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Dave Knott writes: Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2026, the first major version of their flagship compiler in almost four years. Release notes are available here. The compiler has also been updated, including improved (but not yet 100%) C++23 core language and standard library implementations.

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Sony reported that PlayStation 5 sales have reached 84.2 million units, officially surpassing every Xbox console ever released. IGN reports: The PlayStation 5 is now up to 84.2 million copies sold after shifting an additional 3.9 million units during the three-month period ending September 30, Sony has announced. That's a slight increase on the 3.8 million PS5 units Sony sold during the same quarter last year, but it's an impressive result given the price of the console has actually gone up over the course of this generation, rather than come down. [...] As an aside, unlike Sony, Microsoft does not make Xbox Series X and S sales figures public, but analysts have suggested the combined Xbox Series effort is being outsold by the PS5 by at least a factor of 2:1. The more appropriate comparison for the PS5 then, is with its predecessor, the PlayStation 4. Five years into the current console generation, the PS5 is slightly behind the PS4 (the PS4 sold-in to retailers more than 86.1 million units after five years on sale). But Sony has said this console generation is its most financially successful ever, with sales surpassing those made during the reign of all previous Sony consoles.

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The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The Volumio team has announced the release of Volumio 4.067, a major update of the project's single-purpose Debian-based Linux distribution designed and fine-tuned exclusively for music playback. This release updates the underlying system to Debian 12: "Today marks something special for us and for everyone who loves what....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. This week in DistroWatch Weekly:
Review: Fedora 43
News: Debian introduces Rust dependency into APT, Redox ports process monitors and web engine, Kubuntu website goes off-line, Mint introduces new troubleshooting tools, FreeBSD improves reproducible builds, Flatpak resumes development
Questions and answers: Size and stability of the Linux kernel
Released last week:....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The MX Linux team has announced that version 25 of its distribution is now available. MX Linux 25 is based on Debian 13. The release announcement shares the key new features: "MX Linux 25 is now available for use. MX 25 is built from Debian 13 'Trixie' and....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The PorteuX development team has release PorteuX 2.4, the latest version of the project's set of lightweight and stripped-down Linux distribution featuring a number of popular desktop environments. This release presents a new desktop option, the COSMIC desktop developed by System 76: "This release brings the COSMIC desktop....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The Murena team have announced a new version of its /e/OS operating system for mobile devices. The new 3.2 version features notifications when apps are leaking data and customization options for the side button on the Fairphone 6. There are also improvements to the project's software centre: "In....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The iodéOS team have announced the availability of iodéOS 6.9. The new version focuses on security and user accounts, enabling automatic reboot after a period of inactivity, full signing out of user accounts, and better protection of device settings. "Full logout for secondary users - secondary users can....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The developers of antiX, a lightweight, systemd-free desktop Linux distribution featuring the IceWM window manager, have announced the availability of the initial beta build of a major new version, 25, based on Debian 13. This release adds s6-rc and s6-66 as alternatives to runit and Dinit init systems:....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Umbrel, Inc. has announced the release of umbrelOS 1.5.0, the latest version of the company's Debian-based Linux distribution for home servers, available for standard 64-bit and Raspberry Pi computers. The distribution features a web-based user interface and an online app store with a large range of applications -....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Devuan GNU+Linux 6.0.0, code name "Excalibur", has been released. This latest version of the project's systemd-free Linux distribution forked from Debian in 2015 is based on Debian 13: "It is with great pleasure that the Devuan developers hereby announce the release of Devuan Excalibur 6.0 as the project's....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. This week in DistroWatch Weekly:
Review: StartOS 0.4.0
News: Ubuntu Unity calls for aid, Canonical offer Ubuntu credentials, Red Hat partners with NVIDIA to provide access to AI tools, SUSE plans to ship AI agent with SLE 16
Questions and answers: Do piped programs run sequentially or in parallel?
Released last....

A Munich court ruled that OpenAI violated German copyright law by training its models on lyrics from nine songs and allowing ChatGPT to reproduce them. OpenAI now faces damages as it considers an appeal. Reuters reports: The regional court in Munich found that the company trained its AI on protected content from nine German songs, including Groenemeyer's hits "Maenner" and "Bochum." The case was brought by German music rights society GEMA, whose members include composers, lyricists and publishers, in another sign of artists around the world fighting back against data scraping by AI. Presiding judge Elke Schwager ordered OpenAI to pay damages for the use of copyrighted material, without disclosing a figure. GEMA legal advisor Kai Welp said GEMA hoped discussions could now take place with OpenAI on how copyright holders can be remunerated. OpenAI had argued that its language models did not store or copy specific training data but, rather, reflected what they had learned based on the entire training data set. Since the output would only be generated as a result of user inputs known as prompts, it was not the defendants, but the respective user who would be liable for it, OpenAI had argued. However, the court found that both the memorization in the language models and the reproduction of the song lyrics in the chatbot's outputs constitute infringements of copyright exploitation rights, according to a statement on the ruling.

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Kaspersky Brings Its Anti-Virus Software To Linux For Home Users  Phoronix

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Big G is finally making good on its promise to add its market-leading Nano Banana image-editing model to the app. The model powers a couple of features, and it's not just for Google's Android platform. Nano Banana edits are also coming to the iOS version of the app. [...] The Photos app already had conversational editing in the "Help Me Edit" feature, but it was running an older non-fruit model that produced inferior results. Nano Banana editing will produce AI slop, yes, but it's better slop. Google says the updated Help Me Edit feature has access to your private face groups, so you can use names in your instructions. For example, you could type "Remove Riley's sunglasses," and Nano Banana will identify Riley in the photo (assuming you have a person of that name saved) and make the edit without further instructions. You can also ask for more fantastical edits in Help Me Edit, changing the style of the image from top to bottom. Google is very invested in getting people to use its AI tools, but less-savvy users might not be familiar enough with AI prompting to get the most out of Nano Banana. So Google Photos is also getting a collection of AI templates in a new "Create with AI" section. This menu will offer pre-formed prompts based on popular in-app edits. Some of the options you'll see include "put me in a high fashion photoshoot," "create a professional headshot," and "put me in a winter holiday card." The app is also getting a new "Ask" button, which is not to be confused with "Ask Photos." The former is a new contextual button that appears when viewing a photo, and the latter is Google's controversial natural language search feature. [...] When looking at a photo, you can tap the Ask button to get information about the content of the photo or find related images. You can also describe edits you'd like to see in this interface, and Nano Banana will make them for you.

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Plasma Mobile 6.5 brings big updates to this platform for small Linux devices (like phones)  Liliputing

I replaced my Linux desktop with Fedora Silverblue, and it feels futuristic  XDA

FFmpeg, the open source multimedia framework that powers video processing in Google Chrome, Firefox, YouTube and other major platforms, has called on Google to either fund the project or stop burdening its volunteer maintainers with security vulnerabilities found by the company's AI tools. The maintainers patched a bug that Google's AI agent discovered in code for decoding a 1995 video game but described the finding as "CVE slop." The confrontation centered on a Google Project Zero policy announced in July that publicly discloses reported vulnerabilities within a week and starts a ninety-day countdown to full disclosure regardless of patch availability. FFmpeg, written primarily in assembly language, handles format conversion and streaming for VLC, Kodi and Plex but operates without adequate funding from the corporations that depend on it. Nick Wellnhofer resigned as maintainer of libxml2, a library used in all major web browsers, because of the unsustainable workload of addressing security reports without compensation and said he would stop maintaining the project in December.

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Want to try Linux but prefer the Windows UI? This distro is for you  ZDNET

Democratic U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren is escalating pressure on the defense industry to stop opposing military right-to-repair legislation, as House and Senate negotiators work to finalize the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. From a report: In a sharply-worded November 5 letter to the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) obtained by Reuters, Warren accused the industry group of attempting to undermine bipartisan efforts to give the Pentagon greater ability to repair weapons and equipment it owns. She called the group's opposition "a dangerous and misguided attempt to protect an unacceptable status quo of giant contractor profiteering." Currently, the government is often required to pay contractors like NDIA members Lockheed Martin, Boeing and RTX to use expensive original equipment and installers to service broken parts, versus having trained military maintainers 3D print spares in the field and install them faster and more cheaply.

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