FOSS Weekly #26.19: Ubuntu Under Attack, Linux Exploitation Ongoing, Upgrading to 26.04, Linux on PS5 and More

Let me start with two not so positive news.

Ubuntu suffered a cyber attack for almost a week. Don’t panick. It was a DDoS attack and makes a website unavailable by flooding the server with traffic. The ubuntu.com website, Snap store, Launchpad, and several other Canonical-owned services went offline or became unreliable. If you had trouble running snap install commands or pulling from a PPA last week, you now know why.

But that was not the end of it. Today, the official Twitter account of Ubuntu was compromised to send out crypto scam. It seems like the misery keeps on piling for Ubuntu.

That’s not the only unpleasant news for Linux users this week. There is/was a new Linux exploit by the name of “Copy Fail”. It’s a form of local privilege escalation. Nothing to worry as a desktop Linux user. Just keep your system updated that will also update your kernel to patch this vulnerability. More detail on copy fail can be found in this article.

“Two” many negative news? Let me share something positive then. The Dutch government is building its own code hosting platform on Forgejo, and the soft launch already has four ministries, several municipalities, and the Electoral Council’s vote-counting software on it.

Another positive news. The people who actually build software on top of web standards rarely get to influence those standards because showing up to IETF, W3C, and ISO working groups takes time and money that independent maintainers don’t have. Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency is running a paid pilot program to fix that.

That’s nice, right? Now let’s talk about our favorite topic. Microsoft getting caught with its pants down. Here’s the big news. VS Code was crediting Copilot for commits written entirely by humans, including on machines where Copilot had been explicitly disabled. The culprit was a single pull request that had changed a default setting without any release note or user-facing notification.

Another news on Micerosoft, and this one is not negative. On the 45th birthday of DOS, Microsoft open sourced its original code under MIT-licensed. Once upon a time, Microsoft paid just under $100,000 for DOS, and that move made them billions. Open sourcing the code won’t change a thing but it’s a good thing from computing history point of view.

Here are other highlights of this edition of FOSS Weekly:

• Linux running on PS5 (anyone can follow the process to achieve that)
• An awesome terminal based file manager
• New HWE ISOs from Linux Mint
• Information on a paid program for standards development.
• And other Linux news, tips, and, of course, memes!

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

A passionate community doesn’t automatically produce maintainers willing to do release engineering every six months. Ubuntu’s official flavour list shrank with 26.04, and the argument Rolan makes is that this is a correction worth making.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

Linux Mint is stretching its release cycle out to December 2026, which is fine for existing users but leaves a gap for people trying to install on very new hardware. The HWE ISOs solve that.

Here’s everything you need to get started with Flatpak. What it is, how to install it on major distros, adding Flathub, and the essential commands for installing, updating, removing, and cleaning up unused runtimes.

Since we are discussing Flatpaks, here are some tools to help improve your Flatpak experience.

If you are new, you should know these important things about the root user in Linux.

👷 AI, Homelab and Hardware Corner

Someone ported Linux to the PS5, got Steam running, played GTA V with ray tracing, and published the whole thing on GitHub.

An It’s FOSS reader has created an interesting multiplayer music trivia party game that runs on Home Assistant. So if you have smart speakers in your home automation system built on Home Assistant, you can turn them into a game show.

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

Ptyxis has replaced GNOME Terminal as the default in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora, and there’s plenty of reasons for it.

📽️ Videos for You

And I demonstrate how to upgrade to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS from 24.04 or even an unsupported version like 24.10. I also answer common questions in the latest video.

🎟️ Event alert: Lomiri Tech Meet in Netherlands

If you are in or around the Netherlands, are a student, and would be interested in an open source mobile development hackathon, then you are in luck. The Lomiri Tech Meeting is happening on May 16.

💡 Quick Handy Tip

In Brave Browser, you can press CTRL + Space to access the Quick Commands in the address bar. When you are in, type the action you want and press Enter. You can try things like new tab, new split, new private window, etc.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Do you know your way around Linux directories?

I just cannot pull myself away from customizing my Linux setup. 🥲

🗓️ Tech Trivia: On April 30, 1993, CERN issued an official document that put the World Wide Web software and protocols into the public domain.

This was a pivotal moment in technology history, as it ensured that the Web would be an open standard that anyone could use, build upon, and distribute without paying licensing fees or royalties.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: Ask.com has reached its demise, and it has gotten our resident FOSSers talking. There’s another interesting thread talking about AI back in the day.

This article first appeared on Read More