Welcome to week thirty-nine of Linuxiac’s 2025 Weekly Roundup—your go-to source for all things Linux & Open Source. Here’s a look at the biggest Linux and FOSS highlights from the past week (Sep 22 – 28).
Linux Distributions
This week brought five Linux updates, with the major news being the debut of the COSMIC Desktop beta, which was introduced in the Pop!_OS 24.04 beta release. Here’s what I’ve prepared for you.
- System76 Launches Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Beta and COSMIC Desktop Beta
- Kali Linux 2025.3 Brings Nexmon Wi-Fi Support for Raspberry Pi
- MX-25 “Infinity” Beta Launches with Debian 13 “Trixie” Base
- KDE-Centric KaOS 2025.9 Released with Plasma 6.4.5
- Elementary OS 8.0.2 Brings Kernel 6.14, Better Accessibility
Software Updates
Apart from the distro releases, here’s a summary of the latest open-source software updates that earned a spot in our news.
- Linux Kernel 6.17 Released, This Is What’s New
- Fish Shell 4.1 Released with Brace Syntax, Transient Prompts
- Kitty Terminal 0.43 Brings Session Management
- OBS Studio 32.0 Released with Plugin Manager, Metal Renderer
- RPM 6.0 Package Manager Released with New Package Format
- Incus 6.17 Container & Virtual Machine Manager Released
- Calibre 8.11 Adds “Ask AI” Feature to E-Book Viewer and Fixes Bugs
- Ubuntu Touch 20.04 OTA-10 Released, Adds Upgrader for 24.04 Migration
- PostgreSQL 18 Released with Up to 3× Faster I/O and Easier Upgrades
- DuckDB 1.4 LTS Released with Database Encryption, MERGE, and Iceberg Writes
- Archinstall 3.0.11 Released with Systemd Service Handling Fixes
- Krita 5.2.13 Bugfix Update Brings 16K Page Size Support
- GNU Coreutils 9.8 Released with SHA3 Support
- Varnish Cache 8.0 Arrives in the Middle of a Heated Rebranding Controversy
- ProtonUp-Qt v2.14 Brings New Proton-EM Compatibility Tool
- Kdenlive 25.08.1 Released with Stability Fixes and UI Improvements
Must-Reads You Can’t Miss
There was also some exciting news from the Linux and FOSS ecosystem, so stay tuned and don’t miss out. Here are the highlights.
- Fedora Council Proposes Policy on AI-Assisted Contributions
- Ladybird Browser Gains Cloudflare Support to Challenge the Status Quo
- Microsoft Exchange Support Coming to Thunderbird in October 2025
- ByteDance Engineers Propose Parker, a New Multi-Kernel Approach for Linux
- XTX Markets Open-Sources TernFS, Its Exabyte-Scale Distributed Filesystem
Well, that was all. If you missed our previous wrap-up for the week of Sep 15 – 21, you can catch up by checking here, where you’ll find Ubuntu 25.10 Beta, Zorin OS 18 Beta, LMDE 7 “Gigi” Beta, GNOME 49, Systemd 258, Firefox 143, Vivaldi Browser 7.6, JDK 25 LTS, Debian’s APT Adds Native History Parsing, Linus Torvalds Tinkers with GuitarPedal, Jonathan Riddell Leaves KDE After 25 Years, and more.
Needless to say, keep an eye on Linuxiac—it’s the perfect way to stay updated on all the latest from Linux and Open Source.
Wishing you a fantastic week ahead!
