The 277th installment of the 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup is here for the week ending February 1st, 2026, keeping you updated on the most important developments in the Linux world.

Variscite has introduced its first SMARC compatible SoM family with the VAR-SMARC-MX8M-PLUS, built around NXP’s i.MX 8M Plus processor. The module is designed for compact embedded and industrial systems that combine AI and vision processing with extended connectivity and integrated security. The module is built around the NXP i.MX 8M Plus processor, featuring a quad-core […]

Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has received the top prize at the 2026 European Open Source Awards in Brussels.

Samuel Thibault offered up a status update on the current state of GNU/Hurd from a presentation in Brussels at FOSDEM 2026. Thibault has previously shared updates on GNU Hurd from the annual FOSDEM event while this year's was a bit more optimistic thanks to recent driver progress and more software now successfully building for Hurd...

The January 25, 2026 release of DietPi v10.0 introduces new self-hosted services, drops legacy platform support, and raises the minimum supported Debian version to Bookworm. The update adds Uptime Kuma and ownCloud Infinite Scale to the DietPi software catalog, with a focus on long-term maintainability and SBC compatibility.   DietPi: DietPi is a lightweight, Debian-based […]

Samsung Smart TV owners can now use Jellyfin natively, as the open-source media server is now available on the Tizen platform.

Learn how to install and write your first Fortran program on Linux, a high-level language crucial for scientific and engineering calculations in niche domains.

Catch up on the latest Linux news: Linux Lite 7.8, DietPi 10, VirtualBox 7.2.6, COSMIC Desktop 1.0.4, Plasma 6.6 Beta 2, Transmission 4.1, Xfce begins work on a Wayland compositor, what happens if Linus Torvalds steps away, and more.

While typically the stable Linux kernel would come after the -rc7 release a week prior, for Linux 6.19 the release is being dragged out by an extra week not due to any scary bugs but rather due to the holiday downtime at the end of the year. As such Linux 6.19-rc8 is out today with the stable v6.19 release expected next Sunday...

A new BSD distribution I only learned about for the first time this weekend is smolBSD, a project built atop the netbsd-MICROVM kernel coming with NetBSD 11 for providing insanely fast booting micro-VMs intended for micro-services and similar environments...

The upcoming KDE Plasma 6.7 release will add a global keyboard shortcut that lets users quickly clear their notification history.

Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras presented today at FOSDEM on the latest work around Phosh, the mobile phone user interface / Wayland shell project for mobile Linux environments. Phosh has been making steady progress and has more features out on the horizon...

Explore a step-by-step guide for installing, configuring, and running Pydio Cells on Ubuntu to manage and collaborate on your document files.

Introduced to the mainline Linux kernel last year was "sheaves" as an opt-in per-CPU array-based caching layer. Sheaves was merged back in Linux 6.18 and while it started as an opt-in caching layer, the plan is to replace more CPU slabs / caches with sheaves. Queued up for slated introduction in the upcoming Linux 7.0 cycle is replacing more of those caches with sheaves...

Budgie desktop 10.10.1 arrives as the first maintenance update in the 10.10 series, with stability improvements, bug fixes, and better Wayland behavior.

Another great albeit overdue improvement for GNOME 50 has landed: Variable Rate Refresh "VRR" functionality for modern displays is now promoted and no longer treated as an experimental feature...

Shotcut 26.1 has been released today as a major update to this open-source, free, and cross-platform video editing software for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows systems.

Presented today at FOSDEM in Brussels was the state of gaming on FreeBSD by Thibault Payet. Besides various open-source games able to be compiled natively for FreeBSD, this BSD can get in on the Steam Play gaming scene thanks to the "linuxulator-steam-utils" project as a set of workarounds for the Steam Linux client on FreeBSD 14 and newer. Linuxulator-steam-utils builds off FreeBSD's Linuxulator support for running Linux binaries to enjoy the likes of Steam and even Steam Play (Proton) Windows games running on this translation layer for Linux and in turn running on FreeBSD...

Ubuntu-based Linux Lite 7.8 is now available, featuring 12 rewritten applications as the project moves toward Python and GTK4 in Series 8.

For those interested in the Dolby Digital Plus "Enhanced AC-3" audio compression format for open-source software, the last of the patents for this widely-used format by streaming services and more appears to have expired...

NotepadNext 0.13, a cross-platform reimplementation of Notepad++, adds autosave sessions, workspace support, and new editing controls.

Want to use your PS4 / DualShock 4 controller wirelessly on Linux? I just tested a simple Bluetooth method to connect them, and it works flawlessly. No extra drivers, no headachejust pair and play. Tested on KDE Plasma, but it should be compatible with other desktop environments since they share the same Bluetooth backend. Check out the full setup and gameplay test in the video!

GNOME developers had a busy week in preparing for the GNOME 50 beta release, many GNOME developers attending FOSDEM this weekend in Brussels, and other happenings...

Discover different virtual isolation tools in Python, including pipx installation and usage on Linux, with practical examples.

Linux Lite 7.8 has been released today as the latest stable update to this Ubuntu-based distribution using the lightweight Xfce desktop environment and based on the latest Ubuntu LTS series.

AerynOS publishes its January 2026 Alpha ISO, featuring the Linux kernel 6.18 and a refreshed package stack across multiple desktop environments.

Intel today released the LLM-Scaler-vLLM 1.3 update with expanding the array of large language models that can run on Intel Arc Battlemage graphics cards with this Docker-based stack for deploying vLLM...

Tails 7.4.1 has been released today as an emergency update to the latest Tails 7.4 series of this Debian-based distribution designed to protect you against surveillance and censorship.

Chris Mason, the longtime Linux kernel developer most known for being the creator of Btrfs, has been working on a Git repository with AI review prompts he has been working on for LLM-assisted code review of Linux kernel patches. This initiative has been happening for some weeks now while the latest work was posted today for comments...

A new Rust-based tool called cpx offers a modern alternative to the traditional cp command on Linux, adding parallel copying, progress bars, resume support, and configurable defaults.