How time flies... This week already marks one year since the debut of AMD's Zen 5 Strix Point laptop processors with the likes of the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and Ryzen AI 9 365 that also rolled out the RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics. In marking one year that Strix Point laptops have been available, here is a performance benchmarking redux of the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with the ASUS Zenbook S16 for looking at how the Linux performance at launch-day compares to a very leading-edge Linux software stack now one year later.
Announced just once month ago was Wayback as an X11 compatibility layer build atop Wayland components. In the past month Wayback has been off to a quick start with a goal of being production-ready next year and has also already became a project under the FreeDesktop.org umbrella. Today marks the release of Wayback 0.1 as the first preview release for this X11 compatibility layer...
Systemd 257 debuted last December and now finally systemd 258 is preparing to roll out... Systemd 258-rc1 was issued today as the first test release toward this next major release. It's a big one with more than 260 changes noted in the announcement, including multiple new tools and other additions...
GitHub (and by extension its owner, Microsoft) is calling for a new EU tech fund to ensure critical open source software can be maintained.
Its proposal, detailed in a report, stresses that our the economy relies on open source software (OSS) for digital infrastructure, but that maintenance ‘continues to be underfunded, especially when compared to physical infrastructure like roads or bridges’.
GitHub’s research says 96% of all codebases contain open source code, and OSS contributes an estimated $8.8 trillion to the global economy.
Yet, most open source projects get little-to-no funding. A third of projects, many linchpin dependencies in billion-dollar operations, are maintained by just a single person. Others get by on drive-by donations and volunteer contributors – goodwill for the greater good.
Given how widely many OSS components are, and how vulnerable they are to developer burnout, abandonment, or socially-engineered hijacking, the costs in not ensuring open source is in a healthy states are, in a sense, greater.
Infrastructure underpinning day-to-day life, powering the modern economy, balances on precarious foundations. Sustainable open source maintenance will ensure ongoing improvements and all-important security diligence for everything resting on top.
A Sovereign Tech Fund for Europe
The solution, per Github’s report, is to scale up Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) to a pan-European level.
Regular readers will be familiar with the STF since it has, in recent years, provided money to fund important initiatives within the GNOME project, ranging from accessibility work to new privacy and wellbeing features on the desktop.
This proposed EU-STF would give cash to widely-used, critical components to help sustain and support open source maintenance.
GitHub’s report recommends a starting budget of €350 million carved out of the bloc’s 2028-2035 budget, and using the money to action 5 key areas:
Identifying the EU’s most critical open source dependencies
Investments in maintenance
Investments in security
Investments in improvement
Strengthening the open source ecosystem
The funding would require the creation of a new, centralised EU institution (a ‘moonshot model’), or a group of EU member states willing to provide initial funding and then seek further resources from the EU budget (a ‘pragmatic model’).
As GitHub itself puts it: “The flip side of everybody benefiting from this open digital infrastructure is that too few feel responsible for paying the tab.”
The proposed fund would be directed at the ecosystem’s most critical, underfunded dependencies
Cold hard cash is the answer, and GitHub thinks the European Union should step in to spend public money to fill in the OSS funding gap.
Others in the Linux community already take a more direct approach.
Canonical is donating £120,000 in 2025 to the smaller open source projects it relies on to maintain the infrastructure, tooling and triage mechanisms in Ubuntu and adjacent projects. The sums are small but symbolic: accepting responsibility to fund the dependencies you use.
The proposed EU-STF fund would not be a free-for-all (you couldn’t pitch a desktop widget and expect a wedge of polymer in return). Rather, it’d be strategically directed at the ecosystem’s most critical, underfunded dependencies for maintenance, security and improvement.
Github suggests the EU-STF start with a €350 million pool, but adds that this amount “…would not be enough to meet the open source maintenance need”, merely “form the basis for leveraging industry and national government co-financing that would make a lasting impact.”
While €350 million is a huge portion of EU’s budget it is veritable chump-change if viewed against the profits that big tech companies—remember those stats from earlier—generate each year.
Funding is important, but so is who funds it
I don’t disagree with the idea of funding OSS with public money since it open source is a public good. And the idea that a co-ordinated, centralised and (ideally) transparent funding process is needed is, to my mind, the logical approach – no self-beneficial backhanders.
But the cynic inside me is giving this proposal some side-eye.
If open source gets funding from the EU, it must happen lock-step with the EU pushing for adoption of open source in the public sector
Microsoft, like all of the big tech giants, relies heavily on OSS to keep its own profits ever-inflating. The idea that national governments—i.e., taxpayers—must stump up “or else” is a little (pardon the pun) rich given the rich benefit from them doing so.
The Scrooge McDuck money pits were dug out with the labour of hundreds of thousands of open source developers, and each coin clattering down to fill it up part-earned in the same way.
Open source maintainers deserve monetary support. Absolutely. It is vital that valuable talent and critical software is rewarded. I worry the creation of an EU fund at the behest of big tech might be a way for big tech to offload its own responsibilities to fund OSS.
So if open source is to get sustainable funding from the EU, it should happen in lock-step with the EU pushing the use of open-source in the public sector. This fund shouldn’t act as a sleight-of-hand subsidy for big tech to coast on.
What’s interesting from its blog post is that GitHub (and Microsoft) is not paying lip service to this idea. It’s pushing for it. It plans to meet with EU legislators to advocate for such a fund, and warn of the risks of inaction in not creating one soon.
Something has to be done, and an EU Sovereign Tech Fund is one way to address it — but those who milk the community cow for profit ought to pay most for its feed.
The Zed open-source code editor that is written in Rust, has begun supporting Linux rather well, and has continued tacking on new features to assist developer workflows has introduced another new feature: the ability to easily disable all AI features...
OPNsense is a FreeBSD-based specialist operating system (and a fork of pfSense) designed for firewalls and routers. It is developed by Deciso B.V. in the Netherlands. Some of the features of OPNsense include forward caching proxy, traffic shaping, intrusion detection, two-factor authentication and easy OpenVPN client setup. The project's focus on security brings a number of unique features, such as the option to use LibreSSL instead of OpenSSL (selectable in the GUI). OPNsense also includes an update mechanism that delivers important security updates in a timely fashion.
Br OS is a Brazilian Linux distribution based on Ubuntu and featuring the KDE Plasma desktop. It is designed as an intuitive, easy-to-use, general-purpose operating system for web navigation and content creation, providing a selection of useful applications for daily use.
In addition to Blender 5.0 supporting HDR on Linux when using the Vulkan API and with Wayland, another important high dynamic range (HDR) milestone landed this week into Blender: the ability to both import and export HDR videos...
Liya is an Arch Linux-based, rolling release distribution. The project uses the Calamares system installer to set up the distribution which offers users the Cinnamon desktop environment, Pamac graphical package manager, and OnlyOffice. The system is intended to be easy to use, easy to explore, and distraction-free.
With the Linux 6.16 stable kernel potentially being released this coming Sunday, the Linux 6.17 merge window is quickly approaching. Btrfs maintainer and SUSE engineer David Sterba sent out the Btrfs pull request already of new feature code for this copy-on-write file-system in Linux 6.17...
For those making use of Open Virtual Machine Firmware (OVMF) such as for UEFI booting of VMs with KVM+QEMU, the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel is set to offer a convenient new driver to help in debugging the system boot when needed...
Pogocache 1.0 was released today as a fast open-source caching software that aims for low latency and great CPU efficiency. Pogocache supports Memcache / Valkey / Redis / HTTP / Postgres wire protocols while claiming to offer much better throughput and lower latency than these caching alternatives...
Cloud Hypervisor is the open-source, Rust-based VMM started originally by Intel engineers but under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation has evolved into a nice multi-vendor initiative with the likes of Microsoft, Cyberus, Arm, and others all contributing. Even with Intel's cutbacks due to their ongoing corporate restructuring, the Cloud Hypervisor project is thriving as a multi-vendor open-source project for a security-focused hypervisor...
The newest open-source Linux kernel driver being worked on for the growing accelerator "accel" subsystem is a new hardware driver courtesy of Arm for enabling their Ethos U65 and U85 NPUs...
Thunderbird 141 open-source email client is now available for download with a new 'Archive' action for email notifications and other changes. Here's what's new!
A big update to OBS Studio Snap package is available to test, with Canonical rebasing the screen recording and broadcasting software on top of a newer ‘core’ runtime.
The bump to the Snap core is needed as the latest OBS Studio 31.1 release drops support for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, as Canonical software engineer Vanda Hendrychová notes:
“Until now the snap has been running on core22; however, official builds of OBS Studio version 31.0 and subsequent releases are only available for Ubuntu 24.04 and later.We have upgraded the base snap to core24 in order to ensure close alignment with […] upstream.”
This shift will make it easier to maintain the Snap, but it’s not without a caveat: OBS Studio Portable includes “popular third-party plugins out-of-the-box”. The updated version, being built from vanilla source code, does not.
Users can continue to install plugins in the Snap manually, but Hendrychová notes that “OBS Studio plugins are shared libraries, they must be built with the same library versions as those present in the snap”.
To workaround this, she suggests using an Ubuntu 24.04 LXD container for building custom plugins.
Better Intel GPU Support
Intel GPU acceleration is improved in the new build – and AI plugins are planned!
Intel GPU hardware acceleration is improved in this new version due to the inclusion of packages from the Intel Graphics PPA, which is also maintained by Canonical.
Additionally, AI plugins “optimized for Intel hardware” are reportedly going added in a later release. I expect these to be Intel OpenVINO plugins that Audacity offers.
Anyone with hardware able to make use of them should keep an eye out, as they includes features like noise suppression, audio ‘super resolution’, and music generation.
How to test the improvements
Community users are being asked to test the rebased, retooled OBS Studio Snap by installing it from the candidate channel. Those with a stable version installed can switch by running snap refresh obs-studio --channel latest/candidate.
Should testing go fine, the update will roll out to all user on the stable channel in the coming weeks.
The OBS Studio Snap package is, like many apps on the Snap Store, not maintained by its upstream developers, but Ubuntu community members who work under the umbrella of ‘Snapcrafters‘. The OBS Studio offer an official DEB and Flatpak on Flathub.
If you plan on testing this update, and you need or want to report issues you find, you should do so by opening an issue on the Snapcrafters GitHub page for the OBS Studio Snap package.
The crew working on enhancing the FreeBSD laptop support is hoping to have an install option within the installer of FreeBSD 15 that will easily provide a KDE Plasma based desktop environment...
The first release candidate of Python 3.14 is now available for testing as what will be this year's big feature update to this popular scripting language...
Death Road to Canada is a lot of fun and so I have great expectations for the next game from Rocketcat Games, which is a spiritual sequel named Space Dingus.
Connexion
OPNsense is a FreeBSD-based specialist operating system (and a fork of pfSense) designed for firewalls and routers. It is developed by Deciso B.V. in the Netherlands. Some of the features of OPNsense include forward caching proxy, traffic shaping, intrusion detection, two-factor authentication and easy OpenVPN client setup. The project's focus on security brings a number of unique features, such as the option to use LibreSSL instead of OpenSSL (selectable in the GUI). OPNsense also includes an update mechanism that delivers important security updates in a timely fashion. 
Br OS is a Brazilian Linux distribution based on Ubuntu and featuring the KDE Plasma desktop. It is designed as an intuitive, easy-to-use, general-purpose operating system for web navigation and content creation, providing a selection of useful applications for daily use. 
Liya is an Arch Linux-based, rolling release distribution. The project uses the Calamares system installer to set up the distribution which offers users the Cinnamon desktop environment, Pamac graphical package manager, and OnlyOffice. The system is intended to be easy to use, easy to explore, and distraction-free. 
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