Less than two weeks after the November release, Raspberry Pi OS received its December update with a collection of usability improvements, desktop refinements, and important stability fixes.

The release introduces a safe-eject mechanism for USB-connected HDD and NVMe drives, allowing users to remove external storage without risking data corruption. The Labwc desktop also gains a new Alt-F2 shortcut for opening the run dialog, extending its keyboard-driven workflow.

Moreover, the update adjusts how the Screens control panel behaves by no longer generating a default kanshi configuration file on launch, ensuring that existing user configurations are not unintentionally overwritten.

Developers behind Redox OS, the original open-source operating system written from scratch in the Rust programming language, have ported Wayland to it with initially getting the Smallvil Wayland compositor up and running along with the Smithay framework and the Wayland version of the GTK toolkit.

The Redox OS project published their November 2025 status update where one of their main accomplishments for the past month is getting these initial Wayland components up and running on it. Before getting too excited though, they note that the Wayland compositor’s performance is “not adequate” and thus more work to do on their Wayland support but an exciting first milestone

The mailing list link

AWS engineers have been working on Linux kernel improvements to KVM’s VMX code for enhancing the unamanged guest memory when dealing with nested virtual machines. The improved code addresses some correctness issues as well as delivering wild performance improvements within a synthetic benchmark.

On Friday Amazon/AWS engineer Fred Griffoul sent out the latest patches to the KVM nVMX code for improving the performance of unmanaged guest memory.

iDescriptor is a brand-new app that introduces a new way for Linux users to manage iPhones without relying on macOS or iTunes, something that the Linux ecosystem has always lacked.

The project consolidates several capabilities that previously required separate command-line tools or weren’t available at all, turning them into a graphical, cross-platform application that is available for Linux as an AppImage.

Written in C++, iDescriptor is built on top of the libimobiledevice stack and extends it with features that are typically difficult to access from Linux systems. Users can browse their device’s filesystem, import photos and videos, and install applications directly from the App Store using their Apple ID.

The Linux kernel’s Human Interface Devices (HID) subsystem has an existing architectural limitation that there is just up to one battery per HID device. But with modern devices – especially among various gaming peripherals – there can be more than one battery when considering earbuds with a battery for each earbud, multi-device wireless receivers, etc. A proposal was raised today to address this limitation.

Lucas Zampieri of Red Hat sent out the patch today proposing support for multiple batteries per HID devices to overcome this HID subsystem limitation of assuming up to just one battery per device

A Chromium engineer at Google posted the initial Device Tree (DT) files for being able to boot their latest-generation Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, and Pixel 10 Pro XL devices with the mainline Linux kernel.

Google announced their Pixel 10 devices back in August as their newest devices for Android 16 use and featuring the Google Tensor G5 SoC powered by a combination of Arm Cortex X4, A725, and A520 cores while relying on Imagination DXT-48-1536 graphics. Outside the confines of Google’s Android, out today is the initial Device Trees for being able to boo the Google Pixel 10 / Pixel 10 Pro / Pixel 10 Pro XL devices with these patches proposed for the mainline Linux kernel.

While NINJA GAIDEN 4 is Steam Deck Verified, it turns out on Desktop Linux it has some big problems that Valve have hopefully solved now.

Announcing it on Bluesky, Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais mentioned “A Proton Hotfix has been deployed for the NINJA GAIDEN 4 hang issue on desktop”. Looking on the GitHub report, seems many people were seeing the game constantly freeze. Valve have now set it by default for the game.

The ARMEL and MIPS64EL architectures have been dropped from Debian unstable and experimental. This is the end of the road for these aging ARM and MIPS targets in the Debian world.

The ARM EABI “armel” for older ARM 32-bit devices and MIPS 64-bit “mips64el” targets have been fading away for a while with declining relevance and lack of hardware availability and waning developer interest too. For ARMEL the most notable hardware is the Raspberry Pi 1 and Raspberry Pi Zero (W) boards but besides that not too much activity these days from those running ARMEL and actively upgrading to new (Debian) Linux OS releases. The MIPS architecture has been fading into obscurity for a while.

SUSE’s hardware enablement team has worked through proper U-Boot support for the Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer.

The official Raspberry Pi OS images for the Raspberry Pi 5 does not use any bootloader at all while SUSE engineers worked out U-Boot support to enhance the boot support for this popular ARM64 SBC. There will also be USB boot support with this U-Boot code too once the PCI Express support is settled.

The KDE team has announced the release of Plasma 6.5.2, the second bugfix update to the major Plasma 6.5 series. While no new features are introduced, Plasma 6.5.2 focuses on refinement and reliability.

Queued up in a TIP branch ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window opening in about one month’s time is optimizing the Restartable Sequences “RSEQ” code for its exit to user-space code path.

Intel Fellow Thomas Gleixner of Linutronix worked on a set of patches recently for optimizing the exit to user-space path for Restartable Sequences, the functionality for efficient access and manipulation of per-CPU data structures by user-space.