Alpha 2? But Alpha 1 only just came out!

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3140a2/

This is an early developer preview of Python
3.14

Major
new features of the 3.14 series, compared to 3.13

Python 3.14 is still in development. This release, 3.14.0a2 is the
second of seven planned alpha releases.

Alpha releases are intended to make it easier to test the current
state of new features and bug fixes and to test the release process.

During the alpha phase, features may be added up until the start of
the beta phase (2025-05-06) and, if necessary, may be modified or
deleted up until the release candidate phase (2025-07-22). Please keep
in mind that this is a preview release and its use is
not recommended for production environments.

Many new features for Python 3.14 are still being planned and
written. Among the new major new features and changes so far:

• PEP 649: deferred
  evaluation of annotations
• PEP 741: Python
  configuration C API
• PEP 761: Python 3.14
  and onwards no longer provides PGP signatures for release artifacts.
  Instead, Sigstore is recommended for verifiers.
• Improved
  error messages
• (Hey, fellow core developer, if a feature
  you find important is missing from this list, let Hugo
  know.)

The next pre-release of Python 3.14 will be 3.14.0a3, currently
scheduled for 2024-12-17.

More resources

• Online
  documentation
• PEP 745, 3.14
  Release Schedule
• Report bugs at https://github.com/python/cpython/issues
• Help fund Python and
  its community

Enjoy the new release

Thanks to all of the many volunteers who help make Python Development
and these releases possible! Please consider supporting our efforts by
volunteering yourself or through organisation contributions to the Python Software
Foundation.

Regards from a chilly Helsinki with snow on the way,

Your release team,
Hugo van Kemenade
Ned Deily
Steve Dower
Łukasz Langa

I’ve linked to quite a few posts by OpenBSD developer Solène Rapenne on OSNews, mostly about her work for and knowledge of OpenBSD. However, she recently posted about her decision to leave the OpenBSD team, and it mostly comes down to the fact she hasn’t been using OpenBSD for a while now due to a myriad of problems she’s encountering. Posts like these are generally not that fun to link to, and I’ve been debating about this for a few days now, but I think highlighting such problems, especially when detailed by a now-former OpenBSD developer, is an important thing to do. Hardware compatibility is an issue because OpenBSD has no Bluetooth support, its gamepad support is fractured and limited, and most of all, battery life and heat are a major issue, as Solène notes that “OpenBSD draws more power than alternatives, by a good margin”. For her devops work, she also needs to run a lot of software in virtual machines, and this seems to be a big problem on OpenBSD, as performance in this area seems limited. Lastly, OpenBSD seems to be having stability issues and crashes a lot for her, and while this in an of itself is a big problem already, it’s compounded by the fact that OpenBSD’s file system is quite outdated, and most crashes will lead to corrupted or lost files, since the file system doesn’t have any features to mitigate this. I went through a similar, but obviously much shorter and far less well-informed experience with OpenBSD myself. It’s such a neat, understandable, and well-thought out operating system, but its limitations are obvious, and they will start to bother you sooner or later if you’re trying to use it as a general purpose operating system. While it’s entirely understandable because OpenBSD’s main goal is not the desktop, it still sucks because everything else about the operating system is so damn nice and welcoming. Solène found her alternative in Linux and Qubes OS: I moved from OpenBSD to Qubes OS for almost everything (except playing video games) on which I run Fedora virtual machines (approximately 20 VM simultaneously in average). This provides me better security than OpenBSD could provide me as I am able to separate every context into different spaces, this is absolutely hardcore for most users, but I just can’t go back to a traditional system after this. ↫ Solène Rapenne She lists quite a few Linux features she particularly likes and why, such as cgroups, systemd, modern file systems like Btrfs and ZFS, SELinux, and more. It’s quite rare to see someone of her calibre so openly list the shortcomings of the system she clearly otherwise loves and put a lot of effort in, and move to what is generally looked at with some disdain within the community she came from. It also highlights that issues with running OpenBSD as a general purpose operating system are not confined to less experienced users such as myself, but extend towards extremely experienced and knowledgeable people like actual OpenBSD developers. I’m definitely not advocating for OpenBSD to change course or make a hard pivot to becoming a desktop operating system, but I do think that even within the confines of a server operating system there’s room for at least things like a much improved and faster file system that provides the modern features server users expect, too.