Linux’s RAID6 Check Tool Sees 3x Performance Via Batching
For those that use Linux’s raid6check command for checking/repairing an MD RAID6 software RAID array’s device for errors, newly-merged code is showing up to a 3x performance improvement… ⌘ Read more

Canva To Cut Or Relocate 22% of Global Workforce
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Canva is cutting or relocating more than 1,200 jobs, representing 22% of its global workforce, as part of a major restructure that includes laying off staff who helped build the Australian-founded design platform. The changes mirror a trend across the technology sector, where software companies are fighting to stay competitive ag … ⌘ Read more

AMD Releases ZenDNN 6.1 With New Kernels & Optimizations
Last month Intel and AMD jointly announced they would be collaborating on software optimizations with PyTorch/oneDNN. That already led to the UXL Foundation’s release of oneDNN 3.14 with initial AMD Zen optimizations. It looks though like for now at least AMD will also continue to concurrently push new work into their ZenDNN library and not exclusively tied to oneDNN. Out today is ZenDNN 6.1… ⌘ Read more

SUSE To Cut One In Ten Employees Because of AI
SUSE plans to cut roughly 10% of its 1,900-person workforce, with CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen saying “automation and AI” are reducing the need for some roles and allowing the open source software company to operate with less overhead and flatter management structures. “We are announcing a reduction of SUSE’s global workforce of approximately 10 percent,” said Van Leeuwen in an emai … ⌘ Read more

The Linux Kernel Preparing To Remove The Last Of Its MMX Optimized Code
For what will likely be merged to the Linux 7.5 kernel, the mainline kernel is preparing to drop its last optimization its been carrying for far outdated MMX processors. This affects the likes of Intel Pentium MMX and Pentium II processors running modern software with up-to-date kernels when Linux 7.5 is released in 2027… ⌘ Read more

The New York Times Sues Brave Web Browser For AI Scraping, Bypassing Paywalls
The New York Times and several other publishers have sued (PDF) Brave Software, accusing the browser maker of scraping their websites without permission and helping users bypass paywalls. The Verge reports: According to a complaint (PDF) filed by the companies that run New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orla … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s Canada Timezone Troubles Leave Admins Fixing Calendars, Pretending They’re In Bogota
Microsoft is scrambling to fix time-zone problems across Outlook, Power Automate, Fabric, SharePoint and other products after parts of Canada stopped observing seasonal clock changes on November 1. “The company has confirmed problems across a chunk of its software estate, leaving some c … ⌘ Read more

FreeRDP 3.33 Released With WebAssembly Support, Huge Influx Of Activity Due To AI
The FreeRDP 3.33 software released today as the newest version of this open-source Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation… ⌘ Read more

Steam Survey - October 2026 shows an uptick for the Linux user share
Valve just published the Steam Hardware & Software Survey for October 2026, showing an uptick in the Linux user share putting it back to nearly 4%.

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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more

Experts Expect ‘Security Reckoning’ As AI Tools Find And Exploit Software Bugs
The Washington Post reports:

Tens of thousands of South Koreans had their financial data exposed online in recent weeks after at least nine major banks there suffered cyberattacks that suggested a dark future for online security. One man, a 26-year-old living in southern China, was allegedly behind the attacks, according t … ⌘ Read more

In more frustrating news, I did something to my primary laptop, and now it crawls along like a 2005 Celeron trying to run Windows Vista.

My laptop is nothing too special (a Lenovo powered by an i7-1255U (4+8) @ 4.70 GHz with integrated “Iris Xe” graphics), but I’ve been running Manjaro Linux (with KDE Plasma) on it for the past couple of years, and apart from the odd pamac / pacman / “Add Remove Software” inconsistency (or Plasma widget issue), it’s been running pretty well.

Then, a few days ago, it started bugging about updates, and yesterday it added complaints about an unsupported kernel, so I finally pulled the trigger on it, and boy do I regret it.

I initially kept having issues downloading all of the updates (it was trying to download some kind of non-existent Quake-related library, which I had to remove), and I also had issues getting rid of the unsupported 7.1 kernel (due to some “meta” packages that had been installed), but in the end, I resolved both issues, got the kernel removed and the updates installed, and everything seemed fine after the post-update reboot… for about 10 minutes.

And that’s when the machine just decided to start moving at 1/3 speed: typing, moving the cursor, changing windows - everything started acting like it was 2008.

When I first tried to diagnose it, top showed kwin_wayland eating 50% of the CPU, and plasmashell another 10%, but it wasn’t consistent (they both came and went). I disabled all of the desktop effects, which helped some, as did blanking my plasma config (setting my desktop back to default), but things are still noticeably laggier than they were a few days ago.

Someone online suggested freeing up 25% space total on my root drive (which typically runs 90-95% full), so I’ve been cleaning up (and offloading) as much as I can. If that doesn’t work and I don’t find a solution by the end of the week, I’ll probably have to backup my data, wipe the machine clean, and start fresh. 🙃

AI Use In The Linux Kernel, Microsoft Defender On Linux & Other October Highlights
October brought the releases of Linux 7.3, Ubuntu 26.10, the KDE Plasma 6.8 desktop, and a wealth of other open-source software releases. The expanding use of AI/LLMs within Linux kernel development also made for interesting discussions in October. Microsoft bringing their Defender software to the Linux desktop was perhaps the biggest surprise out of October. Here is a look back at the past month… ⌘ Read more

CUDA Oxide 0.3 Vastly Improves Rust Support For NVIDIA CUDA Programming
NVIDIA software engineers released CUDA Oxide 0.3 for closing out October. CUDA Oxide as a reminder is their experimental Rust to CUDA compiler that has been seeing a lot of activity in recent months… ⌘ Read more

@shinyoukai@twtxt.net Yeah, I think you can get pretty far with a few careful lines of config. But what I have here is a bit more sophisticated. Picket fingerprints connecting clients and is table to work out for example what software and stack your client is, if it really is Chrome or you’re pretneding to be Chrome.

Microsoft Announces Open Source Tool Evaluating Your Software’s Optimization For AI Coding Agents
The problem? Understanding how AI coding agents interact with the software you build. “Whether you’re maintaining an SDK, building a command-line interface, or publishing an MCP server or skills… you need to understand whether agents can discover and use what you ship, and what yo … ⌘ Read more

Free Software Foundation Hosts Free ‘Encryptfest’ Event on Sunday
The Free Software Foundation’s “EncryptFest” today covers both encryption and privacy. The free two-hour event runs from 13:00-15:00 Eastern Daylight Time (17:00-19:00 UTC), and includes:

— A discussion on “bulk surveillance, and how encryption protects personal privacy”
— A short video from renowned cryptographer Bruce Schneier.
— A discussio … ⌘ Read more

New Wayland Protocol Proposed For VNC/Remote Software
Prominent Wayland developer Simon Ser sent out a merge request today for introducing the new ext-transient-output protocol. With ext-transient-output, it’s intent is for helping remoting software like VNC servers in a Wayland world… ⌘ Read more

CIOs Admit They Are Being Forced To Upgrade Enterprise IT
Computer Weekly reports:

A Censuswide survey of 2,018 CIOs and senior IT decision-makers at large organisations in the US and UK for independent software maintenance provider Origina has found that organisations spend almost $13m on upgrades pushed by IT providers. On average, 28% of enterprise software budgets go on upgrades, migrations and licensing changes d … ⌘ Read more

People Are Vibe Coding Their Way to Better TVs
Frustrated by intrusive ads, sluggish interfaces, and data tracking, smart TV owners are using AI coding tools and open-source projects to strip unwanted software from their televisions and build customized home screens. The Verge reports: Several vibe-coded TV-debloating projects exploded in popularity over the weekend. Cleanyourtv (known as tv-vibehack until the 19th), t … ⌘ Read more

oneDNN 3.14 Released With ACE Support, Initial AMD Zen Optimizations
The UXL Foundation announced today the release of oneDNN 3.14 as the latest feature update to this library providing optimized deep learning operations for software like PyTorch, TensorFlow, OpenVINO, and others. While oneDNN began as an Intel software project, making this version notable is beginning to see AMD Zen CPU optimizations land in oneDNN proper… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Workqueue Changes Bring A “10 To 100 Times Faster” Optimization
Adding to all the exciting performance optimizations and other improvements for Linux 7.4 is an exciting workqueue improvement. It’s not too often getting to talk about “10 to 100 times faster” software improvements… ⌘ Read more

Modular’s MAX Source Code Now Fully Opened, Under New MAX License
Back in August Modular’s Mojo language was open-sourced following the acquisition of Chris Lattner’s company by Qualcomm. The latest achievement now out of the company is their MAX software being fully opened up with the entire source tree available… ⌘ Read more

x86 Kernel Shadow Stacks Being Worked On For Linux As Powerful Control Flow Protection
Linux user-space for several years had shadow stack support for hardware-enforced control-flow enforcement in defending against return oriented programming (ROP) attacks. Intel Tigerlake and newer CPUs or AMD Zen 3 and newer have the necessary hardware shadow stacks support. Shadow stacks have been effective for helping user-space software fend ROP attacks while now there is new work toward bringing shadow stack support for k … ⌘ Read more

Intel & AMD Now Collaborating On Software Optimizations With PyTorch/oneDNN
Intel has long worked on tuning their oneDNN neural network library for their hardware and saw its adoption by PyTorch and other AI frameworks. AMD has maintained ZenDNN as their downstream fork that is oneDNN API compatible while catering to their Zen processor designs. As an interesting twist, AMD and Intel jointly announced today they will be collaborating around oneDNN for PyTorch and pushing the AMD Zen improvements into oneDNN… ⌘ Read more

Linux Foundation Estimates 25% Of New Pull Requests To Be Low-Quality AI Slop
The Linux Foundation published a new study today around the impact of generative AI on open-source software development. One key takeaway is that ~25% of new open-source software pull requests amount to AI slop… ⌘ Read more

Wine Ported to OpenBSD
Wine has been successfully ported to OpenBSD, with developers reporting that dozens of 64-bit Windows applications now run on the operating system. “Even the Remaster of The Witcher 3 which released just last month runs, and runs well,” writes Thomas Frohwein, OpenBSD developer and ports maintainer. OSnews reports: The biggest limitation seems to be the lack of support for WoW64, so 32bit Windows software won’t work. Still, this … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de The vast majority, yes. However, I know it’s hard to believe, I have seen black sheep that actually improved the code base. Sometimes. Much more often, it’s not the case and I’m far from really understanding the merge request that I’m supposed to review.

One really looses the feeling for the software quickly. Those who think this is a bad thing are in the minority, unsurprisingly.

Canonical’s Multipass 1.17 Adds Direct Support For Non-Ubuntu Linux Distros
Canonical’s Multipass software is used for orchestrating Ubuntu virtual instances with a single command to launch Ubuntu VMs across Windows, macOS, and Linux. Multipass 1.17 was released today and they are now offering direct support for enabling non-Ubuntu Linux distributions as well… ⌘ Read more

GNU Linux-libre 7.3-gnu Removes More Firmware Blobs
GNU Linux-libre 7.3 is now available following yesterday’s Linux 7.3 release. The GNU Linux-libre downstream continues stripping out driver/hardware support where dependent upon firmware blobs or other proprietary elements deemed out of line with free software ideals… ⌘ Read more

FSF Criticizes Raspberry Pi DRM Blocking RAM Upgrades
The Free Software Foundation “has never supported Raspberry Pi,” writes their deputy directory Sean O’Brien, “as it depends on nonfree software for the boot process, leaving an important part of the computer outside the user’s control.”

But they’re now decrying “an even more intrusive restriction on user freedom” — the binary-blob bootloader changes that limit your a … ⌘ Read more

Servo Gets CSS Grid Working, Threadboost Offering Big Speed-Ups
Servo’s August status report has finally appeared for outlining progress made on this open-source, Rust-based browser engine. This follows the recent release of the Servo 0.6 software, including the Servoshell demo browser… ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.20 Released With CD-ROM Support Change
Wine 11.20 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this software for enjoying Windows games and apps on Linux. We are quickly approaching the point where this development work will culminate into the Wine 12.0 stable release in early 2027… ⌘ Read more

AI Resurrects AVX-512 Support For Mesa’s LLVMpipe Software Driver
With pending code for Mesa, the LLVMpipe software-based Gallium3D/OpenGL driver could soon become faster on modern systems that support AVX-512. That’s assuming the AI/LLVM-generated code is all in order… ⌘ Read more

Intel LLM-Scaler-vLLM PV 1.5 Brings Big Improvements
Intel software engineers today released the latest version of LLM-Scaler-vLLM PV 1.5, their containerized Docker stack providing a convenient AI/LLM experience atop Intel Arc Graphics hardware and born out of their Project Battlematrix initiative… ⌘ Read more

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com

and/or the people in charge realize that “enterprise-class” and “vibe-coded” are mutually exclusive software concepts

I’m really uncertain about this, to be honest. Short-term, you can vibe-code a ton of stuff and get away with it. I think that quality/correctness only matters for a small fraction of software out there. But long-term? I guess that then depends on whether you’re able to still pay the AI bills. Maintenance/refactoring is going to be veeeeeeeeeeery expensive, and virtually no human will be able to do those tasks. Or, you know, just rip off your customers and don’t sell any long-lasting support contracts in the first place.

I dunno. 🤷‍♀️

I hope things get better for you, @movq@www.uninformativ.de (and for anyone else dealing with the same issues).

Thanks! 🙏

Bank of America Hired 1,000 Contractors to Patch Software Flaws Exposed By Anthropic’s Mythos
Bank of America hired 1,000 outside contractors to help patch software vulnerabilities exposed by advanced AI models, including Anthropic’s Mythos. The effort added hundreds of millions of dollars in third-quarter expenses. CNBC reports: In an interview after the bank’s third-quarter earnings … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Releases Microsoft Defender For The Linux Desktop
Microsoft’s newest software release for Linux is… Microsoft Defender for the Linux desktop. Microsoft Defender has been ported to Linux to “secure Linux desktops” with Microsoft acknowledging that “more developers begin to use Linux desktops” and thus bringing their security application and threat-protection product to Linux desktops to complement their prior ill-used Linux server support… ⌘ Read more

Yeah, things aren’t quite that bad where I work yet (thanks to no one wanting to pay the outrageous bills associated with the “frontier models”), but some people keep pushing for it. Personally, I’m still hoping that either the bubble bursts real soon and/or the people in charge realize that “enterprise-class” and “vibe-coded” are mutually exclusive software concepts, but who knows.

In the meantime, at my work, we’re still doing mandatory human PR reviews (with optional copilot ones), and there’s a big push for “respectful” AI use (as in being respectful of others, like always reading any text / code the AI generated for you before asking someone else to). We’ll see how it goes.

I hope things get better for you, @movq@www.uninformativ.de (and for anyone else dealing with the same issues).

US Tech Giants Warn Europe That Data Sovereignty Requirements Could Cost $128 Billion
A study commissioned by CCIA Europe, whose members include Amazon, Google, and Meta, estimates that the EU’s proposed Cloud and AI Development Act could impose 115 billion euros ($128 billion) in costs over a decade as governments and companies migrate workloads and rewrite software. The figure is more tha … ⌘ Read more

Epic Games To Improve Easy Anti-Cheat On Linux With Anti-Cheat Systemd Service & eBPF
In addition to Epic Games announced a preview of their new Epic Games Launcher, including Linux support, they also announced plans to improve their Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) software on Linux. Along with this improved EAC they are also working on official Linux support for the popular Fortnite game… ⌘ Read more

AI usage at work has risen to absurd and moronic levels.

Entire dev teams getting dismantled and fired.

The people that work in accounting are expected to write their own accounting software (or rather, let AI do it). Same for marketing. And everybody else.

Former “tech nerds”, whom I used to respect, tell me that they haven’t read any code in months. Let alone written some. They tell me that “AI is really good now”, it’s the future, yadda yadda. At the same time, when I read their code, I want to scream and cry (and most days I do).

Virtually everything is vibe-coded now. Everywhere you look you get to see code that no human will ever be able to maintain. Huge system “designs”, expensive, slow.

At this point, I’m almost hoping for the bubble NOT to burst, because that might very well mean the end of this company (and, thus, my job).

There is no “exit strategy”. We completely depend on AI services now.

At the same time, I’m expected to implement ISO27001.

Everything is vague, chaotic, wonky, shitty, buggy.

People are actively working on making themselves obsolete, and they don’t seem to notice that they’re doing that, because they’re so engulfed with playing with their new AI toy.

I checked job offers, but it looks like every company is like this now. Maybe some are still a bit behind, but sooner or later, they’ll all be like that.

And the worst part is: None of this matters in the slightest, as long as there’s some idiot out there who buys our stuff. Welcome to capitalism.

People keep telling me that you can “use AI responsibly” and “just to some degree, just as a tool”, but they don’t seem to realize that this does not matter in capitalism. Companies don’t need “good products”. They just need to sell something. If you still believe that “doing a good job” matters and that “they still need competent people”, haha, my sweet summer child, nothing you do matters. You just happened to be needed in the past, but those days are gone.

The future is absolutely bleak – assuming there is a future.

Asterinas 0.19.0 Brings Up X.Org & Other Improvements To This Rust-Written OS
Asterinas is the open-source project developing a Rust-based, memory-safe Linux alternative OS while striving for Linux software compatibility. Out now is Asterinas 0.19 as the project continues advancing on its goals… ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds On Why AI Works For Him
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Many open-source developers still dislike AI. The latest example is System76 banning AI-generated content from its COSMIC desktop. At Open Source Summit Europe, Linux creator Linus Torvalds offered a different take: “I actually really like using AI,” Torvald told Dirk Hohndel, his good friend and head of Ericsson Software Technology, in their latest … ⌘ Read more

FreeType 2.15 Released With Apple HVF Driver, ISO Open Font Format Edition 5
FreeType 2.15 is now available for this widely-used font rendering library used across many different operating systems and software applications… ⌘ Read more

AI Coding Agents Generate More Code, But Not More Software
A study of more than 700 software firms found that AI coding agents significantly increase the amount of code developers produce, but not the amount of software companies actually ship. Ars Technica reports: A recent study (PDF) of actual coding practices across hundreds of firms finds that human code review forms a significant “bottleneck” for the overall ef … ⌘ Read more

Amazon In Talks To Buy AI Startup Decart For Around $7 Billion
Amazon is reportedly in talks to acquire AI startup Decart in a deal that could value the company at up to $7 billion. Decart’s DOS software helps developers optimize AI models for different processors in weeks rather than months, a capability that could be particularly useful to AWS as it pushes its own Trainium chips. SiliconANGLE reports: The c … ⌘ Read more

I should give river a try:

https://isaacfreund.com/software/river/

It brings back the old model from X11 where the window manager is a separate program/process.

SQLite 3.54 Released With Faster Performance, Drops Windows XP Support
SQLite 3.54 released today for this wildly popular embedded SQL database engine used by countless applications and other software. With SQLite 3.54, support for Microsoft Windows XP and older is finally removed… ⌘ Read more

Apollo Software Pioneer Margaret Hamilton Dies at 90
“Margaret Hamilton, the groundbreaking researcher who helped create the field of software engineering and whose code helped land NASA’s Apollo astronauts on the moon to win the 20th century space race, has died,” writes longtime Slashdot reader Veeru. “She was 90.” MIT News reports: A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish … ⌘ Read more

Google, Unity Launch Platform To Create Video Games From Prompts
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Alphabet’s Google and gaming tools developer Unity Software announced a new platform that will allow people to create video games from simple text prompts, marking the latest incursion of generative artificial intelligence into artistic and creative industries. The initiative, called Playground, … ⌘ Read more