Linux Weekly News

The effort to ensure that open-source software is reproducible has been gathering steam over the years, and gaining traction with major Linux distributions. Debian, for example, has been working toward reproducible builds for more than a decade; it can now produce official live CDs of the current stable release that are reproducible. Fedora started on the path much later, but it has progressed far enough that the project is now considering a change proposal for the Fedora 43 development cycle, expected to be released in October, with a goal of making 99% of Fedora's package builds reproducible. So far, reaction to the proposal seems favorable and focused primarily on how to achieve the goal—with minimal pain for packagers—rather than whether to attempt it.

Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of four stable kernels on March 28: 6.13.9, 6.12.21, 6.6.85, and 6.1.132. Users are advised to upgrade.

KDE contributor David Edmundson has published a blog post about improving KDE Plasma's login experience by replacing SDDM with a new Plasma Login Manager.

It's worth stressing nothing is official or set in stone yet, whilst it has come up in previous Plasma online meetings and in the 2023 Akademy. I'm posting this whilst starting a more official discussion on the plasma-devel mailing list.

Oliver Beard and I have made a new mutli-process greeter, that uses the same startup mechanism as the desktop session. It doesn't have all the features that we propose at the start of the blog, but an architecture where features and services can be slowly and safely added.

That discussion is here for those who would like to follow along. The prototype is currently in two repositories: plasma-login for the frontend work, and plasma-login-manager, which is a fork of SDDM.

Ubuntu 23.10 and 24.04 LTS introduced a feature using AppArmor to restrict access to user namespaces. Qualys has reported three ways to bypass AppArmor's restrictions and enable local users to gain full administrative capabilities within a user namespace. Ubuntu has followed up with a post that explains the namespace-restriction feature in detail, and says these bypasses do not constitute security vulnerabilities.

LWN covered Ubuntu 24.04 LTS last May.

One recurring criticism of Rust has been that the language has no official specification. This is a barrier to adoption in some safety-conscious organizations, as well as to writing alternate language implementations. Now, the Rust project has announced that it will be adopting the Ferrocene Language Specification (FLS) developed by Ferrous Systems and maintaining it as part of the core project. While this may not satisfy die-hard standardization-process enthusiasts, it's a step toward removing another barrier to using Rust in safety-critical systems.

The Linux kernel is massive — approximately 28 million lines of code. Since 2005, more than 13,500 developers from more than 1,300 different companies have contributed to the Linux kernel. Additionally, there are many kernel versions, and developers update the code constantly, distributing that code to developers who are working on various distributions of Linux. Akamai now delivers the infrastructure that these developers and their users rely on, at no cost, supporting the Git environments developers use to access kernel sources quickly, regardless of where they're based.

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Version 0.11 of the Neovim text editor has been released. Notable changes in this release include simpler Language Server Protocol (LSP) client setup, improved tree-sitter performance, better emoji support, and enhancements for Neovim's embedded terminal emulator. See the release notes for a full list of changes.