Linux Weekly News

Tobias Heider has written an article that explains changes that are coming for Ubuntu's generic Arm64 desktop ISO images in the 25.10 release. The current solution, Heider says, depends on GRUB features that are unavailable in secure boot mode and require adding device-specific logic to multiple packages. The new solution, called stubble, is derived from systemd-stub:

A bundled stubble image contains stubble itself, a Linux kernel, a HWID lookup table to map devices to device trees and multiple device trees. When grub loads this "kernel", stubble executes first, reads the SMBIOS table to generate HWIDs, looks for a match in the embeeded lookup table and loads a matching device tree before passing control to the actual Linux kernel.

The elegance in this approach lies in how it interacts with the rest of the system. Integrating stubble happens entirely at build time in the kernel package. The stubble package is a build dependency for the kernel. After building the kernel itself, we bundle it with stubble and our DTBs and ship the combined binary instead. The resulting stubble + kernel + dtb bundle can be loaded by grub like any other Ubuntu kernel. No further changes in grub or other packages are necessary to make it work.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.16.2, 6.15.11, and 6.12.43 stable kernels. He notes that this is the last release in the 6.15.y series, and recommends that users move to the 6.16.y kernel branch at this time.

Version 25.8 of the LibreOffice open-source office suite has been released. Notable changes include several new functions in the Calc spreadsheet application, ability to export to the PDF 2.0 format, better PowerPoint font compatibility with Impress, and significant performance improvements. For a full list of changes, see the release notes on the Document Foundation wiki.

After more than two years of development, the Debian Project has released its new stable version, Debian 13 ("trixie"). The release comes with the usual bounty of upgraded packages and more than 14,000 new packages; it also debuts Advanced Package Tool (APT) 3.0 as the default package manager and makes 64-bit RISC-V a supported architecture. There are few surprises with trixie, which is exactly what many Linux users are hoping for—a free operating system that just works as expected.

The Python Package Index (PyPI) has announced that it is now checking for expired domains to try to prevent domain-resurrection attacks. In this type of attack, a malicious user buys an expired domain and uses it to take over an account by resetting the password associated with the email used with PyPI. Since June, PyPI has unverified more than 1,800 email addresses after their associated domains entered expiration phases.

After an initial bulk check period that took place in April 2025, PyPI will check daily for any domains in use for status changes, and update its internal database with the most recent status.

If a domain registration enters the redemption period, that's an indicator to PyPI that the previously verified email destinations may not be trusted, and will un-verify a previously-verified email address. PyPI will not issue a password reset request to addresses that have become unverified.

PyPI recommends that users add a second verified email address "from another notable domain (e.g. Gmail)" to their account, if they do not have one already.

Statically typed programming languages can help catch mismatches between the kinds of values a program is intended to manipulate, and the values it actually manipulates. While there have been many bytes spent on discussions of whether this is worth the effort, some programming language designers believe that the type checking in current languages does not go far enough. Koka, an experimental functional programming language, extends its type system with an effect system that tracks the side-effects a program will have in the course of producing a value.

This year, 51% of all surveyed Python developers are involved in data exploration and processing, with pandas and NumPy being the tools most commonly used for this.

Many of us in the Python pundit space have talked about Python as being divided into thirds: One-third web development, one-third data science and pure science, and one-third as a catch-all bin.

We need to rethink that positioning now that one of those thirds is overwhelmingly the most significant portion of Python.

As a result, Git can generate packs using the path walk approach that are often significantly smaller than even those generated with the new name hash function described above. Its timings are competitive even with generating packs using the existing revision order traversal.

Mitchell Hashimoto has written a blog post about "fully embracing the GObject type system" with a rewrite of the GTK version of Ghostty:

The rewrite is now the default if one builds Ghostty from source, and will be included in the 1.2 release that is expected in the next few weeks. LWN covered Ghostty in January.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.16.1, 6.15.10, 6.12.42, 6.6.102, and 6.1.148 stable kernels. Get them while they're hot!

The purpose of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) is to provide a specification for filesystem layout; it specifies the location for files and directories on a Linux system to simplify application development for multiple distributions. In its heyday it had some success at this, but the standard has been frozen in time since 2015, and much has changed since then. There is a slow-moving effort to revive the FHS and create a FHS 4.0, but a recent discussion among Fedora developers also raised the possibility of standardizing on the suggestions in systemd's file-hierarchy documentation, which has now been added to the Linux Userspace API (UAPI) Group's specifications.