The U-Boot universal bootloader project has announced the release of version 2025.07. It has multiple new features including "uthreads" (inspired by the "bthreads" coroutines in the barebox bootloader), exFAT support, new architecture and SoC support and improvements to existing platforms, cleanups, better testing, and more. Project leader Tom Rini took the opportunity to mention his efforts toward getting some help with the project and more formal governance:

As this is a full release, and not just a release candidate I'm hoping for a few more people to read this and then read what I'm linking to as well. For the overall health of the project, and the community, I'm hoping to find a few people within the community that can help with overall organization and management. I would like to long term be able to move us to being under the Software Freedom Conservancy umbrella and that in turn means having a organizational structure that's not just a single person.

He also noted that there is a community meeting on July 8th, 2025 at 9am (GMT -06:00) on Google Meet.

The GNU project's Bourne Again SHell (Bash) has released version 5.3, with some significant new features, including some from the associated Readline 8.3 release, which provides command-line editing and other features for Bash and lots of other programs. Bash 5.3 has a "new form of command substitution that executes the command in the current shell execution context", pathname-completion sorting will be handled based on the GLOBSORT shell variable, generated completions can go to a shell variable instead of to stdout, the source code has been updated to C23, and more. Meanwhile:

Readline has new features as well. There is a new option that allows case-insensitive searching, a new command that executes a named readline command, and a new command that exports possible word completions in a specified format for consumption by another process.

Niri is a relatively new Rust-based compositor for Wayland with a different take on tiling window management: windows are placed onscreen in an "infinite" row that can expand beyond the bounds of the visible workspace. It is not a full-blown desktop environment, but niri may be a suitable option for Linux users who want tiling features and the minimalism of a window manager for Wayland.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (thunderbird and xmedcon), Fedora (darktable, mbedtls, sudo, and yarnpkg), Mageia (catdoc and php), Red Hat (java-1.8.0-ibm, kernel, python-setuptools, python3, python3.11, python3.12, python3.9, socat, sudo, tigervnc, webkit2gtk3, webkitgtk4, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), SUSE (alloy, apache-commons-fileupload, apache2-mod_security2, assimp-devel, chromedriver, clamav, clustershell, corepack22, ctdb, curl, dpkg, erlang-rabbitmq-client, ffmpeg-4, firefox, firefox-esr, flake-pilot, fractal, gdm, ggml-devel-5699, gio-branding-upstream, git-lfs, glib2, glibc, go1.23, go1.24, govulncheck-vulndb, gpg2, grafana, grype, helm, himmelblau, icu, jgit, jq, jupyter-bqplot-jupyterlab, jupyter-jupyterlab-templates, jupyter-matplotlib, jupyter-nbclassic, jupyter-nbdime, jupyter-panel, jupyter-plotly, keylime-ima-policy, kubernetes1.30-apiserver, kubernetes1.31-apiserver, kubernetes1.32-apiserver, libbd_btrfs-devel, libetebase-devel, libmozjs-128-0, libprotobuf-lite31_1_0, libQt5Bootstrap-devel-static-32bit, libsoup, libsoup-2_4-1, libsoup-3_0-0, libspdlog1_15, libssh, libssh-config, libsystemd0, libtpms-devel, libwireshark18, libwx_gtk2u_adv-suse16_0_0, mirrorsorcerer, moarvm, nix, nodejs-electron, nova, oci-cli, opa, openbao, ovmf-202505, pam, pam_pkcs11, perl, perl-32bit, perl-CryptX, perl-File-Find-Rule, perl-YAML-LibYAML, podman, polaris, postgresql-jdbc, pure-ftpd, python-furo-doc, python-requests, python310, python311, python311-Django, python311-Django4, python311-jupyter-core, python311-Pillow, python311-pydata-sphinx-theme, python311-requests, python311-salt, python311-urllib3, python312, python313, python314, python39, radare2, redis, samba, SDL, SDL2, sudo, teleport, thunderbird, tomcat, tomcat10, tomcat11, traefik, traefik2, valkey, velociraptor, vim, xorg-x11-server, and xwayland), and Ubuntu (linux-ibm, linux-intel-iotg, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.11, and linux-oem-6.14).

The 6.16-rc5 kernel prepatch has been released. Quoth Linus: "Please keep testing, but this all feels fairly regular for this phase of the release".

The 6.15.5, 6.12.36, 6.6.96, and 6.1.143 stable kernels have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

The pedalboard library for Python is aimed at audio processing of various sorts, from converting between formats to adding audio effects. The maintainer of pedalboard, Peter Sobot, gave a talk about audio in Python at PyCon US 2025, which was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in May. He started from the basics of digital audio and then moved into working with pedalboard. There were, as might be guessed, audio examples in the talk, along with some visual information; interested readers may want to view the YouTube video of the presentation.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 9.0, container-tools:rhel8, ghostscript, git-lfs, grafana-pcp, pandoc, perl-FCGI:0.78, ruby:2.5, ruby:3.3, tigervnc, and varnish:6), Debian (jpeg-xl and mediawiki), Fedora (darktable, guacamole-server, mingw-gdk-pixbuf, and yarnpkg), Oracle (gimp, kernel, libsoup, python-tornado, python3.12, and thunderbird), Slackware (php), SUSE (libgepub), and Ubuntu (libtpms, linux-aws-5.15, linux-intel-iot-realtime, and linux-bluefield).

Collin Richards has announced version 0.0.1 of tmux-rs, a port of the tmux terminal multiplexer to Rust.

For the [past] 6 months or so I've been quietly porting tmux from C to Rust. I've recently reached a big milestone: the code base is now 100% (unsafe) Rust. I'd like to share the process of porting the original codebase from ~67,000 lines of C code to ~81,000 lines of Rust (excluding comments and empty lines). You might be asking: why did you rewrite tmux in Rust? And yeah, I don't really have a good reason. It's a hobby project. Like gardening, but with more segfaults.

Richards says that the next goal for the project is to convert it to safe Rust. It is currently "not very difficult to get it to crash", but he wanted to share the project with other Rust fans now. The project is available on GitHub.

The kernel project makes a strong promise to its users: the kernel ABI will not be changed in ways that break user-space code. The occasional failure notwithstanding, kernel developers do try to live up to that promise. They are handicapped by one little problem, though: there is no description of what the kernel ABI is, and no comprehensive way to test whether a given change breaks it. The kernel API specification framework proposed (in its second revision) by Sasha Levin addresses some of those concerns, but the solution is incomplete and does not come for free.