Hot on the heels of Copy Fail comes Dirty Frag, another Linux kernel privilege escalation with a working exploit already public. It chains two flaws, neither of which can work alone.
Luckily, fixes have arrived for it in the Linux kernel, as well as Fedora and Pop!_OS. I suggest you make the necessary updates or risk being open to a highly publicized exploit.
Seeing the rise of such exploits, there is now a new kernel proposal called killswitch, which would allow system administrators to disable a vulnerable kernel function at runtime.
In addition to that, there is a proposal for a scheduler in kernel that promises frame time improvements on aging hardware under heavy CPU load.
A few weeks ago, we reported about LVFS turning up the heat on vendors who didn't pay their fair share. Now, Dell and Lenovo have both signed on as Premier sponsors at $100,000 a year each, making them the first vendors to reach that tier.
Ubuntu announced local-first AI plans, and now Fedora has approved its own AI Developer Desktop initiative with a unanimous council vote. Three Atomic Desktop images are planned, two of them CUDA-enabled, and none of them would be phoning home to cloud services.
Fedora has also announced Hummingbird, a distro that ships the entire OS as a bootable OCI image with atomic updates and rollback support.
Debian has made reproducible builds a hard requirement for the Forky cycle. Since May 9, any package that can't be compiled byte-for-byte identically from its source is blocked from entering testing.
Here are other highlights of this edition of FOSS Weekly:
- How moving away from OneDrive looks like.
- Yazi file browser (that I missed to include last week).
- A Ratatui terminal.
- And other Linux news, tips, and, of course, memes!
🧠 What We’re Thinking About
My colleague Sourav, a long-time OneDrive user, had to move away from it over fears of Copilot messing around with his photos and videos. Ente Photos was the alternative he went for.
Sourav Rudra
🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings
Yazi is a Rust-based terminal file manager that does a lot more than ls and cd. You get a three-pane layout, image previews, syntax-highlighted code previews, and archive peeking without extraction.
Most KDE users know Dolphin does split view and tabs. Fewer know it can verify file checksums, restore recently closed tabs with Ctrl+Shift+T, and paste images directly from the browser.
If you have been eyeing a move to Fedora, then our Getting Started with Fedora series is the one for you. This curated resource page covers everything from first boot to enabling RPM Fusion, NVIDIA drivers, Steam setup, and upgrading between versions.
👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner
Sanctions pushed Huawei to build their own mobile OS. Five years later, it's on 55 million devices and growing fast.
Sourav Rudra
If you are coding with AI agents, here's a new open source tool that works like git but for the AI coding agents.
Tired of AI fluff and misinformation in your Google feed? Get real, trusted Linux content. Add It’s FOSS as your preferred source and see our reliable Linux and open-source stories highlighted in your Discover feed and search results.
✨ Apps and Projects Highlights
Terminal can be scary. Terminal can be fun. Terminal can be weird. This week, we came across a new terminal that is amusing, absurd and fun. It shows terminals can have 3D effects.
Sreenath
If you live in the terminal and use Discord, Concord can be a TUI client replacement for it. Keep in mind that it is a relatively new offering, so verify this before installing it on your computer.
chojs23
📽️ Videos for You
You can run Arch Linux apps on Ubuntu by using Distrobox.
💡 Quick Handy Tip
In Kate text editor, you can compare two files for differences in content. First, open two files in separate tabs. Then, right-click on the title of the inactive tab and select the "Compare it with Active Document" option.
This will open a new tab, highlighting the differences between the files.
🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse
Do you know all the Apt commands? You can test your knowledge with our package management quiz.
Abhishek Prakash
Newbies have a hard choice to make nowadays. 😆
🗓️ Tech Trivia: On May 10, 1954, Texas Instruments engineer Gordon Teal stunned attendees at an IRE conference in Dayton, Ohio, by announcing the first commercially produced silicon transistor, moments after other speakers had declared such a device was still years away.
🧑🤝🧑 From the Community: Pro FOSSer Ernest shares how he has created a home-brewed, cross-platform reminders system.
