Linux Magazine March 2026

Dear Reader, The world moves quickly and you have to keep on making choices. I guess we all know that, but in the high tech industry, those choices move billions of dollars and affect thousands of lives. In some ways, they affect the culture and history of the whole planet. We like to think that those choices are made with lots of analysis – and maybe they are, but it does seem sometimes that a lot of this is about tech billionaires chasing rabbits and living out their sci-fi fantasies. This past month, Meta announced massive layoffs in their Reality Labs, the division dedicated to building the company’s vision of “the metaverse.” Reality Labs was launched in 2020, with much hype of course (hype being the rocket fuel for this…

If you’re a Linux Mint lover (of which there are plenty), you’ll be thrilled to know the development team has made the latest iteration available for you to download and install. Linux Mint 22.3 “Zena” has plenty to offer for those who like a bit extra in their new releases. Of course, you’ll find the usual software updates, such as the latest Warpinator that supports IPv6 and the ability to send texts. There’s also an addition by way of a name change. System Reports has been rebranded as System Information, which is a tool for troubleshooting hardware-related issues. This same tool can also be used to install multimedia codecs and set up a system restore. System Information also collects information for USB, GPU, PCI, and BIOS. Then there’s a brand…

Linux malware isn’t something that’s always on the mind of admins. However, a new framework has been discovered, called VoidLink, that is far more advanced than your typical malicious code. VoidLink is a framework with over 30 modules that can be added or removed to customize its capabilities for specific targets and meet an attacker’s goals. There are modules for stealth, reconnaissance, privilege escalation, and even movement within a network. As a malware campaign evolves, so too can the malware, thanks to its modular design. VoidLink’s focus is Linux installations found on cloud hosts, such as AWS and Google Cloud – a list that continues to grow. VoidLink uses a vendor’s API to discern which cloud service is hosting a particular machine. Check Point Research discovered VoidLink, and they’ve explained…

Gnome developer Jordan Petridis submitted proposals to both GNOME and Firefox (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1747207) for disabling what he called the “abomination“ that is middle-mouse paste. In the Firefox proposal, titled “Get `middlemouse.paste` from system,“ there were comments such as, “Middlepaste is bad and needs to be disabled by default,“ but several commenters made it very clear that they’d like to see it remain. There are those who claim that middle-mouse paste is a security issue, with one commenter saying, “middle-clicking could paste sensitive information (e.g., passwords from a password manager) into a page when the user does not intend to and without the user’s knowledge.“ The thing is, that can happen with Ctrl+V as well. Given that this feature has been around for a very long time, it’s my opinion (as someone…

Manjaro 26.0 (aka “Anh-Linh“) has been released with plenty of upgrades and a major change. The upgrades are the usual suspects: kernel, pre-installed software, desktop environments, and toolchains. You’ll get kernel 6.18, Xfce 4.20, Gnome 49, KDE Plasma 6.5, KDE Gear 25.12, KDE Frameworks 6.21, the NVIDIA 590 Linux driver, Mesa 25.3 graphics drivers, LibreOffice 25.8.4, Firefox 146, GStreamer 1.26.10 multimedia framework, WirePlumber 0.5.13 policy manager for PipeWire, ALSA 1.2.15.1, and more. In addition, this is also the first Manjaro release to include System76’s COSMIC desktop environment. The big change, however, has to do with Wayland and X.Org (http://x.org/). Starting with Manjaro 26.0, both KDE Plasma and Gnome now default to Wayland. If using Wayland isn’t your top priority, the only option you have for X.Org is Xfce. This is…

Linux Magazine www.linux-magazine.com ADMIN Online http://www.admin-magazine.com/ Optimizing File I/O • Andreas Scheumann, Philipp Koester, and Rainer Keller File I/O is a limiting factor for many applications and can become a bottleneck for data-intensive computing. We analyze different file access functions and present a script that visualizes and optimizes inefficient file I/O. AI and the BooM Stack • Joe Casad openEuler prepares for the AI future with a complete software stack tailored for artificial intelligence. Develop a Simple Scanning App • Andrea Ciarrocchi A NAPS2 PDF scanner, the C# language, and the. NET Framework set the stage for a CLI app for scanning documents. Automating Migration to openEuler • Rubén Llorente Easily migrate your old CentOS 7 systems to the modern openEuler with the x2openEuler migration toolset.…