Not my usual self, but consistent with it, I hereby offer a collection of news and comments related to Linux. Anchors work by using a section’s number (e.g., #3).

1 ● Big Manjaro Brother is here! Philip Müller, announcing Manjaro 26.1 Bian-May:

GNOME’s parental controls have made a massive leap forward in GNOME 50. For the first time it is now possible for parents and guardians to monitor screen time and set limits for child accounts, including bedtime schedules. The new features allow automatically locking the screen when a screen limit or bedtime is reached. Parents and guardians also have the ability to extend screen time past the limit when needed. We also ship Big Parental Controls 1.0 from our sister-project Big Linux from Brazil, to comply with recent laws there.

For fuck’s sake, what a tard!

2 ● KDE LTS is now a thing! Nate Graham, in What a real LTS looks like: Kubuntu 26.04:

Last year, Plasma developers canceled the long-term support (LTS) version of Plasma. Why?

We had a few reasons:

  • Almost nobody was using it; really only Kubuntu. Other discrete-release operating systems like Debian and openSUSE Leap generally ignored it.
  • It wasn’t a real LTS; we only backported some fixes for Plasma, and nothing for the Frameworks it was built upon, nor the Gear-aligned KDE apps it shipped with.
  • Our backporting of fixes was fairly blind since there weren’t CI resources to validate them, and nobody ever felt like testing them manually.

As a consolation prize for canceling the Plasma LTS product, we decided at the time to add an additional bug-fix release to the normal Plasma schedule, effectively lengthening the support period for each non-LTS Plasma version by 2 months — from 4 months to 6.

And as a result, there have been no Plasma 6 LTS versions.

…Until now!

Plasma 6.6 is now an LTS version. And not just Plasma 6.6 itself, but also a specific version of KDE Frameworks: 6.24, which will also receive backported bug-fixes. And Gear 25.12, too!

What changed?

It wasn’t a change to my or anyone else in KDE’s opinion of what a proper LTS product looks like. Rather, it was the Kubuntu Focus company stepping up to fund the creation of one, as announced today!

That’s right, Kubuntu focus is sponsoring a Plasma 6.6 LTS product for the next three years!

That’s great, but, um, Debian stable is an LTS distro; how exactly was it (and is it) offering KDE Plasma for 3+2=5 years if there’s no LTS version of Plasma?!

Gemini answered that Debian’s maintainers manually monitor upstream KDE commits. When KDE fixes a critical bug or security vulnerability in a newer version of Plasma, the Debian maintainers must manually cherry-pick that code, then surgically backport that patch to their frozen, older version of Plasma, whatever that version is.

  • Debian 13 (Trixie) shipped with KDE Plasma 6.3. (Not an upstream LTS.)
  • Debian 12 (Bookworm) shipped with KDE Plasma 5.27, which was the final LTS release of the Plasma 5 series.
  • Debian 11 (Bullseye) shipped with Plasma 5.20. (Not an upstream LTS.)
  • Debian 10 (Buster) shipped with Plasma 5.14. (Not an upstream LTS.)

3 ● Phoronix: Analyzing Fedora’s Slow Performance On The Framework Laptop 13 Pro With Intel Panther Lake. This is more than informative; it’s revealing!

Fedora’s disappointing performance was a surprise since it was on the Linux 7.1 kernel and other up-to-date software packages not too far off from the other Linux distributions tested on this Framework Laptop 13 Pro with Intel Core Ultra X9 388H SoC. Though one difference compared to the likes of Ubuntu was Fedora Workstation 44 shipping with Intel Thermald 2.5.9 rather than Thermald 2.5.11 on Ubuntu 26.04 LRS or the latest Thermald 2.5.12 upstream. Thermald 2.5.9 upstream was from February 2025. As I pointed out back in 2021, Intel Thermald can be very important for Linux on modern Intel laptops.

Typically Fedora Linux ships with the latest software packages, but in the case of Thermald, it ended up being a non-responsive maintainer after the packager left Red Hat and thus it hasn’t been updated in some time.

…

So from a new Fedora 44 install and with Thermald 2.5.12 now being pushed down as a Fedora 44 update, I ran some benchmarks in the affected workloads.

Surprisingly, even with all of the Fedora 44 updates as of yesterday including Thermald 2.5.12, the performance was still behind the other Linux distributions on this Intel Panther Lake laptop. So it wasn’t Thermald alone.

Then I remembered that back in 2024, Fedora switched from Power-Profiles-Daemon to Tuned. Most other Linux distributions ship with power-profiles-daemon rather than the Red Hat Tuned project.

…

So while the newer Thermald may help Fedora 44 on newer Intel laptops, switching from tuned-ppd to power-profiles-daemon ended up being more impactful in allowing the Framework Laptop 13 Pro better compete with the other Linux distributions.

…

Due to only receiving very limited number of different laptops for Linux testing and often having to return review samples after testing, I don’t know how widespread the poor behavior of Fedora’s defaults are across other laptop models. But if you have been finding Fedora Workstation not meeting your expectations on modern laptops, it may be worth trying sudo dnf swap tuned-ppd power-profiles-daemon.

Remember how, in my post Stop drinking Kool-Aid regarding battery life in Linux, I insisted that, should you want to use something, it should be power-profiles-daemon?

I only learned about TuneD later, and I added a section about it, declaring it nonsensical. Well, here you go. It is crap!

Actually, it’s complicated, so I selected some comments for you.

Comment by ahrs:

Thermald doesn’t do anything on AMD:

$ systemctl status thermald.service
thermald.service - Thermal Daemon Service
…
systemd[1]: Starting Thermal Daemon Service…
thermald[810]: Unsupported cpu model or platform
thermald[810]: Try option --ignore-cpuid-check to disable this compatibility test
systemd[1]: thermald.service: Deactivated successfully.
systemd[1]: Started Thermal Daemon Service.

Comment by MadCatX:

My latest experience with tuned was that of a dumpster fire. I have an older Skylake desktop machine where tuned reactivated itself after a distupgrade. The machine was noticeably sluggish even when opening menus and switching browser tabs. The only solution was to disable and mask its systemd service, only then the computer became usable again.

Comment by davidvfx07:

To me this sounds to very likely be due to intel_lpmd not receiving power profile signals. It’s Intel’s low power management daemon, and it handles allocation of work between cores etc, in order to save battery life at the cost of performance. It only gets power profile signals via power-profiles-daemon, which Fedora does not ship with by default anymore. In order for it to understand when you switch between power_save, balanced, and performance modes with tuned, it needs some interface that translates tuned profiles to the power-profiles-daemon ones. If mainline Fedora does not ship tuned-ppd (which it seemingly doesn’t), then that could explain why performance was bad, as intel_lpmd was probably stuck in power_save or balanced mode. This is all of course assuming intel_lpmd is shipped in mainline Fedora as well.

I’ll add that I’m using an XPS 14 358H, and daily drive a custom Atomic Fedora image, based off fedora-bootc:44 (the barebones minimal image). This means that I need to add every auxiliary package I need, including intel_lpmd, tuned, and tuned_ppd. Once I’ve set everything up, everything works great, with Geekbench 6 scores of 17208 multi and 2966 single, in the throughput-performance tuned profile.

Comment by dlrex:

tuned-ppd (which simply replaces power-profiles-daemon) isn’t the culprit here. The default tuned configuration shipped in Fedora isn’t great for desktop performance. One of the first things I do after installing Fedora is to replace the default tuned profile with an empty one. Their decision to ship a sub-optimal tuned configuration on all installs is …controversial.

Comment by avis:

Using these daemons with Panther Lake CPUs can be detrimental.

Check my 358H GeekBench 7 scores: they’re currently the highest in the whole world. I don’t have either daemon installed. None.

For the benchmark run I only did this temporarily:

sudo cpupower set --epp performance

And then reverted to:

sudo cpupower set --epp balance_performance

That’s it. And just like Michael, I have a standard Fedora 44 installation, yet my scores are higher than those of CachyOS.

Linux localhost 7.1.5-200.fc44.x86_64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Fri Jul 24 20:44:56 UTC 2026 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Perhaps Linux distributions should reconsider their insistence on enabling these power-management daemons by default. Modern Intel CPUs already have sophisticated hardware power/performance management, and adding another layer of policy isn’t necessarily beneficial.

Sometimes the best configuration is simply to let the hardware and kernel do their job.

My message will be overlooked and ignored by most people here but why would I care?

Red Hat sucks. Also, the Luddite in me feels vindicated. 🤡

4 ● Phoronix: Fedora CoreOS To Enable systemd-oomd & zRAM Swap By Default.

Who the fuck is going to use Fedora CoreOS? systemd-oomd is a tool meant to crash a system that works.

5 ● openSUSE Tumbleweed Bug 1250876 – Cinnamon 6.4.6 not loading in Tumbleweed.

Reported on 2025-10-02 at 10:58 UTC. There was a workaround that no longer works. Cinnamon cannot be used with openSUSE Tumbleweed. Capisci?

6 ● OMG! Ubuntu: LightDM returns from the dark with first release in 4 years.

LightDM, Ubuntu’s former display manager, has had its first new release in four years – and the first under a new set of maintainers.

LightDM v1.33.0 is a ‘catch up’ release that adds Qt6 support (Qt5 still works, don’t worry) and clears a backlog of fixes that had built up since the previous release in 2022. There shouldn’t be any breaking changes either, per the release notes.

While it might sound like a sudden revival of a legacy effort, LightDM is still widely used by Linux distributions and desktops.

Debian XFCE and Xebian are using LightDM. This fact has some implications for setting QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME.

7 ● Modular and Mojo. This is actually about AI, and it’s only now that I heard about these things. Linuxiac: Mojo 1.0 Programming Language Officially Released.

Modular:

Inference reimagined, from Kernel to Cloud. One unified stack.

Your model, any compute, one platform. Run AI across GPUs and CPUs – engineered for the most demanding inference workloads, from kernel to cloud.

One unified stack from kernels to cloud, built from the ground up for heterogeneous compute. Scale AI from cloud to edge – CPUs, GPUs, and ASICs.

The AI bubble keeps expanding… Modular 26.5: Mojo 1.0 is here!

8 ● OpenAI, on X:

Now in preview: The ChatGPT desktop app for Linux.

Use ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work, and Codex where you already work and build, with your projects and browser workflows on supported Linux systems.

And:

The ChatGPT desktop app is now available in preview for desktop variants of these Linux distributions:

  • Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and 26.04 LTS
  • Debian 13
  • Fedora 43 and 44

Install with .deb or .rpm packages for x64 or ARM64.

Grab them from openai.com/codex/. Comments on Phoronix, on OMG! Ubuntu, and on Linuxiac.

Once again, Electron-based. 🤷

9 ● GNOME Shell plans and GNOME 51 beta. The crap keeps evolving… but not too fast, and Nautilus keeps being retarded.

And:

10 ● Linuxiac: Bazaar Joins GNOME Circle, Targets GNOME 52 as GNOME Software Successor.

I always hated the Flatpak support in GNOME Software or Discover, and I hate Bazaar as well. Flatpaks should be explored on Flathub, you fucking tards! Installing them only requires copying and pasting one line.

Instead of Bazaar, make sure you install Warehouse and Flatseal. (Also Gear Lever if you happen to use AppImages.)

11 ● Debian at 33! 🥳🎉🎈

12 ● Linuxiac: TUXEDO OS Debian-Based Open Beta Is Now Available for Testing. Finally!

13 ● etbe (Russell Coker): Hacked by Chinafans.

He was using WordPress in version 7.0+dfsg1-1. Who the fuck is using a distro-provided WordPress?! This guy was supposed to be smart, not retarded! 🤦‍♂️

Also, WordPress can update itself automatically, or you can do it from the administration panel. Jesus fucking Christ! 🙄

14 ● If you missed it, I didn’t like Odyssey Linux. Quite sad, I’d say.