Linux Weekly News: Key Stories Ahead of This Week

[system]

A busy week saw kernel milestones, multiple security advisories, desktop stack changes, and a few notable distro releases.

Top Stories

• LUKS keys remained in memory across suspend since Linux 6.9 — A widely discussed report notes that “since Linux 6.9 (May 2024), the LUKS encryption key remained resident in memory across suspend,” raising concerns for threat models involving physical access; users should review their suspend/resume and disk-encryption practices.^[1]

• GNU Guix discloses four vulnerabilities, urges immediate updates — The project detailed issues including remote privilege escalation via guix substitute: “The remote exploitation of guix substitute only requires that the vulnerable system attempt to download a binary substitute… so can a man-in-the-middle (MITM),” and provided remediation steps.^[2]

• Fedora Council pauses Community Initiatives process, closes AI developer desktop discussion — Fedora leadership says it will “halt the community initiative process immediately,” with existing initiatives continuing, while it works on “a new mechanism to allow Council to set strategic direction” that more intentionally includes community input.^[3]

• Asahi Linux progress: M3 audio, macOS 27 boot fix, AVD path, m1n1 1.6.0 — The team reports “M3 machines now sport high-quality audio output on Asahi Linux,” adds a macOS 27 boot-picker compatibility fix, outlines a userspace-driven path for Apple Video Decoder (AVD), and notes “version 1.6.0 of m1n1” now “requires Rust for stage 2 builds.”[^^4]

Releases & Updates

• Linux 7.2-rc2 — Linus: “It’s Sunday afternoon, and rc2 is out. Things look very normal… slightly smaller than rc2 was in 7.1.”[^^5]
• Linux 7.1.3 (stable) — Latest stable point release as listed on kernel.org (dated 2026-07-04).^[4]
• GNOME 51 Alpha — “Today marks the alpha release of GNOME 51,” kicking off the cycle toward the September stable with many fixes and improvements.^[5]
• DXVK 3.0.1 — A follow-up to 3.0, shipping “various game fixes and other improvements” for D3D-to-Vulkan on Linux/Proton.^[6]
• CalyxOS 7.2.2.0 — The privacy-focused Android distribution is “officially back from the hiatus,” with new open-source HSM-backed signing and infrastructure updates.^[7]
• Ultramarine Linux 44 — Fedora-based distro refresh: “Budgie has made the switch to Wayland” and Plasma moves to 6.7; GNOME defaults now enable minimize/maximize buttons.^[8]
• Kali Linux 2026.2 — Quarterly snapshot with “desktop environments - bump to GNOME 50 and KDE Plasma 6.6”, APT/source layout changes, boot optimizations, and more.^[9]
• UPower 1.91.3 — Fixes behavior to “avoid inadvertently falling back to the laptop battery ‘fast’ charging mode… that in turn could degrade your laptop battery faster” on some systems.^[10]

Worth Reading

• Secure Boot certificate expiration is here by LWN — “One of those certificates expired recently, but that will not cause systems that are able to boot to stop doing so,” with scenarios where issues can still crop up and timelines explained.^[11]

• Rust ‘cp’ broke Ubuntu image builds by Phoronix — Ubuntu ran into the Rust Coreutils cp “breaking Ubuntu image builds due to differences in argument handling,” a reminder of subtle incompatibilities when swapping core tools.^[12]

• Firefox is adding Vulkan video decoding for Nvidia GPUs by OMG! Ubuntu — Mozilla is bringing Vulkan-based video decode on Nvidia, which can reduce CPU overhead for supported codecs on Linux.^[13]

• Kernel.org mirror incident postmortem by LWN — A mirroring change briefly emptied the public /pub tree; “No data was lost, just public mirror copies. Everything is now being restored,” with status tracked publicly.^[14]

• Fedora 45 considering x86_64 Shadow Stack by default by Phoronix — Proposal to enable hardware shadow stacks out of the box on modern Intel/AMD for stronger ROP defenses.^[15]

• BPF JIT spraying hardening landing ahead of 7.2-rc2 by Phoronix — Post-merge-window changes are “hardening the kernel’s BPF code against JIT spraying attacks.”[^^18]

• GNOME Mutter GPU reset recovery progressing by Phoronix — GNOME’s compositor is “finally seeing real GPU reset recovery handling,” reducing session loss on rare GPU resets.^[16]

• Linux 7.3 to fix a small I/O bottleneck on PCIe Gen5 NVMe by Phoronix — Work underway “addressing a ‘significant’ bottleneck affecting small direct I/O performance” on fast storage.^[17]

• Ubuntu 25.10 reaches EOL on July 9 by OMG! Ubuntu — Reminder that 25.10 “loses security updates this week”; plan upgrades accordingly.^[18]

• Ubuntu is swapping its time sync tool for a Rust-based ntpd-rs by OMG! Ubuntu — Canonical will replace system time sync with ntpd-rs, a Rust implementation, in upcoming releases.^[19]

From LinuxBlog.io

• My AI Predictions, Two Years Later: The Ones That Landed — A review of earlier AI forecasts with which ones held up and why.^[20]
• How I Chose the Best Managed Network Switch for My Home Lab — Practical criteria and short list for reliable, quiet, feature-complete small-lab switches.^[21]

Share what you’re upgrading, deploying, or reading this week in the comments so others can learn from it.

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1. Ingo Blechschmidt: "So. For the past few days I've been deep in a fun…" - Mathstodon ↩︎

2. Four vulnerabilities in Guix [LWN.net] ↩︎

3. Fedora Council proposes pausing Community Initiatives [LWN.net] ↩︎

4. https://www.kernel.org/ ↩︎

5. https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-51-Alpha ↩︎

6. https://www.phoronix.com/news/DXVK-3.0.1-Released ↩︎

7. CalyxOS is back – download release 7.2.2.0 with full maintenance support ↩︎

8. Ultramarine 44 Takes Flight ↩︎

9. Kali Linux 2026.2 Release (GNOME 50, KDE 6.6, Helper Scripts, APT Formats & VM Boot Tweaking) | Kali Linux Blog ↩︎

10. https://www.phoronix.com/news/UPower-1.91.3 ↩︎

11. https://lwn.net/Articles/1079808/ ↩︎

12. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rust-Coreutils-cp-Ubuntu-Images ↩︎

13. Firefox is adding Vulkan video decoding for Nvidia GPUs ↩︎

14. Kernel archive /pub tree restoring [LWN.net] ↩︎

15. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-45-Consider-Shadow-Stack ↩︎

16. https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-GPU-Reset-Recovery-2026 ↩︎

17. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-Faster-Small-Direct ↩︎

18. Ubuntu 25.10 support ends on 9 July 2026 ↩︎

19. Ubuntu is swapping its time sync tool for a Rust-based version - OMG! Ubuntu ↩︎

20. My AI Predictions, Two Years Later: The Ones That Landed | LinuxBlog.io ↩︎

21. How I Chose the Best Managed Network Switch for My Home Lab | LinuxBlog.io ↩︎