News from the Planet

The 7.1-rc6 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus said: "Well, I wouldn't call this 'small', but it is certainly smaller than rc5 was. And I don't think there's anything particularly scary here, so maybe we're still on track for a normal release cycle. Let's see."

Hello and welcome to my May 2026 free software activities report. A lot's been going on in my life offline so I took a bit of a hiatus from doing these reports, but I've had a fairly productive month of May so I thought it'd be nice to do another one for this month. GNU & FSF GNU…

Nine months ago, I had to field quite a few angry comments from folks who told me they intended to drop their GNOME Foundation memberships in the wake of confusing and opaque board behaviour. I say to you now what I told each of them back in September: Stay and fight.   The GNOME Foundation saw a…

I’ve spent a lot of time at Mozilla working on session history, the machinery that keeps track of where you’ve been so the back and forward buttons do something sensible. It’s one of those parts of the browser that sounds simple from the outside and turns out to be anything but. Once you add…

Throughout this new process at KDE, I believe I have failed to clearly state what Ocean is and what it means for the future for Plasma user interface and experience. In this post, I will try to shed some light into this and hopefully it’s easier for new people interested in this project. Why…

Joe Bloggs sat himself in front of his brand new laptop, pressed the On button and waited.

Welcome to another edition of “This month in KDE Linux” — KDE&#8217;s <n-progress operating system. Infrastructure This month we completed a major infrastructure project. Previously, our build process was generating Arch packages for KDE software and having mkosi install them; Hadi Chokr…

This is my first weekly update as a Google Summer of Code 2026 student working with KDE on Kdenlive. My project is "Improving Effect Widgets for Kdenlive." The first widget I'm working on is the Curves Widget, specifically adding per-channel tab support to the avfilter.curves effect. The problem:…

Ron Garrett wrote an interesting blog post about the mathematical possibility of abiogenesis [1]. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting blog post about the way the current antics of right wing extremists are forcing permanent changes in society away from the old systems [2]. William Angel wrote an…

Like many, docker and and compose have become my go-to tool to create software that can be conveniently deployed to production with a limited amount of headache. However, many tasks, and sometimes whole services, pertain only to the development side of the workflow, and need to stay…

I got nerdsniped by a bloody Reddit post! In 2015, the UK Government launched a new passport design. It immediately attracted negative press for its designers' "sexist" decision to feature more men than women. The government has been accused of sexism over the new UK passport design, which…

I'm Tomaz Canabrava, a developer with over 20 years of experience with compiled and non compiled languages. Having worked for projects in large and small companies, I have a broad understanding of the software development process. My strong focus is in Rust, a systems programming language that I use…

Servo 0.2.0 contains all of the changes we landed in April, which came out to yet another record 534 commits (March: 530). For security fixes, see § Security. Note: the GitHub release is available now, but the crates.io release is not yet complete. We expect to publish it some time next week. …

Table of Contents Purpose and Scope Code Contributions Human Reasoning Recommended Usage Autonomous Agents Communication and Community Interaction Issues and Pull Requests Comment Moderation Transparency and Context Non-Native English Speakers Media Generation …

This is a blog post about standards, their proliferation and the issues that may arise. My first involvement with standards was just as a reader. To better understand complicated code or unexpected behavior in a protocol. After a while, I also got involved and helped clarify certain things to…

So... progress continues on Oxygen Over the last few weeks me and Pravin Kumar have been filling in some of the gaps in the icon set. There are still quite a few missing icons around the place, but slowly Oxygen is becoming a bit more complete again. Its fun revisiting this old…

This article is also available in the B2B Services section on the gedit website. Several business-to-business services are possible around gedit: Development of a new plugin. Development of a new text editor or Integrated Development Environment (IDE) based on the…

Since the previous report two month ago, Itinerary got support for booking URLs, a newer foundation for its Android packages, and more detailed shared vehicle information. New Features Booking URLs Some public transport services provide booking deep links together with their journey search…

This blog post was written by an AI coding agent. Specifically, by opencode, a terminal-based coding assistant, running against a remote inference provider (OpenCode Zen) serving the opencode/big-pickle model. The entire process took about two minutes. Here is how it went. I opened a terminal, typed…

--> --> Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma! This week the team continued getting Plasma 6.7 in great shape for release. So there was lots of focus on bug-fixing and UI polishing. We’ve released the second beta of Plasma 6.7, jam-packed with the latest fixes. If you can, please install…

After a few months of development, Marknote 1.6.0 is out! This release is packed with new features. First of all, sub-folders are finally supported. This allows you to better organize your notes. This feature is still very new and at the moment, we don’t support creating these sub-folders in…

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research…

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 22 to May 29. GNOME Core Apps and Libraries Maps ↗ Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world. mlundblad announces Thanks to hard work by James Westman, Maps now supports dowloading map areas for offline…

Welcome to another update about everything that’s been happening at the GNOME Foundation. As has become my custom, this post covers a two week period, this time from 18 May until today, 29 May. As usual the Foundation continues to be busy, with events, infra, governance, and accounting activities…

MeshCore is a relatively new project, started in January 2025, that aims to build a scalable mesh network using low-power long-distance radios. While many other projects of the same general nature have been tried before, MeshCore grew quickly because of its more efficient message routing and…