Tux Machines

Do you waddle the waddle?

Other Sites

9to5Linux

9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: February 15th, 2026

Thank you!

KaOS Linux Drops KDE Plasma After 12 Years for Niri/Noctalia to Escape systemd

After using the KDE/Plasma desktop environment by default for more than 12 years since its initial release under the name of KdeOS, the KaOS Linux distribution will no longer ship with its unique Plasma desktop setup, as the devs do not want to use the systemd init system anymore in the distro.

Vim 9.2 Is Out with Comprehensive Completion, Wayland Support, and More

Coming two years after Vim 9.1, the Vim 9.2 release introduces full Wayland support (including clipboard support), XDG Base Directory Specification support on Linux, the ability to complete words directly from registers, support for fuzzy matching during insert-mode completion, and a new built-in interactive tutor plugin.

REMnux 8 Linux Toolkit for Malware Analysis Is Out to Celebrate 15th Anniversary

REMnux 8 is here as a major release that comes more than 5 years after REMnux 7.0 to celebrate the project’s 15th anniversary, introducing AI capabilities, a new, more resilient installer, new and updated tools, and a base OS bump as the distribution is now based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat).

GNOME 49.4 Released with Improvements for Nautilus, GNOME Shell, and Mutter

Coming a month after GNOME 49.3, the GNOME 49.4 release is here to fix screen time tracking with idle inhibitors, fix tab focus behavior in the Quick Settings menu, prevent the recreation of the default folders after they were removed, disable tone mapping with HDR, and fix screen sharing of monitors with no framerate.

LinuxGizmos.com

BPI-R4 Pro Router Board Delivers MT7988A SoC with Tri-Band Wi-Fi 7 Capability

The BPI-R4 Pro was first introduced in May 2025 and is offered in two variants. The “8X” model provides 8GB of DDR4 memory, while the “4E” variant includes 4GB of DDR4. Both versions feature 8GB of eMMC storage, 256MB of SPI-NAND flash, and a microSD card slot for additional storage.

Low-Cost BeaglePlay SBC Gains Fully Upstream PowerVR Graphics with Vulkan 1.2

BeaglePlay, introduced in 2023, is built around the Texas Instruments AM625, a quad-core Cortex-A53 SoC that integrates a PowerVR Rogue AXE-1-16M GPU. With recent upstream driver progress, the board can now run Vulkan 1.2 using entirely mainline components, without proprietary binaries or out-of-tree kernel patches.

Ezurio Carbon AM62 Targets Industrial Linux with TI Sitara AM62x

Carbon AM62 integrates up to a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor clocked at up to 1.4GHz, alongside a Cortex-M4F and Cortex-R5F for real-time and management tasks, plus a dual-core programmable real-time unit subsystem for deterministic I/O workloads.

Bit-Brick K1 Pro Adds 6 TOPS NPU and Dual NVMe to Compact SBC

On the compute side, RK3576 combines quad Cortex-A72 cores clocked up to 2.2GHz with quad Cortex-A53 cores up to 1.8GHz. Graphics are handled by a Mali-G52 MC3 GPU, and the SoC integrates a 6 TOPS INT8 NPU with support for INT4, INT8, INT16, FP16, BF16, and TF32 precisions.

xSDR packs 2×2 MIMO, Artix-7 FPGA, and 3.8 GHz tuning into M.2 2230 form factor

The LMS7002M supports dual-channel transmit and receive paths with channel bandwidths from 0.5 MHz to 90 MHz. Sample rates range from 0.1 MSPS up to 122.88 MSPS in SISO mode, and above 80 MSPS in MIMO configurations.

news

Git v2.44.0

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 24, 2024

The latest feature release Git v2.44.0 is now available at the
usual places.  It is comprised of 503 non-merge commits since
v2.43.0, contributed by 85 people, 34 of which are new faces [*].

The tarballs are found at:
https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/
The following public repositories all have a copy of the 'v2.44.0' tag and the 'master' branch that the tag points at:
url = https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git url = https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git url = git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git url = https://github.com/gitster/git
New contributors whose contributions weren't in v2.43.0 are as follows. Welcome to the Git development community!
Achu Luma, Antonin Delpeuch, Benjamin Lehmann, Britton Leo Kerin, Carlos Andrés Ramírez Cataño, Chandra Pratap, Ghanshyam Thakkar, Illia Bobyr, James Touton, Janik Haag, Joanna Wang, Josh Brobst, Julian Prein, Justin Tobler, Kyle Lippincott, lumynou5, Maarten van der Schrieck, Marcel Krause, Marcelo Roberto Jimenez, Michael Lohmann, moti sd, Nikolay Borisov, Nikolay Edigaryev, Ondrej Pohorelsky, Sam Delmerico, Sergey Kosukhin, Shreyansh Paliwal, Sören Krecker, Stan Hu, Tamino Bauknecht, Wilfred Hughes, Willem Verstraeten, Xiaoguang WANG, and Zach FettersMoore.
Returning contributors who helped this release are as follows. Thanks for your continued support.
Alexander Shopov, Andy Koppe, Arkadii Yakovets, Arthur Chan, Bagas Sanjaya, Calvin Wan, Carlo Marcelo Arenas Belón, Christian Couder, Dragan Simic, Elijah Newren, Emir SARI, Eric Sunshine, Glen Choo, Han-Wen Nienhuys, Jean-Noël Avila, Jeff Hostetler, Jeff King, Jiang Xin, Johannes Schindelin, John Cai, Jonathan Tan, Jordi Mas, Josh Soref, Josh Steadmon, Josip Sokcevic, Junio C Hamano, Kate Golovanova, Konstantin Ryabitsev, Kristoffer Haugsbakk, Linus Arver, Matthias Aßhauer, M Hickford, Orgad Shaneh, Oswald Buddenhagen, Patrick Steinhardt, Peter Krefting, Philippe Blain, Phillip Wood, Ralf Thielow, Randall S. Becker, René Scharfe, Rubén Justo, Simon Ser, SZEDER Gábor, Taylor Blau, Teng Long, Todd Zullinger, Toon Claes, Vegard Nossum, Victoria Dye, and Yi-Jyun Pan.
[*] We are counting not just the authorship contribution but issue reporting, mentoring, helping and reviewing that are recorded in the commit trailers.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Git v2.44 Release Notes =======================
Backward Compatibility Notes
* "git checkout -B <branch>" used to allow switching to a branch that is in use on another worktree, but this was by mistake. The users need to use "--ignore-other-worktrees" option.
UI, Workflows & Features
* "git add" and "git stash" learned to support the ":(attr:...)" magic pathspec.
* "git rebase --autosquash" is now enabled for non-interactive rebase, but it is still incompatible with the apply backend.
* Introduce "git replay", a tool meant on the server side without working tree to recreate a history.
* "git merge-file" learned to take the "--diff-algorithm" option to use algorithm different from the default "myers" diff.
* Command line completion (in contrib/) learned to complete path arguments to the "add/set" subcommands of "git sparse-checkout" better.
* "git checkout -B <branch> [<start-point>]" allowed a branch that is in use in another worktree to be updated and checked out, which might be a bit unexpected. The rule has been tightened, which is a breaking change. "--ignore-other-worktrees" option is required to unbreak you, if you are used to the current behaviour that "-B" overrides the safety.
* The builtin_objectmode attribute is populated for each path without adding anything in .gitattributes files, which would be useful in magic pathspec, e.g., ":(attr:builtin_objectmode=100755)" to limit to executables.
* "git fetch" learned to pay attention to "fetch.all" configuration variable, which pretends as if "--all" was passed from the command line when no remote parameter was given.
* In addition to (rather cryptic) Security Identifiers, show username and domain in the error message when we barf on mismatch between the Git directory and the current user on Windows.
* The error message given when "git branch -d branch" fails due to commits unique to the branch has been split into an error and a new conditional advice message.
* When given an existing but unreadable file as a configuration file, gitweb behaved as if the file did not exist at all, but now it errors out. This is a change that may break backward compatibility.
* When $HOME/.gitconfig is missing but XDG config file is available, we should write into the latter, not former. "git gc" and "git maintenance" wrote into a wrong "global config" file, which have been corrected.
* Define "special ref" as a very narrow set that consists of FETCH_HEAD and MERGE_HEAD, and clarify everything else that used to be classified as such are actually just pseudorefs.
* All conditional "advice" messages show how to turn them off, which becomes repetitive. Setting advice.* configuration explicitly on now omits the instruction part.
* The "disable repository discovery of a bare repository" check, triggered by setting safe.bareRepository configuration variable to 'explicit', has been loosened to exclude the ".git/" directory inside a non-bare repository from the check. So you can do "cd .git && git cmd" to run a Git command that works on a bare repository without explicitly specifying $GIT_DIR now.
* The completion script (in contrib/) learned more options that can be used with "git log".
* The labels on conflict markers for the common ancestor, our version, and the other version are available to custom 3-way merge driver via %S, %X, and %Y placeholders.
* The write codepath for the reftable data learned to honor core.fsync configuration.
* The "--fsck-objects" option of "git index-pack" now can take the optional parameter to tweak severity of different fsck errors.
* The wincred credential backend has been taught to support oauth refresh token the same way as credential-cache and credential-libsecret backends.
* Command line completion support (in contrib/) has been updated for "git bisect".
* "git branch" and friends learned to use the formatted text as sorting key, not the underlying timestamp value, when the --sort option is used with author or committer timestamp with a format specifier (e.g., "--sort=creatordate:format:%H:%M:%S").
* The command line completion script (in contrib/) learned to complete configuration variable names better.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
* Process to add some form of low-level unit tests has started.
* Add support for GitLab CI.
* "git for-each-ref --no-sort" still sorted the refs alphabetically which paid non-trivial cost. It has been redefined to show output in an unspecified order, to allow certain optimizations to take advantage of.
* Simplify API implementation to delete references by eliminating duplication.
* Subject approxidate() and show_date() machinery to OSS-Fuzz.
* A new helper to let us pretend that we called lstat() when we know our cache_entry is up-to-date via fsmonitor.
* The optimization based on fsmonitor in the "diff --cached" codepath is resurrected with the "fake-lstat" introduced earlier.
* Test balloon to use C99 "bool" type from <stdbool.h> has been added.
* "git clone" has been prepared to allow cloning a repository with non-default hash function into a repository that uses the reftable backend.
* Streaming spans of packfile data used to be done only from a single, primary, pack in a repository with multiple packfiles. It has been extended to allow reuse from other packfiles, too.
* Comment updates to help developers not to attempt to modify messages from plumbing commands that must stay constant.
It might make sense to reassess the plumbing needs every few years, but that should be done as a separate effort.
* Move test-ctype helper to the unit-test framework.
* Instead of manually creating refs/ hierarchy on disk upon a creation of a secondary worktree, which is only usable via the files backend, use the refs API to populate it.
* CI for GitLab learned to drive macOS jobs.
* A few tests to "git commit -o <pathspec>" and "git commit -i <pathspec>" has been added.
* Tests on ref API are moved around to prepare for reftable.
* The Makefile often had to say "-L$(path) -R$(path)" that repeats the path to the same library directory for link time and runtime. A Makefile template is used to reduce such repetition.
* The priority queue test has been migrated to the unit testing framework.
* Setting `feature.experimental` opts the user into multi-pack reuse experiment
* Squelch node.js 16 deprecation warnings from GitHub Actions CI by updating actions/github-script and actions/checkout that use node.js 20.
* The mechanism to report the filename in the source code, used by the unit-test machinery, assumed that the compiler expanded __FILE__ to the path to the source given to the $(CC), but some compilers give full path, breaking the output. This has been corrected.
Fixes since v2.43 -----------------
* The way CI testing used "prove" could lead to running the test suite twice needlessly, which has been corrected.
* Update ref-related tests.
* "git format-patch --encode-email-headers" ignored the option when preparing the cover letter, which has been corrected.
* Newer versions of Getopt::Long started giving warnings against our (ab)use of it in "git send-email". Bump the minimum version requirement for Perl to 5.8.1 (from September 2002) to allow simplifying our implementation.
* Earlier we stopped relying on commit-graph that (still) records information about commits that are lost from the object store, which has negative performance implications. The default has been flipped to disable this pessimization.
* Stale URLs have been updated to their current counterparts (or archive.org) and HTTP links are replaced with working HTTPS links.
* trace2 streams used to record the URLs that potentially embed authentication material, which has been corrected.
* The sample pre-commit hook that tries to catch introduction of new paths that use potentially non-portable characters did not notice an existing path getting renamed to such a problematic path, when rename detection was enabled.
* The command line parser for the "log" family of commands was too loose when parsing certain numbers, e.g., silently ignoring the extra 'q' in "git log -n 1q" without complaining, which has been tightened up.
* "git $cmd --end-of-options --rev -- --path" for some $cmd failed to interpret "--rev" as a rev, and "--path" as a path. This was fixed for many programs like "reset" and "checkout".
* "git bisect reset" has been taught to clean up state files and refs even when BISECT_START file is gone.
* Some codepaths did not correctly parse configuration variables specified with valueless "true", which has been corrected.
* Code clean-up for sanity checking of command line options for "git show-ref".
* The code to parse the From e-mail header has been updated to avoid recursion.
* "git fetch --atomic" issued an unnecessary empty error message, which has been corrected.
* Command line completion script (in contrib/) learned to work better with the reftable backend.
* "git status" is taught to show both the branch being bisected and being rebased when both are in effect at the same time.
* "git archive --list extra garbage" silently ignored excess command line parameters, which has been corrected.
* "git sparse-checkout set" added default patterns even when the patterns are being fed from the standard input, which has been corrected.
* "git sparse-checkout (add|set) --[no-]cone --end-of-options" did not handle "--end-of-options" correctly after a recent update.
* Unlike other environment variables that took the usual true/false/yes/no as well as 0/1, GIT_FLUSH only understood 0/1, which has been corrected.
* Clearing in-core repository (happens during e.g., "git fetch --recurse-submodules" with commit graph enabled) made in-core commit object in an inconsistent state by discarding the necessary data from commit-graph too early, which has been corrected.
* Update to a new feature recently added, "git show-ref --exists".
* oss-fuzz tests are built and run in CI. (merge c4a9cf1df3 js/oss-fuzz-build-in-ci later to maint).
* Rename detection logic ignored the final line of a file if it is an incomplete line.
* GitHub CI update. (merge 0188b2c8e0 pb/ci-github-skip-logs-for-broken-tests later to maint).
* "git diff --no-rename A B" did not disable rename detection but did not trigger an error from the command line parser.
* "git archive --remote=<remote>" learned to talk over the smart http (aka stateless) transport. (merge 176cd68634 jx/remote-archive-over-smart-http later to maint).
* Fetching via protocol v0 over Smart HTTP transport sometimes failed to correctly auto-follow tags. (merge fba732c462 jk/fetch-auto-tag-following-fix later to maint).
* The documentation for the --exclude-per-directory option marked it as deprecated, which confused readers into thinking there may be a plan to remove it in the future, which was not our intention. (merge 0009542cab jc/ls-files-doc-update later to maint).
* "git diff --no-index file1 file2" segfaulted while invoking the external diff driver, which has been corrected.
* Rewrite //-comments to /* comments */ in files whose comments prevalently use the latter.
* Cirrus CI jobs started breaking because we specified version of FreeBSD that is no longer available, which has been corrected. (merge 81fffb66d3 cb/use-freebsd-13-2-at-cirrus-ci later to maint).
* A caller called index_file_exists() that takes a string expressed as <ptr, length> with a wrong length, which has been corrected. (merge 156e28b36d jh/sparse-index-expand-to-path-fix later to maint).
* A failed "git tag -s" did not necessarily result in an error depending on the crypto backend, which has been corrected.
* "git stash" sometimes was silent even when it failed due to unwritable index file, which has been corrected.
* "git show-ref --verify" did not show things like "CHERRY_PICK_HEAD", which has been corrected.
* Recent conversion to allow more than 0/1 in GIT_FLUSH broke the mechanism by flipping what yes/no means by mistake, which has been corrected.
* The sequencer machinery does not use the ref API and instead records names of certain objects it needs for its correct operation in temporary files, which makes these objects susceptible to loss by garbage collection. These temporary files have been added as starting points for reachability analysis to fix this. (merge bc7f5db896 pw/gc-during-rebase later to maint).
* "git cherry-pick" invoked during "git rebase -i" session lost the authorship information, which has been corrected. (merge e4301f73ff vn/rebase-with-cherry-pick-authorship later to maint).
* The code paths that call repo_read_object_file() have been tightened to react to errors. (merge 568459bf5e js/check-null-from-read-object-file later to maint).
* Other code cleanup, docfix, build fix, etc. (merge 5aea3955bc rj/clarify-branch-doc-m later to maint). (merge 9cce3be2df bk/bisect-doc-fix later to maint). (merge 8430b438f6 vd/fsck-submodule-url-test later to maint). (merge 3cb4384683 jc/t0091-with-unknown-git later to maint). (merge 020456cb74 rs/receive-pack-remove-find-header later to maint). (merge bc47139f4f la/trailer-cleanups later to maint).

Read on

Other Recent Tux Machines' Posts

Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Puff Pieces Won't Solve SRA Problems [original]
The SRA is guarding against justice
LibreOffice 26.2 Open-Source Office Suite Officially Released, This Is What’s New
The Document Foundation released LibreOffice 26.2 today as a major update for this open-source, free, and cross-platform office suite software for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows systems.
Mesa 26.0 Open-Source Graphics Stack Officially Released, Here’s What’s New
The Mesa 26.0 open-source graphics stack has been released today as a major update that introduces new features and improvements across most of the included graphics drivers.
Vim 9.2 Is Out with Comprehensive Completion, Wayland Support, and More
Vim 9.2 has been released today as the latest version of this open-source and highly configurable text editor, a release that introduces new features and improvements.
Canonical/Ubuntu: FunOS 24.04.4, Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS, and More
Canonical/Ubuntu picks
 
The 'Bird Kitchen' [original]
4 weeks ago we needed to confront some locals over the feeding of birds
Today in Techrights
Some of the latest articles
9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: February 15th, 2026
The 279th installment of the 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup is here for the week ending February 15th, 2026.
KaOS Linux Drops KDE Plasma After 12 Years for Niri/Noctalia to Escape systemd
KaOS Linux 2026.02 was released today as the February 2026 ISO snapshot for this independent GNU/Linux distribution, which uses Arch Linux’s pacman package manager, and the first release to ship with the Niri Wayland compositor.
today's leftovers
GNU/Linux and more
Recent Proxmox Coverage at Valnet
Proxmox articles
Games: 150 Steam Machine, Proton, Nvidia and Razer
gaming with GNU/Linux
GNU/Linux Distributions and Operating Systems: Immutable Options, NixOS, Arch, Vanilla OS, and More
Recent Valnet articles
This lightweight Linux distro made my 10-year-old laptop usable again
Linux Mint Xfce
Wayland might be the future of Linux, but I’m not leaving X11 yet
Explore the unexpected benefits of X11 that are making Linux users hesitant to embrace the new Wayland technology
Keeping the Site Fast in Spite of Annoying Bots [original]
Running sites takes a lot of work and many skills
Microsoft Windows' Decline, as Seen From Maldives [original]
It seems like a global thing
GNU/Linux and ChromeOS Hit 5% in Anguilla [original]
Anguilla is not a poor country
Never Give Up [original]
For new adopters of GNU/Linux there are sometimes reasons to just "give up" or "call it quits"
I’m going back to the 2000s this weekend by installing this classic Linux distro
Q4OS
GNU/Linux Leftovers
half a dozen picks regarding GNU/Linux
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and “I love Free Software day”
FOSS leftovers
Standards/Consortia: XMPP, UTF-8, and Antenna Kit
Protocols and more
Programming Leftovers
Development news
Open Hardware/Modding: Adafruit, ESP32, and More
Hardware news
FreeBSD and OpenBSD Leftovers
BSD news
Barry Kauler on Limine 10.7.0 and Default Password in EasyOS
latest from Barry Kauler
today's howtos
Instructionals/Technical posts
Android Leftovers
How to recover a notification you accidentally swiped away on Android
Fedora made me realize Windows was the problem with my workflow
There are several times in my life when I thought I was doing alright until I upgraded something
Linux Mint 23 adds home encryption option for new users
Linux Mint 23 will introduce an expanded set of account administration options when it debuts later this year
Free and Open Source Software
Only free and open source software is eligible for inclusion
Bit-Brick K1 Pro Adds 6 TOPS NPU and Dual NVMe to Compact SBC
Documentation is provided through a wiki covering microSD and eMMC flashing with Rockchip’s RKDevTool
Ezurio Carbon AM62 Targets Industrial Linux with TI Sitara AM62x
Ezurio positions this split-core arrangement for designs that need Linux application processing alongside deterministic control and I/O handling on dedicated cores
GNU/Linux in Greece [original]
Why does Greece like the platform more than the rest of Europe (on average)?
Today in Techrights
Some of the latest articles
REMnux 8 Linux Toolkit for Malware Analysis Is Out to Celebrate 15th Anniversary
Lenny Zeltser informs 9to5Linux today about the release and general availability of REMnux 8, the go-to Linux toolkit for malware analysis and reverse-engineering of malicious software.
ChromeOS and GNU/Linux Reach 5% in El Salvador [original]
ChromeOS isn't for freedom, but at least it is not Windows
today's leftovers
GNU/Linux and more
Programming Leftovers
Development picks
Mozilla: Promotion of Slop Plagiarism and Thunderbird's Mobile Progress Report
a pair of Mozilla updates
OpenSUSE: Planet News Roundup and Tumbleweed Review of the Week
OpenSUSE updates
Games and GNU/Linux in the Mainstream: Godot 4.7 dev 1, "Is Linux Finally Ready for Mainstream PC Gaming?" and More
3 new posts/articles
Linux Graphics: Development Work by Christian Gmeiner and Dave Airlie
coding oriented posts
HowTo Geek on Linux commands, systemd tools, and "actually useful Linux apps to install this weekend"
Some Valnet articles
today's howtos
Instructionals/Technical posts
Red Hat's Blog Posts and Paid-for Puff Pieces in the Media
latest from Red Hat
GNOME 49.4 Released with Improvements for Nautilus, GNOME Shell, and Mutter
The GNOME Project released GNOME 49.4 today as the fourth point release of the latest GNOME 49 “Brescia” desktop environment series with more bug fixes and improvements.
Hackaday, and HaikuOS (Operating Systems), and postmarketOS
today's leftovers
Web, Databases, and Standards
FOSS leftovers
Programming Leftovers
Development related picks
Games: Unreal Tournament, SteamOS, and More
latest half dozen from GamingOnLinux
Android Leftovers
Galaxy A17 trades performance for Android updates, and I don’t think it’s worth it
AerynOS is the atomic Linux distro nobody is talking about
I'm still only around nine months into my Linux journey
Putting Linux on a tablet? Here's 7 distros to try
So, let's explore some of the best Linux distros for tablet PCs
Glacia OS – New Ubuntu based Distro Features Unity Desktop
For those who like the old Unity Desktop, there’s new work in progress Linux Distribution features that desktop environment
800 Days Soon [original]
One week from now it'll be 800 days of uptime for this modest laptop
Free and Open Source Software
This is free and open source software
KDE Frameworks 6.23 Improves the Open/Save Dialogs Across Plasma and KDE Apps
The KDE Project released today KDE Frameworks 6.23 as the monthly update to this collection of more than 80 add-on libraries to Qt and a companion to the KDE Plasma desktop environment and KDE Gear software suite.
This Week in Plasma: Finalizing 6.6
This week we put the finishing touches on Plasma 6.6
Linux mint: Monthly News – January 2026
Before we start with the news, I’d like to thank you for your donations and for your support
My 5 favorite Linux distros that are ready to use out of the box (no setup required)
These distros are easy to install, include the right apps
Released: Helwan Linux Dev Cinnamon LTS V3.0
Following our commitment to stability, we are proud to announce the immediate availability of Helwan Linux Dev Cinnamon LTS V3.0
6 Months From Now It'll Be 5 Years After Vista 11 Came Out, Its "Market Share" in US Government Sites is 13.5% [original]
This coming summer it'll be 5 years since Vista 11 first got 'leaked'
Today in Techrights
Some of the latest articles