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[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for November 20, 2025 - LWN.net

2025-11-20T00:13:11.000Z

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

Front: Hardware architectures; Fedora Flatpaks; Debian hardware support; sockaddr structure; NUMA nodes; Homebrew.
Briefs: LightDM security; Debian Libre Live; Xubuntu postmortem; Blender 5.0; Git 2.52.0; Rust in Android; Thunderbird 145; Quotes; ...
Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Fangtopia is a scarily delightful puzzle city-builder that I could probably sink my fangs into for a few hours - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-11-19T22:53:41.000Z

A bit of creepy crawly, low-key city building? Ah, go on then. October and Halloween might be behind us, but Fangtopia is a puzzle game stroke city builder that still feels appropriate for late autumn. Having had a go with its demo, it's deceptively simple, in fact it felt so simple I wasn't entirely sure if I was doing anything at all. But when it clicked, all the pieces fell into place resulting in a pleasantly chill time.

Citizen Sleeper and Dishonored meet in the grimey, steampunk, dice-driven RPG Duskpunk, which is out today - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-11-19T21:40:47.000Z

Here's a sentence I am very glad to write: the first Citizen Sleeper-like is here! Or at least the first one I'm aware of (and the actual genre is dice-driven RPG, no more something-likes, ok?). It's called Dusk Punk, which mixes the narrative and mechanical framework established by Citizen Sleeper with the aesthetics and world of games like Dishonored, and it's out today.

Mafia: The Old Country is getting a free update filled with challenges, a new difficulty, and an okay-looking cinematic mode - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-11-19T20:13:58.000Z

Anyone order a free Mafia: The Old Country update? Well, whether you did or not, a free update is what you're getting. This one's quite features driven, focusing a lot of challenges and cosmetics, but there's a few new weapons and the like too. Let's take a little look-see!

Ark: Survival Ascended's famous-people-laden expansion Lost Colony gets a December release date - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-11-19T17:56:28.000Z

Ark is one of those strange series to me that seems to have a ridiculous amount of cash to dispense, what with its star-studded cast in the animated adaptation. Gerard Butler and bloody Michelle Yeoh are in it! Not to mention David Tenant, Elliot Page, Russel Crowe and Vin Diesel, the final of whom is meant to be in the borderline MIA Ark 2. But some of those voices will be appearing in-game through Ark: Survival Ascended's next expansion, Lost Colony, which now has a release date!

The cross-platform Nexus Mods app v0.21.1 makes mod collection installation smoother - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2025-11-19T17:47:03.000Z

The Nexus Mods app team have rolled out another early release for their in-progress successor to Vortex, with v0.21.1 bringing more improvements.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault is out now in early access with newly roguelike dungeons and more puzzling inventories - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-11-19T17:22:27.000Z

It's been seven years since the first Moonlighter, and in all that time, I've somehow never noticed that the title is a reference to sleepless penury. My mind jumped to the association of moonlight with magic and romance, skimming clean over the less enchanting sense of "moonlighting" as working a second job after dark. Luckily, this knowledge has dawned on me just in time to softly kneecap my enthusiasm for Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault, which launches into early access today, and appears quite a bit different from its predecessor.

Marathon's short film director doesn't know why this needs clarifying, but no, he didn't use AI to make it - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-11-19T17:08:44.000Z

I won't comment on the quality of Marathon, the game, because I've not had the chance to play it, though obviously it's not been received with all that much fanfare. You know what I did quite like? Marathon, the short film, the one that came with the game's reveal from Alberto Mielgo. It felt like a strong promise of a (more-or-less) fresh sci-fi world, the performances were subdued, it felt larger than life. Good stuff! Yet as many things currently are, it's been scrutinised over potential AI use, prompting Mielgo to put out a (understandably aggro) statement.

[$] Debian debates amending architecture support stratagem - LWN.net

2025-11-19T16:17:20.000Z

The Linux kernel supports a large number of architectures. Not all of those are supported by Linux distributions, but Debian does support many of them, officially or unofficially. On October 26, Bastian Blank opened a discussion about the minimum version of these architectures that Debian should support: in particular, raising the de-facto minimum versions in the next Debian release ("forky"). Thread participants were generally in favor of keeping support for older architecture variants, but didn't reach a firm conclusion.

Postmortem of the Xubuntu.org download site compromise - LWN.net

2025-11-19T16:16:22.000Z

In mid-October, the Xubuntu download site was compromised and had directed users to a malicious zip file instead of the Torrent file that users expected. Elizabeth K. Joseph has published a postmortem of the incident, along with plans to avoid such a breach in the future:

To be perfectly clear: this only impacted our website, and the torrent links provided there.

If you downloaded or opened a file named "Xubuntu-Safe-Download.zip" from the Xubuntu downloads page during this period, you should assume it was malicious. We strongly recommend scanning your computer with a trusted antivirus or anti-malware solution and deleting the file immediately.

Nothing on cdimages.ubuntu.com or any of the other official Ubuntu repositories was impacted, and our mirrors remained safe as long as they were also mirroring from official resources.

None of the build systems, packages, or other components of Xubuntu itself were impacted.

Calc As A Desktop App - Irreal

2025-11-19T16:05:55.000Z

As I’ve said many times before, I’m a big fan of Emacs Calc. Try as I might, I haven’t been able to master Calc in its entirety. That’s mostly because it has many advanced features that I seldom or never have the need to use.

Regardless, there are a lot of features that I do use. As long as I’m on my laptop, Calc is the only calculator that I use. I can’t remember ever having a calculation, no matter how esoteric, that it couldn’t make. I use it enough that I have it bound to F10 in Emacs.

Thomas Ingram has done me one better. He’s arranged to make Calc a desktop app by having his computer call Calc from anywhere. He does this on Linux by adding a Desktop file that points at Emacs with an --eval command line option asking it to run full-calc. He has a version for those who—inexplicably—don’t run Emacs in server or demon mode and one for those who do.

Living in the Apple ecosystem, as I do, the Desktop file option isn’t open to me but I could do the same thing by using iCanHazShortcut that I use for macOS keyboard macros. Doubtless there are plenty of other ways. Regardless, in either ecosystem or probably any modern OS it’s possible to call Emacs and ask it to run calc.

I always have Emacs running so I probably won’t implement Ingram’s solution unless I find myself often needing Calc when I’m not inside Emacs. As I said, it would be easy to add it to my iCanHazShortcut app if I do. If you don’t spend most of your time in Emacs, as I do, Ingram’s solution may be just what you need to keep Calc at your fingertips.

GStreamer Conference 2025 video recordings now available - LWN.net

2025-11-19T15:56:10.000Z

Recordings from the GStreamer Conference 2025, held in London in late October, are now available on the GStreamer Conferences Archive site. Includes the GStreamer State of the Union talk by Tim-Philipp Müller, State of MPEG 2 Transport Stream (MPEG-TS) by Edward Hervey, and many others.

AMD FSR Redstone arrives December 10 with a teaser - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2025-11-19T14:52:11.000Z

AMD have gone and done it. They've put up a teaser for an announcement of AMD FSR Redstone arriving on December 10.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Security updates for Wednesday - LWN.net

2025-11-19T14:08:18.000Z

Security updates have been issued by Debian (pdfminer), Fedora (chromium and firefox), Mageia (bubblewrap, flatpak, cups-filters, and thunderbird), Oracle (container-tools:rhel8, kernel, and squid), Red Hat (kernel), Slackware (libarchive), SUSE (gimp, itextpdf, kernel, thunderbird, and unbound), and Ubuntu (lasso).

Hytale's original co-founder wastes no time showing off the game "as it is" after buying the rights from Riot - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-11-19T13:48:38.000Z

On Monday, Hypixel co-founder Simon Collins-Laflamme revealed the good news that he'd followed through on saying he'd chat to Riot Games about buying the rights to the Minecrafty sandbox game Hytale by buying the rights to said game. Now, with an independent team back working on the game following the closure of itsoriginal studio, Collins-Laflamme and co have shared a 16 minute look at what Hytale's currently like to play.

A great showcase of open source - Blender 5.0 is out with completely overhauled colour management - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2025-11-19T13:47:18.000Z

Another release is here for the incredible open source project Blender. The 5.0 release brings huge changes like completely overhauled colour management.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Surviving each day is a fierce battle in the upcoming Primal Survival - GamingOnLinux Latest Articles

2025-11-19T13:32:08.000Z

Primal Survival is an upcoming prehistoric game about surviving as Homo habilis or Homo erectus, and it really sounds interesting with the dangerous world.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Asbury Pines is a murder mystery of dizzying scale that has you joining the dots from the Stone Age to Armageddon - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-11-19T13:16:54.000Z

I was unaware of incremental mystery management sim Asbury Pines till kindly Mr_B mentioned it in this week's Maw round-up. It launches into early access today, and has a pretty lung-emptying setup. You're trying to solve a murder in a hitherto sleepy small American town. To do this, you must oversee and make connections between around 50 characters - some of them animals and plants - across 12 historical eras, spewing your brain outward from the present day to the Stone Age and the post-apocalyptic future.

This is presented as a dense and whirring mixtable of icons, bars, progression trees, timelines, and story cards, like a 4X research tree but with a narrative shoved through it. Did you think you were being a clever custard with your swanky evidence board in Alan Wake 2? Try Asbury Pines on for size, gumshoe - it's like Cloud Atlas for accountants. They do call it "accessible" in marketing materials, mind.

Microsoft detail 'agentic AI' plan for Windows 11, immediately admit it might install malware on your PC - Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed

2025-11-19T13:01:34.000Z

Microsoft have delivered a timely reminder that AI isn’t just effective at injecting ugly, soulless anti-art and nonsense robochat into your games – it also has the power to ruin your entire PC.

MS recently updated a support article explaining the 'agentic AI' features they plan to roll out for Windows 11, which involve creating a separate desktop instance and allowing AI 'agents' to perform supposedly menial tasks (like file sorting and email sending) within it. All while you kick back on your main workspace, online shopping for the third yacht that the AI revolution has surely enabled you to afford. Unfortunately, among the agents’ capabilities is the risk of installing malware.

Things My Tween’s Friends Probably Aren’t Saying During Their Sleepover at Our House - McSweeney’s

2025-11-19T13:00:00.000Z

“Your parents keep such a clean and tidy house. You’d never know they have kids.”

“No thanks, I’ve seen enough YouTube. It’s a little passé at this point.”

“Why don’t we pitch in and do our dishes while we’re here to show our appreciation for your parents’ hospitality?”

“The more I learn about sex, the more I think that keeping my virginity until marriage is the most sensible option.”

“Someone set a timer so that we don’t accidentally spend an excessive amount of time playing video games.”

“I wish my mom were as talented a chef as yours. The way she defrosts these Hot Pockets is unparalleled.”

“Have you guys started the social studies project that’s due next week? Me neither. Let’s get to work on it now.”

“Sometimes I think our manners could use some work. Does anyone want to sign up for cotillion with me?”

“Your mom and dad are so stylish. I really appreciate the effort they put into their appearance by putting on their nicest sweatpants before we come over.”

“Can I check the fridge real quick for some raw vegetables to munch on?”

“Let’s keep our voices down so that we don’t disturb anyone.”

“Yeah, I know it’s a little early to start thinking about college, but I’m only planning to apply to ones that are affordable for my parents. I can’t imagine anything more ridiculous than picking a school because I’m a fan of its football team.”

“Your younger sibling is a delight. Let’s make sure they know they’re welcome to join in our camaraderie any time.”

“Have we remembered to brush our teeth?”

“Your parents are so cool and quick-witted. I guess what people say is true—it’s impossible to make fun of elder millennials.”

“Huh, I rolled a 6 and a 7 on these dice, and our game scores came out to 41, 69, and 420. What unremarkable numbers.”

“10 o’clock already! Let’s get to bed. You know how important sleep is at our age.”