News from the Planet

Welcome to another edition of “This month in KDE Linux”! Infrastructure remained a major focus this month, with multiple outages and bugs in Arch’s package archive leading to Harald Sitter creating a local mirror for KDE Linux. This substantially increased build delivery reliability. Harald…

We are very excited to announce that Debian has been assigned seven contributors to work under mentorship on a variety of projects with us during the Google Summer of Code. Here is a list of the projects and contributors, along with details of the tasks to be performed. Project: Automated Debian…

Debian packages: firmware-nonfree: Bugs: replied to #1132448: firmware-mediatek: Wifi perf degraded a lot after upgrade firmware-mediatek from 20250410-2 to 20260221-1~bpo13+1 and 20260309-1 Merge requests: …

Table of Contents Introduction The MCS problem The test script GitLab’s official suggestion and why it falls short How GNOME currently handles this Exploring libkrun Firecracker and the custom executor path What comes next Introduction GNOME’s GitLab runners use Podman as the container runtime…

--> --> Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma! This week Plasma 6.7 entered its “soft feature freeze” where we stop merging newly-written features and focus on finishing up and merging the ones that were already in flight. As such, some nice new features that have been in development for…

Hello! One of my long term projects on here is figuring out how to write frontend Javascript without using Node or any other server JS runtime. One issue I run into a lot in my frontend JS projects is that I don’t know how to write tests for them. I’ve tried to use Playwright in the past, but it…

Terence Eden reports that the UK's National Health Service (NHS) is preparing to close almost all of its open-source repositories as a response to LLM tools, such as Anthropic's Mythos, becoming more sophisticated at finding security vulnerabilities. He does not, to put it mildly, agree with the…

Pictured above is the new DeskPi Super4C installed in an 8U mini rack. The Super4C is a 4-node Raspberry Pi CM5 cluster board that solves two pain points I had with the older Super6C. I was testing this board around the same time I helped kick off the SBCC 2026, the Single Board Cluster Competition…

The eight release of the binb package, and first in two years, is now on CRAN and in r2u. binb regroups four rather nice themes for writing LaTeX Beamer presentations much more easily in (R)Markdown. As a teaser, a quick demo combining all four themes is available; documentation and examples are in…

Modern database and filesystems make pervasive use of B-trees, which are tree structures optimized for storing sorted lists of keys and values on block devices. Dolt is an Apache 2.0-licensed project that makes clever use of a variant of a B-tree to support efficient version control for an entire…

It’s the first day of May, and it’s time for another update on what’s been happening at the GNOME Foundation. It’s been two weeks since my last post, and this update covers highlights of what we’ve been doing since then. Remembering Seth Nickell This week we received the very sad news of the death…

A rainy day starts May.

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 318. This version includes the following changes: [ Chris Lamb ] * Upload to test PyPI integration. * Bump Standards-Version to 4.7.4. [ Manuel Jacob ] * Remove a misleading comment. You find out more by…

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 24 to May 01. GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries NewsFlash feed reader ↗ Follow your favorite blogs & news sites. Jan Lukas announces Hi TWIG. Newsflash can now swipe between articles. This closes off one of the oldest still…

GNOME is once again participating in GSoC. This year, we have 6 contributors working on adding Debug Adapter Protocol support to GJS, incorporating vocab-style puzzles into GNOME Crosswords, creating a native GTK4/Rust rewrite of the Pitivi timeline ruler, porting gitg to GTK4, implementing app…

My experience at MiniDebConf Campinas 2026 Last week, I spent the entire week in Campinas attending MiniDebConf and MiniDebCamp. The Debian Brazil community organizes this event every year, and this year's edition was the biggest so far. During MiniDebCamp, I sponsored a few uploads and spent two…

Recently a new submodule has landed in Kirigami: “Forms”. Until this point, Kirigami had only offered the classic “FormLayout” component. which is used for configuration pages throughoug systemsettings, Plasma, and some apps. It’s the classical form used in desktop toolkits for…

Charles Stross wrote an interesting blog post about the apparent desire of super rich people to kill the poor, it seems that the people in power want to make all the conspiracy theories come true [1]. Wouter wrote an insightful blog post about the need for free firmware [2]. Matthew Garrett wrote an…

Yesterday, I wanted to debug a glycin (or Shell) issue on GNOME OS. Turns out, there is currently no documentation that works or includes all necessary steps. Here is the simplest variant if you don’t develop on GNOME OS and have an internet connection that can download 16 GB in a reasonable amount…

Hello Qt,

How to build reverse dependencies using Salsa CI Last week, I attended MiniDebConf Campinas, and one of my favorites talks was "Salsa CI, showing features that almost nobody knows" by Aquila Macedo. One of the things I learned is that we can easily build reverse dependencies using: $ git push -o…

I mentor several people in Debian, and have been repeatedly asked to offer an opportunity to ask questions on a live call. I have now started a recurring video call for exactly that, which I call Mentoring Mondays, and it is open for anyone aspiring to contribute to Debian, one of the oldest and…

Recently, I have been using GNOME OS, as my daily driver. After being a seasoned Linux for long, dabbling in distros like Alpine Linux, Arch Linux, Fedora (and even Silverblue), I tried switching to something more opinionated and that "works by default" all while being hard to break. And given my…

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a training/mentorship program that allows new contributors to open source to work on projects for between 175 to 350 hours under the guidance of experienced mentors. KDE will mentor twelve projects in this year's Google Summer of Code. Marknote Marknote is a rich text…

Support for remote controlling Windows PCs may be added to Raspberry Pi Connect, Raspberry Pi's free remote access service. When they announced Pi Connect in 2024, I speculated the service was launched in response to RealVNC's sluggish adoption of Wayland, leading to Pi users lacking a solid…