By Larry Cafiero

Hand it to Dibakar Ghosh at HowToGeek.com for taking the time to do this, and while the story is a couple of weeks old, it bears repeating today. Ghosh took the time to test nine – count ‘em, nine – Arch-based distros – in the middle of the AUR hubbub, no less – and provide readers with a list of ninth to first.

“Most Arch-based distros either preserve that minimalism while reducing complexity, or they go all-in on power, performance, and extra features,” Ghosh writes. “After testing many options, these nine stood out—and here’s how I’d rank them according to my needs and workflow.”

Because it seems that there are many distro based on Arch, the usual suspects appear in the story, with plausible explanations regarding why Ghosh has ranked them as he did. While I have no argument with the rankings as such – and it includes a couple I would have never considered at all – I still think that Manjaro, for all its recent turmoil, is still the best distro of the lot, and he ranks it at number five.

Seriously?

So what did he rank first? Not a chance – read the article. It’s worth the few minutes of your time

KDE Plasma 6.8 taking shape

Fun fact: The release of KDE Plasma 6.8 in October is scheduled to coincide with the 30^th anniversary of the founding of KDE. That said, we thought we’d check in on developments in the Wayland-only desktop environment.

Sven Bauduin at PC Games Hardware wrote an update earlier this month about it, in which he wrote that the major development is the departure of X11 for just Wayland.

“With Plasma 6.8, the login screen will only offer the Plasma Wayland session,” Bauduin writers. “KDE also plans to remove X11-specific code from Plasma Shell, System Settings and device configuration in this release. That makes Plasma 6.7 the last version expected to ship with a dedicated X11 session. It is scheduled for mid-June 2026, while Plasma 6.8 is currently expected around October 14, 2026.”

According to KDE developer David Edmundson, all is not lost for those who depend on the X11 window system to operate their software.

“Wayland support remains present,” writes Edmundson is his blog. “You can keep using your X11 applications, and our XWayland application support is second-to-none.

Edmundson continues to say that if you use KDE applications on another desktop environment, this change will have no effect. He reassures users that “KDE applications will continue to work in X11 for the foreseeable future.”

First Kernel 7.2 release candidate

Marcus Nestor at 9 to 5 Linux reported on Sunday that Linus Torvalds announced on Sunday the general availability of the first Release Candidate (RC) of the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel series for public testing and early adopters.

Two weeks have passed since the release of Linux kernel 7.1 and the opening of the merge window for Linux kernel 7.2 for contributors to submit their patches, which means that it’s now time to test drive the Release Candidate (RC) versions during the next couple of months, every Sunday afternoon,” the article states.

During this two-week merge window, the Linux 7.2 kernel received many new features and improvements, most notably support for devres-based management of ACPI notify handlers, initial HDMI 2.1 FRL support to the AMDGPU driver, initial CRI platform support for the Intel Xe driver, and Intel CPU model number support for Panther Lake R series.

“Linux 7.2 also promises to introduce support for the ‘zerocopy’ library to the Rust support to make zero-cost memory manipulation effortless, new hwcaps for the 2025 dpISA extensions for the AArch64 (ARM64) architecture, and enable large folios by default for the Btrfs file system,” the article says.

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 on Friday.

By Larry Cafiero

It’s been coming for awhile now, but now that it’s here, it still has to sting for the X11 fans out there. But KDE has released the latest version of the Plasma desktop environment – 6.7 for those of you keeping score at home – and of the many “improvements” to it is the imminent abandonment of X11 for Wayland.

In other words, it’s the last KDE Plasma version with X11 support, with the next version, 6.8, being Wayland-only.

Nevertheless, the highlights of the new desktop environment are plenty, according to the announcement on KDE’s announcement page. First and foremost, Oxygen and Air themes have been updated from older KDE versions and make a return to the latest version.

Other KDE Plasma 6.7 highlights include a revamped Plasma Big Screen mode for mirroring the desktop on a big screen television, support for per-screen virtual desktops, a full-featured print queue viewer app, a global push-to-talk feature, Wayland session restore, and a “multi-GPU swapchain” feature for Vulkan support.

Also, according to 9 to 5 Linux, “KDE Plasma 6.7 also brings support for typing characters that aren’t on your physical keyboard, a dedicated setup UI for configuring shared printers on Windows networks, the ability to exclude windows from screen recording using permanent window rules, and a Plasma Panel switch to instantly go from light mode to dark mode.”

However, if you really must insist on keeping X11 around – and I know there are some of you out there – fear not: Bobby Barisov ran a story on the Linuxiac site on Thursday proclaiming that “[i]f you are a KDE user who still depends heavily on X11 and is concerned about what happens after Plasma 6.8 drops the X11 session, there is some good news. SonicDE is an emerging X11-focused desktop project based on forked KDE Plasma components with a simple goal: to preserve and enhance KDE’s X11-specific components.”

For those interested in SonicDE, there’s a page with more information here.

Arch AUR registrations blocked

According to Christine Hall at FOSS Force on Tuesday, “Arch has evidently stopped new AUR registrations for the time being while maintainers scrub malware and users debate how to harden the popular community repository.”

“Although things seem to be quieting down a bit — we’ve heard no new reports of newly discovered poisoned packages since early Sunday — there is news to report,” the article states. “It appears that AUR maintainers who’ve been working overtime to remove malware-laden packages and delete their committers’ accounts, have now blocked new AUR registrations.”

But fear not, Arch and Arch-based distro users: According to an article on It’s FOSS by Souray Rudra on Thursday, “ yay, the most popular AUR helper for Arch Linux, just put out a release aimed at tackling that mess on the user level, introducing two new features that make it easier to spot a risky package before you install it and to automate the review work yourself.”

Instructions on how to get yay up and running on your Arch or Arch-based distro are included in the article.

Meanwhile, like FOSS Force, we’re keeping an eye on this situation as well, and we’ll let you know something when we know something ourselves.

And that’s all for today. Some might argue that it’s too much. Either way, don’t forget: Distro of the Week appears Wednesday – and it’s always a good one on hand – and Bits and Bobs will return on Monday.