Compiled by Larry Cafiero
Michael Larabel at Phoronix reported on Wednesday that Gnome 51 was released, complete with improved frame scheduling among it many improvements.
“Gnome 51 debuted today with many nice improvements to Mutter for bettering the desktop responsiveness and a smoother experience with improved frame scheduling,” the article says. “There are also new Wayland protocols supported (such as ext-background-effect-v1) and other optimizations there, including removal of legacy NVIDIA driver support with EGLStreams. Mutter also now has support for custom pointer acceleration profiles.”
The article continues to state that “Gnome 51 also brings a number of settings improvements, offline map support for Gnome Maps, faster startup of Gnome Software, the Gnome Calendar is also faster now too, and the Gnome File Previewer has a complete UI revamp.”
Debian 13.7 gets update
Bobby Borisov at Linuxiac wrote last Saturday that Debian 13.7 released 107 security updates and 106 bug fixes, as well as updates on the installer, kernel ABI, Cinnamon glbc, and other package updates.
“If you’ve been keeping your system updated through security.debian.org, there’s not much to do with this release, because most of the fixes were already included in earlier updates,” the article states. “13.7 just brings them together in one place.”
Notable changes include the Debian Installer, which has been rebuilt for the point release and now uses the Linux kernel 6.12.107. The audit package also gains support for the RISC-V 64-bit architecture. Desktop users will find a fix for Cinnamon that restores downloading and updating applets, desklets, extensions, and themes.
“At the system level, glibc fixes buffer overflow and underflow vulnerabilities and adds compatibility with Linux kernel 7.0 headers,” the article says. “Plus, several packages have been rebuilt against the updated glibc.”
Firefox enters public beta testing
Marcus Nestor at 9 to 5 Linux reports on Tuesday that Mozilla Firefox 157 has entered a period of public beta testing with the web browser’s new Nova design, with other improvements including audio/video synchronization and a vertical tabs sidebar.
“Firefox 157 looks like a small update, due to the newly adopted two-week release schedule, promising proper support for displaying HDR videos encoded in 8-bit color formats as HDR in most cases, which fixes several cases of dull gray-looking videos that should have been more vibrant,” the article states.
But continuing from there, the article also says that “Firefox 157 also promises to improve audio/video synchronization when changing playback rate on HTMLMediaElement, an improved Vertical Tabs sidebar to work better when the cursor moves to the edge of the screen in full-screen mode, and support for viewing recent searches on Android when tapping the search field.”
One interesting thing that could appear in the Firefox 157 release “is the brand-new design that we previewed in Firefox Nightly back in July,” the article says. “The new theme is called Nova and promises to make the popular open-source web browser feel cleaner, faster, adaptable, and warmer, according to Mozilla.”
Best window manager for Linux?
Linux Stans reported on Monday a very comprehensive and thorough report on the best window manager for Linux distributions.
We’re not joking. This is quite comprehensive. The article breaks down 12 – count ‘em, 12 – window managers, giving the positives and negatives of each, afterward providing a guide for users.
“If you’ve never used a tiling window manager before, start with i3 on X11 or Sway if you’re already on Wayland,” the article states. “Both have the documentation and community size to get you through the first frustrating week. If you want something that looks impressive with minimal effort, Hyprland is the current favorite, and Niri is worth a look if the scrollable layout appeals to you. If you want the smallest possible resource footprint and don’t mind compiling code, dwm is hard to beat. And if none of that appeals to you, Openbox or IceWM will get you a fast, familiar, floating desktop without asking you to learn a new workflow at all.
“There’s no wrong answer here. Try one, keep your old desktop environment installed as a safety net, and switch back anytime it stops working for you.”
Note to self: Take a look at some of the window managers other than Openbox, Fluxbox, and IceWM.
Fedora 45 beta released
Marcus Nestor at 9 to 5 Linux reported on Tuesday that the Fedora 45 Beta was released with the Linux 7.2 kernel, Gnome 51 and KDE Plasma 6.7, with the final release expected in late October or early November.
“Some interesting features in Fedora Linux 45 include fully reproducible package builds, kmscon as the default VT console, signature checking by default for RPM default package verification mode, disk images for Fedora Atomic desktops built with image-builder, and the new WebUI installer on all Fedora Atomic ISO images,” the article says.
Fedora 45 is also expected to bring “web-based remote installation support for Fedora Atomic desktops, LibreOffice help packages in HTML and noarch, systemd-oomd and zram swap by default for Fedora CoreOS, GRUB EFI support for confidential computing, PAM support in chpasswd and newusers, and IPv6 support in NetworkManager.”
Among other changes, “Fedora Linux 45 promises to relocate all packaged RPM repository configuration data from /etc to /usr, switch the default Secrets Service provider for Fedora desktops from KWallet and GNOME Keyring to oo7, restrict ptrace by default, and disable vendor change by default for DNF5,” the article says.
Seven eternal Linux applications
Umair Khurshid of How-To Geek wrote an article on seven pioneering Linux applications that never needed replacing, and for all intents and purposes he is spot on.
We’re not going to list all of them here, needless to say – read the article – but two of them are programs which in 20 years of Linux use by yours truly I absolutely swear by. And I will give you those – Vim and the GNU Image Manipulation Program, also known as GIMP.
“Linux has changed dramatically since the early days of the kernel,” the article starts. “Desktops have gone from X11 environments with primitive window managers to polished graphical shells. Containers, cloud computing, virtualization, and immutable operating systems have transformed how people deploy Linux. Even the hardware running Linux today would have seemed extraordinary to many of its earliest users.”
The article continues: “Yet some applications have barely budged from their place in the Linux ecosystem. You can install a modern Linux distro in 2026 and still find yourself using software whose origins stretch back decades.”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the many reasons we use Linux, isn’t it?
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.