Firefox 126.0 released
Telemetry was added to create an aggregate count of searches by category to broadly inform search feature development."
Telemetry was added to create an aggregate count of searches by category to broadly inform search feature development."
Version 24.0 of the Arch-based Manjaro distribution is now available with the 6.9 kernel, GNOME 46, Xfce 4.18, and an update to the Pamac package installer. This is also the project's first release with KDE Plasma 6:
The Plasma edition comes with the latest Plasma 6.0 series and KDE Gear 24.02. It brings exciting new improvements to your desktop.
With Plasma 6, KDE's technology stack has undergone major upgrades: a transition to the latest version of application framework, Qt, and an improved graphics platform when Wayland is used. These changes are as smooth and unnoticeable to the users as possible. You will see the same familiar desktop environment that you know and love. But these under-the-hood upgrades benefit Plasma's security, efficiency, and performance, and improve support for modern hardware. Thus Plasma delivers an overall more reliable user experience, while paving the way for many more improvements in the future.
The project also offers minimal install images with the 6.6 LTS and 6.1 LTS kernels to support older hardware.
Large language models (LLMs) have been the subject of much discussion and scrutiny recently. Of particular interest to open-source enthusiasts are the problems with running LLMs on one's own hardware — especially when doing so requires NVIDIA's proprietary CUDA toolkit, which remains unavailable in many environments. Mozilla has developed llamafile as a potential solution to these problems. Llamafile can compile LLM weights into portable, native executables for easy integration, archival, or distribution. These executables can take advantage of supported GPUs when present, but do not require them.
So 6.9 is now out, and last week has looked quite stable (and the whole release has felt pretty normal)." Significant changes in this release include the ability to create pidfds for individual threads, the BPF arena subsystem, the BPF token security mechanism, truncate() support in io_uring, support for the Rust language on 64-bit Arm systems, weighted interleaving in the memory-management subsystem, the device-mapper virtual data optimizer target, initial FUSE passthrough support, and more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) for more information.
In April, the Gentoo Linux project banned the use of generative AI/ML tools due to copyright, ethical, and quality concerns. This means contributors cannot use tools like ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot to create content for the distribution such as code, documentation, bug reports, and forum posts. A proposal for Debian to adopt a similar policy revealed a distinct lack of love for those kinds of tools, though it would also seem few contributors support banning them outright.
The so-called software supply chain starts with source code. But most security measures and tooling don't kick in until source is turned into an artifact—a source tarball, binary build, container image, or other method of delivering a release to users. The gittuf project is an attempt to provide a security layer for Git that can handle key management, enforce security policies for repositories, and guard against attacks at the version-control layer. At Open Source Summit North America (OSSNA), Aditya Sirish A Yelgundhalli and Billy Lynch presented an introduction to gittuf with an overview of its goals and status.
Fedora Magazine reports that the Fedora Asahi Remix for Apple Arm hardware, based on Fedora 40, is now available:
Fedora Asahi Remix offers KDE Plasma 6 as our flagship desktop experience. It also features a custom Calamares-based initial setup wizard. A GNOME variant is also available, featuring GNOME 46, with both desktop variants matching what Fedora Linux offers. Fedora Asahi Remix also provides a Fedora Server variant for server workloads and other types of headless deployments. Finally, we offer a Minimal image for users that wish to build their own experience from the ground up.
See the installation guide to get started with the Asahi Remix.