Phoronix reports: Chris Masonthe longtime Linux kernel developer most known for being the creator of Btrfshas been working on a Git repository with AI review prompts he has been working on for LLM-assisted code review of Linux kernel patches. This initiative has been happening for some weeks now while the latest work was posted today for comments... The Meta engineer has been investing a lot of effort into making this AI/LLM-assisted code review accurate and useful to upstream Linux kernel stakeholders. It's already shown positive results and with the current pace it looks like it could play a helpful part in Linux kernel code review moving forward.
"I'm hoping to get some feedback on changes I pushed today that break the review up into individual tasks..." Mason wrote on the Linux kernel mailing list. "Using tasks allows us to break up large diffs into smaller chunksand review each chunk individually. This ends up using fewer tokens a lot of the timebecause we're not sending context back and forth for the entire diff with every turn. It also catches more bugs all around."

Lennart Poettering has left Microsoft to co-found Amutablea new Berlin-based company aiming to bring cryptographically verifiable integrity and deterministic trust guarantees to Linux systems. He said in a post on Mastodon that his "role in upstream maintenance for the Linux kernel will continue as it always has." Poettering will also continue to remain deeply involved in the systemd ecosystem. The Register reports: Linux celeb Lennart Poettering has left Microsoft and co-founded a new companyAmutablewith Chris Kuhl and Christian Brauner. Poettering is best known for systemd. After a lengthy stint at Red Hathe joined Microsoft in 2022. Kuhl was a Microsoft employee until last yearand Braunerwho also joined Microsoft in 2022left this month. [...]

It is unclear why Poettering decided to leave Microsoft. We asked the company to comment but have not received a response. Other than the announcement of systemd 259 in DecemberPoettering's blog has been silent on the matteraside from the announcement of Amutable this week. In its first postthe Amutable team wrote: "Over the coming monthswe'll be pouring foundations for verification and building robust capabilities on top."

It will be interesting to see what form this takes. In addition to Poetteringthe lead developer of systemdAmutable's team includes contributors and maintainers for projects such as LinuxKubernetesand containerd. Its members are also very familiar with the likes of DebianFedoraSUSEand Ubuntu.

A group of Linux gaming-focused distros and developers have formed the Open Gaming Collective to pool work on shared components like kernelsinput systemsand Valve tooling. The Verge reports: Universal Bluedeveloper of the gaming-focused Linux distribution Bazziteannounced on Wednesday that its helping to form the OGC with several other groupswhich will collaborate on improvements to the Linux gaming ecosystem and âoecentralize efforts around critical components like kernel patchesinput toolingand essential gaming packages such as gamescope." The other founding members of the OGC include NobaraChimeraOSPlaytronFyra LabsPikaOSShadowBlipand Asus Linux.

[...] It's worth noting that this will mean some changes to Bazzitewhich is switching to the OGC kernelreplacing HHD with InputPlumber as its input frameworkand integrating features like RGB and fan control into the Steam UI. Bazzite also added that"We'll be sharing patches we've made to various Valve packages with the OGC and attempting to upstream everything we can."

NVIDIA has officially launched a native GeForce NOW client for Linux as a Flatpakgiving Linux gamers access to cloud-rendered RTX gaming. Phoronix reports: While confined to a Flatpakfor now NVIDIA is just "officially" supporting it on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and later. Grantedthanks to Flatpak it should run on other non-Ubuntu distributions too but in terms of the official support and where they are qualifying their builds they are limiting it just to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and later. [...] At launch the Flatpak build is also just for x86_64 Linux with no AArch64 Linux builds or similar at this time.

Running GeForce NOW on Linux while games are rendered in NVIDIA's cloud with Blackwell GPUsyou still need to be using a modern GPU with H.264 or H.265 Vulkan Video support NVIDIA isn't yet supporting Vulkan Video AV1 with GeForce NOW on Linux but just H.264/H.265. If you are using NVIDIA graphics the NVIDIA R580 series or newer is recommended while using the X.Org session. If you are using Intel or AMD Radeon graphicsMesa 24.2+ is recommended and using the Wayland session.

When you are up and running with GeForce NOW on Linuxyou have access to over 4,500 games. The free tier of GeForce NOW provides standard access to the gaming servers and limited session caps for an introductory-level experience. It's with the performance tier where you can enjoy RTX ray-tracing and 1440p @ 60 FPS performance and up to six hour sessions. With GeForce NOW's Ultimate tier is where you are running on GeForce RTX 5080 GPU servers with support for up to 5K @ 120 FPS gaming or 1080p @ 360 FPS with up to eight hour gaming sessions in length.

The Linux kernel community has formalized a continuity plan for the day Linus Torvalds eventually steps asidedefining how the process would work to replace him as the top-level maintainer. ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols reports: The new "plan for a plan," drafted by longtime kernel contributor Dan Williamswas discussed at the latest Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit in Tokyowhere he introduced it as "an uplifting subject tied to our eventual march toward death." Torvalds addedin our conversationthat "part of the reason it came up this time around was that my previous contract with Linux Foundation ended Q3 last yearand people on the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board had been aware of that. Of coursethey were also aware that we'd renewed the contractbut it meant that it had been discussed."

The plan stops short of naming a single heir. Insteadit creates an explicit process for selecting one or more maintainers to take over the top-level Linux repository in a worst-case or orderly-transition scenarioincluding convening a conclave to weigh options and maximize long-term project health. One maintainer in Tokyo jokingly suggested that the grouplike the conclave that selects a new popebe locked in a room and that a puff of white smoke be sent out when a decision was reached.

The document frames this as a way to protect against the classic "bus factor" problem. That iswhat happens to a project if its leader is hit by a bus? Torvalds' central role today means the project currently assumes a bus-factor of onewhere a single person's exit couldin theorydestabilize merges and final releases. In practiceas Torvalds and other top maintainers have discussedthe job of top penguin would almost certainly currently go to Greg Kroah-Hartmanthe stable-branch Linux kernel maintainer. Responding to the suggestion that the backup replacement would be Greg KHTorvalds said: "But the thing isGreg hasn't always been Greg. Before Gregthere was Andrew Morton and Alan Cox. After Gregthere will be Shannon and Steve. The real issue is you have to have a person or a group of people that the development community can trustand part of trust is fundamentally about having been around for long enough that people know how you workbut long enough does not mean to be 30 years."

The "NexDock" (from Nex Computer) already turns your phone into a laptop workstation. Purism chose it as the docking station for their Librem 5 phones.

But now Nex is offering its own smartphone "that runs Android 16launches Debianand dual-boots into Windows 11," according to the blog It's FOSS: Fourteen years after the first concept video was teasedthe NexPhone is herepowered by a Qualcomm QCM6490whichthe keen-eyed among you will remember from the now-discontinued Fairphone 5.

By 2026 standardsit's dated hardwarebut Nex Computer doesn't seem to be overselling itas they expect the NexPhone to be a secondary or backup phonenot a flagship contender. The phone includes an Adreno 643 GPU12GB of RAMand 256GB of internal storage that can be expanded up to 512GB via a microSD card.

In terms of softwarethe NexPhone boots into NexOSa bloatware-free and minimal Android 16 systemwith Debian running as an app with GPU accelerationand Windows 11 being the dual-boot option that requires a restart to access. ["And because the default Windows interface isn't designed for a handheld screenwe built our own Mobile UI from the ground up to make Windows far easier to navigate on a phone," notes a blog post from Nex founder/CEO Emre Kosmaz].

Andbefore I forgetyou can plug the NexPhone into a USB-C or HDMI displayadd a keyboard and mouse to transform it into a desktop workstation.
There's a camera plus "a comprehensive suite of sensors," according to the article"that includes a fingerprint scanneraccelerometermagnetometergyroscopeambient light sensorand proximity sensor....

"NexPhone is slated for a Q3 2026 release (July-September)..."

Back in 2012explains Nex founder/CEO Emre Kosmaz"most investors weren't excited about funding new hardware. One VC even told us'I don't understand why anyone buys anything other than Apple'..." Over the last decadewe kept building and shipping — six generations of NexDock — helping customers turn phones into laptop-like setups (display + keyboard + trackpad). And now the industry is catching up faster than ever. With Android 16desktop- experiences are becoming more native and more mainstream. That momentum is exactly why NexPhone makes sense today...

Thank you for being part of this journey. With your supportI hope NexPhone can help move us toward a world where phones truly replace laptops and PCs — more oftenmore naturallyand for more people.

An anonymous reader shared this article from the blog Linuxiac In a blog postAlan Popea longtime Ubuntu community figure and former Canonical employee who remains an active Snap publisher... [warns of] a persistent campaign of malicious snaps impersonating cryptocurrency wallet applications. These fake apps typically mimic well-known projects such as ExodusLedger Liveor Trust Walletprompting users to enter wallet recovery phraseswhich are then transmitted to attackersresulting in drained funds.
The perpetrators had originally used similar-looking characters from other alphabets to mimic other app listingsthen began uploading "revisions" to other innocuous-seeming (approved) apps that would transform their original listing into that of a fake crypto wallet app.

But now they're re-registering expired domains to take over existing Snap Store accountswhich Pope calls "a significant escalation..." I worked for Canonical between 2011 and 2021 as an Engineering ManagerCommunity Managerand Developer Advocate. I was a strong advocate for snap packages and the Snap Store. While I left the company nearly five years agoI still maintain nearly 50 packages in the Snap Storewith thousands of users... PersonallyI want the Snap Store to be successfuland for users to be confident that the packages they install are trustworthy and safe.

Currentlythat confidence isn't warrantedwhich is a problem for desktop Linux users who install snap packages. I report every bad snap I encounterand I know other security professionals do the same — even though doing so results in no action for days sometimes... To be clear: none of this should be seen as an attack on the Snap StoreCanonicalor the engineers working on these problems. I'm raising awareness of an issue that existsbecause I want it fixed... But pretending there isn't a problem helps nobody.

T2 SDE "is not just a regular Linux distribution," explains its repository on GitHub. "It is a flexible Open Source System Development Environment or Distribution Build Kit. Others might even name it Meta Distribution. T2 allows the creation of custom distributions with state of the art technologyup-to-date packages and integrated support for cross compilation."

And now after "a decade of deep focus on embedded and server systems," T2 SDE Linux "is back to the Desktop," according to its web sitecalling the new "T2 Desktop" flavour "ready for everyday home and office use!" Built on the latest KDE Plasmasystemdand Waylandthe new T2 Desktop flavour delivers a moderncleanand performant experience while retaining the project's trademark portability and reproducible cross-compilation across architectures.
T2 Desktop targets x86_64arm64and riscv64delivering "a fully polishedstreamlined out-of-the-box experience," according to project lead René Rebe (also long-time Slashdot reader ReneR): I>[T2 Desktop] delivered a full KDE Plasma desktop on RISC-Vreproducibly cross-compiled from source using T2 SDE Linux. The desktop spans more than 600 packages — from toolchain to Qt and KDE and targets a next-generation RVA23 RISC-V flagship desktopincluding full multimedia support and AMD RDNA GPU acceleration under Wayland.

As a parallel milestonethe same fully reproducible desktop stack is now also landing on Qualcomm X1 ARM64 platformshighlighting T2 SDE's architecture-independent approach and positioning both RISC-V and ARM64 as seriousfirst-class Linux desktop contenders.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers have discovered a never-before-seen framework that infects Linux machines with a wide assortment of modules that are notable for the range of advanced capabilities they provide to attackers. The frameworkreferred to as VoidLink by its source codefeatures more than 30 modules that can be used to customize capabilities to meet attackers' needs for each infected machine. These modules can provide additional stealth and specific tools for reconnaissanceprivilege escalationand lateral movement inside a compromised network. The components can be easily added or removed as objectives change over the course of a campaign.

VoidLink can target machines within popular cloud services by detecting if an infected machine is hosted inside AWSGCPAzureAlibabaand Tencentand there are indications that developers plan to add detections for HuaweiDigitalOceanand Vultr in future releases. To detect which cloud service hosts the machineVoidLink examines metadata using the respective vendor's API. Similar frameworks targeting Windows servers have flourished for years. They are less common on Linux machines. The feature set is unusually broad and is "far more advanced than typical Linux malware," said researchers from Checkpointthe security firm that discovered VoidLink. Its creation may indicate that the attacker's focus is increasingly expanding to include Linux systemscloud infrastructureand application deployment environmentsas organizations increasingly move workloads to these environments. "VoidLink is a comprehensive ecosystem designed to maintain long-termstealthy access to compromised Linux systemsparticularly those running on public cloud platforms and in containerized environments," the researchers said in a separate post. "Its design reflects a level of planning and investment typically associated with professional threat actors rather than opportunistic attackersraising the stakes for defenders who may never realize their infrastructure has been quietly taken over."

The researchers note that VoidLink poses no immediate threat or required action since it's not actively targeting systems. Howeverdefenders should remain vigilant.

BrianFagioli writes: Wine 11.0 has officially landedwrapping up a year of development with more than 6,000 code changes and a broad set of upgrades that touch gamingdesktop behaviorand long-standing architectural work. The biggest milestone is the completion of the new WoW64 modelwhich is now considered fully supported and allows 32-bit and even 16-bit applications to run in a cleaner way inside 64-bit prefixes. Wine also gains support for the NTSYNC kernel module now bundled in Linux 6.14which cuts overhead from thread synchronization and should deliver observable performance benefits in games and multi-threaded applications. A single unified wine binary now replaces the old wine64 launcherand several system behaviors align more closely with modern Windowsincluding syscall numbering and NT reparse points.

Graphics and desktop integration received more polishincluding deeper Vulkan support (up to API 1.4.335)hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding through Direct3Dand further improvements to Wine's Wayland driverwhich now supports clipboard operationsIMEsand shaped windows. X11 users gain better window activation and fullscreen handlingand legacy DirectX features continue to expand under Wine's Vulkan renderer. Device support also moves forwardwith better joystick handlingimproved Bluetooth visibility and pairingand working TWAIN scanning on 64-bit apps. Broad multimedia updatesDirectMusic refinements.NET/XNA improvementsand developer-facing tools round out a release that appears focused on smoothing sharp edges rather than introducing flashy experiments. As alwayssource is live now and distro packages are rolling out.

Linus Torvalds has started experimenting with vibe codingusing Google's Antigravity AI to generate parts of a small hobby project called AudioNoise. "In doing sohe has become the highest-profile programmer yet to adopt this rapidly spreadingand often mockedAI-driven programming," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. Fro the report: [I]t's a trivial program called AudioNoise -- a recent side project focused on digital audio effects and signal processing. He started it after building physical guitar pedalsGuitarPedalto learn about audio circuits. He now gives them as gifts to kernel developers andrecentlyto Bill Gates.

While Torvalds hand-coded the C componentshe turned to Antigravity for a Python-based audio sample visualizer. He openly acknowledges that he leans on online snippets when working in languages he knows less well. Who doesn't? [...] In the project's README fileTorvalds wrote that "the Python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding," describing how he "cut out the middle-man -- me -- and just used Google Antigravity to do the audio sample visualiser." The remark underlines that the AI-generated code met his expectations well enough that he did not feel the need to manually re-implement it. Further reading: Linus Torvalds Says Vibe Coding is Fine For Getting Started'Horrible Idea' For Maintenance

A year ago the Steam Survey showed a 2.29% marketshare for Linux. Last May it reached 2.69%its highest level since 2018. November saw another all-time high of 3.2%.

But December brought a surprisereports Phoronix: Back on the 1st Valve published the Steam Survey results for December 2025 and they put the Linux gaming marketshare at 3.19%a 0.01% dip from November. But now the December results have been revised... [and] put the Linux marketshare at 3.58%a 0.38% increase over November. Valve didn't publish any explanation for the revision but occasionally they do put out monthly revised data. This is easily an all-time high... both in percentage terms and surely in absolute terms too.

An anonymous reader shared this report from It's FOSS: Jenny Guanni Qua researcher at [VC fund] Pebblebedanalyzed 125,183 bugs from 20 years of Linux kernel development history (on Git). The findings show that the average bug takes 2.1 years to find. [Though the median is 0.7 yearswith the average possibly skewed by "outliers" discovered after years of hiding.] The longest-lived buga buffer overflow in networking codewent unnoticed for 20.7 years! [But 86.5% of bugs are found within five years.]

The research was carried out by relying on the Fixes: tag that is used in kernel development. Basicallywhen a commit fixes a bugit includes a tag pointing to the commit that introduced the bug. Jenny wrote a tool that extracted these tags from the kernel's git history going back to 2005. The tool finds all fixing commitsextracts the referenced commit hashpulls dates from both commitsand calculates the time frame. As for the datasetit includes over 125k records from Linux 6.19-rc3covering bugs from April 2005 to January 2026. Out of these119,449 were unique fixing commits from 9,159 different authorsand only 158 bugs had CVE IDs assigned.
It took six hours to assemble the datasetaccording to the blog postwhich concludes that the percentage of bugs found within one year has improved dramaticallyfrom 0% in 2010 to 69% by 2022. The blog post says this can likely be attributed to:

• The Syzkaller fuzzer (released in 2015)

• Dynamic memory error detectors like KASANKMSANKCSAN sanitizers

• Better static analysis

• More contributors reviewing code

But "We're simultaneously catching new bugs faster AND slowly working through ~5,400 ancient bugs that have been hiding for over 5 years."

They've also developed an AI model called VulnBERT that predicts whether a commit introduces a vulnerabilityclaiming that of all actual bug-introducing commitsit catches 92.2%. "The goal isn't to replace human reviewers but to point them at the 10% of commits most likely to be problematicso they can focus attention where it matters..."

Gentoo Linux posted its 2025 project retrospective this week. Some interesting details: Mostly because of the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositoriesGentoo currently considers and plans the migration of our repository mirrors and pull request contributions to Codeberg. Codeberg is a site based on Forgejomaintained by a non-profit organizationand located in BerlinGermany. Gentoo continues to host its own primary gitbugsetc infrastructure and has no plans to change that...

We now publish weekly Gentoo images for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)based on the amd64 stagessee our mirrors. While these images are not present in the Microsoft store yetthat's something we intend to fix soon...

Given the unfortunate fracturing of the GnuPG / OpenPGP / LibrePGP ecosystem due to competing standardswe now provide an alternatives mechanism to choose the system gpg provider and ease compatibility testing...

We have added a bootstrap path for Rust from C++ using Mutabah's Rust compiler mrustcwhich alleviates the need for pre-built binaries and makes it significantly easier to support more configurations. SimilarlyAda and D support in gcc now have clean bootstrap pathswhich makes enabling these in the compiler as easy as switching the useflags on gcc and running emerge.
Other interesting statistics for the year:

• Gentoo currently consists of 31,663 ebuilds for 19,174 different packages.
• For amd64 (x86-64)there are 89 GBytes of binary packages available on the mirrors.
• Gentoo each week builds 154 distinct installation stages for different processor architectures and system configurationswith an overwhelming part of these fully up-to-date.
• The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has remained at an overall high level in 2025with a slight decrease from 123,942 to 112,927.
• The number of commits by external contributors was 9,396now across 377 unique external authors.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Heraklit for sharing the 2025 retrospective.

Is there a trend? This week four different articles appeared on various tech-news sites with an author bragging about switching to Linux.

"Greetings from the year of Linux on my desktop," quipped the Verge's senior reviews editorwho finally "got fed up and said screw itI'm installing Linux."

They switched to CachyOS — just like this writer for the videogame magazine Escapist: I've had a fantastic time gaming on Linux. Valve's Windows-to-Linux translation layerProtonand even CachyOS' bundled fork have been working just fine. Of courseit's not perfectand there's been a couple of instances where I've had to problem-solve somethingbut most of the timeany issues gaming on Linux have been fixed by swapping to another version of Proton. If you're deep in online games like FortniteCall of DutyDestiny 2GTAV or Battlefield 6it might not be the best option to switch. These games feature anti-cheats that look for versions of Windows or even the heart of the OSthe kernelto verify the system isn't going to mess up someone's game....

CachyOS is thankfully pre-packed with Nvidia driversmeaning I didn't have to dance around trying to find them.... Certain titles will perform worse than their counterpartssimply due to how the bods at Nvidia are handling the drivers for Linux. This saidI'm still not complaining when I'm pushing nearly 144fps or more in newer games. The performance hit is therebut it's nowhere near enough to stave off even an attempt to mess about with Linux.

Do you know how bizarre it is to say it's "nice to have a taskbar again"? I use macOS daily for a lot of my workwhich uses a design baked back in the 1990s through NeXT. Seeing just a normal taskbar that doesn't try to advertise to me or crash because an update killed it for some reason is fantastic. That's how bad it is out there right now for Windows.
"I run Artixby the way," joked a senior tech writer at Notebookcheck (adding "There. That's out of the way...") I dual-booted a Linux partition for a few weeks. After a Windows update (that I didn't choose to do) wiped that partition andconsequentlythe Linux installationI decided to go whole-hog: I deleted Windows 11 and used the entire drive for Linux...

Artix differs from Arch in that it does not use SystemD as its init system. I won't go down the rabbit hole of init systems herebut suffice it to say that Artix boots lightning quick (less than 10 seconds from a cold power on) and is pretty light on system resources. Howeverit didn't come "fully assembled..." The biggest problem I ran into after installing Artix on the [MacBook] Air was the lack of wireless driverswhich meant that WiFi did not work out of the box. The resolution was simple: I needed to download the appropriate WiFi drivers (Broadcom driversto be exact) from Artix's main repository. This is a straightforward process handled by a single command in the Terminalbut it requires an internet connection... which my laptop did not have. UltimatelyI connected a USB-to-Ethernet adapterplugged the laptop directly into my routerand installed the WiFi drivers that way. The whole process took about 10 minutesbut it was annoying nonetheless.

For the recordmy desktop (an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H-based system) worked flawlessly out-of-the-boxeven with my second monitor's uncommon resolution (1680x1050vertical orientation). I did run into issues with installing some packages on both machines. Trying to install the KDE desktop environment (essentially a different GUI for the main OS) resulted in strange artifacts that put white text on white backgrounds in the menusand every resolution I tried failed to correct this bug. After reverting to XFCE4 (the default desktop environment for my Artix install)the WiFi signal indicator in the taskbar disappeared. This led to me having to uninstall a network manager installed by KDE and re-linking the default network manager to the runit services startup folder. If that sentence sounds confusingthe process was much more so. It has been resolvedand I have a WiFi indicator that lets me select wireless networks againbut only after about 45 minutes of reading manuals and forum posts.

Other issues are inherent to Linux. Not all games on Steam that are deemed Linux compatible actually are. Civilization III Complete is a good example: launching the game results in the map turning completely black. (Running the game through an application called Lutris resolved this issue.) Not all the software I used on Windows is available in Linuxsuch as Greenshot for screenshots or uMark for watermarking photos in bulk. There are alternatives to thesebut they don't have the same features or require me to relearn workflows... Linux is not a "one and done" silver bullet to solve all your computer issues. It is like any other operating system in that it will require users to learn its methods and quirks. Admittedlyit does require a little bit more technical knowledge to dive into the nitty-gritty of the OS and fully unlock its potentialbut many distributions (such as Mint) are ready to go out of the box and may never require someone to open a command line...

[T]he issues I ran into on Linux werefor the most partmy fault. On Windows or macOSmost problems I run into are caused by a restriction or bug in the OS. Linux gives me the freedom to break my machine and fix it againteaching me along the way. With Microsoft's refusal (either from pride or ignorance) to improve (or at least not crapify) Windows 11 despite loud user outrageswitching to Linux is becoming a popular option. It's one you should consider doingand if you've been thinking about it for any length of timeit's time to dive in.
And tinkerer Kevin Wammer switched from MacOS to Linuxsaying "Linux has come a long way" after more than 30 years — but "Windows still sucks..."