FOSS Weekly #26.20: Killswitch in Linux, Fedora’s AI Move, Rat in Terminal, KDE Dolphine Tweaks and More
https://itsfoss.com/newsletter/foss-weekly-26-20/
Publish Date: 2026-05-14 10:00:00
Source Domain: itsfoss.com
Hot on the heels of Copy Fail comes Dirty Frag, another Linux kernel privilege escalation with a working exploit already public. It chains two flaws, neither of which can work alone.
Luckily, fixes have arrived for it in the Linux kernel, as well as Fedora and Pop!_OS. I suggest you make the necessary updates or risk being open to a highly publicized exploit.
Seeing the rise of such exploits, there is now a new kernel proposal called killswitch, which would allow system administrators to disable a vulnerable kernel function at runtime.
In addition to that, there is a proposal for a scheduler in kernel that promises frame time improvements on aging hardware under heavy CPU load.
A few weeks ago, we reported about LVFS turning up the heat on vendors who didn’t pay their fair share. Now, Dell and Lenovo have both signed on as Premier sponsors at $100,000 a year each, making them the first vendors to reach that tier.
Ubuntu announced local-first AI plans, and now Fedora has approved its own AI Developer Desktop initiative with a unanimous council vote. Three Atomic Desktop images are planned, two of them CUDA-enabled, and none of them would be phoning home to cloud services.
Fedora has also announced Hummingbird, a distro that ships the entire OS as a bootable OCI image with atomic updates and rollback support.
Debian has made reproducible builds a hard requirement for the Forky cycle. Since May 9, any package that can’t be compiled byte-for-byte identically from its source is blocked from entering testing.
Here are other highlights of this edition of FOSS Weekly:
- How moving away from OneDrive looks like.
- Yazi file browser (that I missed to include last week).
- A Ratatui terminal.
- And other Linux news, tips, and, of course, memes!
🧠What We’re Thinking About
My colleague Sourav, a long-time OneDrive user, had to move away from it over fears of Copilot messing around with his photos and videos. Ente Photos was the alternative he went for.
I…
