Ubuntu 24.10 to Include the Latest Linux Kernel

Canonical announced that Ubuntu 24.10 will be the first release to ship with the latest upstream kernel.

That means "Oracular Oriole" will come with Linux kernel v6.11. Previously, Ubuntu shipped with kernels that would soon reach end of life (EOL), which was driven by Canonical's need to always ship what they knew would work and had been sufficiently tested, vetted, and updated.

According to the Ubuntu Kernel Engineering Director, Brett Grandbois (https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/kernel-version-selection-for-ubuntu-releases/47007), the old policy was a conservative "wait and see" approach, which guaranteed stability on the appointed release day but proved unpopular with consumers looking for the latest features and hardware support.

Under the new policy, Grandbois states, "Ubuntu will now ship the absolute latest available version of the upstream Linux kernel at the specified Ubuntu release freeze date, even if upstream is still in Release Candidate (RC) status."

This will, of course, bring about a few complications, such as kernel variants, dependent components, a tighter release, possible unstable releases, and late releases.

Grandbois said that any upstream kernel that has a merge window opened after feature freeze would be considered too unstable and its release too far in the future to be adopted for a pending release.

You can read more about this new policy in Grandbois's blog post (see above), which goes into further detail about the issues and guidelines.

Plasma Desktop 6.1.4 Release Includes Improvements and Bug Fixes

It was only three weeks ago that Plasma Desktop 6.1.3 was released, which is a very fast turnaround for a desktop environment release (even though it's just a point release), but here we are.

The developers of the Plasma Desktop have released their latest iteration that adds several improvements and fixes.

On top of the list of improvements is a fix for Plasma Widget resizing to make the animation much smoother. Along the same lines, the developers have managed to make the pop-ups from the Task Manager to better scale.

There have been a lot of fixes to the KWin Window Manager, such as a fix for X11 windows being stuck in should_get_focus, a fix for checking whether GraphicsBufferView is nil, keeping the titlebar in the screen when open windows are too tall and would normally place it above the display, and several others fixes.

KWin also is now capable of running with real-time capabilities on systems that include the musl library. KWin's 10-bit color support is disabled for monitors that are plugged into a dock and the triple-buffering features no longer stutter.

The Plasma Desktop offers improvements in the folder view, applets/task manager, and KRunner no longer shows a match if just one query word matches.

This update also fixes issues with Discover, Dr. Konqi, KGamma, KPipeWire, KRdp, KScreen, kscreenlocker, and more.

You can read the details for the entire update in the official release notes: https://kde.org/announcements/changelogs/plasma/6/6.1.3-6.1.4/.

Manjaro Team Tests Immutable Version of its Arch-Based Distro

If you do a quick search, you'll find there are a handful of immutable Linux distributions based on Arch (such as Arkane Linux – https://arkanelinux.org/). As immutability seems to make more and more sense with each passing day, it was only a matter of time before another Arch-based distribution decided to create a similar offering.

That offering is coming from the Manjaro team, and they're working with the Arkdep toolkit (which was created by the Arkane Linux team) to create an immutable, atomic OS on top of the Btrfs filesystem.

According to a forum post (https://forum.manjaro.org/t/manjaro-immutable-out-now-for-community-testing/166364), the reason the Manjaro team decided to go with Arkdep is ease of use and the support for personalized configurations. The post also links to the arkdep-build docs, where you can learn how to build your own images. The Manjaro team also has offered their Arkdep profiles as a template (https://github.com/manjaro/arkdep-profiles).

The plan is for this new immutable version to become an official spin of Manjaro, but, as of now, there's no time frame for when this will happen, as there is a lot to do and currently it is only in the testing/information gathering stage.

Anyone interested in trying the immutable take on Manjaro will need to have a machine that meets the minimum requirements of 32GB of internal storage (64GB recommended) and UEFI boot.

You can download the ISO from the official download site: https://download.manjaro.org/manjaro-gnome-immutable/20240801/manjaro-gnome-immutable-2024.08.01-x86_64.iso.