CERN Picks Debian, Ubisoft Blocks For Honor on

CERN has spent decades smashing particles together, and this week it decided to stop smashing its own hardware budget instead. According to coverage from Phoronix and Slashdot, the physics lab is moving more than 2,000 industrial computers and embedded systems from the Red Hat family to Debian, and the reason is delightfully mundane: CPU baselines.

When Hardware Outlives the Software Roadmap

Red Hat's newer releases require x86-64 V2 and V3 microarchitecture levels. V3, the baseline for RHEL 10, dates back to 2013 Intel and 2015 AMD silicon. That's fine if your fleet is modern. CERN's accelerator front-end systems, which connect to roughly 17,000 devices across the complex, include machines old enough that Red Hat's requirements simply exclude them. A 2023 CERN risk analysis, as discussed by Michael Tunnell on This Week in Linux, put the cost of staying on the Red Hat path at around 5.4 million Swiss francs, eleven hardware board redesigns, and six additional engineers, with an optimistic success rate of 20 percent by end of 2026.

Twenty percent. Optimistic. If a physics lab that literally invented the web can't afford to keep pace with a distro's CPU floor, that says something about how long enterprises keep specialized hardware running.

Debian, famously willing to build for nearly anything with a pulse, sidesteps the problem. This is a very 1990s lesson wearing a modern coat: the old Amiga and DOS machines ran for decades because their software didn't demand new silicon, and Debian is the last major distribution still honoring that ethos. CERN isn't abandoning Red Hat everywhere; data centers and experimental computing stay on RHEL and AlmaLinux, so the lab will run two distro families at once. Anyone who has managed a heterogeneous fleet just felt a sympathetic twitch.

California Carves Out Open Source

California's AB 1856 passed unanimously, 39-0 in the Senate and 69-0 in the Assembly, per Tom's Hardware. It exempts open-source operating systems from the state's age-verification requirements, which would otherwise have forced OS distributors to collect a birth date at account setup and pass an age bracket to applications. The governor has until September 30 to sign.

The exemption's language covers distributions under licenses permitting copying, redistribution, and modification: mainstream Linux distros, the BSDs, FreeDOS, GrapheneOS. SteamOS sits in murkier territory because Valve bundles an open-source base with a proprietary client, and nobody, including the bill's supporters, has produced a definitive answer for that case. Colorado already had a similar exemption, but most other state laws do not, so treat this as a California carve-out rather than a national reprieve.

On the episode, Tunnell pointed to the Ageless Linux project's state-law tracker as a useful way to follow where these laws stand and when enforcement kicks in. The underlying tension remains: the age data self-reported at setup is trivially falsifiable, which makes the whole apparatus more compliance theater than child protection. Governor Newsom's signature would settle the question for one state. The other forty-nine remain open.

30,000 Games, One Casualty

Linux gaming crossed 30,000 verified or playable titles on Steam, per GamingOnLinux, and within the same news cycle Ubisoft announced it will deliberately block For Honor on Linux and SteamOS starting September 10, 2026. The company's stated reason, as covered on the episode, is that it "cannot meaningfully deploy protection on Linux," tying the move to maintaining fair ranked competition.

Give Ubisoft partial credit for honesty. Unlike some publishers who blamed Linux users as cheaters outright, Ubisoft framed this as a capability gap. Kernel-level anti-cheat demands the kind of system control Windows grants and Linux refuses by design; a user who owns their kernel can, in principle, remove or bypass any rootkit a publisher installs. Tunnell noted Ubisoft has provided no cheating statistics or exploit evidence tying Linux players to any actual problem, and he flagged an asterisk: Easy Anti-Cheat running through Proton retains kernel access to the Proton layer, which should make tampering detectable.

Compatibility, it turns out, is a rental agreement. Ubisoft updated Easy Anti-Cheat in July 2023 specifically to make For Honor work on the Steam Deck, and three years later it pulled the rug. If you own the game and want a refund, Tunnell's advice on the show is to wait until after September 10, when the game stops working and Steam's refund math changes in your favor.

Audacity Grows Up

Audacity 4 shipped with a rebuilt Qt6 interface, replacing the wxWidgets UI that had been fossilized since roughly the Bush administration (the second one). Dockable panels, savable workspaces, themes, a clip-editing overhaul, and a new AUP4 project format. One-way street warning: converted AUP4 projects cannot be saved back to AUP3, so keep your originals. Macros, MIDI, time tracks, and some scripting features are absent at launch.

The 2021 telemetry controversy, when Muse Group's acquisition briefly got Audacity labeled spyware, has largely receded: the telemetry proposal was dropped, the privacy policy was rewritten, and Audacity 4's update checking is default-on but disableable with usage stats opt-in.

OpenShot 4.0 landed the same week with screen and webcam recording, a real color grading suite with scopes and LUTs, a native Qt timeline, and local AI masking that runs on downloadable models with no cloud account required. For software long dismissed as a hobbyist toy, that's a serious feature list.

The Rest of the Stack

A few items from the episode rounded out the week. A former Clear Linux architect, Auke Kok, is building the Ur Project, a distribution-building stack in Rust emphasizing reproducible builds and easy contribution; there's nothing downloadable yet, so file it under watch this space. Linux From Scratch 13.1 refreshed its toolchain for the masochists. Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS arrived as the usual first point release, though Canonical is delaying the automatic 24.04 upgrade prompt a couple of weeks to backport fixes for Rust coreutils regressions.

On the Nvidia and Hugging Face story, I'll be direct: the only reporting I have is Tunnell's episode, where he stated that Nvidia confirmed a roughly $12.9 billion acquisition after teasing it the prior week. If that holds up, it's the same story as Microsoft and GitHub in 2018: a neutral platform absorbed by an interested party, with promises that nothing will change. GitHub's core service survived that one, for what it's worth. But neutrality on a platform whose entire value is being everyone's commons doesn't survive the acquisition press release, whatever the code of conduct says. The 2000s dot-com rollups taught us that the promises are sincere when made and irrelevant eighteen months later.

The week in one line: the institutions that treat software as infrastructure pick tools that respect old hardware, the platforms that treat users as products keep tightening the screws, and the gap between those two philosophies grows a little wider every September.

Mike Sullivan covers technology for BuzzRAG.