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An anonymous reader writes: Kaisen Linux, a Debian-based distro packed with tools for sysadmins, system rescue, and network diagnostics, is shutting down. This comes not long after Intel's Clear Linux also reached the end of the road. Kaisen offered multiple desktop environments like KDE Plasma, LXQt, MATE, and Xfce, plus a "toram" mode that could load the whole OS into RAM so you could free up your USB port. The final release, Rolling 3.0, updates the base to Debian 13, defaults to KDE Plasma 6, replaces LightDM with SDDM, drops some packages like neofetch and hping3, and adds things like faster BTRFS snapshot restores, full ZFS support, and safer partitioning behavior. Unlike Clear Linux, Kaisen will still get security updates for the next two years, giving current users time to migrate without rushing.

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The Linux kernel project lacks a formal succession plan for when Linus Torvalds steps down, Register columnist Rupert Goodwins writes. Torvalds has said "there's no need for formality" and that succession will occur naturally through community trust. "The next benevolent overlord will appear naturally," Torvalds believes. Goodwins calls this approach dangerous, noting that "succession is always a time of uncertainty for those who like the way things are, and opportunity for those who do not." The kernel project faces existing tensions including overstretched maintainers doing "two jobs, the one they're paid for, and the Linux kernel work," commercial pressures from companies like Red Hat, and increasing maintenance burdens from automated bug reports. "Hope, as they say, is not a strategy," Goodwins writes.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: You can't say Linux creator Linus Torvalds didn't give the kernel developers fair warning. He'd told them: "The upcoming merge window for 6.17 is going to be slightly chaotic for me. I have multiple family events this August (a wedding and a big birthday), and with said family being spread not only across the US, but in Finland too, I'm spending about half the month traveling." Therefore, Torvalds continued, "That does not mean I'll be more lenient to late pull requests (probably quite the reverse, since it's just going to add to the potential chaos)." So, when Meta software engineer Palmer Dabbelt pushed through a set of RISC-V patches and admitted "this is very late," he knew he was playing with fire. He just didn't know how badly he'd be burned. Torvalds fired back on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): "This is garbage and it came in too late. I asked for early pull requests because I'm traveling, and if you can't follow that rule, at least make the pull requests good." It went downhill from there. Torvalds continued: "This adds various garbage that isn't RISC-V specific to generic header files. And by 'garbage," I really mean it. This is stuff that nobody should ever send me, never mind late in a merge window." Specifically, Torvalds hated the "crazy and pointless" way in which one of the patch's helper functions combined two unsigned 16-bit integers into a 32-bit integer. How bad was it? "That thing makes the world actively a worse place to live. It's useless garbage that makes any user incomprehensible, and actively *WORSE* than not using that stupid 'helper.'" In addition to the quality issues, Torvalds was annoyed that the offending code was added to generic header files rather than the RISC-V tree. He emphasized that such generic changes could negatively impact the broader Linux community, writing: "You just made things WORSE, and you added that 'helper' to a generic non-RISC-V file where people are apparently supposed to use it to make other code worse too... So no. Things like this need to get bent. It does not go into generic header files, and it damn well does not happen late in the merge window. You're on notice: no more late pull requests, and no more garbage outside the RISC-V tree." [...] Dabbelt gets it. He replied, "OK, sorry. I've been dropping the ball lately, and it kind of piled up, taking a bunch of stuff late, but that just leads to me making mistakes. So I'll stop being late, and hopefully that helps with the quality issues."

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New submitter darwinmac writes: Kapitano, a user-friendly GTK4 frontend for the ClamAV scanner on Linux, has been killed by its developer 'zynequ' following a wave of harsh, personal attacks from a user. The tool was meant to simplify virus scanning but quickly became a flashpoint when a user claimed it produced malware. After defending the code calmly, the developer was nonetheless met with escalating accusations and hostility, leading to burnout. The project is now marked as "not maintained," its code released into the public domain under The Unlicense, and it's being delisted from Flathub. zynequ said: "This was always a hobby project, created in my free time with none of the financial support. Incidents like this make it hard to stay motivated."

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