Canonical is speeding up Ubuntu kernel releases to one a week as AI-assisted bug hunting helps bury defenders under an ever-growing pile of CVEs. The Ubuntu maker is overhauling how it ships kernel Stable Release Updates (SRUs), replacing its current four-week regular and two-week security cycles with overlapping two-week cycles that will push a kernel release every week. Canonical says the change is needed because the number of reported vulnerabilities has exploded, with AI deserving some of the credit – or blame, depending on which side of the patch queue you're sitting. "Large language models (LLMs) and specialized AI agents have transformed bug discovery from a manual, time-intensive process into a highly automated engine," Canonical said on Wednesday. AI isn't solely responsible for the CVE avalanche. The upstream Linux kernel community became a CVE Numbering Authority in 2024 and began assigning identifiers to thousands of bugs on the basis that almost any kernel flaw affecting a running system could have security implications. Put the two together, and Linux vendors have far more CVEs to deal with. Canonical says the resulting backlog requires faster releases to shrink the window between vulnerabilities becoming public and patched kernels reaching users. Under the new system, each SRU cycle lasts two weeks, but a new one starts every week. The first week is spent integrating patches, preparing and building kernel packages, and carrying out basic checks to make sure nothing catches fire. By the end of that stage, release candidates are published to Ubuntu's -proposed pocket. Week two is reserved for the heavier stuff, including hardware certification, distro integration, and regression testing. Once that's done, the kernel is released. Because the next cycle starts while that testing is under way, Canonical can publish another kernel the following week. For admins who consider even that too leisurely, there's a faster route. Organizations particularly sensitive to patching delays can take release candidates from the -proposed pocket after the first week and run their own acceptance tests. Canonical makes the trade-off clear: those users get access to fixes sooner, but before the company has finished its extensive certification testing. That can make kernel CVE fixes available within a week, provided customers are willing to perform some of the testing themselves. Canonical also wants to leave customers less exposed between disclosure and patch availability. It aims to provide safe workarounds where possible, or recommend general hardening measures where none exist, putting systems into what it calls a "defensible, safer state" within 24 to 48 hours of public disclosure. Those measures are not intended to replace patching, merely to give admins something better than crossing their fingers while a fix makes its way through the release process. The end result is a considerably busier kernel release schedule, although perhaps that's inevitable when machines are increasingly being enlisted to find bugs faster than humans can patch them. AI was supposed to make everyone's jobs easier. Ubuntu's kernel team may want a word. ®

The controversial Omarchy distro is attracting both criticism and fans – and financial support, too. Omarchy is an opinionated respin of Arch Linux and a pet project of Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson, better known as DHH. Although the first release was as recent as June last year, this week sees the release of Omarchy 4.0.1 – a security fix for the mid-August Omarchy 4 “Quattro”. Although it started out just over a year ago, Omarchy now has a sibling project Omakub, which is based on Ubuntu, and an organization behind it called Omacom. A week ago, DHH announced the launch of the Omacom Foundation with $8 million. Its founding patrons include figures behind Shopify, Stripe, Dell, Block, Cloudflare, Sesame, and 37signals - closely followed by people behind Dropbox and OpenClaw, taking the total to $10 million. The project, like the man behind it, is controversial. But that means attention, and an “opinionated distro” gets opinionated reviews. Some of the criticism is strong stuff: for instance, Merchants of Insecurity, whose top line is: “First, a PSA: Do NOT use Omarchy if you care about security of your machine even a little bit.” Author “One Happy Fellow” is not the first: last year, a member of Framework's community forums posted Omarchy is not a secure distribution and should be taken off the Linux installation options. Others like it or give it a guarded thumbs up while saying it’s not for them. There really is no such thing as bad publicity. As P. T. Barnum put it: "Say anything you like about me, but spell my name right." DHH is no stranger to controversy. We suspect he doesn’t mind at all. The Register reported in late 2025 that Framework, known for its repairable laptops, was sponsoring Omarchy and Hyprland, and in turn, multiple people criticized Framework for sponsoring such controversial projects. That piece linked to some of the criticism of DHH, but he has been attracting criticism since at least 2014. We tried it, and it does work. It has a unique UI based on the Hyprland tiling compositor and a panel and menus provided in the new release by Quickshell. This is heavily keyboard-driven, but ignores almost all existing keyboard shortcuts and UI conventions from other OSes. There are no title bars, let alone close buttons or anything like that. No middle-click or right-click app menus. The jaded take of the Reg FOSS desk, who is a big fan and advocate of keyboard-driven UIs, is that such things usually reflect ignorance of existing user interface standards. We found it a bit clunky. We had to install an additional tool, hypermon, in order to be able to make our testbed machine’s second display useful. You can’t use established pacman commands to update it – you must use the custom omarchy update script, and when trying that in a VM, we hit a known bug. On hardware, it worked fine. It’s Arch, extensively preconfigured. Lots of apps are preinstalled, and the selection is surprising and not typical of a FOSS product. The selection includes Discord and WhatsApp for communications, Docker, Obsidian for note-taking, Neovim as an editor, and OBS Studio for streaming. There are optional extras for using speech, automatic dictation via Voxtype, and other unusual features. There’s a terminal-based music player, cliamp. (We like the name of that one, and may keep it around.) There are, of course, options to add AI tools – one of the startup messages invites you to configure your preferred plastic pal who’s fun to be with LLM bot. It’s pretty big. A default install (not that there is any other kind) took 14 GB of disk space after the first update. It did install in a VM with a 16 GB virtual disk, but there wasn’t enough disk space to update the OS. It uses about 1.5 GB of memory at idle. It’s not lightweight, but then, Omarchy definitely comes with batteries included, as well as (to quote a friend’s old email signature) “bells and whistles, plus a couple of gongs. Don’t forget the horns, the custard pies and the water-powered whirling knives.” If you don’t know your way around existing environments or distros, want something fashionable and snazzy looking, and are willing and happy to jump in and learn, then this is an interesting new option. You may not agree with the politics and views behind it, but you must be able to either tolerate them – or ignore them. It works, it’s quite fast, it looks striking, and it does the job. If you just want something clean, fast, pretty, and with tiling by default, personally, we’d suggest Pop!_OS instead. ®

A hard core of Windows 10 devices cannot or will not be migrated to Windows 11, leaving enterprises with a growing security problem as support options run out. According to asset tracking service Lansweeper, Windows 10 still runs on 16.9 percent of the Windows devices it monitors, or "roughly one in six." A year ago, the operating system accounted for about half of the machines in its dataset, falling to the low-to-mid 40 percent range by the time Microsoft ended standard support. The decline continued after that, reaching 18.6 percent in June, but Lansweeper says migration has now slowed to a crawl. This presents a problem because even installations enrolled in the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program, under which Microsoft has committed to fixing security bugs, will eventually become vulnerable. Consumer devices can receive security updates until October 12, 2027, while commercial customers willing to pay can extend coverage until October 10, 2028. After that, the fixes stop. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are particularly exposed. Lansweeper reckons that 21.4 percent of SMB machines still run Windows 10, with cost usually being the constraint that keeps the legacy operating system running. The exposure is greater in some sectors, with 23 percent of healthcare and pharmaceutical systems sticking with Windows 10, while consumer and retail devices hover at 22.7 percent. According to Lansweeper's data, "a Windows 10 device carries an average of 1,903 active CVEs against 652 on Windows 11. That's a 2.9x gap." Esben Dochy, principal technical evangelist at the company, told The Register that "the Windows 10 average also includes devices that have ESU patches applied." Part of the problem, according to Lansweeper, is "patch diffing," in which Windows 11 fixes can be reverse-engineered to find flaws in Windows 10. "The supported OS effectively hands attackers a map into the unsupported one," Lansweeper said. According to Lansweeper's figures, 14 percent of Windows 10 assets have ESU patches applied. "I think a meaningful share of the remaining Windows 10 estate isn't being actively unpatched by neglect," Dochy said. "It's being held in place by vendor dependency, certification gaps, cost, or accepted risk. Certified equipment is a good example: many medical devices or industrial systems have their OS tied directly to vendor certification, and in some cases a Windows 11-certified version of that device or software doesn't exist yet. The same applies in retail, where devices are often vendor-locked to specific OS versions for compliance or warranty reasons. "For a lot of this hardware, the vendor is contractually responsible for maintaining the device, including any OS changes, so simply enrolling in ESU as a customer may not resolve the underlying problem. The real fix depends on the vendor's own certification timeline for Windows 11, and the cost that comes with the eventual upgrade or replacement. There are also devices sitting in air-gapped or isolated environments, where the risk is knowingly accepted for now rather than actively managed, so ESU enrollment simply isn't a priority." It's not a great situation, and the apparent stalling of Windows 11 adoption doesn't help. Looking at other market share measures such as Statcounter, there was little change in the share of Windows 10 and its successor over the last few months after a surge following the end of support. As Lansweeper noted: "The easy migrations are done. What's left is the hard core: devices that haven't moved because they can't or won't." Compounding the issue is the rising cost of new PC hardware, a trend unlikely to improve in the near term. According to Microsoft, "the ESU program helps reduce the risk of malware and cybersecurity attacks by providing access to critical and important security updates." Microsoft has extended the program for consumer devices, perhaps in recognition that there are an awful lot of Windows 10 machines still out there. Lansweeper's figures also underline the need for administrators to know which Windows 10 devices remain in their estates and whether each is fully patched. While many devices will have some level of protection, others will not, and over time, the proportion of vulnerable Windows 10 devices will grow, particularly where a move to Windows 11 is not an option. ®

UPDATED Patch Tuesday was followed by Oopsie Wednesday for some Dell customers, with Microsoft slamming on the update brakes after the hardware maker reported some problems. Yesterday was Microsoft's monthly security update for Windows. This month was, by all accounts, a bit of a doozy with a record-breaking number of CVEs patched, some of which were classed as critical and under active exploitation. Better get patching then? Well, er, no. Not if you're using a Dell device affected by issues associated with the update. Microsoft admitted it affected "some Dell devices with Intel processors," but stopped short of providing a full list. The Register asked the Windows giant and Dell which models had been hit, but both have yet to respond. Microsoft confirmed on its update page: "This update might not be available for a limited number of Dell devices with Intel processors due to an incompatibility reported by Dell that can potentially cause unexpected shutdowns, poor performance, increased heat, and battery drain." And the fix? "We are working together with Dell to prevent the affected models from experiencing the issue and plan to release a resolution for affected devices in the coming days." While the pair works on a solution, the update is "temporarily unavailable." Thanks to the sheer number of CVEs in the update, the delay is unfortunate, doubly so when considering that only a week ago, Microsoft was fiercely advocating for users to get patches installed as soon as possible due to the speed at which AI systems can detect and exploit vulnerabilities. In this instance, Microsoft has acted quickly to halt the update for affected devices. However, the fact that it got this far and can cause surprise shutdowns, overheating, and performance problems does not speak well of the company's validation and quality procedures. Dell is hardly a bit player in the hardware ecosystem. Somewhere, deep in the heart of Microsoft's Redmond campus, a sad-faced engineer is likely resetting the "Days since we broke something" counter and thinking fondly of the days when the number reached double or triple figures. ® Updated to add on July 16: A Microsoft spokesperson told The Register: "We are aware of the issue and have paused the Windows 11, versions 25H2 and 24H2 (KB5101650) update for impacted devices while we work on a resolution." The company has also updated its Windows release health dashboard. According to the Windows behemoth, the issue occurs on Dell models with an Intel Innovation Platform Framework Processor Participant driver and is related to the new Windows USB-C Connection Manager interface. The problem first cropped up in the preview update on June 23, ahead of patch Tuesday. There's no workaround, and Microsoft has halted the rollout to affected devices until a fix is ready, "in the next few days."