Linux Magazine December 2025

Dear Reader, It is no secret that AI is changing everything for professional programmers. They were once regarded as rock stars – pampered and adored by tech companies. Six figures straight out of college (or even out of high school, if you were really good) was pretty much the ground floor for many companies, with salaries scaling up depending on the skills, the need, and the competition. And then there were the perks: free gourmet lunches, big parties, massages, signing bonuses…. The sports cars of the anointed ones filled up the freeways of the South Bay. San Francisco got too expensive for the people who lived there because the coders kept bidding up the price of housing. Oh how swiftly things change. AI allowed tech companies to lay off more…

It’s that time again: A Linux kernel has reached its end of life (EOL), so pour a drink out for yet another kernel that served us well. Greg Kroah-Hartman announced on the Kernel.org site (https://lwn.net/Articles/1041781) the following: “… this is the LAST 6.16.y kernel release, this branch is now end-of-life. Please move to the 6.17.y branch at this point in time.” Linux kernel 6.17 was released in September with features such as support for AMD’s Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI) and Intel Panther Lake Xe3 graphics, attack vector controls for CPU mitigations, live patching for AArch64 systems, support for the Raspberry Pi 5 RP1 I/O chip, improvements for filesystems like ext4 and Btrfs, and networking enhancements such as gateway routing for the MCTP subsystem. Fortunately, Linux kernel 6.17 has already found…

Amazon has built a new OS for Fire TV based on Linux. Given that Fire TV is one of Amazon’s most successful ventures, this should be big news (especially for Linux fans). According to Amazon Developer (https://developer.amazon.com/apps-and-games/blogs/2025/09/announcing-vega-os), the Fire TV Stick 4K Select is the first device to use the new Vega OS. The Amazon Developer site says that Vega OS is “highly responsive with an efficient footprint, enabling fast app launches and smooth navigation.” The Fire TV Stick 4K Select makes Vega OS run smoothly with only 1GB of RAM, which is 50-percent less than was used in earlier iterations of the device thanks to the Linux-based OS. If you’re a developer looking to jump on board the new Vega OS-powered devices, Amazon has created a set of developer…

Cairo Dock finally supports Wayland. If your desktop environment uses Wayland, KDE Plasma’s KWin, Labwc, Wayfire, COSMIC, Sway, or Hyprland, then you too can install and use this popular dock. The one caveat is that Cairo Dock still does not support Gnome or Ubuntu Desktop. If you’re lucky enough to use Cairo, you’ll also be thrilled to know that it now supports high-resolution displays with integer scaling factors (HiDPI). Another new addition is support for systemd. That’s right, you can now control Cairo Dock as a standard Linux service (so long as your distribution uses systemd – which most do). If you’ve been a fan of Cairo Dock for some time, you’ve probably visited the official website for information and downloads. This has changed: The old site will be decommissioned,…

Just over a year ago, System76 released the first alpha of COSMIC desktop, with the intention of including it as the default desktop environment for Pop!_OS 24.04. With the beta release, they’ve succeeded in that and more. Now available for general testing, Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta is an LTS release (as it is based on Ubuntu 24.04), and COSMIC was built from the ground up, using the Rust language and the iced graphics toolkit. You won’t find X11 included in the new release, because it is strictly Wayland. If you have apps that do not support Wayland yet, COSMIC does include XWayland for compatibility. COSMIC also includes new apps for the file manager, text editor, terminal emulator, media player, settings app, and the app store. Each app opens quickly and runs…

Linux Magazine www.linux-magazine.com ADMIN Online http://www.admin-magazine.com/ Production Line • Thorsten Scherf The bootc project lets you use a container based workflow to create bootable operating system images. More TUI Tools for HPC Users • Jeff Layton Graphical user interface (GUI) tools are wonderful, but for those times when I encounter issues working on HPC systems that only allow terminal access, I need to know about tools for text-based user interfaces (TUIs). Managing IT Assets • Thorsten Scherf Open-AudIT inventories, manages, and monitors IT assets, whether hardware, software, network device, or virtual machine. Simplify Your Migration from Docker to Podman • Holger Reibold Podman has become an attractive alternative to Docker, not least because it doesn’t require a central daemon.…