and release notes for more information on this release.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.10.1 stable kernel update. This release contains a small number of seemingly urgent regression fixes. Users of this kernel series are advised to upgrade.

Updated installation images for the OpenMandriva ROME rolling release Linux distribution are now available. Notable features in the 24.07 snapshot include KDE Plasma 6 as the default desktop, the addition of Proton and Proton experimental packages for playing Windows games on Linux, as well as GNOME 46.3 and LXQt 2.0.0 spins.

OpenSSL has announced that it has adopted a new governance framework:

The OpenSSL Management Committee (OMC) has been dissolved, and two boards of directors have been elected for the Foundation and the Corporation. Each organization has ten voting members. These boards share all the responsibilities and authorities of the former OMC co-equally.

To further engage our communities, we are establishing two advisory committees for each entity: a Business Advisory Committee (BAC) and a Technical Advisory Committee (TAC). The communities will elect the members of the BACs and TACs, creating a direct channel for community input in roadmap development and reflecting the diverse perspectives of OpenSSL's communities.

OpenSSL has also announced that two projects have adopted the OpenSSL Mission and become OpenSSL projects: Bouncy Castle, which provides cryptographic APIs for Java and C#, and the cryptlib security software development toolkit. See the announcement for full details.

Ryan Sipes told the audience during his keynote at GUADEC 2024 in Denver, Colorado that the Thunderbird mail client "probably shouldn't still be alive". Thunderbird, however, is not only alive—it is arguably in better shape than ever before. According to Sipes, the project's turnaround is a result of governance, storytelling, and learning to be comfortable asking users for money. He would also like it quite a bit if Linux distributions stopped turning off telemetry.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (ghostscript and xmedcon), Gentoo (Dmidecode, ExifTool, and Freenet), Red Hat (containernetworking-plugins, cups, edk2, httpd, httpd:2.4, kernel, kernel-rt, krb5, libreoffice, libuv, libvirt, linux-firmware, nghttp2, nodejs, openssh, python3, runc, thunderbird, and tpm2-tss), Slackware (aaa_glibc, bind, and mozilla), SUSE (postgresql14, python-sentry-sdk, and shadow), and Ubuntu (activemq, bind9, haproxy, nova, provd, python-zipp, squid, squid3, and tomcat).

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) board has announced improvements to its grants program that have been enacted as a response to "concerns and frustrations" with the program:

The PSF Board takes the open letter from the pan-African delegation seriously, and we began to draft a plan to address everything in the letter. We also set up improved two-way communications so that we can continue the conversation with the community. The writers of the open letter have now met several times with members of the PSF board. We are thankful for their insight and guidance on how we can work together and be thoroughly and consistently supportive of the pan-African Python community.

So far the PSF has set up office hours to improve communications, published a retrospective on the DjangoCon Africa review, and put out a transparency report on grants from the past two years. The PSF board has also voted to "use the same criteria for all grant requests, no matter their country of origin".

Red Hat, through members of the Fedora Workstation Working Group, has taken another swing at persuading the Fedora Project to allow metrics related to the real-world use of the Workstation edition to be collected. The first proposal, aimed for Fedora 40, was withdrawn to be reworked based on feedback. This time around, the proponents have shifted from asking for opt-out telemetry to opt-in metrics, with more detail about what would be collected and the policies that would govern data collection. The change seems to be on its way to approval by the Fedora Engineering Steering Council (FESCo) and is set to take effect for Fedora 42.

Version 4.2 LTS of the Blender open-source 3D creation suite has been released. Major improvements include a rewrite of the EEVEE render engine, faster rendering, and much more. See the showcase reel for examples of work created by the Blender community with this release. See the text release notes for even more about 4.2 LTS, which will be maintained until July 2026.

Version 8.4.0 of the digiKam photo editing and management application has been released. This release includes an update of the LibRaw RAW decoder which brings support for many new cameras, a new version of the LensFun toolkit, a feature for automatic translation of image tags, GMIC-Qt 3.4.0, and many bug fixes. See the announcement for full details.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel), Fedora (golang and krb5), Red Hat (cups, firefox, git, java-21-openjdk, kernel, linux-firmware, nghttp2, nodejs, and podman), SUSE (libndp, nodejs18, nodejs20, tomcat, and xen), and Ubuntu (gtk+2.0, gtk+3.0 and linux-hwe-5.4, linux-oracle-5.4).

SUSE has, in a somewhat clumsy fashion, asked openSUSE to consider rebranding to clear up confusion over the relationship between SUSE the company and openSUSE as a community project. That, in turn, has opened conversations about revising openSUSE governance and more. So far, there is no concrete proposal to consider, no timeline, or even a process for the community and company to follow to make any decisions.

The GNOME Foundation has announced that executive director Holly Million is stepping down at the end of July, and will be replaced by Richard Littauer as interim executive director:

On behalf of the whole GNOME community, the Board of Directors would like to give our utmost thanks to Holly for her achievements during the past 10 months, including drafting a bold five-year strategic plan for the Foundation, securing two important fiscal sponsorship agreements with GIMP and Black Python Devs, writing our first funding proposal that will now enable the Foundation to apply for more grants, vastly improving our financial operations, and implementing a break-even budget to preserve our financial reserves.

The Foundation's Interim Executive Director, Richard Littauer, brings years of open source leadership as part of his work as an organizer of SustainOSS and CURIOSS, as a sustainability coordinator at the Open Source Initiative, and as a community development manager at Open Source Collective, and through open source contributions to many projects, such as Node.js and IPFS. The Board appointed Richard in June and is confident in his ability to guide the Foundation during this transitional period.

Million says she is leaving to pursue a PhD in psychology. The board plans to announce its search plan for a permanent executive directory after GUADEC, which takes place July 19 through 24.

Linux Mint has released a beta of its next long-term-support (LTS) release, Linux Mint 22 (code-named "Wilma"), based on Ubuntu 24.04. Aside from the standard software updates that come with any major upgrade, some of Wilma's largest selling points are what it doesn't have; namely snap packages or GNOME applications that have broken theming on non-GNOME desktops like Mint's Cinnamon desktop.

Doug Brown documents the long journey to fixing a bug in the GDebi utility for installing Debian packages. He first encountered the bug in Ubuntu MATE 18.04: "at the time I just ignored this issue. I didn't want to deal with it. I went off to the trusty Linux terminal and installed Chrome that way instead".

Two and a half years ago, I committed to doing more open-source contributions in my free time and was finally irritated enough about this problem to look into it. I searched around for more info. Lo and behold, lots of people were also affected and there was already an issue from 2019 on Ubuntu's bug tracker about it.

[...] As is commonly the case in software development, the difficult part of this fix had nothing to do with the code itself. All of my effort was spent figuring out Ubuntu's patch submission processes and advocating for my merge request. Nobody else seemed to be interested in doing the work to actually fix this bug that has been plaguing Ubuntu MATE and Xubuntu, not to mention some Debian users, for over 6 years. After dealing with the long process of getting my merge request approved, I think I'm starting to understand why!

Brown notes that the fix is now packaged for the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 release, and should be backported to 22.04 and 24.04 eventually.

Fedora Atomic Desktop and Fedora IoT systems installed before Fedora 40 may fail to boot after an update if secure boot is enabled. Fedora Magazine has a post by Timothée Ravier about the problem, how users can work around it, and what the project is doing to avoid the similar problems in the future:

On Fedora Atomic Desktops and Fedora IoT systems, the components that are part of the boot chain (Shim, GRUB) are not (yet) automatically updated alongside the rest of the system. Thus, if you have installed a Fedora Atomic Desktop or a Fedora IoT system before Fedora 40, it uses an old versions of the Shim and bootloader binaries to boot your system.

When Secure Boot is enabled, the EFI firmware loads Shim first. Shim is signed by the Microsoft Third Party Certificate Authority so that it can be verified on most hardware out of the box. The Shim binary includes the Fedora certificates used to verify binaries signed by Fedora. Then Shim loads GRUB, which in turn loads the Linux kernel. Both are signed by Fedora.

Until recently, the kernel binaries where signed two times, with an older key and a newer one. With the 6.9 kernel update, the kernel is no longer signed with the old key. If GRUB or Shim is old enough and does not know about the new key, the signature verification fails.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, gvisor-tap-vsock, kernel-rt, libreswan, linux-firmware, pki-core, and podman), Fedora (firefox and jpegxl), Gentoo (Buildah, HarfBuzz, and LIVE555 Media Server), Oracle (buildah, gvisor-tap-vsock, kernel, libreswan, and podman), Red Hat (containernetworking-plugins, dotnet6.0, dotnet8.0, fence-agents, kernel, libreswan, libvirt, perl-HTTP-Tiny, python39:3.9, toolbox, and virt:rhel and virt-devel:rhel modules), SUSE (firefox, freeradius-server, haproxy, jbigkit, kernel, kernel-firmware, pam, ppp, python3-cryptography, skopeo, and tar), and Ubuntu (dotnet6, dotnet8, exim4, firefox, golang-1.21, golang-1.22, openssh, and python-django).

At DevConf.cz 2024, Marta Lewandowska gave a talk to discuss a new approach for booting Linux systems, "No more boot loader: Please use the kernel instead". The talk, available on YouTube, introduced a new project called nmbl (for "no more bootloader", pronounced "nimble"). The idea is to get rid of bootloaders (e.g., GNU GRUB) with a Unified Kernel Image (UKI) that removes the need for a separate bootloader altogether. It is early days for nmbl, currently the project is only being tested for use with virtual machines, but the idea is compelling. If successful, nmbl could offer security, performance, and maintenance benefits compared to GRUB and other separate bootloaders.

Debian's proposed tag2upload service would be worthy of an article even if it wasn't so contentious; tag2upload promises a streamlined way for Debian developers using Git to upload packages to the Debian Archive. But tag2upload has been in limbo for years due to disagreement and a communication breakdown between the team behind tag2upload and the ftpmasters team. It took the threat of a General Resolution (GR), weeks of discussion, and more than 1,000 emails to finally move forward.