Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.18-rc1, released on October 12. Linus said: "This was one of the good merge windows where I didn't end up having to bisect any particular problem on [any] of the machines I was testing. Let's hope that success mostly translates to the bigger picture too."

Stable updates: 6.17.2, 6.16.12, 6.12.52, and 6.6.111 were released on October 13, followed by the large 6.17.3, 6.12.53, 6.6.112, and 6.1.156 updates on October 15. Note that the 6.16.x series ends with 6.16.12.

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Quote of the week

There are already _so_ many roadblocks for contributing upstream. This just adds another one. On the one hand, it's just another "small" one. I don't believe it's as small as some people would like to believe, "b4 dig" will do nothing for "life before upstream" type usages.

Ultimately, this is yet another question of how much you want to make life harder for contributors of all sorts. A link gives bug reporters who somehow find a commit (e.g. bisect) more context to go on, gives people working on things like hardware enabling that happens pre- upstream (in a way) a lot of context, makes things faster in general, etc.

And we're taking it away because literally *one* person thinks that it adds irrelevant noise.

— Johannes Berg on Link: tags

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The FSF's Librephone project

The Free Software Foundation has announced the launch of the Librephone project, which is aimed at the creation of a fully-free operating system for mobile devices.

Practically, Librephone aims to close the last gaps between existing distributions of the Android operating system and software freedom. The FSF has hired experienced developer Rob Savoye (DejaGNU, Gnash, OpenStreetMap, and more) to lead the technical project. He is currently investigating the state of device firmware and binary blobs in other mobile phone freedom projects, prioritizing the free software work done by the not entirely free software mobile phone operating system LineageOS.

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Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 7 released

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.

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Ubuntu 25.10 released

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.

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Firefox 144.0 released

Version 144.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Changes this time include improvements to tab-group and profile management, stronger encryption for stored passwords, a "search image with Google Lens" operation, and "Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine built into the browser".

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Julia 1.12 released

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.

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Development quote of the week

We should aim to have an ecosystem where Python releases are usable day 1 and where it is easy for users to test their code prerelease if they want to.

I'm happy to report that Python 3.14 was the best Python release ever on this dimension! I have some code in GitHub that lets me assess whether a package supports a given Python version (check it out, I've found it quite helpful for upgrading).

Running this on the top 15000 PyPI packages (thanks hugovk!), we see on day 1, 1289 packages explicitly support Python 3.14 (as opposed to 994 for 3.13).

[...] I said this last year too, but every time one of those lines moves, it's because someone somewhere did something in response to a new Python version, and made that labour freely available on the internet — this will never not be insanely cool to me.

— Shantanu Jain

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