The GNOME Project has provided GNOME OS for some time; until now, the project only provided a "Nightly" edition that was built from the latest commits and was aimed solely at GNOME developers. Adrian Vovk has now announced the release of GNOME OS Preview, which is intended for a non-developer audience: > GNOME OS Preview is the current GNOME OS Nightly, but without the "nightly" > aspect. Instead, it's built from the latest stable GNOME release (GNOME 51.1, > at the time of writing). GNOME OS Preview lives in the same branches on GitLab > as the stable org.gnome.Platform Flatpak runtimes. > > GNOME OS Preview is only a few weeks old, so it has only seen limited > real-life testing so far. We therefore expect people will uncover some issues > initially. That said, Preview is significantly more stable than Nightly, which > dozens of people have been daily driving without major issues for over a year. > Thus, we're feeling confident that Preview is going to be reliable enough for > daily use by non-developer enthusiasts. While Preview is meant for non-developers, it is not considered complete or stable for the broader public. There are a number of features, listed in Vovk's post, that need to be implemented before the project is ready to declare GNOME OS "ready for prime time". Adventurous users, who might not mind having to reinstall the OS once a stable version is declared, can download and start using GNOME OS Preview today.

Self-referential structures that can be used without unsafe code have posed a problem for Rust for years. There are many cases where a self-referential data structure is the elegant algorithmic choice, but implementing it in accordance with Rust's lifetime rules is all but impossible. At Kangrejos 2026, Gary Guo presented a clever solution to the problem in the context of the kernel's pin_init crate, which helps with the creation of immovable data structures, typically for interoperability with C. Guo's changes could help remove most of the unsafe code related to lifetimes in the Nova driver and, eventually, other Rust components.

The NFS network filesystem protocol has a long history on Unix-like operating systems (and beyond). NFS is still evolving, though, and implementations need to keep up. At the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference, NFS developer Jeff Layton gave an overview of recent enhancements to the Linux implementation, along with some hints for what will be coming in the near future.

The results from the 2026 election for members of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB) have been announced. Kees Cook, Dave Hansen, Miguel Ojeda, and Shuah Khan have all been re-elected, and Laurent Pinchart will be joining the board.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (ghostscript, grafana, hplip, libsoup3, lrzsz, rpcbind, and wireshark), Debian (chromium, cifs-utils, expat, gst-plugins-bad1.0, gst-plugins-good1.0, jpeg-xl, mutt, and spip), Mageia (gpsd, libx11, and roundcubemail), Oracle (389-ds-base, compat-libtiff3, environment-modules, ghostscript, grafana, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, hplip, idm:DL1, kernel, kernel-uek, libsoup, libsoup3, lrzsz, rpcbind, and wireshark), Red Hat (gd), SUSE (alloy, amazon-ecs-init, bind, busybox, chromium, distribution, govulncheck-vulndb, iperf, jackson-annotations, jackson-core, jackson-databind, kernel, libXtst, mutt, openssh, php8, python313-python-multipart, python313-python-rapidjson, python313-python3-saml, python313-pywbem, python313-redis, python313-reportlab, python313-requests, python313-rope, python313-rpyc, python313-rsa, qemu, swtpm, the Java stack, and wpa_supplicant), and Ubuntu (golang-1.23, linux-azure, and rabbitmq-server).

Since Android's inception, the kernels it has used have diverged significantly from the mainline. While many of those differences have been resolved over time, and the move to the generic kernel image has helped to bring Android closer, current devices still carry a lot of out-of-tree changes. The preferred form for such changes is by way of vendor hooks. At the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference, Todd Kjos ran a fast-paced session in the Android track to discuss vendor hooks and how they are used.

As part of KDE's 30th anniversary celebration, the project has released The KDE Documentary — A Story of Free Software Underdogs (YouTube video): > The story starts in 1996, when Matthias Ettrich, a student at the University > of Tübingen, posted to a Usenet group asking for programmers to help build a > desktop for Linux. What followed became KDE, one of the largest free software > communities in the world. KDE made Linux usable as a desktop for people who > weren't system administrators, giving it a complete, consistent graphical > environment at a time when there was none. > > The film covers the highs and lows of three decades of KDE: the Qt licensing > fight and the rivalry with GNOME; the success of KHTML, the browser engine > that became the basis of Apple's WebKit and Google's Chrome; and the > contentious release of KDE 4 and the rebuild that followed.

Canonical has announced the release of Ubuntu 26.10 ("Stonking Stingray"): > Ubuntu 26.10 advances enterprise security features, completes the rollout of > the Rust-based uutils coreutils, and strengthens integrations for user > authentication using Microsoft Entra ID. > > [...] Ubuntu 26.10 also ships with GNOME 51, bringing a smoother, more > responsive desktop, better display handling, improved accessibility, and > refinements across core applications. In addition, the Ubuntu App Center now > provides a more consistent experience for managing snaps and debs. See the release notes for a list of new features as well as incompatible changes between 26.10 and prior Ubuntu releases.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (environment-modules, flatpak-builder, kernel, kernel-rt, librabbitmq, libreoffice, libsoup, mod_auth_openidc:2.3, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, OpenEXR, opentelemetry-collector, pki-core:10.6, postgresql:12, python-tornado, python36:3.6, ruby:3.3, tftp, and xorg-x11-server), Debian (buildstream, firefox-esr, mariadb, and sogo), Fedora (exim, freerdp, python3-docs, and python3.14), Mageia (drakx-installer-images, kernel, kmod-nvidia-current-wopengpu, kmod-virtualbox), Oracle (curl, emacs, environment-modules, flatpak, flatpak-builder, gd, hplip, kbd, kernel, librabbitmq, libreoffice, libxml2, microcode_ctl, mod_auth_openidc:2.3, nodejs:22, OpenEXR, pcre2, perl-DBI, python-tornado, rsyslog, tftp, thunderbird, and xorg-x11-server), Red Hat (compat-libtiff3, firefox, ghostscript, idm:DL1, ipa, kernel, kernel-rt, libtiff, lrzsz, and mariadb-connector-c), Slackware (libarchive), SUSE (amazon-cloudwatch-agent, bind, container-suseconnect, containerd, glibc, google-osconfig-agent, helm, kernel, python312, python313-oletools, python313-openpyxl, python313-orjson, python313-paramiko, python313-pipreqs, python313-py, python313-pycryptodome, python313-pycryptodomex, python313-pydrive2, python313-python-engineio, webkit2gtk3, and xorg-x11-server), and Ubuntu (apache2, bind9, bluez, curl, openssh, python-urllib3, and u-boot).

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.11, 6.18.57, 6.12.113, 6.6.159, 6.1.190, 5.15.223, and 5.10.272 stable kernels. This series includes, among other things, a fix for a critical vulnerability (CVE-2026-99999). The flaw in skb_checksum_help() would allow an IPv4 packet with bad checksum metadata to "corrupt the network header and cause a bunch of mischief" in the words of patch author Michael S. Tsirkin. As usual, all users are advised to upgrade.