GNU/Linux and Free Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 03, 2025

• GNU/Linux

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

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Landing GSoC: The Dream Never Gets Old

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Victor Ma: Coding begins!

        Today marks the end of the community bonding period, and the start of the coding period, of GSoC.

        In the last two weeks, I’ve been looking into other crossword editors that are on the market, in order to see what features they have that we should implement. I compiled everything I saw into a findings document.

        Once that was done, I went through the document and distilled it down into a final list. I also added other feature ideas that I already had in mind.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Barry Kauler ☛ bcachefs utility crash in initrd

    The previous post is plans for moving ahead with QV:

  • Reconsidering QV — June 01, 2025

  ...thinking of replacing btrfs with bcachefs.

  The bcachefs utility project is here: [...]

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • OpenSUSE ☛ Tumbleweed Monthly Update - May 2025

    May introduced qemu 10.0 with improved virtualization performance, KDE Plasma 6.3.5 with polished usability fixes, and GStreamer 1.26.1 with smoother media playback across desktop and embedded devices. Security took center stage with OpenSSL 3.5.0’s post-quantum cryptography support and kernel updates, which addresses speculative execution vulnerabilities. Whether you’re a developer, sysadmin, or daily desktop user, May’s snapshots deliver meaningful enhancements for a trusted Tumbleweed experience.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu News ☛ Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 894

    Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 894 for the week of May 25 – 31, 2025. The full version of this issue is available here.

  • Ubuntu Fridge ☛ The Fridge: Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 894

    Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 894 for the week of May 25 – 31, 2025. The full version of this issue is available here.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Bozhidar Batsov ☛ How to Vim: Reloading File Buffers

    In Vim (and many other editors) we interact with the contents of files via the “file buffer” abstraction. Basically, that’s the in-memory representation of a file within a text editor, that occasionally gets synchronized with the disk one (the actual file).

    From time to time a file might get changed outside Vim (e.g. you had it changed in another editor or you pulled some updates from your VCS). In those cases we usually want to reload the file contents into the file buffer. There are multiple ways to do this in Vim (shocker, right) - a manual (with a couple of nuances) and an automated approach (with many nuances).

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox Developer Experience: CDP Retirement in Firefox

        Last call to jump on the WebDriver BiDi train!

        CDP removed in Firefox Nightly 141

        In May 2024 we announced that our experimental support for the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) was being deprecated in Firefox 129, and we were looking at removing it completely by the end of 2024. It has taken a bit more time to make sure libraries and clients could migrate to WebDriver BiDi, but here we are one year later to follow up on that plan.

  • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

    • Document Foundation ☛ LibreOffice project and community recap: May 2025

      Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more… We started May with a new Month of LibreOffice campaign!