This was a quieter week in the Linux ecosystem, but there's still some exciting news, especially if you're a fan of Pop!_OS and the COSMIC desktop. Here are the biggest stories you might have missed.

Kali Linux, a popular Linux distribution for cybersecurity research and penetration testing, just revealed the Kali Linux 2025.4 release. This new build has updates to GNOME, KDE, and Xfce desktop environments, improvements for virtual machines, and much more.

System76 has been working on its own desktop environment for Linux, called COSMIC, intended to fully replace GNOME Shell on the company's Pop!_OS distribution. Now, the COSMIC desktop environment has finally reached stable status.

If you need the fastest possible speeds for external storage, Hyper might have the tool for you. The company's new HyperDrive enclosure uses USB4 V2 to turn any NVMe drive into a high-performance external drive, but you'll have to pay a hefty sum for the privilege.

Visual Studio Code just released its November 2025 update, version 1.107. There are more improvements for AI coding agents and TypeScript support, but I'm mostly excited about another change: a much more powerful terminal.

Home Assistant and Nabu Casa released the ZBT-2 adapter back in November, which adds Zigbee, Thread, and Matter to any Home Assistant server. Now you can buy one right on Amazon.

The popular Notepad++ text editor has been hijacked to spread malware, due to a security vulnerability in the app's update mechanism. If you have the app installed, make sure you have the latest version to stay safe.

Local page translation is one of the best recent additions to Firefox, but iPhone and iPad owners haven't been able to try it out. That's finally changing with the release of Firefox 146, and Mozilla is throwing in a few other minor improvements.

Plex is now testing a new framework for custom metadata providers, giving you more options for adding titles, cover art, and other information to your movie and TV library. It's now in beta testing with a planned rollout in January.

Spotify has slowly expanded beyond audio, most notably with video podcasts, and now music videos are now rolling out to more subscribers. It looks a lot like how YouTube Music works.

Thunderbird, the desktop mail client developed by Mozilla, just released two new updates. Thunderbird 146 is rolling out today in the stable channel, and for those of you who need stability above all else, Thunderbird ESR just got an update to version 140.6.

PhpStorm has stuck around as one of the best PHP development environments, and now JetBrains has released a new major version. PhpStorm 2025.3 is now available with PHP 8.5 support, a new theme, Claude agent integration, and much more.

Visual Studio Code and other lightweight editors might be the most popular choices for Python programming, but JetBrains PyCharm is still great for complex projects and debugging. The latest update is merging the Community Edition and Pro versions, and it brings along a few new features and improvements.

JetBrains might be best known for its IDEA, PyCharm, and WebStorm integrated development environments, but it also has one for Go language development: GoLand. The latest version can help you hunt down resource leaks, code with multiple AI agents, use Terraform files, and much more.

JetBrains has released IntelliJ IDEA 2025.3, the first version of the new unified IDE for Java development. It's combining the Community Edition and Ultimate builds into one package and adding a few new features on top, including full support for Java 25.

This was another busy week in the Linux ecosystem and wider FOSS community, with an update on the way for Linux Mint, growing Steam marketshare, and much more. Here are the biggest stories you might have missed.

TK TK Here are the biggest stories you might have missed.

This was another busy week in tech news, with Home Assistant's December update rolling out, Micron ending production of Crucial memory hardware, price hikes for Raspberry Pi boards, and much more. Here are the biggest stories you might have missed.