GNU/Linux and Free Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 26, 2025

• GNU/Linux

  • Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • LWN ☛ Enhancing screen-reader functionality in modern GNOME

        Accessibility features and the work that goes into developing those features often tend to be overlooked and are poorly understood by all but the people who actually depend on such features. At Fedora's annual developer conference, Flock, Lukáš Tyrychtr sought to improve understanding and raise awareness about accessibility with his session on accessibility barriers and screen-reader functionality in GNOME. His talk provided rare insight into the world of using and developing open-source software for visually-impaired users—including landing important accessibility improvements in the latest GNOME release.

        I did not attend Flock, which was held in Prague from June 5 to June 8. However, I was able to watch the talk shortly after it was given via the recording of the live stream from the event. Slides from the talk have not yet been published.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Windows Central ☛ Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) quietly released an official image for WSL — but most of us won't be able to use it [Ed: IBM pushing Windows instead of GNU/Linux. This is not what Freedom is about.]

      Back in April, Fedora 42 made its long-awaited arrival as an officially supported Linux distro on WSL. For Fedora lovers, such as myself, it was great news.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Ubuntu ☛ NodeJS 18 LTS EOL extended from April 2025 to May 2032 on Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu ☛ Native integration now available for Pure Storage and Canonical LXD

      Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, and Pure Storage, the IT pioneer delivering enterprise-grade all-flash storage, have partnered to introduce a native integration between LXD and Pure Storage FlashArray. This collaboration allows organizations to combine open source virtualization with industry-leading block storage to achieve unmatched performance, simplicity, and reliability for their infrastructure deployments, whether using just LXD or a full Canonical MicroCloud.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Tollef Fog Heen: Pronoun support in userdir-ldap

    Debian uses LDAP for storing information about users, hosts and other objects. The wrapping around this is called userdir-ldap, or ud-ldap for short. It provides a mail gateway, web UI and a couple of schemas for different object types.

  • LWN ☛ CoMaps emerges as an Organic Maps fork

    The open-source mobile app Organic Maps is used by millions of people on both the Android and iOS platforms. In addition to featuring offline maps (generated from OpenStreetMap cartography) and turn-by-turn navigation, it also promises its users greater privacy than proprietary options. However, controversial decisions taken by the project's leaders, feelings of disenfranchisement among contributors, and even accusations of embezzlement have precipitated a divide in the community, leading to a new fork called CoMaps.

    [...]

    One possible eventuality for the two projects is a soft fork, where the apps are developed in parallel, with different funding sources and development teams but sharing mostly identical source code. This organization could be complicated by a proposal made on May 12 to relicense CoMaps under the GNU AGPLv3 rather than the current Apache-2.0 license, a suggestion already attracting significant discussion on Codeberg and Zulip. In such a case, Organic Maps would be forced to follow suit and adopt the AGPL in order to incorporate improvements contributed first to CoMaps, whereas CoMaps would face no legal problems taking patches from Organic Maps. Pastbin had already advocated for Organic Maps to be relicensed under a copyleft license back in September 2023, but this idea was mostly ignored and made no headway.

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers

    • Aral Balkan ☛ Web Numbers

      Are you ready for Web Numbers?