COSMIC Desktop 1.2 lands with archive extraction fixes, better applet behavior, Store loading indicators, and Monitor improvements.

As the last planned article on Phoronix of Q2, here is a look back at what excited readers the most in the second quarter. There were 872 original news articles this quarter as well as 54 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. Here is what excited readers the most over these past three months...

The Git project has officially released Git 2.55, bringing a wide range of improvements focused on performance, developer productivity, and modernizing the world's most widely used version control system. The release introduces smarter repository management, faster operations for large codebases, expanded hook capabilities, and continues Git's gradual adoption of Rust for improved reliability and maintainability.

VirtualBox 7.2.12 is out with an important Linux host fix, plus build improvements for Linux host and guest components.

Parrot OS 7.3 is now available, bringing Linux kernel 7.0, optimized builds for newer CPUs, official Vagrant boxes, and refreshed security tools.

Linux hardware vendor System76 released COSMIC 1.2 today as the latest stable version of this open-source, free, and Rust-based graphical desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions.

Ever since RHEL deprecated their short-lived Btrfs plans, Red Hat engineers over the past decade have been developing Stratis Storage as their storage management solution leveraging XFS, LUKS, DM, and their Rust-based daemon. While Stratis Storage has been available in Fedora Linux going all the way back to Fedora 28, until now there hasn't been the option of using it for the root file-system on new Fedora installations. Finally with Fedora 45 that may change...

KDE Plasma 6.7.2 lands as the second bugfix update in the 6.7 series, polishing KWin, Wayland, networking, and screencasting.

Mageia 10 Linux distribution has been officially released today, June 30th, 2026, as a major update coming almost three years after Mageia 9, with updated components and improvements.

Linux 7.2 is working toward release in August with its more than 43 million lines in the codebase. With Linux 7.2 there are many new changes in tow as summed up in today's feature overview.

Mageia 10 lands after a long development cycle, bringing Plasma 6.5, GNOME 49, Xfce 4.20, Linux kernel 6.18, DNF 5, RPM 4.20, and more.

Offensive Security released Kali Linux 2026.2 today as the latest stable snapshot of this Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution for penetration testing and ethical hacking.

Wine 11.12 bundles FFmpeg’s libswresample and libswscale, updates Wine Mono to 11.2, and fixes 27 bugs.

Wine 11.12 fell off the bi-weekly release rhythm with not making it out last Friday, but it managed to ship today. Wine 11.12 brings fractional scaling support to its Wayland driver and various other enhancements...

Git 2.55 adds Linux support for its built-in FSMonitor daemon, helping large repositories avoid costly working-tree scans.

Red Hat senior software engineer Marcin Juszkiewicz of Red Hat's ARM Team had been dogfeeding with an AArch64 Linux desktop being used as his primary, personal system for nearly the past year. But now he shared he has gone back to using his AMD Ryzen desktop instead over AArch64 Linux issues encountered with his Ampere Altra desktop...

The Kodi Foundation released today the beta version of the upcoming Kodi 22 (codename Piers) release of this open-source media center, bringing more new features and improvements.

Microsoft today shipped the first public preview of WSL Containers "WSLC" as their latest extension of the Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows 11...

Kali Linux 2026.2 arrives with major desktop updates, new tools, faster VM boots, and APT source changes.

Mageia 10 ISOs are now available for this Linux distribution long ago derived from Mandriva Linux and in turn the legendary Mandrake Linux...

Catch up on the latest Linux news: CachyOS June 2026 ISO, KaOS 2026.06, COSMIC Desktop 1.1, Fish Shell 4.8, Podman 6.0, Ubuntu ARM64 rebootless kernel updates, and more.

The initiative gives companies and organizations a formal place to collaborate around Rust’s tooling, ecosystem health, and industry use.

As expected, Linux 7.2-rc1 was released a brief time ago to cap off the Linux 7.2 merge window. Now it's off for eight weeks or so of testing before Linux 7.2 stable is released that will in turn go on to power the likes of Fedora 45 and Ubuntu 26.10...

Archinstall 4.4 adds color-coded install previews, install summaries, better locale handling, IWD networking, and several bootloader and Wi-Fi fixes.

Linus Torvalds announced today the general availability of the first Release Candidate (RC) of the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel series for public testing and early adopters.

Drauger OS 7.8 reworks Ubuntu 26.04 LTS with KDE Plasma into a niche Linux gaming distro, adding kernel 7.0, Wayland by default, and gaming-focused tweaks.

The development team behind the Arch Linux-based CachyOS published a new ISO snapshot for June 2026 that includes the latest package updates, new features, and improvements.

Today marks the last day of the Linux 7.2 merge window with Linux 7.2-rc1 due out later today. With the many new features and improvements merged over the past week since the Linux 7.1 stable debut, the Linux kernel source tree now exceeds 43 million lines...

Not only is GNOME 51 working to replace GNOME System Monitor with its new replacement, but over in System76's COSMIC space they have been baking their own new system monitor too...

Shelly 2.4.1 has been released today as the latest stable version of this open-source graphical package manager for Arch Linux and Arch Linux-based distributions, bringing various new features and performance improvements.