Some GNOME picks

Software news and packaging

Instructionals/Technical articles for today

Modding-friendly gear

Raspberry Pi in focus

A third-party Kubuntu remix with a severe identity crisis

The Python Package Index (PyPI) Blog has an analysis of the compromise of the ultralytics project, and what PyPI has learned from this event:

PyPI staff and volunteers do their best to remove malware, but because the service is open to anyone looking to publish software there is an unfortunately high amount of abuse. Thankfully most of this abuse does not have the same widespread impact as a targeted attack on an already widely-used project.

Mike Fiedler, the PyPI Safety and Security Engineer is working on new systems for reducing the time that malware is available to be installed on PyPI, through APIs that security researchers can automatically send reports to and new "quarantine" release status to prevent harm while a human investigates the situation. Expect more in this space in 2025!

A new "Fedora COSMIC" spin of Fedora Linux has been proposed that would feature the Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment currently being developed by Linux PC vendor System76...

The release of the 4.19.325 stable kernel update on December 5 marked the end of an era of sorts. This kernel had been supported for just over six years since its initial release in October 2018; over that time, 325 updates were released, adding 30,109 fixes. Few Linux kernels receive public support for so long; it is worth taking a look at this kernel's history to see how it played out.

Last week Intel announced the Arc B-Series Battlemage graphics cards as their first Xe2 discrete GPUs. Ahead of the Arc B580 graphics card hitting Internet retailers tomorrow, today the review embargo lifts on the Intel Arc B580. Here is what to expect from the Linux driver support at launch for the Intel Battlemage graphics cards and how the Arc B580 is performing for Linux gaming/graphics workloads.

Now that the initial Intel Arc B580 graphics card gaming review on Linux is out, for productivity-minded users you may be more curious about the GPU compute potential... Here are some initial OpenCL and Level Zero results for the Intel Arc B580 graphics card compared to the Intel Arc A-Series and the AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce competition under Linux.

Skyrocketing revenue, and no mention of "Diversity" or "Climate Change". Which, for The 'Linux' Foundation, is quite weird.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libsoup2.4, python-aiohttp, and upx-ucl), Fedora (iaito, python3.11, python3.9, and radare2), Red Hat (ruby, ruby:2.5, and ruby:3.1), Slackware (mozilla-thunderbird), SUSE (govulncheck-vulndb, nodejs18, nodejs20, and socat), and Ubuntu (ofono and python-tornado).

Earlier this month as part of patches for cleaning up x86 32-bit kernel code for x86_64 systems, there was a patch to drop support for 32-bit x86 KVM host support. That patch has now been split off into its own patch series with also now raising the prospects of ending 32-bit KVM host support across all CPU architectures rather than being just an x86-only change...

Now outside the paywall

The development team behind the popular GIMP open-source image editing software announced today the general availability of the Release Candidate (RC) milestone of the highly anticipated GIMP 3.0 release.

Instructionals/Technical articles

Hardware news

While the Linux 6.13 merge window only recently ended and that kernel won't be out until around the end of January followed by the start of the Linux 6.14 merge window, Intel software engineers on Wednesday sent out their first two pull requests to DRM-Next of new kernel graphics driver features they are readying for this next version of the Linux kernel...

AMD has added support for another RDNA 3.5 refresh variant to the Mesa graphics driver code for Linux systems...