2026-02-20 22:32:51
The closed-source chat platform Discord
announced on February 9 that it would soon require some users to verify their
ages in order to access some content — although the company quickly
added that
the "vast majority
" of users would not have to. That reassurance has to
contend with the fact that the UK and other countries are implementing
increasingly strict age requirements for social media. Discord's age
verification would be done with an AI age-judging
model or with a government photo ID. A surprising number of open-source
projects use Discord for support or project communications, and some of those
projects are now looking for open-source alternatives. Mastodon, for example,
has moved discussion to Zulip. There are some alternatives out there, all
with their own pros and cons, that communities may want to consider if they want
to switch away from Discord.
2026-02-20 22:26:56
Dianne Skoll, creator and maintainer of the command-line calendar and alarm program Remind, has announced the release of The Book of Remind. As the name suggests, it is a step-by-step guide to learning how to use Remind, and a useful supplement to the extensive remind(1) man page. The book is free to download.
2026-02-20 22:04:20
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (grafana), Debian (gegl, inetutils, libvpx, nova, and python-django), Fedora (azure-cli, chromium, microcode_ctl, python-azure-core, python3.14, and roundcubemail), Red Hat (grafana and osbuild-composer), SUSE (apptainer, dnsdist, istioctl, libsoup, openCryptoki, python-nltk, python311, python313, rclone, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (libvpx, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fips, and linux-intel-iotg).
2026-02-20 00:38:56
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the 6.19.3, 6.18.13, 6.12.74, 6.6.127, 6.1.164, 5.15.201, and 5.10.251 stable kernels. As usual, each includes important fixes and users are advised to upgrade.
2026-02-19 23:20:28
The kernel's unloved but performance-critical swapping subsystem has been undergoing multiple rounds of improvement in recent times. Recent articles have described the addition of the swap table as a new way of representing the state of the swap cache, and the removal of the swap map as the way of tracking swap space. Work in this area is not done, though; this series from Nhat Pham addresses a number of swap-related problems by replacing the new swap table structures with a single, virtual swap space.
2026-02-19 22:46:31
Douglas DeMaio has announced that Jeff Mahoney's new governance proposal for openSUSE, which was published in January, is moving forward. The new structure would have three governance bodies: a new technical steering committee (TSC), a community and marketing committee (CMC), as well as the existing openSUSE board.
The discussions during the meeting proposed that the Technical Steering Committee should begin with five members with a chair elected by the committee. The group would establish clear processes for reviewing and approving technical changes, drawing inspiration from Fedora's FESCo model. Decisions for the TSC would use a voting system of +1 to approve, 0 for neutral, or -1 to block. A proposal passes without objection. A -1 vote would require a dedicated meeting, where a majority of attendees would decide the outcome. Objections must include a clear, documented rationale.
Discussions related to the Community and Marketing Committee would focus on outreach, advocacy, and community growth. It could also serve as an initial escalation point for disputes. If consensus cannot be reached at that level, matters would advance to the Board.
[...] No timeline for final adoption was announced. Project contributors will continue discussions through the GitLab repository and future community meetings.