Brief items
Kernel development
Kernel release status
The current development kernel is 6.15-rc3, released on April 20. Linus said: "There's absolutely nothing of huge note here as far as I can tell. Just a fair number of small fixes all over the place".
Note that this release fails to build for most versions of GCC; moving forward to the commit just after the -rc3 tag (9d7a0577c9db) will fix the problem.
Stable updates: 6.14.3, 6.13.12, and 6.12.24 were released on April 20. Note that the 6.13.x series ends with 6.13.12.
Quote of the week
Today, I stepped down as the co-maintainer of the PCI subsystem. [...]— Krzysztof Wilczyński (thanks to Vegard Nossum)Sadly, I was unable to pursue my life goal of securing a job where I could be paid to work on Linux kernel. Seems that nobody wants to hire maintainers nowadays, and the hardware industry is almost impenetrable nowadays.
Thus, yesterday, after I completed a call about KernelCI feedback from fellow kernel developers and maintainers in the middle of my night, I saw another angry e-mail in my inbox from some developer who complained about how outrageous it was that their patch hasn't yet been merged and it has been a day since he sent it! Aside, of course, from people who whinge to me on IRC all the time, I feel like a therapist these days... alas.
This broke me. It was 3 am, and I was tired. The work is very gratifying, and I love every bit of it, but ultimately it's unpaid, not very glorious, quite stressful (try to accidentally break linux-next, see what happens), and nobody cares about you; there are only demands from people for things to be merged.
So, as Rob Herring put it recently... This "Patch Monkey" needs a break. And since there aren't holidays or sabbaticals to take for kernel maintainers, I had no choice but to step down, I suppose.
Distributions
EU OS: A European Proposal for a Public Sector Linux Desktop (The New Stack)
The New Stack looks at EU OS, an attempt to create a desktop system for the European public sector.
EU OS is not a brand-new Linux distribution in the traditional sense. Instead, it is a proof-of-concept built atop Fedora's immutable KDE Plasma spin (Kinoite). EU OS takes a layered approach to customization. The project's vision is to provide a standard, adaptable Linux base that can be extended with national, regional or sector-specific customizations, making it suitable for a wide range of European public sector needs.
RISC-V images for Fedora Linux 42
The Fedora Project's RISC-V special-interest group (SIG) has announced the availability of Fedora Linux 42 images for supported RISC-V boards, as well as QEMU and container images. The SIG is working toward making RISC-V a primary architecture for Fedora, and has made significant progress in the past year.
Our upstreaming work continues apace, and we want to acknowledge that none of this progress would be possible without the incredible collaboration from maintainers across the Fedora Project and beyond. Thank you to everyone who reviewed, accepted, merged, and built our patches. Your support makes this architecture possible.
We're also excited about just how many packages build cleanly without special treatment or overlay repositories that need to be cared for. RISC-V is becoming just another architecture, and that's exactly how it should be.
Ubuntu 25.04 released
Version 25.04 ("Plucky Puffin") of the Ubuntu Linux distribution has been released. This release includes Linux 6.14, GNOME 48, APT 3.0, and introduces a Arm64 desktop ISO to install Ubuntu Desktop on Arm64 systems. This is an interim release, with support through January 2026. See the release notes for a detailed list of new features and changes.Distributions quote of the week
To paraphrase Princess Bride, there are some cases where maintainers are "mostly unresponsive" - just responsive enough to abort the non-responsive process. There are some that never add co-maintainers - so this is hopefully a small step in establishing the norm that maintainers should not have an 'exclusive ownership' mentality but should welcome sharing the burden. Single points of failure are bad.— Michel Lind
Development
NLnet announces funding for 42 FOSS projects
The NLnet Foundation has announced the projects that have received funding from its October call for grant proposals from the Next Generation Internet (NGI) Zero Commons Fund.
The selected projects all contribute, one way or another, to the mission of the Commons Fund: reclaiming the public nature of the internet. For example, there are people working on interesting open hardware projects such as the tablet MNT Reform Touch and the Solar FemtoTX motherboard — a collaborative effort to create an ultra-low power motherboard that can run on solar power. LLM2FPGA aims to enable running open source LLMs locally on programmable chips ("FPGAs") using a fully open-source toolchain. bcachefs readies itself as the next generation filesystem for Linux, improving performance, scalability and reliability when compared to legacy filesystems.
In all, 42 projects have been selected for the NGI grants which are between €5,000 and €50,000. See the announcement for the full list of selected projects, and the current projects page for other recent projects funded by NLnet.
Template strings accepted for Python 3.14
The Python Steering Council accepted PEP 750 ("Template Strings") on April 10. LWN covered the discussion around the proposal, including the substantial revisions to the idea that were needed for it to be accepted. Template strings (t-strings) are a new kind of string that produces structured data instead of a raw string, allowing library authors to build their own custom template-handling logic. Since the approval happened before the cutoff for new features (May 6), support for template strings will be included in Python 3.14, scheduled for October 2025.
Tor Browser 14.5 released
Version 14.5 of the Tor Browser has been released. Notable features in this release include the addition of Connection Assist for the Android version of the Tor Browser, and language support for Belarusian, Bulgarian, and Portuguese for all versions of the browser.
Should Tor Browser fail to establish a direct connection to the Tor network, Connection Assist will offer to find and try bridges for you. But before this feature could be made available on Android, we had to embark on a multi-year effort to refactor our tor integration across each platform first. This project has now reached an important milestone, and we're proud to announce the release of Connection Assist for Android today.
See the full changelog for all changes in this release, and the issues page for known problems.
Development quotes of the week
— David SommersethAnother thing which also appears in many open source apps is «we don't track you» or «no adds in this app»-
It just makes me sad ... because no tracking and no ads should be the normal situation for any application. And applications not needing to communicate with other services over a network shouldn't need to promote «no network access needed».
It is my strong opinion that applications tracking users, enforcing ads and requiring network access for whatever reason when not strictly needed should be forced to put a large sticker on their application of these unwanted «features». Not the other way around.
Me: "I just want to open the calculator pretty quick..." (hits "Super", types "calc" and hits enter without watching) LibreOffice Calc: "YOU SUMMON ME, MORTAL?" Me: "Oh, sweet Jesus, NO."— Konstantin Ryabitsev
Page editor: Daroc Alden
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