Community boosts and tips

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.

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• 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