Compiled by Larry Cafiero
Marcus Nestor of 9 to 5 Linux, among other outlets, reported on Wednesday that KDE is celebrating its 30th birthday while also releasing the KDE Plasma 6.8 desktop environment, moving it to a Wayland-only experience.
A little history: “On October 14th, 1996, Matthias Ettrich proposed a consistent, easy-to-use desktop environment for Unix-like systems,” the article says. “He called it the “Kool Desktop Environment” (KDE) — a deliberate jab at CDE, the proprietary Common Desktop Environment dominant at the time. What followed was 30 years of remarkable momentum.”
But wait, there’s more. “The first stable desktop environment, KDE 1 (One), shipped in 1998. Konqi, the beloved green dragon mascot, arrived in 1999 and eventually displaced Kandalf as the project’s mascot,” the article states. “By 2009, the community had landed one million commits to its codebase. The modern era brought KDE Plasma 5 in 2014, a full rearchitecting of the desktop built on Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks.”
For those of you keeping score at home, KDE’s current portfolio spans the Plasma Desktop, Plasma Mobile, KDE Gear, and KDE Frameworks. KDE counts more than 2,500 regular contributors, maintains software translated into over 108 languages, and sits atop more than six million lines of code.
“To celebrate KDE’s 30th anniversary, the KDE Plasma 6.8 desktop environment will be unveiled later today as a major milestone that moves to a Wayland-only experience and introduces numerous new features, including triple buffering for NVIDIA GPUs by default, enhanced multi-monitor support, Kup backup system integration, and much more,” the article says.
Happy 30th birthday, KDE.
Peppermint OS trying out Void?
Bobby Borisov on Linuxiac reported on Monday that Peppermint OS is setting its sights beyond Debian with Void Linux-based PepVoid, offering a new Void Linux-based edition featuring Xorg and Xlibre potentially coming in November.
“The initiative is very interesting because Void Linux takes a substantially different approach from Debian,” according to the article. “Unlike Debian’s fixed-release model, Void follows a rolling-release approach, allowing users to receive software updates continuously without waiting for major upgrades.”
Additionally, “Void uses the XBPS package manager instead of APT and is a systemd-free distro, betting on the runit init system rather than systemd. These differences give PepVoid a distinctly different technical foundation while, at the same time, retaining the familiar Peppermint philosophy,” the article says.
The Peppermint OS team is targeting November 2026 for a possible official PepVoid release, though the timeline depends on testing progress and will coincide with planned ISO refreshes for the project’s Debian-based editions.
Stonking Stingray now available
Hmmm, this looks like a good candidate for Distro of the Week . . .
Marcus Nestor on 9 to 5 Linux reported on Thursday that Ubuntu 26.10 – otherwise known as Stonking Stingray – is now available for download, and provides for a couple of improvements.
“Powered by the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel series, Ubuntu 26.10 ships with the latest Gnome 51 desktop environment, TPM-backed full disk encryption (FDE) support on computers without a hardware root of trust, updated Settings to show whether a computer is certified for Ubuntu, and many accessibility improvements,” according to the article.
But wait, there’s more. “There are several App Center enhancements in Ubuntu 26.10, such as a unified app-details view for Snap and Debian packages, a dedicated Drivers page where you can review the available graphics drivers, including NVIDIA driver branches, and support for installing codecs for one-time playback when a media file uses a codec that’s not installed,” the article says.
The article also says that Ubuntu 26.10 also introduces the Myna speech-to-text dictation tool, but it’s not installed by default. With Myna, you would use locally installed AI models for dictation into the focused app by holding a configurable key. The transcription only runs locally, with no audio being sent to a cloud service.
“Under the hood, Ubuntu 26.10 comes with an updated toolchain that includes GCC 15.2, GNU C Library 2.44, GNU Binutils 2.47, systemd 261.3, Mesa 26.2, LLVM 22.1.8, Python 3.14.7, Rust 1.97.1, Go 1.27, OpenJDK 25.0.4, Zig 0.14.1, Zig 0.16, .NET 10.0.112, and others. Ubuntu 26.10 also switches to 100% Rust coreutils,” the article says.
Among other noteworthy changes, Ubuntu 26.10 improves rendering with fractionally scaled monitors, splits OpenSSH into two source packages on Ubuntu Server, removes support for legacy System V scripts, improves loading of desktop icons, and adds initial support for the SpacemiT K3 platform, along with RISC-V desktop images.
Gentoo looking for sponsors
Christine Hall at FOSS Force reported on Monday that after losing several long-running sponsors Gentoo is looking for infrastructure sponsors, specifically around hosting, hardware, rack space and, wait for it, cash.
“The Linux distribution Gentoo announced last week that it’s looking for some infrastructure sponsors,” the article says. “Like a large number of open source projects — and probably a majority of distros — Gentoo relies not only on volunteer developers to write and maintain code, it’s also dependent on community donations and sponsors to help cover expenses and meet infrastructure needs.”
The article continues: “The project, which announced in February that it was leaving Microsoft-owned GitHub for open source Codeberg, posted on Wednesday that this year several long-running sponsors were compelled to drop their support, so it’s looking for replacements. It appears the primary need is for infrastructure stuff such as rack space, servers in a data center, and server hardware, although cash donations are needed too.”
For potential sponsors, the project has set up an Infrastructure/Sponsorship wiki that includes a wish list of its needs:
EDITOR’S NOTE: Because I will be on the road most of next week, thanks to a speaking gig at the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference, there will be no Bits & Bobs column appearing next Saturday, Oct. 24. The Bits and Bobs column will return on the following Saturday.
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 skip a week but return with news over the week the following Saturday.