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This week System76 launched the first stable release of its Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment, reports 9to5Linux.Announced in 2021, it's designed for all GNU/Linux distributions — and it shipping with Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS (based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS): Previous Pop!_OS releases used a version of the COSMIC desktop that was based on the GNOME desktop environment. However, System76 wanted to create a new desktop environment from scratch while keeping the same familiar interface and user experience built for efficiency and fun. This means that some GNOME apps have been replaced by COSMIC apps, including COSMIC Files instead of Nautilus (Files), COSMIC Terminal instead of GNOME Terminal, COSMIC Text Editor instead of GNOME Text Editor, and COSMIC Media Player instead of Totem (Video Player). Also, the Pop!_Shop graphical package manager used in previous Pop!_OS releases has now been replaced by a new app called COSMIC Store. "If you're ambitious enough, or maybe just crazy enough, there eventually comes a time when you realize you've reached the limits of current potential, and must create something completely new if you're to go further..." explains System76 founder/CEO Carl Richell: For twenty years we have shipped Linux computers. For seven years we've built the Pop!_OS Linux distribution. Three years ago it became clear we had reached the limit of our current potential and had to create something new. Today, we break through that limit with the release of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS with the COSMIC Desktop Environment. Today is special not only in that it's the culmination of over three years of work, but even more so in that System76 has built a complete desktop environment for the open source community... I hope you love what we've built for you. Now go out there and create. Push the limits, make incredible things, and have fun doing it! |
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Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols files this report from Tokyo:
At the invitation-only Linux
Kernel Maintainers Summit here, the top Linux maintainers decided, as Jonathan Corbet, Linux kernel developer, put it, "The consensus among the assembled developers is that Rust
in the kernel is no longer experimental — it is now a core part
of the kernel and is here to stay. So the 'experimental' tag
will be coming off." As Linux kernel maintainer Steven Rosted told
me, "There was zero pushback." This has been a long time coming. This shift caps five years of sometimes-fierce debate over whether the memory-safe language belonged alongside C at the heart of the world's most widely deployed open source operating system... It all began when Alex Gaynor and Geoffrey Thomas at the 2019 Linux Security Summit said that about two-thirds of Linux kernel vulnerabilities come from memory safety issues. Rust, in theory, could avoid these by using Rust's inherently safer application programming interfaces (API)... In those early days, the plan was not to rewrite Linux in Rust; it still isn't, but to adopt it selectively where it can provide the most security benefit without destabilizing mature C code. In short, new drivers, subsystems, and helper libraries would be the first targets... Despite the fuss, more and more programs were ported to Rust. By April 2025, the Linux kernel contained about 34 million lines of C code, with only 25 thousand lines written in Rust. At the same time, more and more drivers and higher-level utilities were being written in Rust. For instance, the Debian Linux distro developers announced that going forward, Rust would be a required dependency in its foundational Advanced Package Tool (APT). This change doesn't mean everyone will need to use Rust. C is not going anywhere. Still, as several maintainers told me, they expect to see many more drivers being written in Rust. In particular, Rust looks especially attractive for "leaf" drivers (network, storage, NVMe, etc.), where the Rust-for-Linux bindings expose safe wrappers over kernel C APIs. Nevertheless, for would-be kernel and systems programmers, Rust's new status in Linux hints at a career path that blends deep understanding of C with fluency in Rust's safety guarantees. This combination may define the next generation of low-level development work. |
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New submitter emangwiro shares a report: The HDMI Forum, responsible for the HDMI specification, continues to stonewall open source. Valve's Steam Machine theoretically supports HDMI 2.1, but the mini-PC is software-limited to HDMI 2.0. As a result, more than 60 frames per second at 4K resolution are only possible with limitations. In a statement to Ars Technica, a Valve spokesperson confirmed that HDMI 2.1 support is "still a work-in-progress on the software side." "We've been working on trying to unblock things there." The Steam Machine uses an AMD Ryzen APU with a Radeon graphics unit. Valve strictly adheres to open-source drivers, but the HDMI Forum is unwilling to disclose the 2.1 specification. According to Valve, they have validated the HDMI 2.1 hardware under Windows to ensure basic functionality. |
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Jolla is "trying again with a new crowd-funded smartphone," reports Phoronix:
Finnish company Jolla started out 14 years ago where Nokia left off with MeeGo and developed Sailfish OS as a new Linux smartphone platform. Jolla released their first smartphone in 2013 after crowdfunding but ultimately the Sailfish OS focus the past number of years now has been offering their software stack for use on other smartphone devices [including some Sony Xperia smartphones and OnePlus/Samsung/ Google/ Xiaomi devices]. This new Jolla Phone's pre-order voucher page says the phone will only produced if 2,000 units are ordered before January 4. (But in just a few days they've already received 1,721 pre-orders — all discounted to 499€ from a normal price between 599 and 699 €). Estimate delivery is the first half of 2026. "The new Jolla Phone is powered by a high-performing Mediatek 5G SoC," reports 9to5Linux, "and features 12GB RAM, 256GB storage that can be expanded to up to 2TB with a microSDXC card, a 6.36-inch FullHD AMOLED display with ~390ppi, 20:9 aspect ratio, and Gorilla Glass, and a user-replaceable 5,500mAh battery." The Linux phone also features 4G/5G support with dual nano-SIM and a global roaming modem configuration, Wi-Fi 6 wireless, Bluetooth 5.4, NFC, 50MP Wide and 13MP Ultrawide main cameras, front front-facing wide-lens selfie camera, fingerprint reader on the power key, a user-changeable back cover, and an RGB indication LED. On top of that, the new Jolla Phone promises a user-configurable physical Privacy Switch that lets you turn off the microphone, Bluetooth, Android apps, or whatever you wish. The device will be available in three colors, including Snow White, Kaamos Black, and The Orange. All the specs of the new Jolla Phone were voted on by Sailfish OS community members over the past few months. Honouring the original Jolla Phone form factor and design, the new model ships with Sailfish OS (with support for Android apps), a Linux-based European alternative to dominating mobile operating systems that promises a minimum of 5 years of support, no tracking, no calling home, and no hidden analytics... The device will be manufactured and sold in Europe, but Jolla says that it will design the cellular band configuration to enable global travelling as much as possible, including e.g. roaming in the U.S. carrier networks. The initial sales markets are the EU, the UK, Switzerland, and Norway. |
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Steam's November 2025 survey shows Linux gaming climbed to its highest share in a decade "thanks to the success of the Steam Deck, the underlying Steam Play (Proton) software, and now further excitement thanks to the upcoming Steam Machine and Steam Frame," writes Phoronix's Michael Larabel. From the report: A decade ago in the early Steam days the initial use was around 3% and back then the Steam user-base in absolute terms was much smaller than it is today. Back in October Steam on Linux finally re-crossed that 3% threshold after for years being stuck in a 1~2% rut. Now the Steam Survey results were published minutes ago for November and they continue an upward trend for Linux.
Steam on Linux is up to 3.2%, an increase of 0.15% for the month. One year ago Steam on Linux was at 2.03% last November, 1.91% for November 2023, and a decade ago for November 2015 was at just 0.98%. [...] Due to AMD APUs powering the Steam Deck, AMD CPUs continue to power nearly 70% of Linux gaming systems. Meanwhile under Windows, AMD has around a 42% CPU marketshare. |
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From the blog 9to5Linux:
Linux kernel 6.18 is now available for download, as announced today by Linus Torvalds himself, featuring enhanced hardware support through new and updated drivers, improvements to file systems and networking, and more.
Highlights of Linux 6.18 include the removal of the Bcachefs file system, support for the Rust Binder driver, a new dm-pcache device-mapper target to enable persistent memory as a cache for slower block devices, and a new microcode= command-line option to control the microcode loader's behavior on x86 platforms.
Linux kernel 6.18 also extends the support for file handles to kernel namespaces, implements initial 'block size > page size' support for the Btrfs file system, adds PTW feature detection on new hardware for LoongArch KVM, and adds support for running the kernel as a guest on FreeBSD's Bhyve hypervisor. |
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Microsoft's push to transform Windows into an "agentic OS" that allows AI agents to control PCs is drawing user backlash similar to the Windows 8 controversy, as the company marks the operating system's 40th anniversary this week, writes Tom Warren, a reporter at The Verge who has been covering Microsoft for nearly two decades. Windows chief Pavan Davuluri announced the agentic OS plans in a post on X last week and faced immediate criticism in hundreds of replies before they were locked days later. "It's evolving into a product that's driving people to Mac and Linux," one person wrote, while another asked for a return to Windows 7's "clean UI, clean icon, a unified control panel, no bloat apps, no ads, just a pure performant OS." Davuluri later responded to software engineer Gergely Orosz, saying "we care deeply about developers" and acknowledging Microsoft has "work to do on the experience, both on the everyday usability, from inconsistent dialogs to power user experiences." Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told the Dwarkesh Podcast that the company's business "which today is an end user tools business, will become, essentially an infrastructure business in support of agents doing work." The Recall feature already spooked users when it was initially turned on by default before Microsoft reworked it to be opt-in. Navjot Virk, corporate vice president of Windows experiences, told The Verge that "every user can use [AI agents] when they're ready. It's their choice, they decide." |
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Blender 5.0 has been released with major upgrades including HDR and wide-gamut color support on Linux via Wayland/Vulkan, significant theme and UI improvements, new color-space tools, revamped curve and geometry features, and expanded hardware requirements. 9to5Linux reports: Blender 5.0 also introduces a working color space for Blend files, a new AgX HDR view, a new Convert to Display compositor node, new Rec.2100-PQ and Rec.2100-HLG displays that can be used for color grading for HDR video export, and new ACES 1.3 and 2.0 views as an alternative to AgX and Filmic.
A new "Jump Time by Delta" operator for jumping forward/backward in time by a user-specified delta has been introduced as well, along with a revamped Curve drawing, which better supports the new Curves object type and all of their features, and a new Geometry Attribute constraint. Also new is a "Cylinder" option for curve display type that allows rendering thicker curves without the flat ribbon appearance, support for the Zstd (Zstandard) fast lossless compression algorithm for point caches, as well as a new "Curve Data" panel in edit mode that allows tweaking built-in curve attribute values. A full list of changes can be found here. You can download from the official website. |
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Android's security team published a blog post this week about their experience using Rust. Its title? "Move fast and fix things."
Last year, we wrote about why a memory safety strategy that focuses on vulnerability prevention in new code quickly yields durable and compounding gains. This year we look at how this approach isn't just fixing things, but helping us move faster. The 2025 data continues to validate the approach, with memory safety vulnerabilities falling below 20% of total vulnerabilities for the first time. 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... Data shows that Rust code requires fewer revisions. This trend has been consistent since 2023. Rust changes of a similar size need about 20% fewer revisions than their C++ counterparts... In a self-reported survey from 2022, Google software engineers reported that Rust is both easier to review and more likely to be correct. The hard data on rollback rates and review times validates those impressions. Historically, security improvements often came at a cost. More security meant more process, slower performance, or delayed features, forcing trade-offs between security and other product goals. The shift to Rust is different: we are significantly improving security and key development efficiency and product stability metrics. With Rust support now mature for building Android system services and libraries, we are focused on bringing its security and productivity advantages elsewhere. Android's 6.12 Linux kernel is our first kernel with Rust support enabled and our first production Rust driver. More exciting projects are underway, such as our ongoing collaboration with Arm and Collabora on a Rust-based kernel-mode GPU driver. [They've also been deploying Rust in firmware for years, and Rust "is ensuring memory safety from the ground up in several security-critical Google applications," including Chromium's parsers for PNG, JSON, and web fonts.] 2025 was the first year more lines of Rust code were added to Android than lines of C++ code... |
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Valve has unveiled a new Steam Machine console, taking a second shot at living room gaming a decade after its 2015 Steam Machine initiative failed. The 6-inch cube runs Linux-based SteamOS but plays Windows games through Proton, a compatibility layer built on Wine that translates Microsoft graphical APIs. Valve spent over a decade working on SteamOS and ways to run Windows games on Linux after the original Steam Machines failed. The device promises six times the performance of the Steam Deck handheld using AMD's 2022-2023 technology. In an interaction with The Verge, Valve demonstrated Cyberpunk 2077 running at settings comparable to PS5 Pro or beyond on a 4K television. The console updates games in the background and includes automatic HDMI television control that Valve tested against a warehouse of home entertainment equipment. The system navigates entirely through gamepad controls and resumes games instantly from sleep mode. Valve said pricing will be "comparable to a PC with similar specs" rather than subsidized like traditional consoles. PCs with similar GPUs have cost roughly $1,000 or more. Linux currently plays Windows games better than Windows in side-by-side tests. |