cm0002

Thu 11 Dec 2025 00.00 EST

I had not planned to write anything about my trip to the West Bank last month. But I changed my mind when I witnessed how much daily life for Palestinians had deteriorated, how dispirited they have become and how much control Israel and its settlers now exercise over the Palestinian population. I had expected conditions for Palestinians would be worse, but not this much worse.

At the end of the second intifada, there were, according to the UN, 376 checkpoints and barriers in the West Bank. Today there are an estimated 849, many of them erected in the last two years.

Thu 11 Dec 2025 00.00 EST

I had not planned to write anything about my trip to the West Bank last month. But I changed my mind when I witnessed how much daily life for Palestinians had deteriorated, how dispirited they have become and how much control Israel and its settlers now exercise over the Palestinian population. I had expected conditions for Palestinians would be worse, but not this much worse.

At the end of the second intifada, there were, according to the UN, 376 checkpoints and barriers in the West Bank. Today there are an estimated 849, many of them erected in the last two years.

NetworkManager, a system service and set of tools for managing network connections, widely adopted by most Linux distributions, is rolling out version 1.54.3 today as the second maintenance update to the 1.54 series.

One change affects private connections that specify a user in the connection.permissions property. NetworkManager now verifies that the designated user actually has access to the 802.1X certificates and private keys configured for that connection.

This additional check prevents situations where a connection profile references credentials that the intended user cannot read, reducing the risk of misconfigurations and unexpected connection failures, especially in multi-user or enterprise setups.

Similarweb.

In the open-source ecosystem, funding has long been a central challenge, often determining whether a project can grow sustainably or slowly fade away. And while many initiatives continue to struggle for financial support, it’s encouraging to see others, like KDE, not only maintain a stable foundation but even surpass expectations.

I say this because, according to the latest data, KDE has surpassed its 2025 fundraising goal by a wide margin, reaching €276K—an impressive 276% of the original €100K target. Updated daily, the campaign’s progress bar now stretches far beyond its intended limit, reflecting an exceptional wave of support from users and contributors across the open-source community.

Showing just how insane it is to be a game developer right now, we've hit an all-time high for game releases on Steam in 2025 and not many get seen.

Taken from SteamDB, we can see from their data that there's been 19,008 games for 2025. That is a lot of games to be launching in a single year, which is up from 18,558 games in 2024 and 14,111 in 2023. This is a reminder that developers are not just competing with new releases when launching a game, but everything on Steam with many older titles remaining incredibly popular.

Showing just how difficult it can be to actually get a game in front of an audience, of the 19,008 from this year, a whopping 9,269 games have 10 or fewer reviews. There is a slight silver lining here though, as it appears the number of games receiving at least 100 reviews have been growing over the years since 2020. It's a bit lower than 2024 right now, but that will likely even-out before the end of 2025.

All of the PCI subsystem updates were merged last week for the nearly-over Linux 6.19 merge window. Standing out this cycle are Resizable BAR improvements as well as introducing a few new PCIe controller drivers.

The PCI pull for Linux 6.19 brought Resizable BAR (ReBAR) improvements. Among the Resizable BAR improvements were for preventing resource tree corruption when BAR resize fails and restoring BARs to the original size of a BAR resize fail. There are also changes for the Intel Xe and i915 drivers as well as AMDGPU driver so that PCI core can properly restore BARs if the resize fails.

The Blender 3D modeling software could enjoy better macOS support with better cross-platform code paths thanks to in-development work for leveraging KosmicKrisp for Vulkan API usage on macOS via Metal.

Blender has been making good progress on its Vulkan acceleration for the viewport rendering as an alternative to OpenGL. Blender 5.1 is aiming for Vulkan by default on Windows and Linux systems.

A new patch series from an NXP engineer optimizes the secure erase performance for certain Kingston eMMC devices. Currently with the Linux kernel performing a secure erase on 1GB of data can take around ten minutes. With these new patches that 1GB secure erase can be done in around two seconds.

Some Kingston eMMC devices will consume a fixed two seconds per secure erase operation regardless of the erase size. When the Linux kernel is currently performing a secure erase it is limited by the max discard size and thus will issue around 300 operations to erase 1GB. Today's patches from NXP engineer Luke Wang will drop that secure erase process into a single command and thus consuming just around two seconds of time.

Framework Computer had worked to keep their memory prices lower than other laptop vendors amid the ongoing memory shortages throughput the industry worldwide. But today they've finally had to cave in and increase their DDR5 memory modules for the Framework Laptop DIY Editions by 50%.

Due to the ongoing price hikes around system memory with shortages throughout the supply chain, Framework raised their DDR5 memory options today by 50% for the Framework Laptop DIY Edition. Framework Computer is keeping the prior prices for existing pre-orders and also is foregoing any price changes for their pre-built laptops or the Framework Desktop. Framework Computer also lets you order DIY laptops without any memory at all if so desired for re-using existing modules or should you score a deal elsewhere.