653: The Kernel Always Wins

The news this week highlights shifts in Linux from multiple angles. What's evolving, why it matters, and that moment where the future actually works. Sponsored By: Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free! Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love. Support LINUX Unplugged Links: 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM SCaLE 23x | Registration — Get 40% off registration with promo code "UNPLG" PlanetNix 2026 — Where Nix Builders Come Together Pasadena Linux Party Meetup Valve explains why it hasn’t announced release dates for its new hardware, now plans for “first half of the year” — Valve now says all three products will ship “in the first half of the year.” Latest VirtualBox Code Begins Supporting KVM Backend — Support for KVM or other native OS hypervisors in conjunction with VirtualBox has long been sought and it's finally becoming a reality. bcachefs-tools v1.36.1 — Interactive TUI for monitoring various filesystem internals, slowpaths and device performance, with duration and frequency tracking for various events. Helpful for diagnosing performance issues. bcachefs v1.36.1 is out - next release will be erasure coding : r/bcachefs bcachefs PSA: if you're on 1.33-1.35, upgrade asap — Several people have been hit by this, so - please upgrade asap. Mattermost — Mattermost is an open source platform for secure collaboration across the entire software development lifecycle. Debian's CI Data No Longer Publicly Browseable Due To LLM Scrapers / Bot Traffic Venice AI - Private AI for Unlimited Creative Freedom ThinkBox V2 - A Custom 4-Bay SATA/SAS HDD NAS for Your Lenovo M720Q Code for Climate 2026 — The Mad Botter Earth Day Open Source Challenge — We're doing our Earth Day open-source competition again The Mad Botter INC. Once again featuring System76 hardware and this time with dual tracks for college and non-college students. Michael Dominick on X - Earth Day Open Source Challenge Red5d/podcast_mcp — MCP server for accessing Podcasting 2.0 RSS feed episode data. "I've really only tested it with JB feeds!" Pick: Plexus — Remove the fear of Android app compatibility on de-Googled devices. Plexus-app: GitHub Pick: ReinschriftTodo — Reinschrift combines a native GNOME interface with the simplicity of plain text. Your tasks remain a normal Markdown file – easy to back up, versionable via Git, and editable on any device with your favorite editor. Reinschrift on Flathub