News from the Planet

SRFI 273 is now in final status. The original SRFI 253 established a basis for type-checked (or otherwise checked) data handling. But it lacked some quality-of-life features. This SRFI extends SRFI 253 to match existing implementation practice and common sense. Provided extensions are: …

Today I stumbled over some behavior that I found quite surprising: $ ipython3 -c 'import httpx;print(httpx.URL("https://example.com/foo/bar/../../baz"))' https://example.com/baz Even more surprising that behavior is actually standards-compliant, even mandated by RFC 3986. The underlying…

1981 was a different time for computing. It was expensive (both hardware and software), and it was far from a given that machines from one vendor would be able to talk to those from another. In fact, Columbia University had just such a problem, so in 1981, Frank da Cruz and Bill Catchings designed…

The latest version of the Firefox Profiler is now live! Check out the full changelog below to see what’s changed: Highlights: [Nazım Can Altınova] Add an “apply source map” button to the profile info panel (#6200) [Nazım Can Altınova] Show markers that are in the committed range only in…

This is such a useful book. It makes the case that there's no such thing as "human error" - instead most catastrophes are caused by system issues, misaligned incentives, and unrealistic processes. You are not the custodian of an otherwise safe system that you need to protect from erratic human…

I have spent the last two years rebuilding GNOME Boxes from the ground up, driven by three main factors. I spoke extensively about this effort in my recent Linux App Summit, GUADEC 2025 and 2026 talks, but today I am excited to share the result for general testing. First, shifting to a Flatpak-first…

In the feedback about dropping X11 support, one very surprisingly common comment is from users saying they "need" kgamma, a simple tool that allows the user to adjust the gamma, red, blue and green that gets drawn to the screen operating directly on the X server. On our Wayland session we have…

… is now hosted on KDE infrastructure, instead of this blog! Check out <ae July 2026 post, or the entire series here.

--> --> Welcome to the inaugural edition of This Month in KDE Linux hosted on blogs.kde.org! Previously, these posts lived on Nate Graham’s personal blog. But KDE Linux is growing up and becoming a more important part of KDE, larger than its individual contributors! So it’s time to move the…

Yesterday, I uploaded Term::ANSIColor v6.0.0-TRIAL to CPAN for early testing. This release will raise the minimum required Perl version to 5.12, dropping support for Perl 5.8 and 5.10. When I did the same with podlators a couple of years ago, it upset a few people and one of them asked me to make…

Debian packages: apt: Bugs: replied to #1078608: apt update silently leaves old index data firmware-nonfree: Merge requests: opened and merged !151:…

for the past few months i have been working on implementing rich text in drawy as part of google summer of code 2026. Overview on the old implementation: The old text logic depended on a manual implementation, almost everything was built from scratch using a string. Placing the cursor, caret…

There’s yet another Linux kernel exploit based on container functions, here’s the result when run as user_t on a SE Linux system: $ ./packet_edit_meme [*] target /bin/su as uid 1000; entry at file offset 0x4340; shellcode 48 bytes unshare: Permission denied [-] page-cache corruption failed Here is…

We just merged the visual signature UI into Papers (GNOME Document Viewer), developed by Malika Asman during her Outreachy internship (funded by the GNOME Foundation). Compared to digital signatures, visual signatures do not require a cryptographic certificate. As such, they do not really guarantee…

Hey y’all! I’m Jagath Ramayanapu (Shyam) from India, and I’m a GNOME GSoC intern this year. This summer, I’m working on bringing app uninstallation directly to the GNOME Shell App Grid. Previously, to remove an app in GNOME, you had to open GNOME Software, find the app, and click Uninstall. With…

The good folks at Hikmicro have sent me their D02 Infrared Camera to review. It's part of their "Eco" series of thermal imagers - designed to be easy to use around the home and relatively cheap. Despite the no-fills appearance, it packs in a lot of features which put some more expensive models to…

If you run a homelab, you’ve inevitably run into the absolute nightmare that is CGNAT (Carrier-Grade NAT) or strict corporate firewalls. You have a server at home that you want to SSH into, but your ISP doesn’t give you a public IP address. Or maybe you’re at a coffee shop or behind a strict…

Time for another bi-monthly update on what happened around Itinerary! Since the previous report there’s a new combined journey view, support for ride sharing services and new Apple Wallet pass formats, among many other things. New Features New combined journey view With more and more journeys…

Review: How to Steal a Galaxy, by Beth Revis Series: Chaotic Orbits #2 Publisher: DAW Books Copyright: December 2024 ISBN: 0-7564-1949-2 Format: Kindle Pages: 143 How to Steal a Galaxy is a far-future science…

--> --> Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma! …but before we start, here’s a quick reminder that we’ve entered the last week to submit your proposal for the next <aE Goals cycle! If you’re not ready to champion a goal, you can still get involved by joining one of the existing proposals…

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 24 to July 31. GNOME Releases Sophie (she/her) reports GNOME 51 is entering it’s API/ABI, Feature, and UI freezes this Saturday, August 1st. Accordingly, the GNOME 51 beta version is expected for the following week. All changes…

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-31. Sovereignty is a substrate Tags: tech, hardware, supply-chain, complexity Interesting piece which shows very well the complexity of the hardware supply chain. The parts which matter the most are largely ignored by…

Normally, I do not read book reviews. Either I haven't read the book, in which case there's spoiler potential, or I have, in which case it's unlikely to be useful or enjoyable for me to read a thing about a thing I've already read. But Review: Radiant Star caught my eye, and I thought, “Hmm, I've…

Performance on “secondary” GPUs has historically been suboptimal on Linux, especially with external GPUs. Let’s take a look at why it’s slow, and how we’re finally fixing it. How Multi-GPU even works To know how things work with multiple GPUs, we first need to look at how applications present…

I've been using the built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet on my Mac Studio for a few years. It works fine: I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network, and run backups at around 1 GB/sec. But... I want more. I upgraded my rack and my NAS to 25 GbE a couple years ago, and wanted to upgrade my…