2026-04-29 02:50:44
LWN has received the sad news that Seth Nickell passed away, on April 16, from his father, Eric Nickell:
Many of you knew Seth from his work in the GNOME Usability Project, but his roots in that community trace back to his high school years. As a father of a high school junior, I remember being terrified when he flashed the hard drive of a computer he purchased for himself with this weird "Linux" thing. And I was a bit awed by the college application essay he wrote about open source and Linus Torvalds.
It was his interest in packet radio that drew him into working with the Linux AX.25 HOWTO as a high schooler, and from there to his focus on making the Linux desktop work for everyone.
The family plans to share news of a memorial at a later time. He will be deeply missed.
2026-04-28 22:33:38
The Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora Linux 44. There are "what's new" articles for Fedora Workstation, Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop, and Fedora Atomic Desktops. The Fedora Asahi Remix for Apple Silicon Macs, based on Fedora 44, is also available. See the Fedora Spins page for a full list of alternative desktop options.
Fedora Linux 44 Workstation ships with the latest GNOME release, GNOME 50. This comes with a long list of refinements to your desktop, including everything from accessibility to color management and remote desktop. Many of the applications that are installed by default on Fedora Workstation have also seen improvements, from Document Viewer to File Manager and Calendar. To learn more about these and other changes, you can read the GNOME 50 release notes.
KDE Plasma Desktop: If you are a KDE user, you should also notice a couple of very obvious changes. Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44 is based on the latest Plasma 6.6, which includes the new Plasma Login Manager and Plasma Setup to provide a more cohesive and integrated experience from the moment the computer is powered on for the first time. The installation process has been simplified, enabling you to easily set up Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop for a computer for a friend or a loved one.
The release notes include important changes between Fedora 43 and Fedora 44 for desktop users, developers, and system administrators.
2026-04-28 22:12:36
There are dozens of music-player applications for Linux; the options range from bare-bones programs that only play local files to full-blown music-management projects with a full suite of tools for managing (and playing) a music collection. Strawberry is in the latter category; it has a bumper crop of features, including smart playlists, support for editing music metadata tags, the ability to organize music files, and more.
2026-04-28 21:46:18
We have received the sad news that Tomáš Kalibera, a member of the R Project core team, has passed away after a short illness.
A friend who knew him well wrote to me: he was very happy, and his work fulfilled him. That is, perhaps, the best thing one can say about a life in open source — that the work mattered, that it reached millions, and that the person who did it found meaning in it.
Kalibera was mentioned in this 2019 article about C programs passing strings to Fortran subroutines. He will be greatly missed.
2026-04-28 21:18:41
FOSDEM's organizers have announced
that all of the video recordings "worth publishing
" from FOSDEM 2026 are now available.
Videos are linked from the individual schedule pages for the talks and the full schedule page. They are also available, organised by room, at video.fosdem.org/2026.
LWN's coverage of talks from FOSDEM 2026 can be found on our conference index.
2026-04-28 21:11:40
Security updates have been issued by Debian (openjdk-21 and webkit2gtk), Fedora (botan3, chromium, cockpit, firefox, flatpak, gum, libarchive, libcoap, mingw-python3, ngtcp2, nss, openssh, openssl, openvpn, PackageKit, python3-docs, python3.11, python3.12, python3.13, python3.14, vim, and xrdp), Oracle (firefox, gdk-pixbuf2, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, python3.12, python3.9, sudo, and tigervnc), Red Hat (tigervnc and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Slackware (mpg123 and proftpd), SUSE (emacs, firefox, fontforge, freeciv, freerdp, libngtcp2-16, libsystemd0, and strongswan), and Ubuntu (authd, clamav, glance, haproxy, jq, lcms2, nginx, nltk, ntfs-3g, packagekit, pillow, strongswan, and vim).