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The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. This week in DistroWatch Weekly:
Review: openSUSE 16.0 Leap
News: Redox introduces performance improvements, TrueNAS Connect available for testing, Flatpaks do not work on Ubuntu 25.10, Kamarada plans to switch its base, Solus enters new epoch, Frugalware discontinued
Questions and answers: Safest source for acquiring new applications
Released last week: Gnoppix....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Colin Percival has announced the availability of the first beta build of the upcoming FreeBSD 15.0. In this major release, the FreeBSD installer, bsdinstall, now supports downloading and installing firmware packages after the FreeBSD base system installation is complete. "The FreeBSD Release Engineering team is pleased to announce....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Tony George has announced the release of Asmi Linux 25.10, the latest version of the project's Ubuntu-based distribution that uses a highly customised Xfce desktop with a plethora of user-friendly touches. "Asmi Linux 25.10 is now available, based on Ubuntu 25.10. Highlights: based on Ubuntu 25.10 'Questing Quokka';....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Rodolphe Bachelart has announced the release of Voyager Live 25.10. This is the project's Ubuntu-based variant and is based on the just-released Ubuntu 25.10. According to the release announcement (in French), it is a version with the new GNOME 49 desktop, light, fast, modern, fluid, secure and performant....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Joshua Peisach has announced the release of Ubuntu Cinnamon 25.10, the latest release from the project that integrates the popular Cinnamon desktop with Ubuntu's core system. The new version uses the 6.4.12 version of Cinnamon and updates the default desktop theme: "I am proud to announce the latest....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Celebrating 20 years of the project, Amy Eickmeyer announced the availability of Edubuntu 25.10 earlier today. As an official Ubuntu flavour, Edubuntu brings the freedom of the Linux desktop and the vast library of open-source education software into the classroom. "We are happy and proud to release the....

Generative AI models trained on internet data lack exposure to vast domains of human knowledge that remain undigitized or underrepresented online. English dominates Common Crawl with 44% of content. Hindi accounts for 0.2% of the data despite being spoken by 7.5% of the global population. Tamil represents 0.04% despite 86 million speakers worldwide. Approximately 97% of the world's languages are classified as "low-resource" in computing. A 2020 study found 88% of languages face such severe neglect in AI technologies that bringing them up to speed would require herculean efforts. Research on medicinal plants in North America, northwest Amazonia and New Guinea found more than 75% of 12,495 distinct uses of plant species were unique to just one local language. Large language models amplify dominant patterns through what researchers call "mode amplification." The phenomenon narrows the scope of accessible knowledge as AI-generated content increasingly fills the internet and becomes training data for subsequent models.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NordVPN just made its Linux GUI app open-source, and there's more on the way  TechRadar

Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 Drops Support for Older PCs  How-To Geek

California has enacted new legislation that aims to limit companies from charging consumers "exorbitant" fees to cancel fixed-term contracts. From a report: Assembly Bill 483 was signed into law by California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday, placing transparency requirements and fee limits on early terminations for installment contracts -- plans that allow consumers to make recurring payments for goods and services over a specified duration. This includes services that lure consumers into signing annual contracts by allowing them to pay in installments that appear similar to rolling monthly subscriptions, but with hefty cancellation fees for not locking in for the full year. The bill bans companies from hiding early termination fee disclosures within fine print or obscured hyperlinks, and limits the total fee amount to a maximum of 30 percent of the total contract cost. The goal is to make it easier for Californians to take these fees into account when comparing between services, and lessen the financial burden if they need to end their contract early.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Learn more about the companies that are part of the Google for Startups Gemini Founders Fund inaugural cohort.Learn more about the companies that are part of the Google for Startups Gemini Founders Fund inaugural cohort.

Learn more about how you can ask Google Photos’ to edit your pictures for you and common ways it can improve photos.Learn more about how you can ask Google Photos’ to edit your pictures for you and common ways it can improve photos.

Researchers at UC San Diego and the University of Maryland have found that roughly half of geostationary satellite signals transmit sensitive data without encryption. The team spent three years using an $800 satellite receiver on a university rooftop in San Diego to intercept communications from satellites visible from their location. They collected phone calls and text messages from more than 2,700 T-Mobile users in just nine hours of recording. The researchers also obtained data from airline passengers using in-flight Wi-Fi, communications from electric utilities and offshore oil and gas platforms, and US and Mexican military communications that revealed personnel locations and equipment details. The exposed data resulted from telecommunications companies using satellites to relay signals from remote cell towers to their core networks. The researchers examined only about 15% of global satellite transponder communications and presented their findings at an Association for Computing Machinery conference in Taiwan this week. Most companies warned by the researchers have encrypted their satellite transmissions, but some US critical infrastructure owners have not yet added encryption.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steam on Linux: 5 annoying bugs that need to be fixed ASAP  XDA

FSearch is like Everything, but for Linux — and it's amazing  XDA

A new Gemini-powered feature for Gmail helps you quickly and easily find time on your calendar.

An anonymous reader shares a report: China's expansion of its rare earth export controls appeared to mark another escalation in the US-China trade war last week. But the announcements were also significant in another way: unusually, the documents could not be opened using American word processing software. For the first time, China's Ministry of Commerce issued a slew of documents that could be directly accessed only through WPS Office -- China's answer to Microsoft Office -- as Beijing continues its tech self-reliance drive. Developed by the Beijing-based software company Kingsoft, WPS Office uses a different coding structure to Microsoft Office, meaning WPS text files cannot be opened directly in Word without conversion. Previously, the ministry primarily released text documents in Microsoft Word format.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zorin OS 18 Officially Released, Specifically Tailored for Windows 10 Expats  9to5Linux

Yet Another Longtime Linux Driver Maintainer At Intel Has Left  Phoronix

Around 200,000 Linux computer systems from American computer maker Framework were shipped with signed UEFI shell components that could be exploited to bypass Secure Boot protections. https://lnkd.in/eTpkU_Zs  LinkedIn