Brief items
Security
Security quote of the week
These things are not trustworthy, and yet they are going to be widely trusted.— Bruce Schneier on the ease of poisoning LLM data
Kernel development
Kernel release status
The current development kernel is 7.0-rc1, released on February 22. Linus said: "You all know the drill by now: two weeks have passed, and the kernel merge window is closed."
Stable updates: 6.19.3, 6.18.13, 6.12.74, 6.6.127, 6.1.164, 5.15.201, and 5.10.251 were released on February 19.
The large 6.19.4 and 6.18.14 updates are in the review process; they are due on February 27.
Support period lengthened for the 6.6, 6.12, and 6.18 kernels
The stated support periods for the 6.6, 6.12, and 6.18 kernels has been extended. The 6.6 kernel will be supported with stable updates through the end of 2027 (for four years of support total), while 6.12 and 6.18 will get updates through the end of 2028, for four and three years of support.Quote of the week
With our normal release schedule of 5-6 releases per year and my antipathy to big version numbers, you should basically expect us to bump the major number roughly every 3.5 years.— Linus TorvaldsAnd yeah, I don't have a solid plan for when the major number itself gets big. But doing the math - by that time, I expect that we'll have somebody more competent in charge who isn't afraid of numbers past the teens. So I'm not going to worry about it.
Distributions
openSUSE governance proposal advances
Douglas DeMaio has announced that Jeff Mahoney's new governance proposal for openSUSE, which was published in January, is moving forward. The new structure would have three governance bodies: a new technical steering committee (TSC), a community and marketing committee (CMC), as well as the existing openSUSE board.
The discussions during the meeting proposed that the Technical Steering Committee should begin with five members with a chair elected by the committee. The group would establish clear processes for reviewing and approving technical changes, drawing inspiration from Fedora's FESCo model. Decisions for the TSC would use a voting system of +1 to approve, 0 for neutral, or -1 to block. A proposal passes without objection. A -1 vote would require a dedicated meeting, where a majority of attendees would decide the outcome. Objections must include a clear, documented rationale.
Discussions related to the Community and Marketing Committee would focus on outreach, advocacy, and community growth. It could also serve as an initial escalation point for disputes. If consensus cannot be reached at that level, matters would advance to the Board.
[...] No timeline for final adoption was announced. Project contributors will continue discussions through the GitLab repository and future community meetings.
Distributions quotes of the week
What if the goal of technical progress is NOT to remove physical limits on the amount of the bad quality work humans can produce?— Aleksandra Fedorova
I want to promote fully free hardware and firmware. However, given that very little hardware that does not require non-free firmware exists at present, I don't believe Debian is all that useful of a vehicle for promoting fully free hardware and firmware at the current stage.— Russ AllberyThat movement is still at the phase of trying to make such hardware and get people to buy it, and Debian is not a hardware company so we cannot contribute to that effort beyond ensuring that Debian supports what hardware does exist. I certainly support the latter effort, and I wish the free hardware movement the best of luck, but it's not mature enough for Debian to, for instance, recommend it to users who expect a normal computing experience.
Development
Firefox 148.0 released
Version
148 of Firefox has been released. The most notable change in this
release is the addition of a "Block AI enhancements" option that
allows turning off "new or current AI enhancements in Firefox, or
pop-ups about them
" with a single toggle.
With this release, Firefox now supports the Trusted Types API to help prevent cross-site scripting attacks as well as the Sanitizer API that provides new methods for HTML manipulation. See the release notes for developers for changes that may affect web developers or those who create Firefox add-ons.
GNU Awk 5.4.0 released
Version 5.4.0 of GNU awk (gawk) has been released. This is a major release with a change in gawk's default regular-expression matcher: it now uses MinRX as the default regular-expression engine.
This matcher is fully POSIX compliant, which the current GNU matchers are not. In particular it follows POSIX rules for finding the longest leftmost submatches. It is also more strict as to regular expression syntax, but primarily in a few corner cases that normal, correct, regular expression usage should not encounter.
Because regular expression matching is such a fundamental part of awk/gawk, the original GNU matchers are still included in gawk. In order to use them, give a value to the GAWK_GNU_MATCHERS environment variable before invoking gawk.
[...] The original GNU matchers will eventually be removed from gawk. So, please take the time to notice and report any issues in the MinRX matcher, so that they can be ironed out sooner rather than later.
See the release announcement for additional changes.
GNU Octave 11.1.0 released
Version 11.1.0 of the GNU Octave scientific programming language has been released.
This major release contains many new and improved functions. Among other things, it brings better support for classdef objects and arrays, broadcasting for special matrix types (like sparse, diagonal, or permutation matrices), updates for Matlab compatibility (notably support for the nanflag, vecdim and other parameters for many basic math and statistics functions), and performance improvements in many functions.
See the release notes for details.
The Ladybird browser project shifts to Rust
The Ladybird browser project has announced a move to the Rust programming language:
When we originally evaluated Rust back in 2024, we rejected it because it's not great at C++ style OOP. The web platform object model inherits a lot of 1990s OOP flavor, with garbage collection, deep inheritance hierarchies, and so on. Rust's ownership model is not a natural fit for that.But after another year of treading water, it's time to make the pragmatic choice. Rust has the ecosystem and the safety guarantees we need. Both Firefox and Chromium have already begun introducing Rust into their codebases, and we think it's the right choice for Ladybird too.
Large language models are being used to translate existing code.
Restarting LibreOffice Online
LibreOffice online is a web-based version of the LibreOffice suite that can be hosted on anybody's infrastructure. This project was put into stasis back in 2022, a move marked by some tension with Collabora, a major LibreOffice developer that has its own online offering. Now, the Document Foundation has announced a new effort to breathe life into this project.
We plan to reopen the repository for LibreOffice Online at The Document Foundation for contributions, but provide warnings about the state of the repository until TDF's team agrees that it's safe and usable – while at the same time encourage the community to join in with code, technologies and other contributions that can be used to move forward.
Meanwhile, this post from Michael Meeks suggests that the tension around online versions of LibreOffice has not abated.
The Book of Remind
Dianne Skoll, creator and maintainer of the command-line calendar and alarm program Remind, has announced the release of The Book of Remind. As the name suggests, it is a step-by-step guide to learning how to use Remind, and a useful supplement to the extensive remind(1) man page. The book is free to download.
Vlad: Weston 15.0 is here: Lua shells, Vulkan rendering, and a smoother display stack
Over on the Collabora blog, Marius Vlad has an overview of Weston 15.0, which was released on February 19. Weston isOne of Weston's fundamental pillars has always been making the most efficient use of display hardware. Over time, all the work we did to track and offload as much work as possible to this efficient fixed-function hardware has come at the cost of eating CPU time. In the last couple of release cycles, we've focused really hard on improving performance on even the most low-end of devices, so not only do we make the most efficient use of the GPU and display hardware, but we're also really kind on your CPU now. As part of that and to improve our tooling, Weston 15 now comes with support for the Perfetto profiler.
Development quote of the week
— Viktor LöfgrenAI models are extremely bad at original thinking, so any thinking that is offloaded to a LLM is as a result usually not very original, even if they're very good at treating your inputs to the discussion as amazing genius level insights.
This may be a feature if you are exploring a topic you are unfamiliar with, but it's a fatal flaw if you are writing a blog post or designing a product or trying to do some other form of original work.
Some will argue that this is why you need a human in the loop to steer the work and do the high level thinking. That premise is fundamentally flawed. Original ideas are the result of the very work you're offloading on LLMs. Having humans in the loop doesn't make the AI think more like people, it makes the human thought more like AI output.
The way human beings tend to have original ideas is to immerse in a problem for a long period of time, which is something that flat out doesn't happen when LLMs do the thinking. You get shallow, surface-level ideas instead.
Ideas are then further refined when you try to articulate them. This is why we make students write essays. It's also why we make professors teach undergraduates.
Prompting an AI model is not articulating an idea. You get the output, but in terms of ideation the output is discardable. It's the work that matters.
You don't get build muscle using an excavator to lift weights. You don't produce interesting thoughts using a GPU to think.
Miscellaneous
MetaBrainz mourns the loss of Robert Kaye
The MetaBrainz Foundation has announced the unexpected passing of its founder and executive director, Robert Kaye:
Robert's vision and leadership shaped MetaBrainz and left a lasting mark on the music industry and open source movement. His contributions were significant and his loss is deeply felt across our global community.
The Board is actively overseeing a smooth leadership transition and has measures in place to ensure that MetaBrainz continues to operate without interruption. Further updates will be shared in due course.
Page editor: Daroc Alden
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