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The maintainer of git.kernel.org reports that AI training crawlers are consuming more CPU resources than all legitimate access combined, including actual git clones. Across five geographically distributed nodes, 14 CPU cores are constantly occupied just rendering git commits as HTML pages for these bots, even though the same data is available far more efficiently via direct git clone.
California's legislature unanimously passed Assembly Bill 1856, which carves out open-source operating systems and software distributed under permissive licenses such as GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache from the state's Digital Age Assurance Act. The bill also exempts software components not sold as standalone apps through app stores, covering package managers like apt and pacman, and excludes browser extension stores. The measure now awaits Governor Gavin Newsom's signature before the underlying law takes effect on January 1, 2027.
A joint project by the Italian Linux Society and the Free Software Foundation Europe, called Refund4Freedom, has launched a website offering forms and guidance for consumers seeking refunds on Windows 11 licenses bundled with new PCs. The site reports that Acer and Lenovo have functioning refund processes, Asus offers one only through an obscure Italian channel, while Dell and HP currently provide no such option. It also warns buyers to keep proof of an untouched system before attempting a refund claim.
A new Linux distribution called stillOS has debuted with a strong focus on simplifying onboarding for people who have never used Linux before. It uses atomic updates so the operating system and apps update automatically in the background without risking system stability, and it lets users customize their desktop without needing any technical Linux knowledge.
EasyEffects is a Linux application that taps into the PipeWire audio system to apply real-time sound processing—equalization, compression, bass enhancement, limiting and more—to a laptop's built-in speakers. Because it works directly with the audio streams entering and leaving the system, users can noticeably improve the thin, tinny sound typical of laptop speakers without buying external hardware. The tool bundles plugins from projects like Calf Studio Gear, MDA.LV2 and GStreamer with adjustable presets, all managed through one interface instead of separate mixers or command-line scripts.
Paperwork is a free, open-source document management tool available for both Linux and Windows that lets users import, tag, label, and search files locally without uploading them to third-party servers. It supports formats like PDF, DOCX, and ODT, and includes features such as OCR, scanner support, automatic label suggestions, and keyword-based search.
Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency, via its Sovereign Tech Fund, is investing €508,640 into a two-year effort to improve Flatpak, the Linux app packaging and sandboxing system. The project is organized by Modal with Para-Real Ltd. as a supporting organization, aiming to close gaps in Flatpak's security model, including missing Portals for networking and VPNs.
At the FOSSY conference held this year at the University of British Columbia, developer Timothy Sample presented on bootstrappable builds, a lesser-known cousin of reproducible builds. He explained the concept as a chain of increasingly capable compilers that starts from a tiny, fully auditable seed program and eventually builds an entire modern Linux user space. Sample traced his own decade-long involvement in the effort back to his early use of GNU Guix, a functional package manager similar to Nix.
A community developer has released an unofficial build that repackages Cursor's Electron-based Grok Bot app, officially available only for macOS and Windows, so it runs natively on Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. The project swaps out Windows-only native components and packages the app as a .deb, tarball, or AppImage, currently targeting Grok Bot version 0.29.0 on Electron 42.1.0.
ZDNET published a curated list of Linux distributions suited for people switching from Windows in 2026, deliberately excluding Linux Mint. Zorin OS tops the list for its Windows-like interface options and a feature that detects when a user tries to install a .exe or .msi file and suggests an open-source alternative from its app store.
The Asahi Linux project has released version 7.2 of its Progress Linux distribution, continuing its effort to bring full Linux support to Apple Silicon Macs. This update focuses heavily on improving power management, particularly around how the application CPU cores enter and exit sleep states using ARM's Wait For Interrupt instruction and Apple's deep-sleep variant. The team is also working to align its downstream power management driver with the standardized Power State Coordination Interface required for upstream kernel acceptance.
A security research team investigated repeated crashes in a customer's Go application running on embedded 32-bit ARM Linux systems, which failed with a fatal 'netpoll: eventfd ready for something unexpected' error after long uptimes. Tracing the fault into Go's netpoll_epoll.go code, they found it matched a previously reported but unresolved issue in the Go project's issue tracker involving epoll reporting more than the expected EPOLLIN event.