FOSS NEWS — April 2025
Figured I’d try something new and cover a few topics at once in a sort of, monthly roundup! We’re midway through April, so this will go over what’s happening this month and shortly thereafter. Naturally, focusing on the projects I am personally most interested in.
Fedora 42 – Releasing April 15th (Tuesday!)
42? The answer to life, the universe and more?? Its not even out yet, at the 42 refrences are already wearing a little thin for me, hah. None the less, Fedora 42 comes out this coming Monday. Some points of interest:
New Anaconda Web UI Installer provides an enhanced, intuitive interface.
Python 3.8 Retirement – Python 3.8 has reached EOL status
KDE Plasma – Now a full-fledged desktop option, not just a “spin” flavor. The KDE special interest group has been working on integrating the latest Plasma applications and testing them for ensured stability.
Debian 13 Trixie – Freeze Timeline
I’ve been running Trixie on my desktop for a few months now, and because it is so close to freeze I have recently decided to put it on my X1 Carbon as well. So far, everything has been fantastic.
Transition and Toolchain Freeze – March 15th (Done)
Soft Freeze – April 15th (This coming Monday)
Hard Freeze – May 15th
The final release date for Debian Trixie is yet to be announced, but it is expected to be around June or August of this year.
Major changes in Debian 13:
Trixie will use the 6.12 LTS kernel
KDE Plasma 6
Addition of official RISC-V 64-bit support
Dropping support for the mipsel architecture
Removal of i386 & armel installers
Ubuntu 25.04 Plucky Puffin
The 25.04 (non-LTS) release of Ubuntu will release on April 17th, with 9 months of standard support.
Plucky Puffin will feature:
Gnome 48 – Improved responsiveness and a new “wellbeing feature”
Wayland continues as default display server
Compiler optimization level changed from -02 to -03 – Aiming to boost execution speeds and performance
Linux Kernel 6.14
ZFS and BTRFS Optimizations – Atomic updates and rollbacks inspired by NixOS are now supported
New Security Center dashboard – Centralized firewall, update and vulnerability management.
Chrony updated for encrypted time sync
Netplan Enhancments now supporting WPA-PSK-SHA256 wifi
The release candidate came out two days ago, and we’ll see the final release on Thursday the 17th.
FreeBSD 14.3 – Releasing in June
I’m definitely looking forward to this release, and we should be seeing BETA releases next month. Final release is scheduled for June 3rd.
14.3 will introduce support for 32-bit UEFI systems; benefiting users with older 32 bit EFI systems which have 64 bit CPUs. Updates to storage controller and network interface drivers are also in the works.
WiFi Improvements
Intel WiFi driver enhancements have been a goal; improving the iwlwifi(4) driver, addressing bugs and adding hardware crypto support.
Work has been done on porting the iwx driver over from OpenBSD to enable 802.11ac and 802.11ax functionality. This driver supports the Intel AX200, AX210 and AX201/AX211 adapters.
The 14.x series has been nothing shy of Impressive when it comes to performance, and I have no doubts that 14.3 will continue to deliver on that front.