Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 7, based on Debian 13 ("trixie"), has been released:

Its goal is to ensure Linux Mint would be able to continue to deliver the same user experience, and how much work would be involved, if Ubuntu was ever to disappear. LMDE is also one of our development targets, to guarantee the software we develop is compatible outside of Ubuntu.

The LMDE release notes are rather sparse; users are also advised to review Debian 13's release notes.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, vim, and webkit2gtk3), Debian (distro-info-data, https-everywhere, and php-horde-css-parser), Fedora (inih, mingw-exiv2, mirrorlist-server, rust-maxminddb, rust-monitord-exporter, rust-prometheus, rust-prometheus_exporter, rust-protobuf, rust-protobuf-codegen, rust-protobuf-parse, and rust-protobuf-support), Mageia (fetchmail), Oracle (gnutls, kernel, vim, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, and webkit2gtk3), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (curl, libxslt, and net-tools), and Ubuntu (linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-6.8, linux-azure-fips, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.14, and linux-raspi).

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.17.3, 6.12.53, 6.6.112, and 6.1.156 stable kernels. As usual, each contains important fixes throughout the kernel tree. Users of these kernels are advised to upgrade.

Version 1.12 of Julia has been released. Highlights of the release include new multi-threading features, new tracing flags and macros, and an experimental --trim feature. See the release notes for a full list of new features, changes, and improvements. LWN last covered Julia in January.

Debian packagers have a great deal of latitude when it comes to the configuration of the software they package; they may opt, for example, to disable default features in software that they feel are a security hazard. However, packagers are expected to ensure that their packages comply with Debian Policy, regardless of the upstream's preferences. If a packager fails to comply with the policy, the Debian Technical Committee (TC) can step in to override them, which it has done in the case of a recent systemd change that broke several programs that depend on a world-writable /run/lock directory.

Sudden increases in the size of Fedora's initramfs files have prompted the project to fast-track a proposal to increase the default size of the /boot partition for new installs of Fedora 43 and later. The project has also walked back a few changes that have contributed to larger initramfs files, but the ever-increasing size of firmware means that the need for more room is unavoidable. The Fedora Engineering Steering Council (FESCo) has approved a last-minute change just before the final freeze for Fedora 43 to increase the default size of the /boot partition from 1GB to 2GB; this will leave plenty of space for kernels and initramfs images if a user is installing from scratch, but it is of no help for users upgrading from Fedora 42.

Ubuntu 25.10, "Questing Quokka", has been released. This release includes Linux 6.17, GNOME 49, GCC 15, Python 3.13.7, Rust 1.85, and more. This release also features Rust-based implementations of sudo and coreutils; LWN covered the switch to the Rust-based tools in March. The 25.10 version of Ubuntu flavors Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Cinnamon, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu have also been released.

Firefox has long had support for multiple profiles to store personal information such as bookmarks, passwords, and user preferences. However, Firefox did not make profiles particularly discoverable or easy to manage. That is about to change; Mozilla has announced that it is launching a profile-management feature that will make it easier to create and switch between profiles. According to the support page for the feature, it will be rolled out to users gradually beginning on October 14.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (apptainer, civetweb, mod_http2, openssl, pandoc, and pandoc-cli), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, iputils, kernel, open-vm-tools, and podman), SUSE (cairo, firefox, ghostscript, gimp, gstreamer-plugins-rs, libxslt, logback, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-1_1, python-xmltodict, and rubygem-puma), and Ubuntu (gst-plugins-base1.0, linux-aws-6.8, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure, linux-azure-nvidia, linux-gke, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, and linux-raspi).

Systemd v258 was released on September 17 after more than nine months of development. LWN has already covered some of the features and changes being readied for v258 before it was final. Now that the release is out, it is time to look at more of what came in v258, including a sandbox shell, new boot options, service-level disk quotas, and enhancements to systemd-resolved.

Despite its name, the Robot Operating System (ROS) is not an operating system; it is a software development kit (SDK) that provides building blocks for robotic applications. One of the main goals of ROS is to present a common API that abstracts away the details of particular hardware drivers or algorithms to make development easier; developers can focus on what a robot should do rather than the low-level details of specific controllers. The latest release of ROS, Kilted Kaiju, features improvements to the middleware layer that is used to deliver data between components.

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.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, mysql:8.0, and openssh), Debian (libcommons-lang-java, libcommons-lang3-java, libcpanel-json-xs-perl, libjson-xs-perl, libxml2, open-vm-tools, and u-boot), Fedora (bird, dnsdist, mapserver, ntpd-rs, python-nh3, and rust-ammonia), Oracle (kernel and mysql:8.0), Red Hat (cups, postgresql:12, and postgresql:13), SUSE (cJSON-devel, gimp, kernel-devel, kubecolor, open-vm-tools, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, and ruby3.4-rubygem-rack), and Ubuntu (linux-azure-5.15 and openssl, openssl1.0).

Version 1.5.0 of the Radicle peer-to-peer Git collaboration platform has been released. This release includes better support for bare repositories, structured logging, and improvements in the output of rad patch show:

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.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel and kernel-rt), Fedora (expat), Red Hat (kernel and multiple packages), SUSE (avahi, busybox, busybox-links, kernel, sevctl, tcpreplay, thunderbird, and tor), and Ubuntu (isc-kea, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-aws-6.8, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-aws-fips, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-realtime, python-pip, and rabbitmq-server).

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.