Compiled by Larry Cafiero
Linux Stans presented an interesting article on Thursday rating the six best Linux distro for kids today, which came up with some fascinating results.
Long gone are the days of Qimo 4 Kids, if you remember that distro. Qimo – pronounced “chemo,” as in the cancer treatment – “used to be one of the most recommended kids’ distros around, thanks to its cartoon-style interface and lightweight Xfce desktop,” according to the article.
However, Qimo for Kids officially shut down in January 2016, and its last release is based on Ubuntu 10.04.
Once again, the rankings are interesting and very sensible in a way. Are we going to give them to you here? No way. Read the article, because again it holds a lot of good information. Nice work, Linux Stans.
Stonking Stingray ready for testing
Marcus Nestor of 9 to 5 Linux reported on Thursday that Canonical had released Snapshot 3 of the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 – code named Stonking Stingray – release as the third development milestone targeting early adopters and application developers who want to test their apps.
“Development of Ubuntu 26.10 (codename Stonking Stingray) kicked off on April 30th, 2026, with the usual toolchain upload, based on the Ubuntu 26.94 LTS (Resolute Raccoon) release, which means that it’s powered by Linux kernel 7.0 and uses the GNOME 50 desktop environment. In time, these will be updated to newer versions,” the article states.
Currently Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 3 is also using Linux kernel 7.0, just like the previous two Snapshots, but this one moved to Gnome 51 Beta. Canonical is still working on upgrading these stacks, which will probably happen closer to the beta release, while they work on new features and improvements.
“These include a complete desktop experience on RVA23-compliant hardware, improved driver management, improved multimedia support, a new, simplified installation experience, a new onboarding experience, on-device speech-to-text voice interaction, a package-agnostic App Center, and much more,” according to the article.
The final release of Ubuntu 26.10 is expected to be powered by the Linux 7.2 kernel series, which should be out in late August, along with the upcoming Mesa 26.2 graphics stack and the GNOME 51 desktop environment series, the article says.
FOSS Force interviews Stallman
Kudos to Christine Hall of FOSS Force for wrangling this interview with Free Software Movement founder Richard Stallman last week.
In a wide-ranging interview – and by “wide-ranging” we mean long, but interesting – Stallman discusses GNU, Linux, the open-source split, large language models, SaaS, digital surveillance, and why software freedom remains a moral issue.
“Richard Stallman needs no introduction, especially for an audience that reads FOSS Force,” the article begins. “Without him, the free software movement would at the very least be much different, and the four software freedoms would possibly still be waiting for someone to give voice to them. There would also be no GPL, the first general-purpose copyleft license, written long before there was such a thing as open source. Speaking of that, without Stallman there would also likely be no open source, although I’m pretty sure that he wouldn’t see that as such a bad thing.”
The article is in a Q-and-A format in which Hall asks important questions and gets relevant answers from Stallman. It is definitely worth a read.
CERN switches some systems to Debian
Michael Larabel of Phoronix reported on Wednesday that after being a long-time Red Hat institution, CERN is transitioning some of their systems to Debian.
“CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, besides being well known for its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is known among longtime Linux users as a RHEL/CentOS shop,” the article starts. “CERN formally even co-maintained the Scientific Linux RHEL derivative with other educational/research institutions in the past. So to much surprise now, CERN is transitioning to Debian Linux for industrial accelerator-control computers.”
The article also states that CERN discussed this at a Debian conference in Switzerland this past weekend. Historically, CERN used their Red Hat-based Scientific Linux for about a decade before moving to CentOS in 2015.
“Now after a decade with CentOS, they are moving on and embracing Debian for a portion of their systems,” the article says.
But an update on the article cleared up CERN’s position, stating that “CERN has clarified that their focus with the migration is on their industrial accelerator-control computers while data centers and experimental computing remain on RHEL/AlmaLinux.”
And that’s all for today. Don’t forget: Distro of the Week appears Wednesday – and it’s always a good one on hand – and Bits and Bobs will return with news over the week next Saturday.