Electrical Current Might Be the Key To a Better Cup of Coffee
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: University of Oregon chemist Christopher Hendon loves his coffee – so much so that studying all the factors that go into creating the perfect cuppa constitutes a significant area of research for him. His latest project: discovering a novel means of measuring the flavor profile of coffee simp … ⌘ Read more

Remembering Seth Nickell
LWN has received the sad news that Seth Nickell passed away, on
April 16, from his father, Eric Nickell:

Many of you knew Seth from his work in the GNOME Usability Project, but his
roots in that community trace back to his high school years. As a father of
a high school junior, I remember being terrified when he flashed the hard
drive of a computer he purchased for himself with this weird “Linux” thing.
And I was a bit awed by the college application essay he wrote about open
source and Linus Tor … ⌘ Read more

Fedora Linux 44 has been released
The Fedora Project has announced
the release of Fedora Linux 44. There are “what’s new”
articles for Fedora\
Workstation, Fedora\
KDE Plasma Desktop, and Fedora\
Atomic Desktops. The Fedora Asahi Remix for Apple Silicon Macs,
ba … ⌘ 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

In Memoriam: Tomáš Kalibera
We have received the sad news that Tomáš Kalibera, a member of the
R Project core team, has
passed away\
after a short illness.

A friend who knew him well wrote to me: he was very happy, and
his work fulfilled him. That is, perhaps, the best thing one can
say about a life in open source — that the work mattered, that it
reached millions, and that the person who did it found meaning in it.

Kalibera was mentioned in … ⌘ Read more

Sovereign Tech Agency Launches New Initiative To Help Open Standards
Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency (Sovereign Tech Fund) has provided critical financial resources to open-source software projects and maintainers the past several years. This has proven to be an incredible effort and today they announced their newest initiative as the Sovereign Tech Standards… ⌘ Read more

Trump Administration Will Pay More Energy Firms to Cancel Wind Farms
The Trump administration says it will reimburse energy companies $885 million to cancel two planned offshore wind farms, with the firms in turn agreeing to put money into oil and gas projects instead. “The deals are modeled after a similar agreement last month with the French energy giant TotalEnergies,” notes the New York Times. “Tota … ⌘ Read more

Notepad++ Finally Lands On macOS as a Native App
BrianFagioli writes: Notepad++ has finally made its way to macOS, and this time it is not through a compatibility layer. A new community-driven port brings the long-standing Windows text editor over as a fully native Mac application, built with Cocoa and compiled for both Apple Silicon and Intel systems. Instead of relying on Wine or similar tools, the project replaces the Windo … ⌘ Read more

pgBackRest is no longer maintained
David Steele, maintainer of the popular pgBackRest backup and restore project for
PostgreSQL, has archived\
the project and announced that it is no longer being maintained.

After a lot of thought, I have decided to stop working on pgBackRest. I did
not come to this decision lightly. pgBackRest has been my passion project for
the last thirteen years, and I was fortunate to have corporate sponsorship f … ⌘ Read more

Kernel prepatch 7.1-rc1
Linus has released 7.1-rc1 and closed the
merge window for this release.

Things look fairly normal, although we do have a few different
projects to cull some old hardware support to help minimize
maintenance burden: phasing out i486 support (configs deleted, code
deletions to follow) and independently starting to remove some
really old networking hardware support, and removing some SoC
support that never went anywhere.

But we’re more than making up for … ⌘ Read more

New Problem for NASA’s ‘Lunar Gateway’: Corrosion in Two Modules Caused by Supplier
In March, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced that the moon-orbiting “Lunar Gateway” space station was being “paused” to focus instead of missions to the moon’s surface. And Ars Technica agrees that the project was essentially “spending billions of dollars to make it more difficult to reach the lunar … ⌘ Read more

How Teachers Fight Students’ Shortening Attention Spans Shorter Activities, Hands-On Projects, and Meditation
The Washington Post reports that some teachers are now implementing “brain breaks” in their classrooms to cope with shorter attention spans, “including limiting screen time; cutting the time students spend on one activity; adding more engaging, hands-on project … ⌘ Read more

Apple M3 Support On Asahi Linux Is Approaching The Original Alpha Quality Of The M1
A new progress report from the Asahi Linux project is now published that highlights recent upstreaming work for the Linux 7.0 kernel release as well as the latest additions to the downstream Asahi Linux code. The Asahi Linux project also pushed out their first updated Asahi installer in nearly two years… ⌘ Read more

Maine Governor Vetoes Data Center Moratorium Bill
Maine Gov. Janet Mills vetoed a bill that would have imposed the nation’s first statewide moratorium on new data centers, saying she supported the idea in principle but would not block a major redevelopment project tied to jobs and local investment. Instead, she said she will create a council to study data centers’ effects while also signing a separate measure to deny them cer … ⌘ Read more

Community Votes to Deny Water to Nuclear Weapons Data Center
A Michigan township has voted to impose a one-year moratorium on providing water to hyperscale data centers, a move aimed at delaying a planned facility that would support Los Alamos National Laboratory’s nuclear weapons research. The moratorium may not be enough to stop the project, however: “the University and LANL plan to break ground on the data cent … ⌘ Read more

New Gas-Powered Data Centers Could Emit More Greenhouse Gases Than Entire Nations
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: New gas projects linked to just 11 data center campuses around the US have the potential to create more greenhouse gases than the country of Morocco emitted in 2024. Emissions estimates from air permit documents examined by WIRED show that these natural gas proj … ⌘ Read more

Intel Lands Tesla As First Major Customer For 14A Chip Technology
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday the EV maker plans to use Intel’s next-generation 14A manufacturing process to make chips at its Terafab project, an advanced AI chip complex Musk has envisioned in Austin. The contract would mark Intel’s first major customer for the technology, a breakt … ⌘ Read more

Just saw the video. Can’t believe that ladder is that expensive. Even in AUD, it is almost $100. It is also 2.5 stars, with 13 reviews. Gulp. Engineering aside (and you are right, it is pretty interesting, and some, if not most of it went over my head), the ladder is rubbish. This is the one I have. Not super, but have been with me for a while, and used quite a bit, still as good as new.

Intel Ends Open Ecosystem Community/Evangelism, Archives Other Open-Source Projects
Over the past number of months there has been a steady flow of Intel open-source projects archived on GitHub amid the corporate restructuring at the company and realigning of their open-source focus. This week another batch of Intel open-source projects were formally archived… ⌘ Read more

[$] Dependency-cooldown discussions warm up
Efforts to introduce malicious code into the open-source supply
chain have been on the rise in recent years, and there is no indication that they
will abate anytime soon. These attacks are often found quickly, but not quickly
enough to prevent the compromised code from being automatically injected into other
projects or code deployed by users where it can wreak havoc. One method of avoiding
supply-chain attacks is to add a delay of a few days before pulling upates in what
is known as a “dep … ⌘ Read more

Fedora Verified: a proposal to recognize Fedora contributor status
The Fedora Project has been wrestling with the question of who should be able to vote in\
Fedora elections recently, with project membership being a major topic at\
the Fedora Council face-to-face held in early February. Now the
project is considering a new contributor status, “Fedora Verified”,
and is [looking\
to get input](https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/fedora-verified-rec … ⌘ Read more

Git 2.54.0 released
Git maintainer Junio Hamano has announced
Git 2.54.0, which includes contributions from 137 people; 66 of those
people are first-time contributors to the project. Changes include the
addition of Git history rewriting, Git’s web interface (gitweb)
“has been taught to be mobile friendly”, and much more. See the
announcement for all improvements, additions, and bug fixes. Hamano
is now taking a short break:

I will go offline for a couple of weeks starting thi … ⌘ Read more

Box64 0.4.2 Begins Working On POWER PPC64LE Backend, Support For SteamRT3 + Proton 11
While FEX-Emu has been garnering a lot of attention due to being sponsored by Valve and slated to be used by the Steam Frame for running Linux x86_64 binaries on AArch64, the Box64 project continues moving along with similar goals for x86_64 binaries on other CPU architectures… ⌘ Read more

GNU Coreutils 9.11 Brings New Performance Improvements: Up To 15x Faster cat
It’s not only the uutil’s Rust Coreutils project seeing performance improvements but some increased healthy competition now from GNU Coreutils. With today’s release of GNU Coreutils 9.11 the wc command is up to multiple times faster and even cat can be up to 15 times faster… ⌘ Read more

New Debian Project Leader Elected For 2026
Sruthi Chandran has been elected the new Debian Project Leader “DPL” after running unopposed in this year’s elections… ⌘ Read more

FSF to OnlyOffice: You Can’t Use the GNU (A)GPL to Take Software Freedom Away
Nextcloud joined a project to create a sovereign replacement for Microsoft Office called “Euro-Office”. But after that project forked OnlyOffice, OnlyOffice suspended its partnership with Nextcloud. “They removed all references to our brand/attribute as required by our license,” argued OnlyOffice CEO Lev Bannov on March 30t … ⌘ Read more

Just cancelled my sponsorship of two developers on Github, sorry 😞 – I’m not going to sponsor going forward if no-one else can be bothered to. It seems silly to be the sole sponsor of another’s work or project 🤦‍♂️

Gazing Into Sam Altman’s Orb Could Solve Ticket Scalping
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Sam Altman’s iris-scanning, humanity-verifying World project announced at an event in San Francisco on Friday that Tinder users around the globe can now put a digital badge on their profiles signaling to potential suitors that they’re a real human, provided they’ve already stared into one of World’s glossy white Orbs … ⌘ Read more

Is Linux Mint In Trouble?
BrianFagioli writes: The developers behind Linux Mint say the project is rethinking its release strategy and moving toward a longer development cycle, with the next version now expected around Christmas 2026. In a monthly update, project lead Clement Lefebvre said the team reached a “crossroads” and needs more flexibility to fix bugs, improve the desktop, and adapt to rapid changes across the Linux ecosystem. The upcoming … ⌘ Read more

@kiwu@twtxt.net I returned home from an on-site week at work. Commute was an adventure every day. It started off with a canceled train on Monday morning. Luckily, some very good mates granted my asylum. But even with shorter rides, I faced delays due to fuckwits on the tracks, then the train was terminated early due to the large delay, so we had to change trains. On the bright side, they then sent an entirely empty one, but I don’t get why they just didn’t continue with the first one instead. Due to another delayed train I didn’t catch my connection and the next one was canceled, so I had to wait for the following one. Super great fun. I’m very exhausted now and am very glad that I had already filed in flex time for tomorrow before the on-site event was scheduled.

Meeting my workmates in person was actually nice. It’s okay to do that once a quarter, I don’t need to do that more often. We should have had more meetings, though, trying to work in the office was expectedly incredibly inefficient. We certainly would have had more topics to actually discuss and think about. And most of them would have really benefited from nearly everybody being in the same room. Anyway.

Today, I even met my workmates from past projects in the office, too. So, the socializing was great.

Linux Mint 23 Making Progress On Ubuntu 26.04 Base, Linux 7.0 Kernel & Wayland
The Linux Mint project published their March 2026 monthly status update where they note the ongoing work toward Mint 23 “Alfa” that will be released under their new longer development lifecycle. Linux Mint 23 will be out for Christmas (December) 2026 atop an Ubuntu 26.04 LTS base… ⌘ Read more

Creating an alien species for Project Hail Mary ⌘ Read more

Zig 0.16.0 released
The Zig project has announced version
0.16.0 of the Zig programming language.

This release features 8 months of work: changes
from 244 different contributors, spread among
1183 commits.

Perhaps most notably, this release debuts I/O\
> as an Interface, but don’t sleep on the [Language\
> Chan … ⌘ Read more

Neil deGrasse Tyson Confronts Andy Weir on the Science of Project Hail Mary ⌘ Read more

GreenBoost Memory Orchestrator For NVIDIA GPUs Introduces GreenBoost-Proton For Gaming
Last month we showcased GreenBoost as an open-source means of augmenting NVIDIA GPU vRAM with system RAM and NVMe storage. This memory tiering solution for NVIDIA GPUs was developed by an open-source developer with a focus on CUDA and allowing larger LLMs to be handled on graphics cards with smaller vRAM capacities. There was a setback to the project due to NVIDIA legal but now the project is going in new form and also has … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Released
“The new Linux kernel was released and it’s kind of a big deal,” writes longtime Slashdot reader rexx mainframe. “Here is what you can expect.” Linuxiac reports: A key update in Linux 7.0 is the removal of the experimental label from Rust support. That (of course) does not make Rust a dominant language in kernel development, but it is still an important step in its gradual integration into the project. Another notable security-related c … ⌘ Read more

[$] A build system aimed at license compliance
The OpenWrt One is a
router powered by the open-source firmware from the OpenWrt project; it was also the
subject of a keynote at SCALE in 2025
given by Denver Gingerich of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC),
which played a big role in developing the router. Gingerich returned to
the [conference in\
2026](h … ⌘ Read more

Servo now on crates.io
The Servo project has announced
the first release of servo as a crate for use as a
library.

As you can see from the version number, this release is not a 1.0
release. In fact, we still haven’t finished discussing what 1.0 means
for Servo. Nevertheless, the increased version number reflects our
growing confidence in Servo’s embedding API and its ability to meet
some users’ needs.

In … ⌘ Read more

‘Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ and ‘Project Hail Mary’ Combine for Best Box Office in 7 Years
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie “is officially the year’s highest-grossing film to date with $629 million at the global box office,” reports Variety — and it will likely earn over $1 billion. Project Hail Mary now becomes the year’s second highest-grossing movie, with four-week ticket sales over … ⌘ Read more

Greg Kroah-Hartman Tests New ‘Clanker T1000’ Fuzzing Tool for Linux Patches
The word clanker — a disparaging term for AI and robots — “has made its way into the Linux kernel,” reports the blog It’s FOSS “thanks to Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux stable kernel maintainer and the closest thing the project has to a second-in-command.”

He’s been quietly running what looks like an AI-assisted fuzzing tool o … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net maybe that’s your next project! :-P Welcome back from Vacationland!

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

AMD’s GAIA Now Allows Building Custom AI Agents Via Chat, Becomes “True Desktop App”
In addition to their efforts around the Lemonade SDK itself, AMD software engineers working on their AI initiatives continue to be investing quite a bit into the Lemonade-using GAIA, the project that originally stood for “Generative AI Is Awesome”. AMD’s GAIA now allows building your own custom AI agents via chatting with GAIA as well as becoming a “true desktop app” so it’s easier to deploy across Windows, Linux, and macOS envi … ⌘ Read more

D7VK 1.7 Brings More Improvements For Legacy Direct3D On Vulkan
D7VK as the open-source project that began as a fork of DXVK in adding support for Direct3D 7 atop Vulkan has with time extended its range to also supporting Direct3D 6, 5, and 3 APIs. Out today is D7VK 1.7 in continuing to better support those vintage versions of Microsoft’s Direct3D API… ⌘ Read more

FEX 2604 Released With Better Memory Savings For Running x86_64 Apps/Games On ARM64
Out today is the newest monthly update to FEX for this emulator for running Linux x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 (ARM64) Linux systems, including games and the likes of Steam Play with Windows games. This Valve-sponsored project that is quite important for the upcoming Steam Frame has rolled out more performance improvements, memory savings, and other improvements with FEX 2604… ⌘ Read more

OpenAI To Limit New Model Release On Cybersecurity Fears
OpenAI is reportedly preparing a new cybersecurity product for a small group of partners, out of concern that a broader rollout could wreak havoc if it were released more widely. If that move sounds familiar, it’s because Anthropic took a similar limited-release approach with its Mythos model and Project Glasswing initiative. Axios reports: OpenAI introduced its “T … ⌘ Read more

Little Snitch Comes To Linux To Expose What Your Software Is Really Doing
BrianFagioli writes: Little Snitch, the well known macOS tool that shows which applications are connecting to the internet, is now being developed for Linux. The developer says the project started after experimenting with Linux and realizing how strange it felt not knowing what connections the system was making. Existing tools … ⌘ Read more

[$] A flood of useful security reports
The idea of using large language models (LLMs) to discover security problems is
not new. Google’s Project Zero
investigated
the feasibility of using LLMs for security research in 2024. At the time, they
found that models could identify real problems, but required a good deal of
structure and hand-holding to do so on small benchmark problems. In February
2026, Anthropic
published a report
claim … ⌘ Read more

Relicensing versus license compatibility (FSF Blog)
The Free Software Foundation has published
a short article on relicensing versus license compatibility.

The FSF’s Licensing and\
> Compliance Lab receives many questions and license violation reports
related to projects that had their license changed by a downstream
distributor, or that are combined from two or more programs under
different licenses. We collaborated wit … ⌘ 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