2024 Linux and free software timeline

By Joe Brockmeier
January 7, 2025

In the past, LWN had a tradition of publishing a timeline of notable events from the previous year in early January. We thought we might try reviving that tradition in 2025 to see if our readers find it useful. While we have covered these events as they happened, it's interesting to see how much has taken place in just 12 months.

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 if you are not already a subscriber. If you are, thanks much for making all of our coverage possible.

January
February
March

April
May
June

July
August
September

October
November
December

January

Daroc Alden joined the LWN team (announcement).

Vim 9.1 released and dedicated to Vim creator Bram Moolenaar who passed away in 2023 (announcement).

Scribus 1.6.0 released (announcement).

Both C and C++ has had a lot of development since 1999, and C++ has in fact, in my personal opinion, finally "grown up" to be a better C for the kind of embedded programming that an OS kernel epitomizes. I'm saying that as the author of a very large number of macro and inline assembly hacks in the kernel.
— H. Peter Anvin

Linux 6.7 released (announcement, development statistics, merge-window summaries part 1, part 2).

OpenWrt announced plans for the OpenWrt One project, a Banana Pi-based system, with help from the Software Freedom Conservancy (announcement).

Solus 4.5 released (announcement).

The Vcc compiler, a Clang-based compiler for Vulkan, was announced.

Computer science pioneer Niklaus Wirth passed away (IT Wire article).

Firefox 122.0 released (announcement).

Git forge SourceHut suffered an extended outage due to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack (announcement and post-mortem).

I also agree with you that the culture of Postgres development is hard to change. This is the only OSS project that I've ever worked on, and I still do it the same way I worked on code 30 years ago, except now I use git instead of cvs. I can't imagine how we could modernize some of our development practices without causing unacceptable collateral damage, but maybe there's a way, and for sure the way we do things around here is pretty far out of the 2023 mainstream. That's something we should be grappling with, somehow.
— Robert Haas

Luis Villa wrote about the implications of the ruling in the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) GPL-violation lawsuit against Vizio. "If this ruling holds up at the end of the case, the number of potential enforcers just went way up."

Dave Mills, inventor of the Network Time Protocol (NTP), passed away. (LWN brief).

Qualys disclosed a vulnerability in the GNU C Library (versions 2.36 and 2.37) that could grant a local attacker root access (announcement).

GNU C Library 2.39 released (announcement, LWN article).

LibreOffice 24.2 Community released (announcement).

OpenBSD merged system-call pinning (LWN article).

February

Joe Brockmeier joined the LWN team (announcement).

Damn Small Linux 2024 released (announcement).

Wayland and X.org are both part of freedesktop. Whatever maintenance is still happening on X.org is mostly being done by people who primarily work on Wayland. There isn't some kind of holy war going on between The Wayland Developers who want to kill X.org, and The X.org Developers who believe it is great and want to keep it. They're nearly all the same people, and they all want X.org to die.
— Adam Williamson

FOSDEM 2024 held in Brussels February 3 and February 4. (LWN coverage).

Go 1.22 released (announcement).

Glibc became a CVE numbering authority (CNA) (announcement).

The Linux kernel became a CNA as well (announcement, LWN article).

Fedora announced the creation of Fedora Atomic Desktops brand for its increasing number of image-based spins (announcement).

FreeBSD said it will phase out 32-bit platforms "over the next couple of major releases" (announcement).

LineageOS 21 released (announcement).

Ubuntu contributor Gunnar Hjalmarsson passed away (announcement).

Mitchell Baker steps down and Mozilla hired a new CEO, Laura Chambers (announcement).

All of the current stable developers are busy handling other kernel developer issues or reviewing properly tagged kernel patches. Please wait for the next available developer, or press 0 to return to the main menu.

You are caller number SEVENTY FIVE in the queue with an expected wait time of ELEVEN HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE MINUTES.

Please enjoy the smooth sounds of Enya while you wait.

— Greg Kroah-Hartman

Fedora gave KDE Plasma X11 support a reprieve for Fedora 40 (LWN article).

The runc utility suffers another container breakout (LWN article).

"Keytrap" DNS vulnerability affects most DNS resolvers that handle DNSSEC (announcement).

Hare programming language 0.24.0 released (announcement).

RawTherapee 5.10 released (announcement).

KDE Plasma 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 released (LWN article).

The Forgejo project made a full break from Gitea (LWN article).

Netflix released bpftop tool to help with performance optimization of BPF programs in the kernel (announcement).

Tails 6.0 released (announcement).

Git 2.44.0 released (announcement).

The Open Collective Foundation shut down (announcement, LWN article).

NVK Vulkan driver for NVIDIA devices declared ready for prime time (announcement).

March

A backdoor was discovered in xz, a result of a sophisticated social-engineering attack that very nearly crept into stable releases of several Linux distributions (announcement, LWN article, LWN technical analysis of the attack).

The reality that we are struggling with is that the free software infrastructure on which much of computing runs is massively and painfully underfunded by society as a whole, and is almost entirely dependent on random people maintaining things in their free time because they find it fun, many of whom are close to burnout. This is, in many ways, the true root cause of this entire event.
— Russ Allbery

Musl C library released support for new architectures, loongarch64 and riscv32 (announcement).

The postmarketOS project announced it is adding systemd to make it easier to support GNOME and KDE (announcement).

6.8 kernel released (announcement, development statistics, LWN merge-window summary part 1, part 2).

Fedora debated how to package machine-learning models (LWN article).

Incredible work from Andres. The attackers made a serious strategic mistake: they made PostgreSQL slightly slower.
— Thomas Munro

Firefox 124.0 released (announcement).

Flox 1.0, a tool for creating virtual environments using nixpkgs, released (announcement).

The 21st Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) took place March 14 through March 17 at the Pasadena Convention Center in Pasadena, CA (LWN coverage).

GNOME 46 released (announcement, LWN article).

I'm on a holiday and only happened to look at my emails and it seems to be a major mess.
— Lasse Collin

Emacs 29.3 released (announcement).

Nova driver project for NVIDIA GPUs announced (announcement).

Perl v5.39.9 released (announcement).

Redis switched to a non-free license (announcement, LWN article).

Rust 1.77.0 released (announcement).

PostgreSQL contributor Simon Riggs passed away (announcement).

NetBSD 10.0 released (announcement).

Redict 7.3.0, a fork of Redis, released (announcement).

Samba 4.20.0 released (announcement).

April

OpenBSD 7.5 released (announcement).

As the maintainer of a package with expert knowledge of it you might think that there is nothing to do but you while you are the expert for that package, you might not be the expert on topics like cross building, reproducible builds, multiarch, build profiles, merged-/usr, build hardening and many other topics which span the whole distribution. There are people who are heavily invested in these topics and who will want to touch very many packages to fix things. It should be made easy for them to make these contributions without them bit‑rotting as a patch in the BTS for months or years.
— Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues

FFmpeg 7.0 released (announcement).

Eclipse Foundation announced collaboration for CRA compliance (announcement).

OpenSSL 3.3.0 released (announcement).

Gentoo Linux became a Software in the Public Interest (SPI) Associated Project (announcement).

LXC fork Incus 6.0 LTS released (announcement).

Google announced a new JPEG coding library called Jpegli (announcement).

Rivendell radio automation system v4.2.0 released (announcement).

Rsync 3.3.0 released and its original author, Andrew Tridgell, returned to the project along with early contributor Paul Mackerras (announcement).

GNU Stow 2.4.0 released (announcement).

V8 JavaScript engine incorporated a new memory sandbox (announcement).

Perhaps the most important takeaway of all is that it's not just a project's code, not even a project's direct and indirect runtime dependencies, but ALL its build dependencies as well, that can be used to inject backdoors. The kernel doesn't depend on any shared libraries at runtime -- but as long as we can hijack the build process, we can fairly easily inject code into the compiled kernel.

On my system, a kernel build runs more than 70 different binaries and loads more than 32 distinct shared libraries. That's a large attack surface.
— Vegard Nossum

OpenSSF and OpenJS warn about social-engineering attacks (announcement).

PuTTY 0.81 released with a fix for CVE-2024-31497, a critical vulnerability that could expose 521-bit ECDSA private keys (announcement).

Fedora 40 released (announcement, LWN article).

GitHub comments used to distribute malware (LWN brief).

Andreas Tille elected as Debian project leader (announcement, LWN coverage of the election and candidates).

Firefox introduced a new crash reporter, written in Rust (announcement).

QEMU 9.0 released (announcement).

Open Source Summit North America held in Seattle, WA from June 23 to June 25 (LWN coverage).

Peter Hutterer released udev-hid-bpf, a tool to facilitate the loading of BPF programs that make human-input devices work correctly (announcement, LWN article on BPF-HID).

To illustrate my personal concerns, I confess to being a bit disgusted by those pontificating on software reliability, especially when they compare it unfavorably to things like house construction. The difference is of course that the average house is not under active attack by nation states. In contrast, whether we like it or not, the Linux kernel is under active attack by nation states, organized crime, and who knows what all else. For RCU at least, I will take all the help I can get, even if it requires me to do a little bit of work up front.
— Paul McKenney

Gentoo bans AI-created contributions (LWN coverage).

The Open Home Foundation launches to provide a home and support for free home-automation projects (announcement).

The Nix community faced a leadership crisis that was resolved by Nix founder Eelco Dolstra stepping down from its board and resigning from the project (LWN article, announcement of Dolstra's resignation).

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) released (announcement, LWN coverage).

Yocto Project 5.0 released (announcement).

Amarok 3.0 "Castaway" released, the first stable release of the Qt-based music player since 2018 (announcement).

Git 2.45.0 released (announcement).

The GNOME board provided a financial update saying that it has "hit the buffers" of its financial reserves and will need to curtail spending (announcement).

May

GNU nano 8.0 released (announcement).

But honestly this is a giant improvement. Only one threat and only one veiled ad hominem attack. There was no swearing nor direct insults. 🙄 So, yeah, it's better but still pretty off-putting for most people. I remain sad about all the developers we'll never see join the community.
— Kees Cook

Fedora Asahi Remix 40 released (announcement).

GCC 14.1 released (announcement).

Rust 1.78.0 released (announcement).

Debian decided against creating an AI-contributions policy (LWN article).

The Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) is held in Salt Lake City, Utah from May 13 to May 15 (LWN coverage).

Tejun Heo made another push to get sched_ext into the Linux kernel (LWN article).

6.9 kernel released (announcement, development statistics, merge summary part 1, and part 2).

The whole "one step forward, two steps back" is absolutely fine if you are line dancing.

But we're not line dancing.

We take it slow and steady, and if you can't fix something without breaking something else, then that thing simply does not get fixed.
— Linus Torvalds

Manjaro 24.0 released (announcement).

PyCon US 2024 took place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from May 15 to May 23 (LWN coverage).

Firefox 126.0 released (announcement) and Mozilla welcomed Nabiha Syed as its new executive director (announcement).

AlmaLinux formed an engineering steering committee (announcement).

Alpine Linux 3.20.0 released with initial support for 64-bit RISC-V among other changes (announcement).

Neovim 0.10 released (announcement).

KDE Gear 24.05.0 released (announcement).

Geoff Huston suggested that it is time to give up on DNSSEC and find a better way to secure the Internet namespace (LWN brief).

KDE announced "Opt Green" campaign to reduce e-waste (announcement).

LyX 2.4.0 released (announcement).

June

FreeBSD 14.1 released (announcement).

Most of the checks of this refactor are being done with GPT-4, that is not even the best current coding AI. And the mechanism of patching is crude, at best. Yet, it works.

I may be wrong, but I believe by this time next year the AI will be so good that I doubt I will even need human reviewers.
— Alfredo Ortega

Kali Linux 2024.2 released (announcement).

Krita celebrated 25 years of development (announcement).

Longtime BSD contributor Mike Karels passed away (announcement).

Debian finally decided to move to RAM-based tmpfs for /tmp and /var/tmp for the Debian 13 ("trixie") release. (LWN coverage).

I honestly see no reason to delay this any more. This whole patchset was the major (private) discussion at last year's kernel maintainer summit, and I don't find any value in having the same discussion (whether off-list or as an actual event) at the upcoming maintainer summit one year later, so to make any kind of sane progress, my current plan is to merge this for 6.11.
— Linus Torvalds

Torvalds decided that the extensible scheduler class ("sched_ext") framework will be merged for Linux 6.11, though it actually landed in 6.12 (announcement).

Firefox 127.0 released with changes in how the browser handles non-HTTPS resources in HTTPS pages (announcement, Mozilla Security Blog about the change).

OpenSUSE Leap 15.6 released (announcement).

Perl v5.40.0 released (announcement).

Systemd v256 released (announcement, LWN article).

I am an old man, but even I understand that sometimes backwards compatibility has to go if there are tangible benefits to breaking changes and no practical workarounds, whether it's 32-bit-only support, or X11, or QEMU; I accept it even if I am personally affected.
— Przemek Klosowski

Ladybird browser "forked" from SerenityOS project (LWN coverage).

PostmarketOS v24.06 released (announcement).

Rust 1.79.0 released (announcement).

Libgcrypt 1.11.0 released (announcement).

MATE 1.28 released (announcement).

All parents want their children to have better lives than they did, which in my dad's case meant I should never want for financial security and in my case means my son should never have to learn C.
— Luis Villa

KDE Plasma 6.1 released (announcement).

Numpy 2.0.0 released (LWN article).

Tor Browser 13.5 released (announcement).

Longtime networking developer Larry Finger passed away (announcement).

Darktable 4.8.0 released (announcement).

Kernel contributor Daniel Bristot de Oliveira passed away (announcement, LWN obituary).

OpenSUSE Leap Micro 6.0 released (announcement).

The FreeDOS project turned 30 (LWN article).

July

CentOS Linux 7 reached end of life, marking the end of the CentOS Linux distribution (Red Hat announcement, LWN brief).

Just putting "privacy" in the name of a feature doesn't make it less creepy. Considering today's branding trends it might even go the other way. "Your privacy is important to us" is the new "your call is important to us." If you dig into the literature behind PPA [Privacy-preserving attribution], you will find some mathematical claims about how it prevents tracking of individuals. This is interesting math if you like that kind of thing. But in practice the real-world privacy risks are generally based on group discrimination, so it's not really accurate to call a system "privacy-preserving" just because it limits individual tracking. Even if the math is neato.
— Don Marti

OpenSSH 9.8 released with a fix for a serious security vulnerability (announcement).

Scientific Linux 7 reached end of life and development of Scientific Linux came to an end with the end of CentOS Linux (announcement).

GNU findutils 4.10.0 released (announcement).

David Rosenthal looked back at 40 years of the X Window System (LWN brief).

Debian reached a compromise on the tag2upload service (LWN article).

Linux 6.10 released (announcement, development statistics, merge window part 1 and part 2).

Blender 4.2 LTS released (announcement).

Version 8.4.0 of digiKam released (announcement).

Holly Million stepped down as executive director of the GNOME Foundation and was replaced by interim executive director Richard Littauer (announcement).

Today's internet systems are too complex to hope that if we are smart and build each piece correctly the sum total will work right. We have to deliberately break things and keep breaking them. This repeated process of breaking and fixing will make these systems reliable. And then a willingness to embrace inefficiencies will make these systems resilient. But the economic incentives point companies in the other direction, to build their systems as brittle as they can possibly get away with.
— Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier

Firefox 128.0 released (announcement).

GDB 15.1 released (announcement).

SUSE asked openSUSE to consider a name change (LWN article).

OpenMandriva ROME 24.07 released (announcement).

GNU C Library 2.40 released (announcement).

GUADEC 2024 took place in Denver, Colorado from July 19 to July 24 (LWN coverage).

OpenSSL announced a new governance structure and adds two new projects Bouncy Castle and the cryptlib security software development toolkit (announcement).

Similarly, trying to make sure that software will work in the year 292 Billion AD might not be all something that most people would consider high priority. After all, it's.... unlikely... that the x86_64 architecture will still be what we will be using 290 billion years from now. So if we need recompile the kernel sometime in the next 100 billion years for some new CPU architecture, and if it's unlikely that hard drives brought brand new are likely to be still in operation a decade or two from now --- there is plenty of time to evolve the on-disk format before a billion years go by, let alone 100 billion or 200 billion years.
— Ted Ts'o

Kernel contributor and Debian Developer Peter de Schrijver passed away (announcement).

Fedora Project approved "opt-in" metrics for Fedora 42 (LWN article).

Arnd Bergmann published a deprecation timeline for older Arm CPUs (announcement).

Linux Mint 22 ("Wilma") released (announcement, LWN article).

Vanilla OS 2 ("Orchid") released (announcement, LWN article).

Git 2.46.0 released (announcement).

Rust 1.80.0 released (announcement).

Forgejo v8.0 released (announcement).

DebConf24 took place in Busan, South Korea from July 28 to August 4 (LWN coverage).

August

Firefox 129.0 released with improvements to reader mode, tab previews, and use of HTTPS by default (announcement).

I don't know for a fact that Linux distributions are poised to return to the center of application development, but I do know that much of what we're doing to isolate and mitigate risk – security scanning, dependency curation, policy enforcement, and scorecards – feels an awful lot like what you get "out of the box" with a distribution. Enterprise IT has moved to a different delivery model than what existed previously, and moving away from that is not trivial. But if I were looking to start an organization or team from scratch, and I wanted to reduce the risk of supply chain attacks, I would probably elect to outsource risk mitigation to a curated distribution as much as possible.
— John Mark Walker

GNU Binutils 2.43 released (announcement).

Fedora contributor Mel Chua passed away (announcement, Fedora Community Blog post).

New attack against the SLUB allocator found (announcement).

Canonical announced a new kernel-version policy for Ubuntu. It will ship the latest available version of the upstream kernel at the specified Ubuntu release freeze date (announcement).

COSMIC desktop environment made its debut after two years of development (LWN article).

Magit 4.0 released (announcement).

Nix fork Lix made its second release (announcement).

With this commit, we have completed an amusing mission of replacing the final parts of the original OpenBSD.

We have reached OpenBSD of Theseus.
— Theo de Raadt

Gentoo Linux dropped IA-64 (Itanium) support (announcement).

The Rust-based Python package and project manager uv 0.3.0 is released (announcement).

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) agreed to invest €686,400 toward FreeBSD infrastructure modernization (announcement).

I also really wish people would stop thinking that C/C++ or Rust are the only options. A lot of code today is written in C that has absolutely no business being written in a systems language. For example, consider something like sysstat in the FreeBSD base system. Every N seconds, it queries a bunch of sysctls and then displays some graphs of output. Aside from the sysctl calls themselves, there's nothing in sysstat that is in any way low-level and there's nothing at all that is performance critical. The entire thing could be written in Lua and interpreted (not even LuaJIT) and it would be completely fine, memory safe (and type safe), and have a load more developers able to contribute to it easily than if it were rewritten in C++ or Rust.
— David Chisnall

Forgejo changed its license to GPLv3+ (announcement).

Calligra Office 4.0 released (announcement).

LibreOffice 24.8 released (announcement).

WineHQ took over Mono (announcement).

Nate Graham announced that KDE e.V. will begin asking for donations directly in Plasma once per year (announcement).

NIST finalized post-quantum encryption standards (LWN article).

Rust-for-Linux developer Wedson Almeida Filho retired from the project citing too much "nontechnical nonsense" (announcement).

ElasticSearch and Kibana become free software once again, after being relicensed under the non-free Server Side Public License (SSPL) in 2021 (announcement).

September

Firefox 130.0 released with the addition of a Firefox Labs tab in settings (announcement).

I've been doing it in my free time, and no company has sponsored that work at all. At the moment, I cannot sustain this work economically any more, and will temporarily and indefinitely stop working on this project. If any company has interests in the future of the project, I'd welcome an offer to sponsor my work here; if so, please let me know.
Alejandro Colomar

Tellico 4.0 released (announcement).

AnandTech shut down, bringing to a close 27 years of technology-industry coverage (announcement).

Sebastian Andrzej Siewior posted a patch series to enable realtime preemption in the mainline kernel on three architectures (announcement).

Redox OS 0.9.0 released (announcement).

Linux man-page maintenance suspended after Alejandro Colomar announced he will have to stop that work due to lack of funding (announcement).

Kangrejos 2024 took place in Copenhagen, Denmark from September 7 to September 8 (LWN coverage).

NGINX moved development to GitHub and away from Mercurial (announcement).

Pandoc 3.4 released (announcement).

GNU Tools Cauldron 2024 took place in Prague, Czech Republic from September 14 to September 16 (LWN coverage).

Radicle 1.0 released (announcement).

Rust 1.81.0 released (announcement).

Open Source Summit Europe 2024 took place in Vienna, Austria from September 16 to September 18 (LWN coverage).

The kernel Maintainers Summit took place in Vienna, Austria on September 17 (LWN coverage).

Linux Plumbers Conference 2024 took place in Vienna, Austria from September 18 to September 20 (LWN coverage).

Thomas Gleixner delivers the pull request for the realtime preemption enablement patches in person (LWN brief).

Samba 4.21.0 released (announcement).

Another area I've been spending a bit of time on lately is looking at how defensive security work has challenges associated with metrics. How do you measure your defensive security impact? You can't say "because we installed locks on the doors, 20% fewer break-ins have happened." Much of our signal is always secondary or retrospective, which is frustrating: "This class of flaw was used X much over the last decade so, and if we have eliminated that class of flaw and will never see it again, what is the impact?" Is the impact infinity? Attackers will just move to the next easiest thing. But it means that exploitation gets incrementally more difficult. As attack surfaces are reduced, the expense of exploitation goes up.
— Kees Cook in an interview on the Reproducible Builds project site.

GNU Screen v.5.0.0 released (announcement).

Python Steering Council issued three-month suspension for Python core developer Tim Peters (LWN article).

6.11 kernel released (announcement, development statistics, merge window summaries part 1 and part 2).

KDE set its goals through 2026 (LWN article).

GNOME 47 released (announcement).

HarfBuzz 10.0.0 released (announcement).

Hy 1.0.0 released after nearly 12 years of development (announcement).

PostgreSQL 17 released (announcement, LWN article).

Tor Project and Tails Linux distribution joined forces and merged operations (announcement).

OpenSSH 9.9 released (announcement).

Arch Linux project announced it was receiving support from Valve (announcement).

Tcl/Tk 9.0 released a mere 27 years after the 8.0 major release in 1997 (announcement).

The legal dispute began between Automattic and WP Engine after WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg demanded WP Engine enter a licensing deal for use of WordPress trademarks (LWN article).

October

FFmpeg 7.1 released (announcement).

If you're still a user of Python 3.8, I don't blame you, it's a lovely version. But it's time to move on to newer, greater things. Whether it's typing generics in built-in collections, pattern matching, except*, low-impact monitoring, or a new pink REPL, I'm sure you'll find your favorite new feature in one of the versions we still support. So upgrade today!
— Łukasz Langa

Firefox 131.0 released (announcement).

Manjaro 24.1 released (announcement).

RPM 4.20 released and will be the final major release in the 4.x series (announcement, LWN article).

OpenBSD 7.6 released (announcement).

GNOME Foundation announced budget cuts and layoffs due to fundraising woes (LWN article).

My point is that "worrying about AI" is a zero-sum game. When we train our fire on the stuff that isn't important to the AI stock swindlers' business-plans (like creating AI slop), we should remember that the AI companies could halt all of that activity and not lose a dime in revenue. By contrast, when we focus on AI applications that do the most direct harm – policing, health, security, customer service – we also focus on the AI applications that make the most money and drive the most investment.

AI hasn't attracted hundreds of billions in investment capital because investors love AI slop. All the money pouring into the system – from investors, from customers, from easily gulled big-city mayors – is chasing things that AI is objectively very bad at and those things also cause much more harm than AI slop. If you want to be a good AI critic, you should devote the majority of your focus to these applications. Sure, they're not as visually arresting, but discrediting them is financially arresting, and that's what really matters.
— Cory Doctorow

Git 2.47.0 released (announcement).

Julia v1.11.0 released (announcement).

X.org Developer's Conference held in Montreal, Canada from October 9 to October 11 (LWN coverage).

Python 3.13 released (announcement).

Ubuntu 24.10 released (announcement).

Forgejo 9.0 released (announcement).

Inkscape 1.4 released (announcement, LWN article).

LibreSSL 4.0.0 released (announcement).

Several Russian developers lost kernel maintainership status (announcement).

The AlmaLinux project introduced a new edition called "Kitten" to serve as a perpetual development release (announcement).

Bootc 1.1.0 released (announcement).

OpenSSL 3.4.0 released (announcement).

Rust 1.82.0 released with tier-1 support for 64-bit Apple Arm systems, a cargo info command, and more (announcement).

Tor Browser 14.0 released (announcement).

Open Source Initiative announced its Open Source AI Definition (announcement, LWN article).

At its heart, the current deliberation around an open source definition for AI is an attempt to drag a term defined over two decades ago to describe a narrowly defined asset into the present to instead cover a brand new, far more complicated future set of artifacts.
— Stephen O'Grady

Python looks at dropping support for PGP signatures and moving exclusively to sigstore to sign artifacts (LWN article).

The Image-Based Linux Summit is held in Berlin on September 24 (LWN coverage).

Fedora 41 released (announcement).

Raspberry Pi project released a new version of Raspberry Pi OS (announcement).

Firefox 132.0 released (announcement).

Google's Flutter user-interface toolkit is forked as Flock over frustration with Google's stewardship of the project (announcement).

The first stable version of Thunderbird for Android was released (announcement).

All Things Open is held in Raleigh from October 27 to October 29 (LWN coverage).

Open Source Summit Japan is held in Tokyo on October 28 and October 29 (LWN coverage).

November

The OpenWrt One router begins shipping (announcement, LWN review).

I was a Debian developer for over twenty years. I am intimately familiar how the sausage is made. I do not understand why the result works at all, never mind works well. It defies logic.

Ditto for open source in general.

But I'm glad it all does.
— Lars Wirzenius

Tim Peters returned to the Python community (LWN article).

BPF instruction set is accepted as RFC 9669, giving it a standard outside the in-kernel implementation (announcement).

LXQt 2.1.0 released with support for multiple Wayland compositors (announcement).

Funding found for man-page maintenance for at least 12 months (announcement).

Longtime Debian and Tor developer, Jérémy Bobbio ("Lunar") passed away (announcement).

PyPI announced support for digital attestations (announcement).

Or to put it a different way: open source maintainers are some of the most verifiably self-taught people in the history of the world, *when they want to be*. Happy to dig into tools, Google, books, mailing list archives, source code, stack traces, whatever. *If they're motivated and have time for it.*

Saying "what they really need is... an online course" is... actually a tacit admission that what's actually missing is time and motivation.
— Luis Villa

AlmaLinux 9.5 released (announcement).

Rocky Linux 9.5 released (announcement).

OpenWrt switched to the Alpine Linux apk package manager (announcement).

6.12 kernel released (announcement, development statistics, merge window summary part 1 and part 2).

Blender 4.3 released (announcement).

FreeCAD 1.0 released (announcement).

Incus 6.7 released (announcement).

The Fedora Project decided to promote the KDE Plasma Desktop spin to full edition status (LWN article).

Firefox 133.0 released with the addition of a new anti-tracking feature, "Bounce Tracking Protection" (announcement).

PHP 8.4 released (announcement).

Rust 1.83.0 released (announcement).

Elementary OS 8 released (announcement).

Arch Linux starts providing explicit licensing for its PKGBUILDs (LWN article).

LWN article database logs its one millionth item, a comment by LWN subscriber "anselm" on US Thanksgiving day (announcement).

NixOS 24.11 released (announcement).

December

Let's Encrypt sets date for ending OCSP support and will turn off its OCSP responders on August 6, 2025 (announcement).

Fedora announced that it plans to replace its Pagure Git forge with Forgejo (announcement).

One fun anecdote is that companies or governments will often say they need months or years to prepare (CLEAN UP) code for open sourcing. Because on the inside, people allow themselves far worse code than they'd prefer to share with the outside world. Open source code often has higher standards, and it is a great mechanism of keeping you on track.

If you can get away with it of course.
— Bert Hubert

Collabora-developed Debian derivative distribution Apertis v2024 released (announcement).

Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller announced he will be stepping down in 2025 (announcement).

Hurl 6.0.0 released (announcement).

The ultralytics package on PyPI is compromised using a flaw in GitHub Actions (announcement, analysis).

GNU Shepherd 1.0.0 released (announcement).

Systemd v257 released (announcement, LWN article on new features, article on secure boot features).

Mozilla announced new branding strategy which will surely be the trick to reverse its declining share of the browser market (announcement)

CentOS Stream 10 and EPEL 10 released (announcement, LWN article).

Fedora Asahi Remix 41 released with support for popular mainstream ("AAA") games (announcement).

Kali Linux 2024.4 released (announcement).

Kubernetes v1.32 released (announcement).

Sequoia PGP project released sq 1.0, the first stable release since it began development in 2017 (announcement).

Xfce 4.20 released with initial Wayland support (announcement).

We, the WordPress community, need to decide if we're ok being led by a single person who controls everything, and might do things we disagree with, or if we want something else. For a project whose tagline is "Democratizing publishing", we've been very low on exactly that: democracy.
— Joost de Valk

WP Engine granted preliminary injunction in WordPress case (LWN article).

Code-completion vulnerability discovered in Emacs (LWN article).

Kees Cook engineers a Git commit prefix collision (announcement, LWN article on commit-ID collisions).

Final release in the 4.19 stable kernel series after more than six years ends an era (LWN article).

Curl project dropped support for hyper, an experimental HTTP backend written in Rust (announcement).

Darktable 5.0.0 released (announcement).

I think this is the tipping point, expect to see way more rust drivers going forward now that these bindings are present. Next merge window hopefully we will have pci and platform drivers working, which will fully enable almost all driver subsystems to start accepting (or at least getting) rust drivers.
— Greg Kroah-Hartman on the addition of Rust bindings for misc devices.

Fish shell announced a 4.0 rewrite in Rust (beta announcement, final release).

Grml 2024.12 released (announcement).

Fedora Engineering Steering Council (FESCo) causes community controversy by revoking "provenpackager" status from a contributor without adequate explanation (LWN article).

A tradition continued with the release of Ruby 3.4 on Christmas day (announcement).

LWN looks back on 2024 (article).

LineageOS 22.1 released on the final day of the year (announcement).

A welcome return

Posted Jan 8, 2025 3:21 UTC (Wed) by andyc (subscriber, #1130) [Link]

Great to see this once again!

Quotes are real gems

Posted Jan 8, 2025 3:23 UTC (Wed) by buck (subscriber, #55985) [Link]

At least the Lasse Collin one (inter alia)

Following the link to the LKML thread is the first time I'd seen/heard that Lasse Collin was a kernel contributor (e.g.,

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/...

)

and that Jia Tan's (benign, I think, in this case) contributions (e.g., a Reviewed-by, on, inter alia

https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/20240320183846.19475-8-la...

) were also bound for the kernel.

Somehow 2024 went by without me ever realizing that.

Thanks, LWN, for getting me caught up

Thank you, I love this!

Posted Jan 8, 2025 4:45 UTC (Wed) by gingercreek (subscriber, #155755) [Link]

As a newer LWN subscriber, I was unaware of this tradition. I'm very happy it's returned: I read the site almost daily, yet there were still plenty of fascinating things in this retrospective that I missed the first time around. Thanks for putting it together! I look forward to perusing past years'.

Quote blocks

Posted Jan 8, 2025 14:56 UTC (Wed) by Kamiccolo (subscriber, #95159) [Link]

Wihihi, those quote blocks all over the place does spice up the thing a lot, despite being quote chaotic.

Kudos for bringing the tradition back!

Good retrospective

Posted Jan 8, 2025 15:06 UTC (Wed) by amit (subscriber, #1274) [Link]

I enjoyed going through this article - the quotes, the news, it was easy to consume and information-dense. Please keep doing these!

thanks!

Posted Jan 8, 2025 15:17 UTC (Wed) by MortenSickel (subscriber, #3238) [Link]

Even though I read lwn neatly every day, I really enjoied this article. Some interesting things I overlooked and some things that looks different when seen in retrospect and together with other events of the year.

And I loved the quotes in the article!

Loved the quotations

Posted Jan 8, 2025 17:49 UTC (Wed) by jwcarter (subscriber, #10502) [Link]

They were well chosen and gave a great summary of what was happening.

May the tradition return

Posted Jan 8, 2025 22:14 UTC (Wed) by stijn (subscriber, #570) [Link]

I love this timeline, hope you will reinstate this tradition. The quotes are choice, I followed quite a few of the associated links and had fun reading various threads. The Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier quote drew my particular attention. Through it I learned about Netflixes Chaos Monkey tool.