Open Source's Political Roots

It’s our 2025 review of Linux and open source news including great gaming news, the impact of AI, the disappointments from Mozilla, the year of Wayland on the desktop, the politics of open source, Intel’s lack of interest, and wins for KDE.

Gaming

Steam Machine, controller, VR headset incoming from Valve

Steam Deck LCD production is ending

AI bullshit

Open source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries

Wikimedia Foundation bemoans AI bot bandwidth burden

ardour.org has banned 1.2M distinct IP addresses for trying to slurp from our git repository

Introducing CC Signals: A New Social Contract for the Age of AI

You should enforce your own existing licenses against AI mass crawling

Anubis guards gates against hordes of LLM bot crawlers

FSF calls Anubis malware

It seems like the AI crawlers learned how to solve the Anubis challenges

Mozilla

Updates on Mozilla’s Leadership and Growth Planning

Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox

An update on our Terms of Use

Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic

Investing in what moves the internet forward

When I say that I can’t recommend third-party forks of either Firefox or Chrome for real world use, this kind of thing is why

Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

Mozilla Slammed Over Battery-Draining “Garbage” AI in Firefox

Firefox Adds CoPilot Chatbot, New Tab Widgets in Nightly Builds

Introducing AI, the Firefox way: A look at what we’re working on and how you can help shape it

Rewiring Mozilla: Doing for AI what we did for the web

Mozilla’s next chapter: Building the world’s most trusted software company

Wayland

Fedora 43 Cleared To Ship With Wayland-Only GNOME

GNOME Dropping X11 Support May Complicate Next Ubuntu LTS

Ubuntu 25.10 drops support for GNOME on Xorg

Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43 to drop X11 in GNOME editions

An update on the X11 GNOME Session Removal

Wayback Is Now Hosted On FreeDesktop.org

Wayback 0.3 released!

GNOME Mutter Now “Completely Drops The Whole X11 Backend”

KDE Going all-in on a Wayland future

Politics

The price of software freedom is eternal politics

Framework flame war erupts over Linux controversy

PSF Gets a Donor Surge After Rejecting Anti-DEI Federal Grant

Intel

All good things come to an end: Shutting down Clear Linux OS

Intel’s Open-Source Strategy Is Changing At Odds With The Ethos Of Open-Source

The Death Of Clear Linux, Other Intel Linux Engineering Setbacks In 2025

KDE

KDE Highlights from 2025

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