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Installing Linux on a MacBook Air "turned out to be a very underwhelming experience," according to the tech news site MakeUseOf: The thing about Apple silicon Macs is that it's not as simple as downloading an AArch64 ISO of your favorite distro and installing it. Yes, the M-series chips are ARM-based, but that doesn't automatically make the whole system compatible in the same way most traditional x86 PCs are. Pretty much everything in modern MacBooks is custom. The boot process isn't standard UEFI like on most PCs. Apple has its own boot chain called iBoot. The same goes for other things, like the GPU, power management, USB controllers, and pretty much every other hardware component. It is as proprietary as it gets. This is exactly what the team behind Asahi Linux has been working toward. Their entire goal has been to make Linux properly usable on M-series Macs by building the missing pieces from the ground up. I first tried it back in 2023, when the project was still tied to Arch Linux and decided to give it a try again in 2026. These days, though, the main release is called Fedora Asahi Remix, which, as the name suggests, is built on Fedora rather than Arch... For Linux on Apple Silicon, the article lists three major disappointments: "External monitors don't work unless your MacBook has a built-in HDMI port." "Linux just doesn't feel fully ready for ARM yet. A lot of applications still aren't compiled for ARM, so software support ends up being very hit or miss." (And even most of the apps tested with FEX "either didn't run properly or weren't stable enough to rely on.") Asahi "refused to connect to my phone's hotspot," they write (adding "No, it wasn't an iPhone").

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Installing Linux on a MacBook Air "turned out to be a very underwhelming experience," according to the tech news site MakeUseOf: The thing about Apple silicon Macs is that it's not as simple as downloading an AArch64 ISO of your favorite distro and installing it. Yes, the M-series chips are ARM-based, but that doesn't automatically make the whole system compatible in the same way most traditional x86 PCs are. Pretty much everything in modern MacBooks is custom. The boot process isn't standard UEFI like on most PCs. Apple has its own boot chain called iBoot. The same goes for other things, like the GPU, power management, USB controllers, and pretty much every other hardware component. It is as proprietary as it gets. This is exactly what the team behind Asahi Linux has been working toward. Their entire goal has been to make Linux properly usable on M-series Macs by building the missing pieces from the ground up. I first tried it back in 2023, when the project was still tied to Arch Linux and decided to give it a try again in 2026. These days, though, the main release is called Fedora Asahi Remix, which, as the name suggests, is built on Fedora rather than Arch... For Linux on Apple Silicon, the article lists three major disappointments: "External monitors don't work unless your MacBook has a built-in HDMI port." "Linux just doesn't feel fully ready for ARM yet. A lot of applications still aren't compiled for ARM, so software support ends up being very hit or miss." (And even most of the apps tested with FEX "either didn't run properly or weren't stable enough to rely on.") Asahi "refused to connect to my phone's hotspot," they write (adding "No, it wasn't an iPhone").

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A Linux distro has dropped KDE Plasma after 12 years as it tries to escape Systemd  XDA

You can now download a Fedora Atomic OS for your Android device  XDA

Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS released with Linux 6.17 + Mesa 25.2  OMG! Ubuntu

Google never asked its users before adding AI Overviews to its search results and AI-generated email summaries to Gmail, notes the New York Times. And Meta didn't ask before making "Meta AI" an unremovable part of its tool in Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. "The insistence on AI everywhere — with little or no option to turn it off — raises an important question about what's in it for the internet companies..." Behind the scenes, the companies are laying the groundwork for a digital advertising economy that could drive the future of the internet. The underlying technology that enables chatbots to write essays and generate pictures for consumers is being used by advertisers to find people to target and automatically tailor ads and discounts to them.... Last month, OpenAI said it would begin showing ads in the free version of ChatGPT based on what people were asking the chatbot and what they had looked for in the past. In response, a Google executive mocked OpenAI, adding that Google had no plans to show ads inside its Gemini chatbot. What he didn't mention, however, was that Google, whose profits are largely derived from online ads, shows advertising on Google.com based on user interactions with the AI chatbot built into its search engine. For the past six years, as regulators have cracked down on data privacy, the tech giants and online ad industry have moved away from tracking people's activities across mobile apps and websites to determine what ads to show them. Companies including Meta and Google had to come up with methods to target people with relevant ads without sharing users' personal data with third-party marketers. When ChatGPT and other AI chatbots emerged about four years ago, the companies saw an opportunity: The conversational interface of a chatty companion encouraged users to voluntarily share data about themselves, such as their hobbies, health conditions and products they were shopping for. The strategy already appears to be working. Web search queries are up industrywide, including for Google and Bing, which have been incorporating AI chatbots into their search tools. That's in large part because people prod chatbot-powered search engines with more questions and follow-up requests, revealing their intentions and interests much more explicitly than when they typed a few keywords for a traditional internet search.

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9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: February 15th, 2026  LXer: Linux News

Last week Scott Shambaugh learned an AI agent published a "hit piece" about him after he'd rejected the AI agent's pull request. (And that incident was covered by Ars Technica's senior AI reporter.) But then Shambaugh realized their article attributed quotes to him he hadn't said — that were presumably AI-generated. Sunday Ars Technica's founder/editor-in-chief apologized, admitting their article had indeed contained "fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool" that were then "attributed to a source who did not say them... That this happened at Ars is especially distressing. We have covered the risks of overreliance on AI tools for years, and our written policy reflects those concerns... At this time, this appears to be an isolated incident." "Sorry all this is my fault..." the article's co-author posted later on Bluesky. Ironically, their bio page lists them as the site's senior AI reporter, and their Bluesky post clarifies that none of the articles at Ars Technica are ever AI-generated. Instead, Friday "I decided to try an experimental Claude Code-based AI tool to help me extract relevant verbatim source material. Not to generate the article but to help list structured references I could put in my outline." But that tool "refused to process" the request, which the Ars author believes was because Shambaugh's post described harassment. "I pasted the text into ChatGPT to understand why... I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh's words rather than his actual words... I failed to verify the quotes in my outline notes against the original blog source before including them in my draft." (Their Bluesky post adds that they were "working from bed with a fever and very little sleep" after being sick with Covid since at least Monday.) "The irony of an AI reporter being tripped up by AI hallucination is not lost." Meanwhile, the AI agent that criticized Shambaugh is still active online, blogging about a pull request that forces it to choose between deleting its criticism of Shambaugh or losing access to OpenRouter's API. It also regrets characterizing feedback as "positive" for a proposal to change a repo's CSS to Comic Sans for accessibility. (The proposals were later accused of being "coordinated trolling"...)

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Linux 7.0 Merges The Code To Replace The Tux Boot Logo At Build Time  Phoronix

Ubuntu 26.04 splits firmware package to reduce update sizes  OMG! Ubuntu

Rivian's stock skyrocketed 27% Friday after the electric car maker "shocked the market with strong earnings results," reports the Los Angeles Times, "proving itself an outlier in the EV market, which has been struggling with the end of government subsidies and cooling consumer excitement." They add that Rivian's strong earnings results suggest that "after years of struggling with losses, it may have at last found a path to profitability." On Thursday, Rivian reported gross profits for 2025 of $144 million, compared with a net loss in 2024 of $1.2 billion... Rivian credited the swing to gross profit to "strong software and services performance, higher average selling prices, and reductions in cost per vehicle..." Rivian delivered 42,247 vehicles in 2025 and produced 42,284 vehicles. The company still reported a $432-million net loss for the year for automotive profits, an improvement from 2024. But Rivian's software and services revenue grew more than threefold to $1.55 billion for the year, reports TechCrunch. "And the joint venture with Volkswagen Group was behind most of that growth, according to Rivian." VW and Rivian formed a technology joint venture in 2024 that is worth up to $5.8 billion. The joint venture is milestone-based and in 2025 Rivian hit the mark, which meant a $1 billion payout in the form of a share sale. Under the terms of the JV, Rivian will supply VW Group with its existing electrical architecture and software technology stack... Rivian is expected to receive an additional $2 billion of capital as part of the joint venture in 2026, CFO Claire McDonough said Thursday on the company earnings call... And while the funds provide a hefty stopgap, Rivian's financial success in 2026 will hinge largely on the rollout of its next EV, the R2 [priced around $45,000].

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I installed this Linux distro on my gaming PC, and it runs Windows games better than Windows  MakeUseOf

Bloomberg reports: India tightened rules governing social media content and platforms, particularly targeting artificially generated and manipulated material, in a bid to crack down on the rapid spread of misinformation and deepfakes. The government on Tuesday (Feb 10) notified new rules under an existing law requiring social media firms to comply with takedown requests from Indian authorities within three hours and prominently label AI-generated content. The rules also require platforms to put in place measures to prevent users from posting unlawful material... Companies will need to invest in 24-hour monitoring centres as enforcement shifts toward platforms rather than users, said Nikhil Pahwa, founder of MediaNama, a publication tracking India's digital policy... The onus of identification, removal and enforcement falls on tech firms, which could lose immunity from legal action if they fail to act within the prescribed timeline. The new rules also require automated tools to detect and prevent illegal AI content, the BBC reports. And they add that India's new three-hour deadline is "a sharp tightening of the existing 36-hour deadline." [C]ritics worry the move is part of a broader tightening of oversight of online content and could lead to censorship in the world's largest democracy with more than a billion internet users... According to transparency reports, more than 28,000 URLs or web links were blocked in 2024 following government requests... Delhi-based technology analyst Prasanto K Roy described the new regime as "perhaps the most extreme takedown regime in any democracy". He said compliance would be "nearly impossible" without extensive automation and minimal human oversight, adding that the tight timeframe left little room for platforms to assess whether a request was legally appropriate. On AI labelling, Roy said the intention was positive but cautioned that reliable and tamper-proof labelling technologies were still developing. DW reports that India has also "joined the growing list of countries considering a social media ban for children under 16." "Young Indians are not happy and are already plotting workarounds."

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While serving his 25-year prison sentence, "convicted former cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried on Tuesday requested a new federal trial," reports Courthouse News, "based on what he says is newly discovered evidence concerning his company's solvency and its ability to repay all FTX customers for what prosecutors portrayed as the looting of $8 billion of his customers' money..." Bankman-Fried says evidence disclosed since his trial disproves prosecutors' case about Bankman-Fried's hedge fund running a multi-billion deficit of FTX customer funds, and instead shows that FTX always had sufficient assets to repay the cryptocurrency platform's customer deposits in full. "What it faced was a short-term liquidity crisis caused by a run on the exchange, not insolvency," he wrote... Bankman-Fried also accuses the Department of Justice of coercing a guilty plea and cooperation deal from Nishad Singh — a close friend of Bankman-Fried's younger brother — who testified at trial as a cooperating witness... Bankman-Fried says in the motion that prior to being pressured into a guilty plea, Singh's initial proffer to investigators "contradicted key parts of the government's version of events. But following threats from the government, Mr. Singh changed his proffers to fit the government's narrative and pleaded guilty to charges carrying up to 75 years in prison, with a promise from the prosecution that it would recommend little or no jail time if it concluded that his assistance in prosecuting Mr. Bankman-Fried was 'substantial,'" he wrote in the petition... Additionally, Bankman-Fried requested that U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over his 2023 trial, recuse himself from ruling on this motion, "because of the manifest prejudice he has demonstrated towards Mr. Bankman-Fried." "Bankman-Fried's mother, Stanford Law School professor Barbara Fried, filed his self-represented bid for a new trial on his behalf in Manhattan federal court..."

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Linuxiac Weekly Wrap-Up: Week 7, 2026 (Feb 9 – 15)  Linuxiac

KaOS Linux Drops KDE Plasma After 12 Years for Niri/Noctalia to Escape systemd  9to5Linux

BPI-R4 Pro Router Board Delivers MT7988A SoC with Tri-Band Wi-Fi 7 Capability  LinuxGizmos.com

I replaced three productivity apps with built-in Linux tools and didn’t miss them  MakeUseOf

Linux Mint is adding post-install home encryption option  OMG! Ubuntu

Linux Mint is adding post-install home encryption option  OMG! Ubuntu