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
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
Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic
Investing in what moves the internet forward
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
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
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