Some news that slipped under the radar prior to the holidays... Linutronix as the Linux consulting firm that has led the real-time "PREEMPT_RT" work and more within the Linux kernel -- and Linutronix was acquired by Intel back in 2022 as an independent subsidiary -- is beginning a "new chapter"...

Gentoo Linux posted its 2025 project retrospective this week. Some interesting details: Mostly because of the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories, Gentoo currently considers and plans the migration of our repository mirrors and pull request contributions to Codeberg. Codeberg is a site based on Forgejo, maintained by a non-profit organization, and located in Berlin, Germany. Gentoo continues to host its own primary git, bugs, etc infrastructure and has no plans to change that... We now publish weekly Gentoo images for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), based on the amd64 stages, see our mirrors. While these images are not present in the Microsoft store yet, that's something we intend to fix soon... Given the unfortunate fracturing of the GnuPG / OpenPGP / LibrePGP ecosystem due to competing standards, we now provide an alternatives mechanism to choose the system gpg provider and ease compatibility testing... We have added a bootstrap path for Rust from C++ using Mutabah's Rust compiler mrustc, which alleviates the need for pre-built binaries and makes it significantly easier to support more configurations. Similarly, Ada and D support in gcc now have clean bootstrap paths, which makes enabling these in the compiler as easy as switching the useflags on gcc and running emerge. Other interesting statistics for the year: Gentoo currently consists of 31,663 ebuilds for 19,174 different packages.For amd64 (x86-64), there are 89 GBytes of binary packages available on the mirrors.Gentoo each week builds 154 distinct installation stages for different processor architectures and system configurations, with an overwhelming part of these fully up-to-date.The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has remained at an overall high level in 2025, with a slight decrease from 123,942 to 112,927.The number of commits by external contributors was 9,396, now across 377 unique external authors. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Heraklit for sharing the 2025 retrospective.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From first week of the year

Now that Budgie 10.10 is out as the last chapter in the Budgie 10 series, the devs behind this modern Linux desktop environment have kicked off the development of the next major release, Budgie 11.

Linux as a brand

RebelsTool 1.0.9 is out

Instructionals/Technical posts

ParrotOS 7 came out, and with it came a switch to the KDE Plasma desktop environment

dArkOS is here to get the most out of the devices you may already own.

The 6.18.5, 6.12.65, 6.6.120, and 6.1.160 stable updates have been released. They all contain a small patch set fixing a scheduling regression associated with idle balancing; the 6.6.120 and 6.1.60 updates also contain a large set of other important fixes.

FOSS and more

GNU/Linux and more

Development with R and markdown etc.

Devices and gadgets

KDE and Qt news

quite a lot for a Sunday

The KDE Project released today KDE Gear 25.12.1 as the first maintenance update to the latest KDE Gear 25.12 series of this collection of open-source apps for the KDE Plasma desktop environment and other platforms.

I turned my old Android phone into a PC stats monitor (and it looks great)

There is a new desktop available for Sparkers

Only free and open source software is eligible for inclusion here