Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, firefox, gdk-pixbuf2, giflib, grafana, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, LibRaw, OpenEXR, PackageKit, pcs, python3.11, python3.12, python3.9, sudo, tigervnc, vim, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, yggdrasil, and yggdrasil-worker-package-manager), Debian (calibre, firefox-esr, and openjdk-17), Fedora (asterisk, binaryen, buildah, dokuwiki, lemonldap-ng, libexif, libgcrypt, miniupnpd, openvpn, podman, python3.9, rust-rpm-sequo … ⌘ Read more

Use Gmail’s ‘Manage Subscriptions’ Tool to Cut Down on Inbox Clutter
Find and remove newsletter subscriptions more easily using Gmail’s built-in tools for organizing bulk emails. ⌘ Read more

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 30, 2026
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Famfs; Python packaging council; Zig concurrency; pages and folios; Strawberry music manager; 7.1 merge window.

• Briefs: GnuPG 2.5.19; Copy Fail; Plasma security; Fedora 44; Ubuntu 26.04; Niri 26.04; pip 26.1; RIP Seth Nickell; RIP Tomáš Kalibera; Quotes; …

• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patc … ⌘ Read more

Security review of Plasma Login Manager (SUSE Security Team Blog)
SUSE’s Security Team has published a detailed\
blog post on their recent review of the Plasma\
Login Manager version 6.6.2,
which was forked from the SDDM display\
manager.

While most of the code [remains t … ⌘ Read more

Wayland Developers Target June For Weston 16 Release
Weston 16.0 could ship by the end of June with good color management and HDR support along with other new features for this reference Wayland compositor… ⌘ Read more

[$] Strawberry is ripe for managing music collections
There are dozens of music-player applications for Linux; the options range
from bare-bones programs that only play local files to full-blown
music-management projects with a full suite of tools for managing (and playing)
a music collection. Strawberry
is in the latter category; it has a bumper crop of features, including smart
playlists, support for editing music metadata tags, the ability to organize music
files, and more. ⌘ Read more

Fedora 44 Released For Living On The Leading-Edge Of Linux Innovations
Fedora 44 is officially released for providing the very latest Linux innovations with GNOME 50 being the default desktop of Fedora Workstation 44, an improved KDE experience with Plasma 6.6 complete with the Plasma Log-in Manager, and other up-to-date software packages… ⌘ Read more

DeepSeek V4 Arrives With Near State-of-the-Art Intelligence At 1/6th the Cost
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: The whale has resurfaced. DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup offshoot of High-Flyer Capital Management quantitative analysis firm, became a near-overnight sensation globally in January 2025 with the release of its open source R1 model that matched proprietary U.S. giants … ⌘ Read more

CachyOS Introduces New Default GUI Package Manager, Kyber For NVMe I/O Scheduler
The April 2026 ISO refresh of the Arch Linux based CachyOS is now available with a variety of refinements, new hardware support, and other polishing… ⌘ Read more

Fans Angry Over Pokemon Go Champion’s Disqualification For Allegedly Shaking the Table
It’s “the curious case of… the Pokémon Go pro who celebrated too hard,” reports the gaming news site Aftermath. It all started on the first weekend in April…

Firestar73, a competitive Pokémon Go player who placed seventh at last year’s world championships, managed to narrowly cinch a game-five fin … ⌘ Read more

LACT 0.9 Released With UI Updates, Voltage-Frequency Curve Editor For NVIDIA
LACT, one of the leading open-source solutions to provide a graphics card management GUI that works across AMD / NVIDIA / Intel graphics hardware on Linux, is out with a major update this weekend… ⌘ Read more

Free Software Foundation Says ‘Responsible AI’ Licenses Which Restrict Harmful Uses are Unethical and Nonfree
The Free Software Foundation’s Licensing and Compliance Manager published a blog post this week to explicitly state that”Responsible AI” Licenses (RAIL) are nonfree and unethical. The licenses restrict AI and ML software “from being used in a specific list of h … ⌘ Read more

[$] On pages and folios
The kernel coverage here at LWN often touches on memory-management topics
and, as a result, tends to talk a lot about both pages and folios. As the
folio transition in the kernel has moved forward, it has often become
difficult to decide which term to use in writing that is meant to be both
approachable and technically correct. As this work continues, it will be
increasingly common to use “folio” rather than page. This article is
intended to be a convenient reference for readers wanting to differentiate
the tw … ⌘ Read more

France Confirms Data Breach At Government Agency That Manages Citizens’ IDs
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The French government agency that handles the issuing and management of citizens’ identity documents, including national IDs, passports, and immigration documents, confirmed Wednesday that it experienced a data breach. In an announcement, the Agence Nationale des Titres Secur … ⌘ Read more

[$] Famfs, FUSE, and BPF
The famfs filesystem first showed up on the\
mailing lists in early 2024; since then, it has been the topic of
regular discussions at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management and
BPF (LSFMM+BPF) Summit. It has also, as result of those discussions, been
through some significant changes since that initial posting. So it is not
surprising that a suggestion that it needed to be rewritten yet again was
not entirely well received. How much more … ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD Working On Intel FRED Support, Laptop Improvements Continue
FreeBSD is out today with their Q1-2026 status report to outline the many different development initiatives their open-source developers have participated in over the past quarter. There is a lot of hardware enablement efforts ongoing as well as continuing to make a more compelling desktop experience and also improving GUI and management options for FreeBSD systems… ⌘ Read more

A Lot Of Memory Management “MM” Improvements Merged For Linux 7.1
Andrew Morton recently sent out his various “MM” related pull requests for the ongoing Linux 7.1 kernel. There are a number of memory management optimizations in this next kernel version, which is always nice to see but all the more so these days with the inflated RAM pricing and other computer component prices… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Kernel Graphics Driver Changes Merged With Intel & AMD Leading The Way
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver and accelerator driver changes for Linux 7.1 were recently merged to Git. As usual, it’s the Intel and AMD kernel graphics drivers seeing a bulk of the interesting open-source GPU driver activity. Plus ongoing work to make Rust-based GPU drivers more viable… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.7 Ready With Wayland Session Management, Other New Improvements
KDE Plasma 6.7 enjoyed a lot of recent feature development work thanks to a developer sprint in Graz, Austria. Also because of that developer sprint, This Week In Plasma wasn’t published last week and so in turn a new issue is now available to highlight the changes over the past two weeks… ⌘ Read more

KDE Gear 26.04 released
Version 26.04 of
the KDE Gear collection of applications has been released. Notable changes
include improvements in the Merkuro\
Calendar schedule view and event editor, support for threads in the NeoChat Matrix chat client, as well as
the ability to add keyboard shortcuts in the Dolphin file manager “to nearly any
option in any menu, plugin or extension”. See the [c … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de LOL. I think I get the idea. I am concerned about AI too. Managers starting with “I don’t know anything about this, but here is what says”. Infuriating.

I came across this one today, here is a gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/opinion/art-artificial-intelligence.html?unlocked_article_code=1.bFA.XNiu.ZukFfdNl3Al1&smid=nytcore-ios-share

Mesa 26.1-rc1 Released For Testing With Many New Vulkan Extensions & Optimizations
Eric Engestrom stepped up again to serve as Mesa release manager for this quarter’s Mesa 26.1 feature release. Mesa 26.1-rc1 was just released in kicking off the weekly release candidate dance until Mesa 26.1 stable is ready for debut in May… ⌘ Read more

Chrome Now Lets You Turn AI Prompts Into Repeatable ‘Skills’
Google is rolling out a Chrome feature called “Skills” that lets users save Gemini prompts as reusable one-click workflows they can run across multiple tabs. The feature also includes preset Skills from Google. It’s launching first for Chrome desktop users set to US English. The Verge reports: Once you have access to the feature, it can be managed by t … ⌘ Read more

AMD Ready With CPPC Performance Priority & Dynamic/Raw EPP In Linux 7.1
All of the power management subsystem feature updates have been merged for the Linux 7.1 kernel… ⌘ Read more

The Good & The Bad When Using LLMs To Write Spack Packages
The Spack package manager is quite popular in the HPC / supercomputer space for scientific software. Even with the more selective niche than a typical general purpose OS package manager, large language models (LLMs) have already proven capable of being useful in generating new Spack packages. But there have also been some headaches involved too for Spack developers… ⌘ Read more

Botched IT Upgrade Ended Liquor Sales for the Entire State of Mississippi
Mississippi has one warehouse — run by a contractor — that sells all the liquor for the entire state of 2.9 million people. “If a restaurant or store anywhere in Mississippi wanted a bottle of Jim Beam, they had to order it from the wholesale warehouse,” reports the Washington Post.

But then Mississippi’s warehouse-managing con … ⌘ Read more

CMake Pursuing Tighter Integration With Package Managers, Other Improvements
While the Meson build system has been capturing much of the limelight in recent years by open-source projects, the cross-platform CMake build system also shows no signs of slowing down and continues evolving with new features and functionality… ⌘ Read more

AI Is Coming for Car Salesmen
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: An auto dealer software company is pitching AI-powered kiosks designed to replace car salesmen on showroom floors. Automotive News says the industry is “skeptical.” But be honest – would you really rather deal with the average car lot shark than a computer?

Epikar, a South Korean company that cooks up digital management solutions for car dealers, has named its n … ⌘ Read more

Intel NPU Linux Driver To Allow Limiting Frequency For Power & Thermal Management
The Intel IVPU accelerator driver used on Linux for the neural processing unit (NPU) on Core Ultra SoCs saw a patch posted for allowing the NPU clock frequency to be limited in the name of power and thermal management… ⌘ Read more

Mir-Based Miracle-WM 0.9 Introduces A WebAssembly Plugin System
Miracle-WM as the Wayland compositor / window manager built atop Canonical’s Mir project is out with a big new feature release. This “hackable” and i3/Sway-inspired Wayland compositor has landed a WebAssembly-based plug-in system for opening up new possibilities as well as a new Rust API with this week’s v0.9 release… ⌘ Read more

[$] Ripping CDs and converting audio with fre:ac
It has been a little while since LWN last surveyed tools for managing a digital\
music collection. In the intervening decades, many Linux users have moved on to
music streaming services, found them wanting, and are looking to curate their own
collection once again. There are plenty of choices when it comes to
ripping, managing, and playing digital audio; so many, in fact, that it can be a
bit daunting. After years of tinkering, I’ve found a few tools … ⌘ Read more

Nix privilege escalation security advisory
The NixOS project has announced\
a critical vulnerability in many versions of the Nix package
manager’s daemon. The flaw was introduced as part of a fix for a\
prior vulnerability in 2024. According to the advisory,
a … ⌘ Read more

Chrome Is Finally Getting Vertical Tabs
Chrome is finally adding built-in vertical tabs, “which will move the tabs to the side of the browser window, making it easier to read full page titles and manage tab groups,” reports TechCrunch. The company is also introducing an immersive reading mode for a distraction-free, text-focused experience. From the report: The company notes that the new vertical tabs can be enabled at any time by rig … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Calls For Robot Taxes, Public Wealth Fund, and 4-Day Workweek To Tackle AI Disruption
OpenAI is proposing (PDF) sweeping policy changes to help manage the societal disruption caused by advanced AI, including taxes on automated labor, a public wealth fund, and experiments with a four-day workweek. The company said the policy document offered a series of “initial ideas” to address … ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD Aims To Better Track Laptop Hardware That Works Or Doesn’t For Their OS
Over the past year the FreeBSD project has been making much progress on making it more viable to run this BSD operating system on laptop hardware. They have worked on better graphics driver support, improved power management / suspend, making sure audio is working, and even rolling out a KDE desktop option from the FreeBSD OS installer to ease the deployment on desktops. While that engineering work continues, they are also working now to … ⌘ Read more

Peter Thiel Is Betting Big On Solar-Powered Cow Collars
Halter, a New Zealand agtech startup now valued at $2 billion, has raised $220 million to expand its AI-powered cattle management system. “Halter is now valued at $2 billion following the Series E, which was led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund with participation from Blackbird, DCVC, Bond, Bessemer, and several others,” reports Inc. From the report: alter plans to … ⌘ Read more

The Document Foundation Removes Dozens of Collabora Developers
Long-time GNOME/OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice contributor
Michael Meeks is now general manager of Collabora Productivity. And earlier this month he complained when LibreOffice decided to bring back its LibreOffice Online project, as reported by Neowin, which had been inactive since 2022. After the original project went dormant — to which Collabora was a … ⌘ Read more

AMD P-State Driver Introducing New Features With Linux 7.1
A few Linux kernel releases have passed since there have been any new features to talk about for the AMD P-State driver for CPU frequency scaling / power management with modern AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors. But for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel there are some new features now ready for mainline… ⌘ Read more

AMD GPU Driver Sees DC Idle Manager & Multi-SDMA Engine Optimization For Linux 7.1
With Linux 7.0-rc6 having released on Sunday, we are hitting the point of the cut-off of new feature material being allowed into the Direct Rendering Manager’s DRM-Next tree of queuing new graphics/display/accelerator feature code ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window. As presumably the last AMDGPU/AMDKFD feature pull ahead of Linux 7.1, today’s pull request from AMD contains some noteworthy final enhancements… ⌘ Read more

Wayland Protocols 1.48 Released With XDG Session Management
Wayland Protocols 1.48 is out today with the long-awaited XDG Session Management protocol in tow as well as several new experimental protocols… ⌘ Read more

Claude Code’s Source Code Leaks Via npm Source Maps
Grady Martin writes: A security researcher has leaked a complete repository of source code for Anthropic’s flagship command-line tool. The file listing was exposed via a Node Package Manager (npm) mapping, with every target publicly accessible on a Cloudflare R2 storage bucket. $ du -hs .35M .$ find -type f | sed ’s/^.*\.//’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -bVr 1332 ts … ⌘ Read more

For the first time in years, I managed to get out and throw a round of disc golf. Had a good time playing Vietnam Veterans Park in Kannapolis, throwing +10 over 9 holes, with my only par being thanks to a 40’ “putt” with my MRV. And the weather was perfect.

I hope to play another round soon.

Tech CEOs Suddenly Love Blaming AI For Mass Job Cuts
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Sweeping job cuts at Big Tech companies have become an annual tradition. How executives explain those decisions, however, has changed. Out are buzzwords like efficiency, over-hiring, and too many management layers. Today, all explanations stem from artificial intelligence (AI). In recent weeks, giants including Google, Amazon, … ⌘ Read more

‘Ads Are Popping Up On the Fridge and It Isn’t Going Over Well’
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Walking into his kitchen, Tim Yoder recoiled at a message on his refrigerator door: “Shop Samsung water filters.” Yoder, a supply-chain manager in Chicago, owns a Samsung Electronics Family Hub fridge. He paid $1,400 for an appliance that came with a 32-inch screen on the door that allows him to control other Samsung gadget … ⌘ Read more

wlroots 0.20 Released,Sway 1.12-rc1 Available For Testing With Color Management
Released today was wlroots 0.20 as this Wayland support library used by some Wayland compositors for doing much of the “heavy lifting” of compositor bring-up. Following wlroots 0.20, Sway 1.12-rc1 was released for testing as this closely-aligned Wayland compositor inspired by the i3 window manager… ⌘ Read more

mdadm 4.6 Released With Boot Failure Fixes, New Lockless Bitmap
The mdadm utility for managing software RAID on Linux systems is out with a new release that adds new features while addressing some recent boot failure issues that were reported… ⌘ Read more

Loongson Linux Display Driver No Longer Orphaned
The Loongson Direct Rendering Manager driver for handling the display controller on LS7A/LS2K SoCs is no longer orphaned with new Loongson engineers stepping up to maintain the code moving forward… ⌘ Read more

SystemD Adds Optional ‘birthDate’ Field for Age Verification to JSON User Records
“The systemd project merged a pull request adding a new birthDate field to the JSON user records managed by userdb in response to the age verification laws of California, Colorado, and Brazil,” reports the blog It’s FOSS.

They note that the field “can only be set by administrators, not by users themselves” — it’s … ⌘ Read more

Jeff Bezos Seeking $100 Billion to Buy Manufacturing Companies, ‘Transform’ Them With AI
Jeff Bezos “is in early talks to raise $100 billion,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “for a new fund that would buy up manufacturing companies and seek to use AI technology to accelerate their path to automation.”

“The Amazon.com founder is meeting with some of the world’s largest asset managers to raise … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Maker Canonical Announces MicroCloud Cluster Manager
Ubuntu maker Canonical announced today MicroCloud Cluster Manager that is now in beta as a new cloud platform for managing lightweight cloud clusters… ⌘ Read more