Operating Systems News Archives

In response to the likes of the Dirty Frag and Fragnesia vulnerabilities, Rocky Linux is introducing an optional security repository for shipping important security updates sooner.

The open-source Haiku operating system inspired by BeOS is now seeing multi-core symmetric multi-processing (SMP) support on ARM64 that works at least in a virtualized world. Plus an assortment of other improvements made to this open-source OS over the course of April.

Sculpt OS as the general purpose operating system built off the Genode OS Framework is out with a new feature release.

Redox OS is out with its status report for April 2026. During the past month this open-source, Rust-based operating system written from scratch has seen improvements for running on real hardware as well as a wide variety of other improvements for bettering this original OS project.

AlmaLinux 10.2 Beta released today as their next AlmaLinux 10 release coming down the pipe and derived from the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.2 state. Plus this AlmaLinux release continues adding more changes on their own.

Omarchy as the Arch Linux based desktop distribution using the Hyprland compositor and led by David Heinemeier Hansson "DHH" is out with a big OS update.

CachyOS is a very fast out-of-the-box Linux distribution and for those concerned about Python performance, the newest updates to this Arch Linux based distribution will provide even better performance.

ReactOS as the "open-source Windows" operating system project striving for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows has seen some exciting improvements this week.

In addition to today's monthly ISO refresh of Arch Linux that is now pulling in the Linux 7.0 kernel and other updates, the downstream EndeavourOS also happens to be out with a new ISO release for starting the month of May.

Due to Linux Mint moving to a longer development cycle with their next release not due until December, Linux Mint developers have decided to begin regularly publishing hardware enablement "HWE" ISOs with newer Linux kernel versions to provide better support for new hardware.

AerynOS, the Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS, is out with a new monthly ISO refresh and details on other recent improvements to this original, from-scratch Linux distribution.

Microsoft's in-house Azure Linux operating system used within Azure and for WSL and other purposes is reportedly pursuing an overhaul where it would be derived from Fedora Linux.

The RHEL-derived AlmaLinux is the latest Linux distribution commenting on the recent age verification laws led by California with their Digital Age Assurance Act.

The community-based AlmaLinux OS alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) continues exploring ways to better differentiate it from upstream RHEL and other derivatives. The latest difference is AlmaLinux OS Kitten 10 adding i686 user-space packages for those wanting to run on a RHEL 10 based platform but still needing x86 32-bit user-space software compatibility.

The Linux Mint project published their March 2026 monthly status update where they note the ongoing work toward Mint 23 "Alfa" that will be released under their new longer development lifecycle. Linux Mint 23 will be out for Christmas (December) 2026 atop an Ubuntu 26.04 LTS base.

Over the course of March there was much progress made on the ARM64 port of Haiku OS, the open-source operating system serving as the spiritual successor to BeOS.

TrueNAS 26 Beta released today as the initial test release for this next version of this Linux-based operating system for network attached storage (NAS) devices and more.

The Rust-based Redox OS open-source operating system provided a status update on all of their interesting development activities during the month of March. In addition to a lot of code improvements, Redox OS also enhanced its documentation as well as added an AI policy to reject any contributions relying on large language models.

The Rust-based Redox OS operating system is preparing to land a new CPU scheduler thanks to work being carried out by open-source developer Akshit Gaur on modernizing the platform's process scheduling subsystem.

Following an April Fools' Day tease of Gentoo claiming they were going to switch to GNU Hurd as their primary kernel moving forward, they have now acknowledged the joke but in fact also announcing there are now experimental Gentoo GNU/Hurd images available.

The CentOS project has established the Accelerated Infrastructure Enablement "AIE" special interest group with a focus on providing a "fast lane" for "in-flight" patches. This CentOS AIE SIG is particularly focused on carrying the code needed for enabling NVIDIA AI factories.

AerynOS 2026.03 is now available as the newest release of this from-scratch Linux distribution originally known as Serpent OS. With this month's update comes GNOME 50, KDE Plasma 6.6.3, and various Wayland compositor updates alongside other software improvements.

It's been nearly three years since the release of Mageia 9 for this Linux distribution who's lineage traces back to the glorious Mandrake Linux. Following the Mageia 10 alpha release back in January, Mageia 10 beta builds are now available.

The community-focused, RHEL/CentOS-derived AlmaLinux distribution announced its support today for the RISC-V CPU ISA with AlmaLinux Kitten 10 builds being made available.

Last year TrueNAS unified their SCALE and CORE offerings as part of solidifying their enterprise storage efforts around Linux from their prior FreeBSD base. This year the developers at iXsystems have another change in store with announcing TrueNAS Connect as a new bridge for accessing TrueNAS enterprise storage features without having to invest in their hardware.

Linux consulting firm Igalia announced this week Moonforge, a new in-house Linux distribution by them based on Yocto and OpenEmbedded.

Developers behind AlmaLinux as this popular community alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) have drafted some new goals for 2026.

Over the past two decades SUSE Linux has been passed around several times. From Novell's acquisition of SUSE back in 2003 to then being acquired by The Attachmate Group to then merging with Micro Focus and then the SUSE business being acquired by private equity firm EQT back in 2018. A report out today indicates that EQT may now be looking to sell off SUSE.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project had an eventful February with a number of driver improvements and a variety of other enhancements.

System76 published a statement today regarding the recent laws coming about in California and likely Colorado and New York too around requiring age verification on operating system accounts and ultimately exposing the information (or at least age brackets) to apps and websites. System76's position is interesting given that they sell Linux-loaded desktops, workstations and laptops plus being an operating system vendor with their in-house Pop!_OS distribution and COSMIC desktop environment.

There were some fairly exciting improvements made by the Redox OS developers over the course of February. They have the Vulkan API working on Redox OS for the first time along with more COSMIC desktop software and even Node.js.

Linux Mint developers recently outlined their work on developing a new Wayland-compatible screensaver for use with their Cinnamon desktop environment. Linux Mint developers announced today that their new screensaver solution is ready for use.

Armbian 26.02 has been released released for this Debian-derived Linux distribution primarily focused on supporting a range of Arm and RISC-V platforms. With Armbian 26.02 there is yet more new boards added while moving to the Linux 6.18 LTS kernel and also adding a RISC-V Xfce desktop install option.

AerynOS 2026.02 was released for closing out February as the newest alpha release for this Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS. In AerynOS 2026.02 are many package updates plus continued work on the tooling and other innovations around this Linux distribution.

Genode OS 26.02 is out as the latest feature update to this open-source operating system framework that also serves as the basis for their Sculpt general purpose OS.

AlmaLinux as one of the leading, modern and community-minded alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) continues enjoying very nice growth. In their 2025 Year In Review they provided a look at their growth with now having more than two million systems per week checking in for software updates.

While these days nearly every major desktop Linux distribution is using Wayland or at least making it available, a decade ago before reaching that maturity one of the options for showing off the potential of Wayland was the oddly-named RebeccaBlack OS. With "RBOS" it shipped the very latest Wayland components and different desktop and toolkit options to easily try out Wayland-based environments from a live Linux environment. Released overnight was a surprise update to RBOS.

The Gentoo Linux project last year announced plans to move their code hosting to Codeberg rather than GitHub. Gentoo's desire to move away from GitHub was motivated by Microsoft's Copilot training on GitHub repositories. Those plans are turning into action now with the main Gentoo project up on Codeberg and honoring pull requests.

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS kicked off 2026 by making many improvements to its kernel, device drivers, and user-space software.

Longtime Linux users may recall the Sabayon Linux distribution that was Gentoo-based and focused on a nice out-of-the-box experience from the mid 2000s through 2019 before fading away after 2018. Sabayon Linux creator Fabio Erculiani wrote in to Phoronix today to announce he's begun working on a new Linux distribution called matrixOS.

The Linux Mint developers have been hard at work continuing to develop new features following their recent Mint 22.3 release. There is continued enhancements around keyboard support, a new administration tool for users, and there are also considerations being made around moving to a longer development cycle between Linux Mint releases.

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system is now able to leverage Cargo and the Rust compiler "rustc" itself running within this platform. Plus they also made a heck of a lot of other improvements too over the course of the past month. Today they published a status update to outline all of the promising advancements made to this independent OS so far in 2026.

Following the release of TrueNAS 25.10 for this Linux-based, OpenZFS-running operating system focused on network appliances / storage devices, iX systems has shared some of their plans for TrueNAS 26 this year.

OpenIndiana as the open-source project built atop Illumos that is continuing to maintain and advance the former OpenSolaris code is working on a big ambitions of modernizing the Image Packaging System (IPS) package management solution. As part of that they are working to move from a C and Python codebase over to Rust.

Linux From Scratch was one of the holdouts continuing optional SysVinit init system support through 2026, but that's now ending. Linux From Scratch "LFS" and Beyond Linux From Scratch "BLFS" are ending their System V Init support moving forward.

In kicking off 2026, AerynOS developers have continued to make progress on their build tooling and infrastructure for this Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS. They have also been working on a new website design and other updated branding to start the new year.

The Arch Linux powered CachyOS distribution is out with its first new ISO release of 2026. This Linux distribution continues to be quite popular with Linux gamers, enthusiasts craving peak performance, and others for wanting to enjoy a polished Arch Linux desktop experience.

GNU Guix 1.5 is out today as the latest major release for this platform built around its functional package manager. This is a big upgrade with it having been three years since the GNU Guix 1.4 release.

The ReactOS project is celebrating today that it marks 30 years since their first code commit in the ReactOS source tree. During the past 30 years now the project has seen more than 88k commits from more than 300 developers as it seeks to be a robust open-source Windows implementation. In their 30 year birthday blog post they also provide a look ahead at what they're working on.

ReactOS as the long-in-development "open-source Windows" project has been on quite a roll recently. Beyond a big Windows NT 6 compatibility improvement and fixing a very annoying usability issue, for this third week of the year there is another big change landing: a significant improvement in networking performance on ReactOS.