System76 shipped COSMIC Epoch 1.2.0 on June 30, 2026 — the second stable update to its all-Rust, Wayland-native desktop environment since the 1.0 release last year. This update is lighter on headline features than 1.1 was, but it addresses some of the most persistent rough edges users have reported: compositor flickering, Intel GPU compatibility problems, and fragile archive handling in the file manager.

AVIF Wallpapers, Finally

The most visible addition is AVIF wallpaper support in cosmic-bg, COSMIC's background daemon. AVIF is the image format derived from the AV1 video codec — it typically compresses 30–50% smaller than equivalent-quality WebP files and considerably better than JPEG, without the quality loss visible at high compression ratios. For a desktop background daemon, this means sharper wallpapers at smaller file sizes, with better color depth support for wide-gamut displays.

The practical benefit is modest for most users, but it's a meaningful capability gap closure. GNOME has supported AVIF wallpapers since 46, and KDE Plasma added it in 6.3. COSMIC catching up removes one reason photographers and designers keeping high-quality images had to transcode before using them as wallpapers.

Compositor Fixes That Actually Matter

The bigger reliability story is in the compositor. COSMIC 1.2 fixes workspace overview flickering — a visible glitch that appeared when switching between workspaces — and addresses a separate flickering issue in COSMIC Launcher, the application search interface that opens on the Super key. Both bugs were cosmetically distracting and had appeared in user reports since 1.0.

Newer Intel integrated GPUs also get better support. COSMIC's Wayland compositor had rendering artifacts on Intel Arc and Xe graphics hardware, stemming from assumptions in the rendering pipeline that didn't match Intel's more recent driver behavior. The 1.2 release adjusts these assumptions, improving compatibility with 12th and 13th generation Intel hardware that's common in laptops currently in the market.

File Manager and Application Reliability

COSMIC Files — the Rust-native file manager — receives two meaningful fixes. Archive extraction, which previously crashed on certain compressed file payloads (particularly multi-part archives and some zip files with non-standard metadata), is now more robust. The Trash folder also gains a proper folder preview, so you can see what's inside a trashed directory without restoring it first.

A long-standing issue where COSMIC Monitor — the system monitor app introduced in 1.1 — was missing application icons in its process list is also resolved. The fix involves correcting how COSMIC Monitor queries the application icon theme, which had been failing silently for apps installed outside the standard XDG application directories.

Where COSMIC Is Heading

System76 has published a roadmap for Epoch 2 and 3, the next major phases of COSMIC development. Epoch 2 targets deeper system integration — better suspend/resume behavior, improved multi-monitor hotplugging, and a COSMIC-native display manager to replace the current SDDM dependency. Epoch 3 is more speculative but includes a redesigned settings architecture and first-class support for adaptive themes that respond to time of day and ambient light.

For current Pop!_OS users and anyone running COSMIC on Arch, NixOS, or Fedora via community packages, 1.2 is worth updating to for the compositor fixes alone. There are no breaking changes, and the update path is straightforward through the standard package manager on supported distributions.

Greg Kroah-Hartman released seven stable Linux kernels simultaneously on July 4, 2026 — 7.1.3, 6.18.38, 6.12.95, 6.6.144, 6.1.177, 5.15.211, and 5.10.260 — with an unusually direct advisory: upgrade promptly.

The reason is CVE-2026-53362, an IPv6 processing bug introduced in kernel 6.0 that allows a process running inside a container to escape its namespace boundaries and gain root access on the host system. On any server running containerized workloads — Kubernetes clusters, Docker hosts, CI/CD runners — this is the kind of bug that security teams start tracking immediately.

Container escapes are among the highest-severity Linux kernel vulnerabilities because the entire model of containerized infrastructure assumes process isolation is robust. A workload inside a container is supposed to be confined to its namespace; a container-escape vulnerability collapses that boundary and potentially exposes the entire host and its other workloads to a compromised process.

The release also patches a second issue: CVE-2026-53359, a use-after-free in the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) subsystem that dates to kernel 2.6.36. Use-after-free bugs in hypervisor code are serious because they can allow a guest VM to interfere with the host or other VMs — though this one requires specific conditions to trigger.

The breadth of the release — seven kernels covering more than five years of active stable branches — reflects how seriously the maintainers are treating CVE-2026-53362. Backporting to 5.10 and 5.15 is resource-intensive work that the team reserves for bugs with clear real-world risk. The Long-Term Support branches at 6.1 and 6.6 are widely deployed in embedded systems, network hardware, and enterprise distributions, which amplifies the exposure surface.

For most users on rolling distributions like Arch or Fedora rawhide, the update arrives through normal package channels. For organizations running RHEL, Debian stable, or Ubuntu LTS with pinned kernel versions, the fix requires manual attention and may need to be coordinated with a planned maintenance window.

The LWN.net changelog for this release batch does not specify proof-of-concept availability for CVE-2026-53362, which typically means no working public exploit has been confirmed — but the potential impact alone is enough to justify treating this as urgent. If you're running any kernel between 6.0 and 7.1.2, now is the time to update.

The GNOME Project shipped the first unstable build of its next desktop environment on July 3, 2026. GNOME 51.alpha, codenamed "A Coruña", opens the development cycle that leads to a stable release on September 16. The alpha touches 73 refreshed core modules and carries a handful of changes significant enough to land on users' radars now — even if the stable build is still ten weeks out.

Maps goes offline

The headline feature for most desktop users is offline map support in GNOME Maps. Previously, Maps required an active internet connection to render tile data; with GNOME 51, you can download regional map packages and navigate without a connection. It is a long-requested capability and the kind of practical improvement that has real everyday value for users on laptops.

Legacy NVIDIA cards are out

GNOME 51 drops all code paths for legacy NVIDIA driver support. In practice, this means GeForce 700-series cards (excluding the GTX 750 Ti, GTX 750, and GTX 745) and all earlier generations will no longer get the proprietary driver path. Those cards will fall back to the open-source Nouveau driver and run in a basic display mode. If you are still running a six-plus-year-old NVIDIA GPU on Linux, September is the deadline to plan your upgrade path.

The decision is not surprising. Maintaining compatibility shims for driver generations that NVIDIA no longer supports upstream adds maintenance burden without corresponding benefit to the vast majority of users. The Nouveau fallback still works for basic display output — just without hardware acceleration at GNOME's full feature set.

What else changed

GNOME Control Center gains a reordered System/Hardware information page, new display configuration options, and the ability to disable the touchpad when a mouse is plugged in — a setting that has been buried in third-party tools for years. QR code sharing for Wi-Fi networks is now handled by a dedicated GNOME widget rather than a patchwork of app-specific implementations.

Under the hood, the alpha includes performance and accessibility improvements in Nautilus (the file manager), a GListModel overhaul in GNOME Calendar for more efficient data binding, and security hardening across evolution-data-server and glib-networking. Build system migrations from Autotools to Meson continue across several modules — incremental work that pays off in faster, more predictable builds for packagers.

The road to stable

The release schedule is firm: API, ABI, feature, UI, and string freezes all trigger August 1. The final string freeze lands August 22, locking translations into place. Stable ships September 16, 2026, with the first point release following October 10.

For Ubuntu users, GNOME 51 is the expected default in Ubuntu 26.10, due in October. Fedora 45, also slated for around the same time, will carry it as well. The alpha is available now for developers and early testers; running it on production hardware is not recommended.

GNOME 51's scope is evolutionary rather than revolutionary — no wholesale redesign, no paradigm shift. What it delivers is a desktop that is measurably more useful offline, cleaner in its hardware support surface, and more consistent in its system settings. That is exactly what a mature, stable desktop project should be doing.

Linux 7.2-rc1 landed on June 28, 2026, with Linus Torvalds describing the merge window as "reasonably normal" — kernel mailing-list language for a clean, well-managed merge window with genuinely impactful changes. The headline addition is AMD HDMI 2.1 FRL support in the amdgpu driver, a long-overdue feature that finally brings the open-source driver in line with what RDNA 4 GPUs have been physically capable of for years.

AMD HDMI 2.1 FRL: What It Actually Changes

Until now, Linux users with AMD GPUs were effectively capped at HDMI 2.0 signaling through the open-source driver — 4K/60Hz maximum over HDMI, even on hardware designed for more. Linux 7.2-rc1 adds Fixed Rate Link (FRL) support, the HDMI 2.1 signaling technology that replaces older TMDS encoding. The practical result: AMD GPU owners on Linux can now drive uncompressed 4K at 120Hz, 8K at 60Hz, and true dynamic HDR over standard HDMI cables — no proprietary workarounds required.

This matters beyond gaming. Creators working with high-frame-rate 4K previews, anyone using a high-refresh HDR monitor over HDMI rather than DisplayPort, and TV-connected Linux setups all benefit from native support. The feature targets RDNA 4-era GPUs specifically, though related HDMI signaling improvements land across the amdgpu driver stack.

AMD ISP4: Webcam Quality Gets a Real Driver

The same release adds support for AMD's fourth-generation Image Signal Processor (ISP4), the dedicated hardware block that handles real-time camera image processing on AMD SoC platforms. On laptops powered by AMD chips, ISP4 is responsible for noise reduction, HDR stitching, and auto-focus — processing that previously required firmware workarounds or simply didn't function under Linux. Native ISP4 driver support means AMD-powered laptops should see immediate improvements in webcam quality through any standard application, without requiring vendor-specific software stacks.

Post-Quantum Signatures for Firmware Integrity

Linux 7.2-rc1 adds post-quantum ML-DSA signature support to the IMA (Integrity Measurement Architecture) and EVM (Extended Verification Module) subsystems. These components verify that boot-time firmware and loaded kernel modules haven't been tampered with. Adding ML-DSA — a lattice-based signature scheme standardized by NIST as part of its post-quantum cryptography project — means the kernel now supports signing and verification resistant to attacks from future quantum computers. For security-sensitive deployments in government, finance, and critical infrastructure, this is a practical, forward-looking addition that doesn't require waiting for a separate security patch.

strncpy Is Finally Out

One of the less-publicized but structurally significant changes is the complete removal of strncpy from the kernel codebase — the conclusion of a multi-year cleanup effort spanning over 360 individual patches. strncpy is a C function with notorious behavior: it doesn't null-terminate when the destination buffer is exactly the right size, and it zero-pads in ways that create subtle buffer overflow vulnerabilities. Eliminating it from the kernel removes an entire category of bug-prone code that has contributed to real CVEs over the years.

43 Million Lines and a Stable Release in August

The merge window pushed the Linux kernel source tree past 43 million lines — 43,179,595 by raw count, according to LinuxTeck's analysis. Linus noted the window was large but manageable, and the candidate cycle is expected to run eight weeks, with 7.2-rc2 due July 5 and a stable release projected around August 23, 2026.

That timeline puts Linux 7.2 in line to power Fedora 45 and Ubuntu 26.10 as their base kernel. For AMD GPU users in particular — especially anyone running a high-refresh monitor over HDMI or a laptop with a built-in webcam — 7.2 is the most meaningful kernel upgrade for AMD hardware in recent memory.

Open-source firmware gets a quarterly release, and the June 2026 edition of coreboot reaches notably far ahead. Coreboot 26.06, released June 25, 2026, adds early support for Intel Nova Lake and AMD Strix Halo — both silicon platforms that haven't hit consumer shelves yet — while welcoming 31 new mainboards to the project's compatibility list.

Intel Nova Lake, Early

Intel engineers contributed early Nova Lake SoC support to the coreboot tree ahead of the platform's commercial debut. It's marked as a work in progress — DDR5 isn't yet supported, and some FSP (Firmware Support Package) workarounds remain while upstream fixes are pending — but having open-source firmware support merged before the chip ships is exactly the kind of ahead-of-time engineering that makes coreboot valuable. Security-sensitive deployments won't need to wait for proprietary firmware to be auditable.

AMD Strix Halo (Ryzen AI Max 300)

AMD's Strix Halo platform — the Ryzen AI Max 300 series — also lands in 26.06. Support currently targets only the AMD Maple reference board, and like the Nova Lake work, it isn't intended for production hardware yet. But Strix Halo is AMD's next-generation integrated graphics architecture with substantial on-chip AI acceleration, and having coreboot support in the tree this early signals a productive upstream relationship between AMD and the coreboot community.

31 New Boards

The board expansion is where most users will find immediate practical value. The 31 newly supported mainboards span a wide range:

• Framework Laptop: additional Framework models join the list, extending the modular laptop's open-source firmware story to more configurations
• ASUS and ASRock: enthusiast-grade desktop boards from both manufacturers, expanding coreboot's reach into mainstream consumer hardware
• Google Chromebooks: several new Google reference devices, which use coreboot as their production firmware
• AMD Crater and AMD Jaguar: AMD reference platforms for embedded and industrial deployments

AMD ROM Armor 2

One of the more significant security improvements in 26.06 is AMD ROM Armor 2 support, which introduces A/B recovery infrastructure for failed firmware loads. When a firmware update goes wrong, the system falls back to the previous known-good image rather than bricking. On embedded and industrial hardware where hands-on recovery isn't always an option, this resilience matters significantly — and it's the kind of feature proprietary UEFI firmware has had in some implementations for years, now arriving in open-source form.

Why Coreboot Still Matters

Proprietary UEFI firmware is effectively unauditable by the people running it. It executes before the operating system, often has network access during initialization, and is implicitly trusted by everything that loads afterward. Coreboot replaces that black box with open, inspectable code that any developer or organization can read, modify, and verify.

The project's quarterly cadence with consistent Intel and AMD engineering contributions suggests coreboot is no longer a niche concern for embedded developers — it's becoming infrastructure for organizations and individuals who take firmware trust seriously. Framework Laptop support in particular means everyday Linux users can run open-source firmware on consumer hardware without buying specialist equipment. That's a meaningful shift in accessibility.

KDE Plasma 6.7, released on June 16, 2026 — with a bugfix update to 6.7.1 on June 23 — lands one of the Linux desktop community's most durable feature requests: independent virtual desktops for each connected monitor.

Until now, virtual desktops in Plasma worked globally. Switch to workspace 2 and every monitor flipped to workspace 2. For users running multiple monitors with different workflows — a terminal on one display, a browser on another, a video feed on a third — this was a persistent friction point. Plasma 6.7 breaks the coupling. Each connected display can now show a separate virtual desktop, and switching workspaces on one monitor leaves the others untouched. It is a workflow change that many Plasma users have been requesting for the better part of two decades.

Beyond the headline feature, 6.7 brings meaningful quality-of-life improvements. Virtual desktop switching in the Overview screen is now faster, navigable with scroll or Page Up/Down keys. Drag-and-drop support lands for managing favorite applications in the task manager. A new microphone volume testing tool removes guesswork from audio setup. Virtual keyboards gain press-and-hold behavior for accessing special characters — matching the behavior users expect from mobile keyboards. Desktop type-ahead mode speeds up file selection in the file manager.

On the theming front, the classic Oxygen theme — the default look of KDE 4 — returns in modernized form with light, dark, and twilight variants, along with restored wallpapers. This is mostly nostalgia for long-time KDE users, but the execution appears polished rather than merely preserved.

More architecturally significant is the Union theming system, shipping as an opt-in tech preview. Union allows developers and users to style Plasma, QtQuick, and QtWidgets applications using a single CSS framework — a unification of styling that has been a long-standing rough edge in the KDE ecosystem. It is experimental for now, but the direction is clear.

Other additions include color management alongside HDR support (important for high-end display setups), improved Windows network printer connectivity, background app integration in the system tray, and performance improvements for CPU-rendered applications and Intel GPUs.

KDE Plasma 6.7 is available now for distributions that track Plasma releases. Neon, openSUSE, Arch, and Fedora-based KDE desktops should have packages available or incoming shortly.

When System76 released COSMIC 1.0 in December 2025, it was a milestone: a full, stable, Rust-built desktop environment for Linux, designed from scratch as the successor to Pop!_OS's GNOME-based shell. Six months later, COSMIC 1.1 landed on June 23 — the first minor version step under a new release strategy designed to move faster than monolithic major releases allow.

The headline addition is COSMIC Monitor, a new system resource viewer that will eventually replace GNOME System Monitor on Pop!_OS. It tracks CPU, memory, disk, and network in the style you'd expect, but built natively for COSMIC's design language and architecture. It's now part of the official COSMIC application suite.

Compositor Fixes That Matter

COSMIC's Wayland compositor has been its most scrutinized component — it's where rough edges in 1.0 showed up most clearly for users coming from X11-based setups. The 1.1 release addresses two specific issues that generated the most friction.

First, tiling exceptions: COSMIC's automatic tiling system is one of its signature features, but some applications genuinely shouldn't tile — they need to float. COSMIC 1.1 adds per-window tiling exceptions so users can specify which apps bypass the tiling rules without disabling the system globally.

Second, cursor warping: COSMIC 1.1 implements the pointer-warp-v1 Wayland protocol, which allows applications to programmatically move the cursor. This sounds minor until you try to use certain games, IDEs, or accessibility tools that depend on it.

File Manager and App-Level Improvements

COSMIC Files gains Page-Up and Page-Down navigation for large directory listings — a small quality-of-life fix that anyone with deeply nested project folders will appreciate. COSMIC Edit and COSMIC Files also receive improved MIME type handling, making file associations more predictable when opening documents.

COSMIC Term, the terminal emulator, gets a performance improvement targeting a specific inefficiency: the previous version re-read theme configurations from disk more often than necessary, which added latency in environments with complex theming. The fix reduces that overhead.

A New Pace for a Maturing Desktop

The more significant change in 1.1 might be strategic rather than technical. System76 is abandoning the traditional Linux desktop cadence of large, infrequent releases in favor of regular minor version increments — pushing fixes and features as they're ready rather than bundling them for a quarterly milestone.

For users, this means faster access to bug fixes after they're merged. For contributors, it reduces the pressure to rush work into a release window. COSMIC 2.0, which is targeting hot reloading, widget animations, and Frosted visual effects, remains on the horizon — but the incremental cadence means daily-use stability improvements won't wait for it.

COSMIC is still a work in progress by any measure, but 1.1 is evidence that System76's bet on Rust for the entire desktop stack is yielding a codebase they can actually iterate on quickly.

On June 18, 2026, the Raspberry Pi Foundation released a new version of Raspberry Pi OS with its most meaningful kernel update in months: a jump to Linux 6.18.34 LTS. The previous build was running on Linux 6.12 LTS — functional, but a release that debuted in late 2024. The 6.18 series brings ARM scheduling improvements, reduced interrupt latency, and networking stack refinements that translate into a measurably snappier experience on any Pi.

What changed in the kernel

The 6.18 LTS kernel introduces more aggressive ARM-specific scheduling heuristics: the CPU is better at prioritizing work on multi-core boards like the Pi 4 and Pi 5. Interrupt latency — the gap between a hardware event and the processor responding — is reduced. USB and networking drivers have been refreshed. For anyone running a Pi as a home server, NAS, or media center, these improvements are the kind that make task switching less sluggish under real load rather than benchmark conditions.

Desktop and UI polish

Beyond the kernel, this release updates the Wayland compositor Labwc to version 0.9.7 and refreshes app icons across LibreOffice, Geany, Xarchiver, and Eye of MATE. Touch screen support gets a dedicated improvement: larger icons in lxpanel and new default touchscreen settings make Raspberry Pi OS noticeably more usable on capacitive displays. That matters for the growing number of DIY kiosk and embedded projects that attach a touch screen.

Seven desktop utilities — including the shutdown dialog and the cloning tool piclone — now use DBus to prevent double-launch bugs. Printer plugin lockups and audio device selection issues have been fixed. Polish language support has been added.

The Flask removal

The quieter change worth noting: python3-flask has been removed from the default installation. It was included as a dependency for a bundled app that no longer needs it. This reduces the base image footprint slightly and eliminates an unnecessary package from the default update surface. If your project uses Flask, you will need to install it manually going forward — but for the vast majority of users, this change is invisible.

How to update

The update covers the full supported hardware range: Raspberry Pi 3B through Pi 5, all Compute Modules, and the Zero 2 W. Run sudo apt full-upgrade from the terminal, or grab a fresh image from the Raspberry Pi website. There are no breaking changes. The kernel jump alone makes this worth installing.

Linus Torvalds tagged Linux 7.1 on June 14th, 2026, and the headline feature is one that has frustrated dual-boot users for years: NTFS — the file system on virtually every Windows drive in existence — now has a proper, first-class driver in the mainline kernel.

The NTFS Driver Rewrite

The old ntfs3 driver, merged into the kernel back in 2021, was functional but rough around the edges. Writes were unreliable under certain workloads and mount times were slow. The 7.1 driver is a ground-up rewrite built on modern kernel infrastructure: iomap for I/O mapping, folio-based page management, and delayed allocation for batching writes efficiently.

The result is measurable. Benchmarks show 110% improvement on multi-threaded write workloads compared to the 7.0 driver. Cold mount times are also significantly faster, which matters when you're booting into Linux and need your Windows partition available immediately. A new companion userspace toolkit, ntfsprogs-plus, ships alongside the kernel driver for repair, format, and inspection tasks.

For anyone who has ever had a Windows drive go read-only mid-session on Linux, this is a genuinely big deal.

What Else Landed in 7.1

Intel's FRED (Flexible Return and Event Delivery) mechanism is now enabled by default. FRED replaces the older IRET-based exception handling path with a more efficient design, reducing overhead on interrupt-heavy workloads like database servers and high-throughput networking.

GPU driver improvements are widespread. Intel Arc graphics get faster shader compilation, AMD's AMDGPU driver adds initial Zen 6 support ahead of those processors shipping, and Apple Silicon support continues to mature with better power management on M-series chips running Asahi-derived drivers.

Steam Deck OLED owners will notice audio fixes that address crackling and drop-outs that appeared after kernel 7.0. Those issues stemmed from timing bugs in the CS35L56 amplifier driver, now corrected.

The legacy i486 architecture support is officially gone. It was already broken in 7.0 and nobody noticed, which says everything about how relevant 486-class hardware is in 2026.

Getting It

Major distributions will ship 7.1 on their normal schedules — Fedora will likely be first with an update, followed by Arch and the rolling releases. Ubuntu LTS users are already on 7.0 with Ubuntu 26.04 and will receive 7.1 backports through the HWE stack in the coming weeks. You can also build from source via kernel.org as always.

If you run a dual-boot setup with Windows and have been stuck on an older kernel specifically to avoid NTFS headaches, 7.1 is the version to upgrade to.

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, codenamed Resolute Raccoon, landed on April 23, 2026. As an LTS release — supported through April 2031, or ten years with Ubuntu Pro — it's the version that enterprises, developers, and cautious desktop users will run for the next five years. The headline changes are substantial: Linux 7.0, GNOME 50, a Wayland-only default session, and the most aggressive adoption of Rust in Ubuntu's core to date.

Linux 7.0 Kernel

Ubuntu 26.04 ships with Linux 7.0, the first kernel release in the 7.x series. Key improvements include expanded cgroup v2 enforcement via systemd 259, better NVIDIA Wayland performance, and improved hardware support for recent AMD and Intel graphics silicon. For server workloads, cgroup v2 is particularly significant — containerized environments running on 26.04 will benefit from more precise resource accounting and better memory pressure handling.

GNOME 50 and the Wayland Transition

The default GNOME session is now Wayland-only. X11 sessions are still available for hardware or software that requires them, and XWayland remains present for legacy applications — but the X11 GNOME session is no longer the fallback. This is a step Canonical has been building toward for several releases.

GNOME 50 itself brings grouped notifications, HDR support on compatible displays, smoother workspace-switching and window-snap animations, and substantially lower memory usage in core shell components. A new Settings application consolidates controls that were previously scattered, including a new Security Center panel covering disk encryption, Ubuntu Pro status, automatic update policies, and privacy settings — all in one place.

Rust in the Core

Ubuntu 26.04 continues Canonical's push to replace C-based core utilities with memory-safe Rust equivalents. Several components that handle privilege escalation and system initialization have been ported or replaced. This isn't visible in day-to-day use, but it significantly reduces the attack surface for the class of vulnerabilities — buffer overflows, use-after-free — that have produced the most critical CVEs in Linux history.

Dracut Replaces initramfs-tools

Ubuntu now uses Dracut as the default initramfs generator, replacing the long-standing initramfs-tools. Dracut is more modular, faster to rebuild, and better supported across the broader Linux ecosystem. For most users the change is invisible. For anyone who customizes early-boot behavior — adding kernel modules, tweaking encryption unlock scripts — the configuration syntax is different and migration will require attention.

New Default Applications

The Resources system monitor replaces the older GNOME System Monitor. It offers per-process GPU tracking and a cleaner interface. GIMP 3.2 ships as the default image editor, bringing non-destructive editing layers and a refreshed UI that GIMP users have been waiting on since the 2.x era.

Who Should Upgrade

Anyone running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on desktop or server hardware should plan an upgrade. The Wayland transition is now complete enough that driver support edge cases are largely resolved, and the Rust-based core reduces long-term maintenance risk. Ubuntu 25.10 reaches end of life on July 9, 2026 — that's less than a month away, making the migration path clear for non-LTS users as well.

I've had this problem for a while, Google Chrome seems to lower the FPS of WebGL content / games to 60 FPS on a dual monitor setup, even if my main monitor uses 144Hz !

Well, here is what I think is happening: chrome seems to use the first monitor as a reference to determine the desired FPS of WebGL contents. Now, that does not mean the "primary display" setting, I am talking about the actual numbers you can see in Settings > Screen Display, those numbers :

They are assigned by the actual firmware, and so far the only way I've found to change them is to swap display cables on the back of my GPU !

So basically, if your dual monitor setup contains a monitor that is 60Hz, make sure it's not the monitor with number 1 assigned, swap cables until your best monitor is 1, then the problem should be fixed !

Based on this article about Log4Shell, you can search for any occurence of log4j on your linux system with this command:

sudo find / -iname "log4j*.jar"

The / indicate to search from the root directory
The -iname is to specify the case insensitive search terms

If nothing outputs after that command finishes, your system should be okay !

If not, please secure your system.

You just got yourself a new Razer device and you realized you can't configure it without the proprietary Synapse software (which is not available on linux), and now you are sad ?

Be sad no more ! The open-source community got your back.

Step 1 : drivers

What you need to do is install OpenRazer (github repo) ! OpenRazer is a collection of drivers for many Razer devices, this will allow communication between your computer and your devices.

Just follow their instructions in the download page.

Step 2 : GUI

You will also need an interface to let you change settings of your devices.

I recommend using Polychromatic (github repo) because it seems to be well adopted and actively maintained. Just follow their instructions in the download page again.

(there is also a list of other compatible applications at the end of the README of OpenRazer if you want)

PS: You might need to reboot your computer if the application tell you that your device ID is not recognized, even if it is in the list of supported devices, to make sure drivers are properly running.

Happy gaming !!
(or happy "whatever" you do with your computer)

I just discovered this after years of using Ubuntu: every user account you have created on your Ubuntu computer (during installation or afterward) have Read and Execute permission to everything in the /home/ directory of EVERY users, by DEFAULT !!

(just type ll /home/ in a terminal and you'll see drwxr-xr-x !)

This is outrageous, it means that any user account could read every documents, every pictures, every-things of any user, even if that user is supposed to be protected by a password !!

This behavior should be fixed since release 21.04 but it DOES NOT FIX PREVIOUSLY CREATED USER ACCOUNTS !

How to fix

You can manually remove the read and execute permission for other users with this command :

sudo chmod 750 /home/*

And to fix the new account creation process, you have to do this too :

sudo sed -i s/DIR_MODE=0755/DIR_MODE=0750/ /etc/adduser.conf
echo "HOME_MODE 0750" | sudo tee -a /etc/login.defs

After that you should be good to go.

To make sure everything is working, just try to access the home directory of any other user (ex: ll /home/other_user_name_here/Documents/, it should say Permission denied.

More info & a personal note

The only explanation I could find for this unsafe and unintuitive default was :

This default was chosen in the early days of Ubuntu, to support use-cases like multiple family members sharing a single PC and wanting to easily share files with one another or within university environments to support easy collaboration.

But to me that's not a good excuse ! In the past, I might have created a "guest" account (with no password) on a laptop to let other peoples try Ubuntu... or I might have created an other user account on a personal computer to run apps or scripts that I did not trust, thinking it would be unable to access my personal files... WRONG !

If your installation of Ubuntu is not fresh (an old version that you updated since then), this solution might be exactly what you need to permanently fix this bug.

First, check the list of installed input drivers with this :

apt list -i | grep xorg-input

If you see xserver-xorg-input-synaptics and xserver-xorg-input-libinput, good news ! Just uninstall the synaptics package like this :

sudo apt remove xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

The reason is simple : this package is obsolete.

Now restart the xorg server (logging out and then back in will do) and the problem should be fixed ! If it is not, try toggling the "Natural Scrolling" setting in the "Mouse & Touchpad" page of Gnome Settings.