The FreeBSD Foundation has published a set of reports from the May 2024 FreeBSD Developer Summit held in Ottawa, Canada. The topics include FreeBSD Core Team updates, FreeBSD 15 release planning, Integration with Rust, and OCI containers on FreeBSD:

Doug Rabson began by providing an overview of the current state of FreeBSD support for OCI containers, noting that while FreeBSD has long supported containers through its jail and vnet features, the ecosystem around OCI containers requires further development. "FreeBSD has been able to do containers for a long time, but we need to align better with OCI standards to make our containers more compatible and easier to use," Rabson remarked​​.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced the addition of three new members to its board: John Gilmore, Christina Haralanova, and Maria Chiara Pievatolo. This is part of FSF governance changes announced in January 2023. The next step is a review of current board members:

These three new members of the FSF's board of directors are the first to be appointed since 2020, when Odile Bénassy joined. Given the importance of the FSF to the free software movement, and the importance of its board to ensure preservation of the software freedom definition, the board has not taken its task lightly. Next, the FSF will evaluate current board members with the FSF's associate members in August, after which the voting members will review the feedback received and decide if each current board member should remain.

More information on the process, and a short biography of each new board member, is available in the full announcement.

An upgrade from Python 3.11 to 3.12 has led to the rejection of some Python apps by Apple's app stores. That led to Eric Froemling submitting a bug report against CPython. That, in turn, led to an interesting discussion among Python developers about how far the project was willing to go to accommodate app store review processes. Developers reached a quick consensus, and a solution that may arrive as soon as Python 3.13.

The 6.9.7, 6.6.36, and 6.1.96 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains an important set of fixes.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg, kernel, libvpx, and linux-5.10), Fedora (chromium, firefox, freeipa, moodle, and openvpn), Oracle (git), Red Hat (golang and java-1.8.0-ibm), and Ubuntu (linux-oracle-6.5, netplan.io, openssl, plasma-workspace, ruby2.7, ruby3.0, ruby3.1, sqlite3, and wget).

The openSUSE project has announced Leap Micro version 6.0. Leap Micro is an image-based, lightweight Linux distribution that is designed to run containerized and virtualized applications. It is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) Micro. Changes in this release include the support for full-disk encryption, the addition of Cockpit for web-based system management, and an optional real-time kernel for x86_64. Boot support for legacy BIOS on x86_64 is deprecated with 6.0, and will be removed in a later release. See the SLE Micro release notes for more information.

Peter Hutterer has written a summary of "papercut fixes" for GNOME tablet support that are planned to ship with GNOME 47.

If you're an avid tablet user, you may have multiple stylus tools - but it's also likely that you have multiple tools of the same type which makes differentiating them in the GUI hard. Which is why they're highlighted now - if you bring the tool into proximity, the matching image is highlighted to make it easier to know which stylus you're about to configure. Oh, and in the process we added a new SVG for AES styli too to make the picture look more like the actual physical tool. The <blink> tag may no longer be cool but at least we can disco our way through the stylus configuration now.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (git, python3.11, and python3.9), Debian (chromium, emacs, git, linux-5.10, and org-mode), Fedora (libopenmpt, nginx-mod-modsecurity, and thunderbird), Mageia (emacs, python-ansible-core, and python-authlib), Oracle (git, python3.11, and python3.9), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, and samba), and Ubuntu (ansible, cups, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, libheif, openvpn, roundcube, and salt).

Version 4.8.0 of the darktable photo editor has been released. Changes include performance improvements for large collections, addition of more EXIF fields in the image information module, and two new modules for image composition: Enlarge Canvas and Overlay. Enlarge Canvas allows adding areas to an image, while Overlay allows adding new content by overlaying pixels from the current image or another image. LWN last looked at darktable in 2022. Users are "strongly advised" to make a backup of their configuration and library before upgrading, as they will not be compatible with darktable 4.6.

Dan Walsh, Stef Walter, and Colin Walters all walk into a presentation and Walter asks, "why would you want to boot your containers?" This isn't the setup for some technology joke, this is part of the trio's keynote at DevConf.cz in Brno, Czech Republic on June 14 about bootable containers (bootc). The talk, which was streamed to YouTube for those of us who didn't attend DevConf.cz in person, provided a solid overview of bootc and the problems it is intended to solve. The idea behind bootc is to make creating operating-system images just as easy as creating application-container images while using the same tools.

GhostBSD is a desktop-oriented operating system based on FreeBSD and the MATE Desktop Environment. The goal of the project is to lower the barrier to entry of using FreeBSD on a desktop or laptop system, and it largely succeeds at this. While it has a few rough edges that make it hard to recommend for the average desktop user, it is a fine choice for users who want a desktop with FreeBSD underpinnings such as the Z File System (ZFS), and the Ports (source) and Packages (binary) software collections.

Philip Hazel was 51 when he began the Exim message transfer agent (MTA) project in 1995, which led to the Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) project in 1998. At 80, he's maintained PCRE, and its successor PCRE2, for more than 27 years. For those doing the math, that's a year longer than LWN has been in publication. Exim maintenance was handed off around the time of his retirement in 2007. Now, he is ready to hand off PCRE2 as well, if a successor can be found.

Version 1.28 of the MATE Desktop has been released.

MATE 1.28 has made significant strides in updating the codebase, including the removal of deprecated libraries and ensuring compatibility with the latest GTK versions. One of the most notable improvements is the enhanced support for Wayland, bringing us closer to a fully native MATE-Wayland experience. Several components have been updated to work seamlessly with Wayland, ensuring a more integrated and responsive desktop environment.

See the announcement for a full list of improvements and bug fixes.

Version 1.11.0 of Libgcrypt, a general-purpose library of cryptographic building blocks, has been released by the GnuPG project:

This release starts a new stable branch of Libgcrypt with full API and ABI compatibility to the 1.10 series. Over the last years Jussi Kivilinna put again a lot of work into speeding up the algorithms for many commonly used CPUs. Niibe-san implemented new APIs and algorithms and also integrated quantum-resistant encryption algorithms.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (container-tools, firefox, and flatpak), Debian (composer, roundcube, and thunderbird), Fedora (kitty and webkitgtk), Oracle (container-tools and flatpak), Red Hat (flatpak and java-1.8.0-ibm), SUSE (gdcm, gdk-pixbuf, libarchive, libzypp, zypper, ntfs-3g_ntfsprogs, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, podman, python-Werkzeug, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (git, linux-hwe-6.5, mariadb, mariadb-10.6, and thunderbird).

Christian Schaller writes about AI and GPU-related features that are in flight and planned for Fedora 41.

Milan Crha has been working together with Alan Day and Jakub Steiner to come up with a streamlined user experience in GNOME Software to let you install the binary NVIDIA driver and provide you with an integrated graphical user interface help to sign the kernel module for use with secure boot. This is a bit different than what we for instance are doing in RHEL, where we are working with NVIDIA to provide pre-signed kernel modules, but that is a lot harder to do in Fedora due to the rapidly updating kernel versions and which most Fedora users appreciate as a big plus. So instead what we are for opting in Fedora is as I said to make it simple for you to self-sign the kernel module for use with secure boot. We are currently looking at when we can make this feature available, but no later than Fedora Workstation 41 for sure.

KDE developer Nate Graham has announced a new set of KDE Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) for the KDE project. Graham says that the goals for the new HIGs were to reflect how KDE designs software today, make the content 100% actionable, improve navigation, and to improve the guidelines so people feel comfortable contributing:

Like any rewrite, there are bound to be rough edges and omissions compared to the old version. Maybe I missed a piece of useful information in the old HIG that had been buried somewhere but retained some value. Maybe there's low-hanging fruit for improvement. Help out by contributing!

The openSUSE project recently announced the second release candidate (RC2) of its Aeon Desktop, formerly known as MicroOS Desktop GNOME. Aside from the new coat of naming paint, Aeon breaks ground in a few other ways by dabbling with technologies not found in other openSUSE releases. The goal for Aeon is to provide automated system updates using snapshots that can be applied atomically, removing the burden of system maintenance for "lazy developers" who want to focus on their work rather than desktop administration. System-tinkerers need not apply.

The Cockpit project has announced the first release of Cockpit Files, a plugin for Cockpit that allows file management on your server via a web browser:

Cockpit Files was initially started by Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student Mahmoud Hamdy and is now under active development by the Cockpit team. The goal is to replace the functionality of the cockpit-navigator plugin from 45Drives and include automated testing per commit, a standard PatternFly-based interface, and consistency with the rest of Cockpit.

Development builds for Fedora are available via a Copr repository, and packages are expected for Arch, Debian, and Fedora. LWN covered the Cockpit project in March.