News Roundup - August 2025
Despite the heat here in the UK, it’s been pretty busy in the world of Linux. There have been some major new releases, not least Debian “Trixie” which will be the next stable LTS base for many of the major Linux derivative distributions for the next few years.
CachyOS and Arch
In the “also ran” camp we have some other new releases like CachyOS. On the one hand this looks very nice and has lots of new features, but on the other hand as an Arch derivative they may be subject to some of the issues that have been plaguing the Arch OS distribution this week.
Not only have they been subject to a massive and prolonged DDOS attack, but this is off the back of a serious exploit in their AUR repository.
Intel and Clear Linux
Probably the most important Linux distribution you never heard of shuttered it’s doors at the end of last month. Clear Linux, which was developed and supported by Intel is no more. You can read the EOL notice and comments here. The distribution was used partly as a testing ground for new features and new optimisations leading to a Linux Kernel optimised for Intel hardware. It will be interesting to see how Linux fares over time as new Intel features appear and how quickly those features appear in the mainline kernel.
Linux Gaming
Not something that tends to make the technical news maybe as often as it should, but Linux is becoming a fairly serious gaming platform in it’s own right thanks to Steam. With active online users now up the the 30-40M+ range, they seem to have built up a user base that’s become more than sustainable.
Linux Hardware
We’re starting to see a huge range of new hardware appearing that supports Linux. Some of this is available with Linux pre-installed but there is a growing collection of very cost-effective hardware that seems explicitly designed for people who want to install their own version of Linux on it.
Linux turns 34
This month Linux had it’s 34th Birthday. August 25th 1991 and Linus announced the first release of Linux. It was pretty basic at the time and didn’t have support for critical features like networks (!) but even at that point it was clearly going to be a force to reckon with. I downloaded my first version from Compuserve a week later and have never looked back.
Firefox 143
Despite some of the negative press Firefox updates keep on coming on a regular basis, this one brings with it better sound support and support for some of the latest CSS coding features.
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