Linux Weekly News

Steve passed away at the dawn of 2025. His time was short but remarkable. He will forever remain an inspiration. Judging by the outpouring of feelings this week, he is equally missed and mourned by colleagues and friends across the open source landscape, in particular in Ubuntu and Debian where he was a great mind, mentor and conscience.

So we had a slight pickup in commits this last week, but as expected and hoped for, things were still pretty quiet. About twice as many commits as the holiday week, but that's still not all that many.

I expect things will start becoming more normal now that people are back from the holidays and are starting to recover and wake up from their food comas.

The Pony programming language is dedicated to exploring how to make high-performance actor-based systems. Started in 2014, the language's most notable feature is probably reference capabilities, a system of pointer annotations that gives the developer fine manual control over how data is shared between actors, while simultaneously ensuring that Pony programs don't have data races. The language is not likely to overtake other more popular programming languages, but its ideas could be useful for other languages or frameworks struggling with concurrent data access.

This WIP is a GCC front-end for Algol 68, the fascinating, generally poorly understood and often vilified programming language. It is common knowledge that Algol 68 was well ahead of its time back when it was introduced, and anyone who knows the language well will suspect this probably still holds true today, but more than fifty years after the publication of the Revised Report the world may finally be ready for it, or perhaps not, we shall see.

For those who see Algol 68 as too new, there was also a COBOL front end posted in December.

We've been hard at work since Android 15's release in September, adapting our unique features to this new version of Android. Android 15 introduced several complex changes under the hood, but due to our previous efforts adapting to Google's UI-centric adjustments in Android 12 through 14, we were able to rebase onto Android 15's code-base faster than anticipated.

Additionally, this is far-and-away the easiest bringup cycle from a device perspective we have seen in years. This means that many more devices are ready on day one that we'd typically expect to have up this early in the cycle!

Last, but not least, we even had enough time and resources to introduce not one, but two new exciting apps! The first one, Twelve, will replace our aging music app, while the other one, Camelot, will let you view PDF files.

This is not yet in the upstream Linux tree, for fear of breaking countless other tools out in the wild. But it can serve as a test commit for those that want to get this fixed ahead of any future collisions (or this commit actually landing).

LWN looked at commit-ID collisions a few weeks back.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has posted three new stable kernel updates: 6.12.7, 6.6.68, and 6.1.122. As usual, he warns that all users of stable kernels must upgrade, although for many systems that seems unlikely to happen until January.