2025 Linux and free software timeline

By Joe Brockmeier
January 7, 2026

Last year we revived the tradition of publishing a timeline of notable events from the previous year. Since that seemed to go over well, we decided we should continue the practice and look back on some of the most noteworthy events and releases of 2025.

As always, our subscribers have made creation of the timeline—and our weekly coverage throughout the year—possible. If you like what you see here (and elsewhere on the site) please consider subscribing to LWN. Thanks a lot to all of our subscribers for making this and all of the rest of our coverage possible.

January
February
March

April
May
June

July
August
September

October
November
December

January

José Marchesi released an Algol 68 front end for GCC (announcement). The feature was approved in November 2025, and will be in the next release.

It is common knowledge that Algol 68 was well ahead of its time back when it was introduced, and anyone who knows the language well will suspect this probably still holds true today, but more than fifty years after the publication of the Revised Report the world may finally be ready for it, or perhaps not, we shall see.
— José Marchesi

Libvirt 11.0.0 was released (announcement).

Bill Gianopoulos, a core developer and release engineer for the SeaMonkey Project, passed away (LWN brief).

Steve Langasek, longtime Debian and Ubuntu contributor, passed away. (LWN brief).

Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko announced that he will transfer the Mastodon name, copyrights, and other assets to a new non-profit organization (LWN brief).

Automattic announced that it will reduce its contributions to the WordPress project as a result of the WP Engine lawsuit (announcement).

You can handwave all you want about how you don't like a given non-profit CEO's salary, or you think you could reduce hosting costs by self-hosting, or what have you. Or you can [try] pushing the high costs onto "volunteers".

But the bottom line is that if you want there to be a large-scale social network, even "do it as cheap as humanly possible" is millions of costs borne by someone.
— Luis Villa

Serious vulnerabilities discovered in rsync; version 3.4.0 released (announcement, LWN article).

Paolo Mantegazza, who drove the Real Time Application Interface project and a key figure in the development of realtime Linux, passed away.

The Software Freedom Conservancy announced the success of a Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL) suit in Germany against AVM, a maker of home-networking equipment.

Helen Borrie, a longtime contributor to the Firebird relational-database project, passed away.

Linux 6.13 released (announcement), LWN kernel index.)

Friction emerged between the direct rendering (DRM) subsystem and stable kernel maintainers over multiple git commit IDs referring to the same commit (article).

Version 3.2.0 of the Dillo web browser was released with SVG support for math formulas, optional support for WebP images, and more (announcement).

OpenVox had its first release; the project is a fork of the Puppet automation framework (announcement).

Wine 10.0 was released with full support for the Arm64EC architecture, better high-DPI display support, Wayland enabled by default, and more (announcement).

I give up. You all need to stop it with the duplicated git commit ids all over the place. It's a major pain and hassle all the time and is something that NO OTHER subsystem does.

Yes, I know that DRM is special and unique and running at a zillion times faster with more maintainers than any other subsystem and really, it's bigger than the rest of the kernel combined, but hey, we ALL are a common project here. If each different subsystem decided to have their own crazy workflows like this, we'd be in a world of hurt.
— Greg Kroah-Hartman

Credential-leaking were vulnerabilities found in some Git credential managers. Security researcher RyotaK shared a series of vulnerabilities that affect password-based authentication with an external credential manager (announcement).

LWN added an EPUB format for articles and the weekly editions (announcement).

Jack Dorsey's scheduled keynote for the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) is canceled after questions arise and protests are planned over the keynote (article).

The Linux Foundation explained the reasoning behind taking away kernel maintainership from several people with Russian citizenship; the removal happened in October 2024 (announcement).

Rust ran into resistance in the kernel's direct-memory-access (DMA) subsystem (LWN article).

Freedesktop.org scrambled to find a new home after its hosting provider asked it to move or start paying by the end of April 2025 (LWN brief). It migrated its infrastructure to Hetzner and Fastly CDN later in the year.

February

FOSDEM was held in Brussels, Belgium from February 1 to February 2 (LWN coverage).

Sylvestre Ledru announced that the uutils project intends to rewrite essential Linux tools in Rust at FOSDEM 2025 (LWN article).

For example, this merge window I did have that unusual "this doesn't work for my rust build" situation, but that one was caught and fixed before the merge window even closed. Guess what *wasn't* caught, and then wasn't fixed until -rc3? A bog-standard build error on the esoteric platform called "i386".
— Linus Torvalds

Miguel Ojeda released policies for the use of Rust in the Linux kernel (announcement).

OpenWrt 24.10.0 was released (announcement).

Codeberg responded to hate attacks (LWN brief).

Asahi Linux adopted a new governance model after Hector "marcan" Martin stepped down as lead (announcement).

The openSUSE project switched to SELinux for its rolling-release distribution, Tumbleweed (announcement).

Jonathan Corbet described LWN's efforts to fight the AI scraperbot scourge, which continues to plague the site and the internet at large well into 2026 (LWN article).

We've recognized that Mozilla faces major headwinds in terms of both financial growth and mission impact. While Firefox remains the core of what we do, we also need to take steps to diversify: investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term; developing trustworthy, open source AI to ensure technical and product relevance in the mid term; and creating online fundraising campaigns that will draw a bigger circle of supporters over the long run. Mozilla's impact and survival depend on us simultaneously strengthening Firefox AND finding new sources of revenue AND manifesting our mission in fresh ways. That is why we're working hard on all of these fronts.
— Mark Surman, president of the Mozilla Corporation

Mesa 25.0.0 was released (announcement).

Mozilla announced leadership updates and a desire to "take steps to diversify" beyond Firefox (announcement).

Linus Torvalds made it clear he will accept Rust bindings for the kernel's DMA-mapping layer over Christoph Hellwig's objections (LWN brief).

Christoph Hellwig stepped down as maintainer of the DMA-mapping layer (LWN brief).

Pi-hole v6 was released with a redesigned user interface, new REST API, and embedded web server (announcement).

Gentoo began offering qcow2 disk images (announcement).

Gapless music player Aqualung 2.0 was released (announcement).

Emacs 30.1 was released with fixes for two security vulnerabilities, including a code-execution vulnerability in the flymake syntax-checking code (announcement, LWN article).

Rust 1.85.0 was released, which stabilizes the Rust 2024 edition (announcement).

Mozilla changed its terms of use and privacy policy; its apparent removal of the promise not to sell users' personal data raised concerns about the organization's intentions (LWN brief). The organization reversed course shortly afterward.

Fedora discussed Flatpak repository priorities after the Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) Studio project complained about how its software is packaged (LWN article).

Jennifer Miller discovered a hole in the kernel's FineIBT protection (LWN article).

The Python Package Index's (PyPI) new terms of service raised concerns (LWN article).

March

LWN took a look at Firefox forks as alternatives for users rubbed the wrong way by Mozilla's stewardship of the browser (LWN article).

When the tail-call interpreter was announced, I was surprised and impressed by the performance improvements, but also confused: I'm not an expert, but I'm passingly-familiar with modern CPU hardware, compilers, and interpreter design, and I couldn't explain why this change would be so effective. I became curious – and perhaps slightly obsessed – and the reports in this post are the result of a few weeks of off-and-on compiling and benchmarking and disassembly of dozens of different Python binaries, in an attempt to understand what I was seeing.
— Nelson Elhage

Fish shell 4.0, a port to Rust from C++, was released (announcement).

Xen 4.20 was released with support for AMD Zen 5 CPUs, improved compliance with the MISRA C standard, PCI-passthrough on Arm, and more (announcement).

Zig 0.14 was released (LWN article).

Python's tail-call speedup was found to be based on LLVM regression (announcement).

Framework Mono 6.14.0 was released. This is the first release since WineHQ took over the project (announcement).

The LLVM project stabilized its Fortran compiler (announcement).

Ubuntu announced a plan to switch away from GNU utilities to the Rust-based uutils project for the 25.10 release (LWN article).

SystemRescue 12.00 was released (announcement).

Nobody is going to try to make money on a proprietary fork of an MIT Coreutils. Nobody is hiding their trade secrets there. This isn't the 80s.

What is a bigger issue is the more symbolic nature of things. People had the opportunity to pick a copyleft licence and chose not to. We can view this as an attack on copyleft (albeit one that's likely symbolic at best), or we can accept that the copyleft community has been doing a poor job winning the hearts and minds of new generations of developers.
— Matthew Garrett

A menu-driven interface for the Emacs Makefile mode, Casual Make was released as part of Casual 2.4.0 (announcement).

GIMP 3.0 was released with an update to GTK 3, non-destructive editing for most filters, and better color-space management (announcement, LWN article).

GNOME 48 was released (announcement).

OSI election ended with unsatisfying results after the organization disqualified candidates that were included on the ballot (LWN article).

SCALE 22x was held in Pasadena, California from March 6 to March 9 (LWN coverage).

Julien Malka proposed a method for detecting XZ-like backdoors (LWN brief).

So it's early Monday morning (well - early for me, I'm not really a morning person), and I'd love to have some good excuse for why I didn't do the 6.14 release yesterday on my regular Sunday afternoon release schedule.

I'd like to say that some important last-minute thing came up and delayed things.

But no. It's just pure incompetence.
— Linus Torvalds

Linux 6.14 was released (announcement, LWN kernel index).

Debian developer Roland Clobus announced that Debian bookworm live images are fully reproducible (LWN brief).

Freedesktop.org dropped OpenH264 from its SDK for Flatpak applications and runtimes (LWN brief).

Neovim 0.11 was released; notable changes included improved tree-sitter performance, better emoji support, and enhancements for Neovim's embedded terminal emulator (announcement).

Raspberry Pi released rpi-image-gen, a tool to create custom images for its devices (announcement).

Kernel.org found a new home (announcement).

Cryptome co-founder John L. Young passed away (LWN brief).

OSPM Summit held was held in Uhldingen-Mühlhofen, Germany from March 18 to March 20 (LWN coverage).

The Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) was held in Montreal, Canada from March 24 to March 26 (LWN coverage).

Arthur Cohen posted a massive series of patches resulting in a burst of progress for the GCC Rust front end (LWN brief).

Python Setuptools updates caused headaches (LWN article).

Rust adopted the Ferrocene Language Specification (FHS) (announcement).

April

Dave Täht, who worked tirelessly to battle bufferbloat and other networking ills, passed away (LWN brief).

Slackware-based PorteuX 2.0 was released (announcement).

I gave a talk at last month about the role of organising in Open Source. I have three obserpinions therefrom:

1. Going all-in on permissive licensing was a mistake that directly led to extractive behaviour

2. Copyleft not having a good answer to the actual concerns of people who chose permissive licensing was a mistake that directly led to people going all-in on permissive licensing

3. It's too late to care about licensing, so we need other forms of consequences/ways to encourage organising
— Christopher Neugebauer

Good thing I'm on my way to a conference of open source lawyers so I can hijack someone else's session, put this on screen as my only slide, and watch the mix of meditating, sobbing, and knife-fighting that results.
— Luis Villa in reference to Neugebauer's post.

Rockbox 4.0 was released with support for a number of new audio-player devices, updated codecs, user-interface improvements, and more (announcement).

Thunderbird expanded its sights to offering web services; the project hopes to compete with proprietary services such as Gmail and Office365 (announcement).

OpenSSH 10.0 was released; support for DSA signature algorithms was removed, while Portable OpenSSH gained support for systemd-style socket activation (announcement).

ACM Queue looked at 50 years of open source software supply chain security (announcement).

OpenSSL 3.5.0 was released (announcement).

FreeDOS 1.4 was released; this was the first release of the open-source replacement for MS-DOS in three years (announcement).

APT 3.0 was released in time to be included with Debian 13 (LWN article).

Fedora 42 was released (announcement, LWN article).

MITRE program funding was extended after reports surfaced that funding was due to run out on April 16, 2025 (LWN brief).

An arbitrary file read vulnerability was announced in Yelp, GNOME's help browser (announcement).

Pinta 3.0 was released; the most notable change is that the image editor had been ported to GTK 4.0 and libadwaita (announcement).

Arch-based Manjaro 25.0 was released (announcement).

Ubuntu 25.04 was released with Linux 6.14, GNOME 48, APT 3.0, and more (announcement).

Template strings were accepted for Python 3.14 (announcement, LWN article).

Debian discussed how the DFSG applies to AI models (LWN article).

OpenBSD 7.7 was released (announcement).

GCC 15.1 was released: notable changes included implementing the C23 dialect by default, a number of new C++26 features, a new COBOL front end, and more (announcement).

Andreas Tille was re-elected Debian Project Leader (announcement, LWN election coverage).

Meson 1.8.0 was released (announcement).

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) completed the review of its board of directors; the process resulted in the reconfirmation of all five sitting board members (announcement).

OSI published an election retrospective as a quiet update to its March blog post announcing the new members of the board (LWN brief).

Oregon State University Open Source Lab faced a shutdown due to budget problems (announcement).

May

Deepin Desktop was removed from openSUSE over security concerns (announcement).

When there is no comment from the maintainer it usually means they do not have time. For that specific report. Day has 24 hours and people have various priorities. About closing the bugs... I tried various approaches as maintainer. Closing the bugs as CLOSE WONTFIX. And people told me "why you are doing that? Somebody else may work on that. Please leave it open." I left the bugs open. And people told me that I should CLOSE as WONTFIX so there is no false hope that it will be fixed in near future. Autoclosing bugs when the Fedora [release is] EOL is a good compromise for me.
— Miroslav Suchý

Sasha Levin released a new version of AUTOSEL, the tool that selects kernel patches for possible backporting into the stable releases (LWN brief).

Home Assistant 2025.5 was released with improvements to its backup system, Z-Wave Long Range support, and more. The home-automation system project celebrated two million active installations with this release (announcement).

System-monitoring application Mission Center 1.0.0 was released with the addition of SMART data for SATA and NVMe devices, display of per-process network usage, and more (announcement).

The Document Foundation celebrated the 20th anniversary of the OASIS Open Document Format's ratification (announcement).

Redis was re-licensed under the AGPLv3 (LWN brief).

USENIX announced the end of its Annual Technical Conference (LWN brief).

SUSE pulled the plug on the venerable YaST installation and configuration utility after more than 25 years in development (LWN article).

Linaro Connect was held in Lisbon, Portugal from May 14 to May 17 (LWN coverage).

PyCon US 2025 was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from May 14 to May 22 (LWN coverage).

Multiple security vulnerabilities were found in GNU Screen (announcement).

We are not satisfied with how this coordinated disclosure developed, and we will try to be more attentive to such problematic situations early on in the future. This experience also sheds light on the overall situation of Screen upstream. It looks like it suffers from a lack of manpower and expertise, which is worrying for such a widespread open source utility. We hope this publication can help to draw attention to this and to improve this situation in the future.
— Matthias Gerstner

The GNOME Foundation named Steven Deobald as its new executive director (announcement).

Container-management tool Podman 5.5.0 was released (announcement).

Oregon State University Open Source Lab announced it has found funding (LWN brief).

The Tor project released the oniux utility to provide Tor network isolation, using Linux namespaces, for third-party applications (announcement).

The Debian AI General Resolution to require training data was withdrawn (LWN article).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 was released (announcement).

FESCo didn't have a specific policy for dealing with a request to remove Proven Packager rights. In addition, the FESCo process was handled entirely in private. The contributor didn't receive a formal notification or warning from FESCo, and felt blindsided by the official decision when and how it was announced. The Fedora Council would like to extend our sincerest apology on behalf of the Fedora Project to them.
— Matthew Miller

Fedora Council overturned FESCo's decision to revoke Peter Robinson's provenpackager status and issues an apology (announcement, LWN article).

Linux 6.15 was released (announcement, LWN kernel index).

The GNU C Library (glibc) project revisited its infrastructure security (LWN article).

NixOS 25.05 was released (announcement).

Mozilla shut down Pocket, a bookmarking service it acquired in 2017 (announcement).

AlmaLinux OS 10.0 was released (announcement).

Kees Cook's kernel.org account was briefly banned following a mistake using b4's trailers subcommand (LWN article).

Block-layer bounce buffering bounced out of the kernel (LWN article).

June

OpenH264 update procedure caused headaches for Fedora; relying on Cisco for updates to the patent-encumbered codec does not go well for the project (LWN article).

Alpine Linux 3.22.0 was released (announcement).

And what I just don't understand about this whole discussion: We're talking about people who want to be frozen in time for 5 years straight during this "maintenance support" window by the vendor (whom they are paying), with only access to security fixes. But somehow they do want to run the latest Postgres Major release, even though the one that they had running still receives bug fixes and security fixes. I just don't understand who these people are. Why do they care about having no changes to their system to avoid breakage as much as possible, except for their piece of primary database software, of which they're happily running the bleeding edge.
— Jelte Fennema-Nio

Fedora updated its strategy through 2028 (announcement).

Flock 2025 was held in Prague, Czech Republic from June 5 to June 8 (LWN coverage).

/e/OS 3.0 was released; the Android-based mobile operating system included improved privacy tools, a "find my device" feature, and more (announcement).

The Open Invention Network celebrated its 20th anniversary (announcement).

A covert web-to-app tracking via localhost exploit on Android, used by Meta and Yandex, was disclosed (LWN brief).

Rocky Linux 10.0 was released (announcement).

A group of WordPress community participants launched the Federated and Independent Repositories Package Manager (FAIR.pm) project as a decentralized alternative to WordPress.org's package distribution (LWN article).

KDE Plasma 6.4 was released with more flexible tiling features, accessibility enhancements, and more (announcement).

Radicle Desktop was released, a graphical interface to simplify using the Radicle peer-to-peer code collaboration software (announcement).

I think we'll be parting ways in the 6.17 merge window.

You made it very clear that I can't even question any bug-fixes and I should just pull anything and everything.

Honestly, at that point, I don't really feel comfortable being involved at all, and the only thing we both seemed to really fundamentally agree on in that discussion was "we're done".
— Linus Torvalds

Torvalds told Kent Overstreet that bcachefs would likely be removed from the kernel (LWN brief).

The Libxml2 maintainer adopted a "no security embargoes" policy (LWN article).

GNOME deepened its dependencies on systemd in order to shed its homegrown service manager and improve its ability to run concurrent user sessions (LWN article).

PostmarketOS 25.06 was released with support for systemd (announcement).

The OsmAnd map and navigation app project celebrated its 15th anniversary (announcement).

Firefox 140 was released with more control over vertical tabs, a dialog for custom search engines, and more (announcement).

Fedora i686 received a reprieve; support for 32-bit x86 applications on Fedora will continue, for now (LWN article).

The copyleft-next project was relaunched by Bradley Kuhn and Richard Fontana. The effort to develop a next-generation copyleft license began in 2012, but had stalled in recent years (LWN brief).

July

The Netdev Foundation launched (announcement).

When I complain that some software (or its dependencies) doesn't work on *BSD but requires Linux, I'm not criticizing Linux. For me, it's not an OS battle, but a matter of freedom and avoiding a dangerous and rampant computing monoculture. And when people reply to me with "well, just use it on Linux" - while they're giving me sensible advice - they're missing the crucial point: if it ONLY runs on Linux, it's not Linux's fault, but we are, precisely, creating a dangerous monoculture.
— Stefano Marinelli

Oracle Linux 10 was released (announcement).

GNU Health Hospital Information System 5.0 released (announcement).

Amarok 3.3 was released based on the KDE Frameworks 6 and Qt6; it featured a major rework of its audio engine to use GStreamer for audio playback (announcement).

Thunderbird 140 was released (announcement).

GNU Bash 5.3 was released (announcement).

U-Boot v2025.07 was released (announcement).

DebConf25 was held in Brest, France from July 14 to July 19 (LWN coverage).

EuroPython 2025 was held in Prague, Czech Republic from July 14 to July 20 (LWN coverage).

Version 6.4 of Parrot, a Debian-based distribution with an emphasis on security improvement and tools, was released (announcement).

Clear Linux has been discontinued but there's no reason to be sad or disappointed. The free and open-source software ecosystem sometimes acts similarly to space: when a star dies, some of its parts can become building materials for another star, asteroid, or even a planet. So, the Clear software and ideas have a chance to be applied to other Linux projects sooner or later.
— Paul Nixer

Intel abruptly pulled the plug on Clear Linux (announcement).

Malicious packages were uploaded to the Arch User Repository (AUR) (announcement).

Google launched OSS Rebuild (announcement).

Forgejo 12.0 was released (announcement).

Fedora's quality team looked to reduce its workload after six of ten Red Hat employees on the team moved to other projects or left the company altogether (LWN article).

HeliumOS 10 was released; the project is a relatively new image-based desktop distribution based on packages from CentOS Stream and AlmaLinux. The distribution uses the KDE Plasma Desktop, Zsh as its default shell, and Btrfs as its default filesystem (announcement).

Wayback X11 compatibility layer project was launched (announcement).

Linux 6.16 was released (announcement, LWN kernel index).

Till Kamppeter put out a call for sponsors for the OpenPrinting project after being laid off by Canonical (LWN brief). He announced in November that the Sovereign Tech Fund would fund his work through 2026.

August

More malware was uploaded to Arch Linux AUR repository (announcement).

Debian grappled with offensive packages, again; two "offensive" fortune packages were dropped ahead of the Debian 13 release (LWN article).

Proxmox Virtual Environment 9.0 was released (announcement).

The Linux Foundation is kindly paying for all the hosting costs of the LVFS, and Red Hat pays for all my time — but as LVFS grows and grows that's going to be less and less sustainable longer term. We're trying to find funding to hire additional resources as a "me replacement" so that there is backup and additional attention to LVFS (and so that I can go on holiday for two weeks without needing to take a laptop with me).
— Richard Hughes

Masahiro Yamada stepped down as the sole maintainer of the kernel's build and configuration systems; Nathan Chancellor and Nicolas Schier stepped up to maintain Kbuild system, but the Kconfig is currently unmaintained (LWN brief).

Richard Hughes announced a sustainability plan for the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and asked for vendors that use the service to help fund its development (LWN brief).

CalyxOS Android distribution project told users to uninstall the OS after co-founder Nicholas Merrill left the project. The project did not resume releases in 2025 (LWN brief).

NGINX added native support for the ACME protocol (announcement).

Debian 13 ("trixie") was released with GNOME 48, KDE Plasma 6.3, Xfce 4.20, Linux 6.12, GCC 14.2, Python 3.13, and systemd 257. Trixie added riscv64 as an officially supported architecture, and dropped i386. The release will be supported through 2030 (announcement, LWN article).

Debian GNU/Hurd 2025 was released (announcement).

"Sideloading" is the rentseeker word for "being able to run software of your choosing on a computing device you purchased". There is no reasonable case for an operating system developer having a say over what programs you run on your hardware.
— Eugen Rochko

Google announced new restrictions on Android app sideloading that would require "all apps to be registered by verified developers in order to be installed by users on certified Android devices" (LWN brief).

FFmpeg 8.0 was released (announcement).

Radicle 1.3.0 was released (announcement).

Syncthing 2.0 was released (announcement).

LibreOffice 25.8 was released (announcement).

Zig 0.15.1 was released with major changes to the Reader and Writer interfaces (announcement).

GNOME is a big collection of small projects, and teams with a large scope and perspective are just not a better way of working on small projects. I see only two possible ways that ends: (a) we'll continue to have de facto maintainers and everything operates same as before, except without any way to formally indicate who the maintainer is, which is not an improvement; or (b) we take "no maintainers" seriously until chaos ensues and eventually we change our minds and bring back maintainers.
— Michael Catanzaro

The Groklaw domain fell into hostile hands (LWN article).

GhostBSD 25.02 was released with a new "OS X-like" desktop environment based on GNUstep (announcement).

Major web browser vendors prepared to dump XSLT support (LWN article).

GNOME discussed changing its technical governance model (LWN article).

The 2025 Open Source Summit Europe was held in Amsterdam, Netherlands from August 25 to August 27 (LWN coverage).

The 2025 Linux Security Summit Europe was held in Amsterdam, Netherlands from August 28 to August 29 (LWN coverage).

Bcachefs maintainer status changed to "externally maintained" (announcement).

Python: The Documentary was released. The 90-minute film features Guido van Rossum, Travis Oliphant, Barry Warsaw, and many more (announcement).

September

GNOME executive director Steven Deobald stepped down after just four months (announcement).

The Guix package manager was removed from Debian following an update to fix security vulnerabilities that contained too many changes to backport to Debian stable (LWN article).

The Rust Innovation Lab was announced by the Rust Foundation (LWN brief).

KDE is a huge producer of software. It's awkward for us to not have our own method of distributing it. Yes, KDE produces source code that others distribute, but we self-distribute our apps on app stores like Flathub and the Snap and Microsoft stores, so I think it's a natural thing for us to have our own platform for doing that distribution too, and that's an operating system. I think all the major producers of free software desktop environments should have their own OS, and many already do: Linux Mint and ElementaryOS spring to mind, and GNOME is working on one too.
— Nate Graham

Cary Coutant released a new ELF specification for public review (LWN brief).

Niri 25.08 was released (announcement).

RustConf 2025 was held in Seattle, Washington from September 2 to September 5 (LWN coverage).

KDE launched its own Linux distribution (again) (LWN article).

npm debug and chalk packages were compromised (LWN brief).

openSUSE disabled bcachefs (LWN brief).

GNOME 49 was released with a new default video player (Showtime), PDF-viewing application (Papers), and a number of other enhancements and updates (announcement).

systemd v258 was released (announcement, LWN coverage part one, part two).

Varnish 8.0.0 was released; the project also announced it will be changing its name to "Vinyl Cache" due to legal difficulties in securing the Varnish name (announcement).

The Universal Blue project announced Bluefin LTS, a long-term-support distribution based on CentOS Stream 10 and EPEL as its base (announcement).

Kangrejos 2025 was held in Oviedo, Spain from September 17 to September 18 (LWN coverage).

The security industry is a machine that turns

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND

into

YOU ARE PART OF A SUPPLY CHAIN ATTACK, SHAME ON YOU

— Alexia Starling

RPM 6.0.0 was released (announcement).

Tails 7.0 was released, based on Debian 13 (announcement).

PostgreSQL 18 was released with "skip scan" lookups for multicolumn B-tree indexes, virtual generated columns, better text processing, oauth authentication, a new asynchronous I/O (AIO) subsystem to improve performance and more (announcement).

The 2025 GNU Tools Cauldron was held in Porto, Portugal from September 26 to September 28 (LWN coverage).

Linux 6.17 was released (announcement, LWN kernel index).

The entire NixOS moderation team resigned following a conflict with the project's steering committee (LWN brief).

Bcachefs removed from the mainline kernel (LWN brief).

Ruby Central conducted a takeover of RubyGems and Bundler GitHub repositories against the wishes of the maintainers (LWN article).

October

openSUSE Leap 16 released; this was the first major release since Leap 15 in 2018. It included the new Agama installer, Cockpit replacing YaST for system management, and more (announcement, LWN article).

Python 3.14.0 was released with official support for free threading, template string literals, and much more (announcement).

News coverage of other OSs is more like business news, where each OS has one official PR operation with a few media-trained people. News coverage of Linux is more like sports journalism, where reporters can find newsworthy people on different teams competing to do different things, which includes talking about problems.
— Don Marti

U-Boot v2025.10 was released (announcement).

The FSF named Ian Kelling as its new president (announcement).

Fedora made a last-minute change to /boot ahead of the Fedora 43 release (LWN article).

FSF announced the launch of the Librephone project (LWN brief).

"Pixnapping" paper outlined a new class of attacks against Android phones (LWN article).

Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 7 was released, based on Debian 13 (announcement).

If you ever wondered why do we need Linux distributions, I would encourage you to take a look at the Release Blocker Review activity run by Adam Williamson and Fedora QA team.

It is not a one-time event, but rather a process run consistently over a long period of time. And it is what makes it possible to ship regular releases of Fedora while not breaking your world every now and then.
— Aleksandra Fedorova

HEEEEEYYYY, let's not go making any overly rash promises, here. :D
— Adam Williamson

Ubuntu 25.10 was released with the Rust-based uutils and sudo-rs, Linux 6.17, GNOME 49, and more (announcement).

Julia 1.12 was released with new multi-threading features, an experimental --trim feature, and more (announcement, LWN article).

Fedora Council approved an AI-assisted contributions policy; disclosure of AI-assistance is now required if "the significant part of the contribution is taken from a tool without changes" (announcement, LWN article).

Ruby Central transferred control of RubyGems and Bundler to the Ruby core team; the original maintainers were not consulted (announcement).

KDE Plasma 6.5 was released; noteworthy features included support for the experimental Wayland picture-in-picture protocol, automatic light-to-dark theme switching based on time of day, and more (announcement).

Valkey 9.0.0 was released with major improvements to performance and scaling of Valkey clusters to more than 2,000 nodes and one billion requests per second (announcement).

DigiKam 8.8.0 was released (announcement).

OpenBSD 7.8 was released (announcement).

We're disappointed to have been put in the position where we had to make this decision, because we believe our proposed project would offer invaluable advances to the Python and greater open source community, protecting millions of PyPI users from attempted supply-chain attacks. The proposed project would create new tools for automated proactive review of all packages uploaded to PyPI, rather than the current process of reactive-only review.
— Loren Crary

Python Software Foundation withdrew a security-related grant proposal; accepting the grant would have required the foundation not to pursue diversity, equity, and inclusion programs (announcement).

GoFundMe was caught creating profiles for open-source nonprofits without permission; the company eventually said it would remove the pages (LWN article).

Fedora 43 was released (announcement).

Debian splits the ftpmaster team (LWN article).

A date bug in Rust-based uutils broke Ubuntu 25.10 automatic updates; all part of the growing pains in adopting a new set of utilities (LWN brief).

Tor Browser 15.0 was released, based on Firefox 140 (announcement).

Typst 0.14 was released; noteworthy features included generating accessible documents by default, support for PDFs as a native image format, and improvements to its HTML export features (announcement, LWN article).

Valgrind 3.26.0 was released with a license change from GPLv2 to GPLv3 (announcement).

November

CHERIoT 1.0, a hardware-software system for secure embedded devices, was released (announcement).

Wasm is similar to every other arch in Linux, but also different. One important difference is that there is no way to suspend execution of a task. There is a way around this though: Linux supports up to 8k CPUs (or possibly more...). We can just spin up a new CPU dedicated to each user task (process/thread) and never preempt it.
— Joel Severin

Linux kernel was ported to WebAssembly by Joel Severin (announcement).

Ubuntu introduced architecture variants (announcement).

LXQt 2.3.0 was released with improved Wayland support (announcement).

FreeBSD added to the Open Container Initiative (OCI) Runtime Specification (announcement).

The Python steering council announced that it accepted PEP 810 ("Explicit lazy imports") (LWN brief, LWN article).

We adopted Rust for its security and are seeing a 1000x reduction in memory safety vulnerability density compared to Android's C and C++ code. But the biggest surprise was Rust's impact on software delivery. With Rust changes having a 4x lower rollback rate and spending 25% less time in code review, the safer path is now also the faster one.
— Jeff Vander Stoep

Google reported success in use of Rust for Android; the company claimed a "1000x reduction in memory safety vulnerability density compared to Android's C and C++ code" (LWN brief).

Homebrew 5.0.0 was released (announcement, LWN article).

Public-inbox version 2.0.0 was released; the mail-archiving system powers LWN and lore.kernel.org's email archives (announcement).

The Racket programming language version 9.0 was released. A descendant of Scheme, it is part of the Lisp family of languages (announcement).

KDE announced that Plasma 6.8 will Be Wayland-only; the 6.8 release is expected in early 2027 (LWN brief).

Pytest 9.0.0 was released; noteworthy changes included the addition of subtests, native support for TOML configuration files, and a new strict mode (announcement).

Blender 5.0 was released; notable improvements include improved color management, HDR capabilities, and a new storyboarding template (announcement).

NixOS 25.11 was released with 7,002 new packages, GNOME 49, LLVM 21, firewalld support, and more (announcement).

December

Linux 6.18 was released (announcement, LWN kernel index).

Rust is not a "silver bullet" that can solve all security problems, but it sure helps out a lot and will cut out huge swatches of Linux kernel vulnerabilities as it gets used more widely in our codebase.

That being said, we just assigned our first CVE for some Rust code in the kernel: https://lore.kernel.org/all/2025121614-CVE-2025-68260-558d@gregkh/ where the offending issue just causes a crash, not the ability to take advantage of the memory corruption, a much better thing overall.

Note the other 159 kernel CVEs issued today for fixes in the C portion of the codebase, so as always, everyone should be upgrading to newer kernels to remain secure overall.
— Greg Kroah-Hartman

FreeBSD 15.0 was released with a new method for installing the base system using the pkg manager, an update to OpenZFS 2.4.0-rc4, native support for the inotify(2) interface, and more (announcement).

Django 6.0 was released; highlights of the release included template partials for modularizing templates, a flexible task framework for running background tasks, a modernized email API, and a Content Security Policy (CSP) feature (announcement).

CPython considered including Rust code; the result of the discussion so far is that it will be a long time before Rust code is in core CPython, if ever (LWN article).

The kernel Rust experiment came to an end—successfully, we might add (announcement).

Alpine Linux 3.23.0 was released with an upgrade to version 3.0 of the Alpine Package Keeper (apk) (announcement).

Andreas Schneider announced version 2.0 of the cmocka unit-testing framework for C (announcement).

Calibre added a controversial AI "discussion" feature (LWN article).

The 2025 Open Source Summit Japan was held in Tokyo, Japan from December 7 to December 9 (LWN coverage).

The 2025 Maintainers Summit was held in Tokyo, Japan on December 10 (LWN coverage).

The 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference was held in Tokyo, Japan from December 11 to December 13 (LWN coverage).

Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS was released with the first stable version of the Rust-based COSMIC Desktop Environment (announcement, LWN article).

LibreOffice these days is sufficiently compatible with Microsoft Office documents that I can exchange edited change-tracked books with >3000 tracked changes and several hundred comments with my production editor without them blinking. (DOCX is an output format as far as Scrivener is concerned; it's an input format as far as publishing is concerned: the real work gets done in Adobe InDesign, which I'm not touching with a barge-pole.)
— Charlie Stross

KDE Gear 25.12 was released with improved Git support in the Kate text editor, better PDF export in Konqueror, and much more (announcement).

Vojtěch Polášek announced Vojtux: an unofficial effort to create a Fedora-based distribution designed for visually impaired users (LWN brief).

Stephen Rothwell stepped down as maintainer of linux-next; Mark Brown became the new maintainer (LWN brief).

A new Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board was elected; Greg Kroah-Hartman, Steven Rostedt, Julia Lawall, David Hildenbrand, and Ted Ts'o are the new members (announcement). After 18 years on the board, LWN founder Jonathan Corbet decided not to run for a seat.

Loong64 became an official Debian architecture (announcement).

Qubes OS 4.3.0 was released with more recent distribution templates, preloaded disposable virtual machines, and the reintroduction of the Qubes Windows Tools set (announcement).

systemd v259 was released after a three-month development cycle. Changes included a new "--empower" option for run0 that provides elevated privileges to a user without switching to root, ability to propagate a user's home directory into a VM with systemd-vmspawn, and more (announcement, LWN article).

LWN looked back at our predictions for 2025 (article).

Ruby 4.0 was released on Christmas day. Notable changes included the experimental Ruby Box feature for in-process isolation of classes and modules, a new just-in-time compiler called ZJIT, and more (announcement).

Shadow-utils 4.19.0 was released; the release notes also included an announcement that the project is deprecating a number of programs, hashing algorithms, and the ability to periodically expire passwords (announcement).