FOSS Recap 2025

  • Fri, Jan 2, 2026
  • 8-minute read

Hey everyone! 👋

As done last year, here is a recap of all the noticeable FOSS related stuff I had the chance to work on and achieve in 2025. 😄

See also the awesome recap of my FOSS mates and good friends: kpcyrd, orhun.

Arch Linux

Packaging

I pushed a total of 2277 packages to Arch Linux repositories, most of them being packages updates with the top five packages being:

I also added some new packages to the repository, such as (but not limited to):

Bumpbuddy

Together with gromit and klausenbusk, we officially released and introduced bumpbuddy (previously referred to as the “Nvchecker PoC”).

Bumpbuddy is a daemon watching for new upstream releases for our packages. It automatically opens GitLab issues for out-of-date packages and manages said issues autonomously (e.g. opened issues are automatically updated to match newer upstream releases and are automatically closed once the matching version is being pushed to the repository).

Aside from offering a centralized and automated way for tracking and reporting new upstream releases for Arch Linux package maintainers, it also provides a public place for anyone to discuss the state of a pending update or expose eventual blocking points.
This should hopefully allow for both more pro-active packages update and more transparency towards users eventually wondering about the progress of a specific update.

See bumpbuddy’s official announcement and automated GitLab issue example for more details.

Some future work and mid / long term goals around bumpbuddy are in progress, such as (but not limited to):

  • Providing a web report overview
  • Manage packages’ out-of-date status in Archweb and get rid of / replace the “Flag Package Out-of-Date” button (which is manual, error prone, may be used abusively and lacks transparency)
  • Open merge requests rather than (or in addition of) GitLab issues, regarding our future goal of adopting a more “GitOps” oriented packaging workflow

Infrastructure

I officially joined the Arch Linux DevOps team and made several contributions to the Arch Linux infrastructure, such as (but not limited to):

WSL Image

I worked on creating an official Arch Linux WSL image that has been included in Microsoft’s manifest of officially supported WSL distributions.

Huge thanks to Mark who offered his help as an Arch Linux community member to maintain this WSL image with me and that later integrated the Arch Linux Staff as an additional official maintainer for it. 🤝

For more details, see the related Arch Linux RFC, the dedicated Arch Wiki page and the blog post I wrote earlier this year on the subject.

Testing Team

Together with gromit, we created around 70 new testing team accounts this year.

Aside from the usual testing, I helped testing some kernel and systemd pre-releases (respectively packaged by gromit and eworm).

I also brainstormed and expressed my support regarding coruja (an Arch Linux Testing team member) proposal about indexing a public list of Testing team members in Archweb, allowing for an easier collaboration between testers & package maintainers and, more importantly, to give our testers some recognition by offering a public place to show / acknowledge their involvement in our beloved distribution. 🥰

Tools / Tooling

BuildBTW

I joined the BuildBTW (future centralized Arch Linux build service) proof of concept as a tester. Aside from showing my appreciation toward the amazing work done so far, I had the occasion to open some improvements suggestions, such as:

Devtools / pkgctl

I made some contributions to our packaging tooling, such as:

Pacman-Contrib

I made some contributions to pacman-contrib, such as:

Archlinux-Contrib

I made several contributions to archlinux-contrib, such as:

Staff

Together with felixonmars, we sponsored integral’s application to become a Package Maintainer, which was accepted.

As mentioned earlier, I also wrote a proposal to add Mark to our staff as an additional maintainer for our WSL image, which was accepted.

RFCs

As mentioned earlier, I wrote an RFC about providing an official WSL image for Arch Linux, which was accepted.

Ports

I (alongside community and other staff members) collaborated on a work in progress Arch Linux aarch64 community port, which eventually aims to be officially supported at some point.

See the page for Arch Linux Ports and the one dedicated to aarch64 for more details.

Arch Summit Organization

I was a part of the organization committee of the 2025 edition of the Arch Summit (a yearly event during which Arch staff meet, socialize and work on multiple subjects), which was held in Hamburg (Germany) with 37 attendees.

Reproducible Builds

I dived deeper into the Reproducible Builds efforts and community this year, joining the Reproducible Summit in Vienna and making numerous reproducible builds related work / contributions:

As mentioned earlier, I wrote the greposcope script (shipped in archlinux-contrib), allowing to download diffoscope outputs of non-reproducible Arch Linux packages and identify specific reproducible builds related issues.

I submitted several upstream and downstream patches in regards to Reproducible Builds, some of them being covered in the following reproducible-builds.org’s monthly news:

Together with Mark, we worked at making the Arch Linux WSL image bit-for-bit reproducible:

I joined a work group to move the git hosting for the Reproducible Builds website from Debian’s GitLab / Salsa instance to Codeberg (note that, at the time I’m writing these lines, the migration is still a work in progress and hasn’t fully been done yet).

Alpine Linux

Packaging

I pushed 47 commits to Alpine Linux aports, most of them being aports (packages) updates.

I also added a total of 8 new aports (packages) to Alpine Linux repositories:

Tooling

I opened 4 merge requests to abuild (Alpine Linux build tools) to submit some fixes and improvements to the abump script:

As mentioned earlier, I also added atools-go to the Arch Linux repository.

Arch-Update

Arch-Update got 49 new releases, 19 new contributors and a lot of new features, including (but not limited to):

  • A new shiny icon set
  • A dropdown submenu for each package sources (All, Package, AUR, Flatpak) in the systay applet right-click menu
  • Support for disabling desktop notifications, AUR support and Flatpak support from the configuration file
  • A new -s / --services option to check for services requiring a post upgrade restart at any time, outside of the main “system upgrade” function
  • New click actions in desktop notifications allowing to directly run Arch-Update or dismiss the notification
  • A new feature opening the upstream project URL of a package pending for update in a web browser when its entry is clicked from the systray applet right-click menu (allowing one to easily check release notes, for instance)
  • Support for sudo-rs (in addition of sudo, doas and run0)
  • Overall improvements regarding the Flatpak support / integration
  • Easier translation maintenance and contributions
  • New translations, including:
    • Chinese (simplified)
    • Chinese (traditional)
    • Hungarian
    • German
    • Brazilian
    • Spanish
    • Russian

Arch-Update was also forked and adopted by CachyOS as Cachy-Update! 🚀
CachyOS users can enable it by checking the “Cachy Update enabled” check box under the App/Tweaks menu in the CachyOS Hello application. See the Cachy-Update entry in the CachyOS “Updating The System” wiki page for more details.

Other

I attended some FOSS related events:

I wrote 3 blog posts:

I submitted a talk for FOSDEM 2026, which was accepted! 🥳 🎉

I installed postmarketOS on a Samsung Galaxy S9+ and I also got 2 pinetime, can’t wait to play around and hack on those! 😎

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That’s it!

2025 was a pretty busy year and I’m once again very happy and proud about everything I had the chance to work on and achieve this year! 😃

I’d like to conclude once again by thanking every awesome people I had the chance to meet, spend some time and work with this year. The above accomplishments probably wouldn’t have been a thing without them! 🙏

Happy new year everyone! 🤗