A proposal to switch the default desktop for Fedora Workstation from GNOME to KDE Plasma largely went over like the proverbial lead balloon—unsurprisingly. But the conversation about the proposal did surface some areas where the distribution could perhaps be more inclusive with regard to the other desktop choices available. The project believes...

The systemd project is preparing for a new release. Version 256-rc1 was released on April 25 with a large number of changes and new features. Most of the changes relate to security, easier configuration, unprivileged access to system resources, or all three of these. Users of systemd will find setting up containers — even without root access...

Version 14.1 of the GCC compiler suite has been released. The list of changes is long; it includes support for more C++26 features, preparation for Fortran 2023 support, a new -fhardened flag to enable security-hardening features, vectorizer improvements, and a number of static-analyzer improvements. See the release notes for details.

The Go Blog has a detailed article on the new, more secure random-number generator implemented for the 1.22 release. For example, when Go 1.20 deprecated math/rand's Read, we heard from developers who discovered (thanks to tooling pointing out use of deprecated functionality) they had been using it in places where crypto/rand's Read was...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel), Gentoo (libjpeg-turbo, xar, and Xpdf), Red Hat (bind, dhcp and glibc), and SUSE (bouncycastle, curl, flatpak, less, and xen).

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has announced its annual impact report for 2023. The report includes updates from PSF staff as well as summaries of the foundation's activities, financials, and infrastructure. The PSF celebrated the 20th anniversary of PyCon US, distributed more than $370,000 in grants, and enjoyed impressive traffic on PyPI:...