Using DemocracyOS represents a challenge for any institution used to make decisions in the traditional way. It is designed for governments to open themselves up to citizen engagement, but power is usually conservative. But the biggest challenge is probably to fight against the presumption that citizens are naturally apathetic and shun commitment. Our challenge is cultural, not technological.

Ashwin Chaugule of Linaro has announced his experimental kernel implementation of Collaborative Processor Performance Controls (CPPC) that is part of the ACPI 5.1 specification.

An increasing amount of x86 and ARM64 hardware is expected in the marketplace soon that supports CPPC, which is a new interface for CPU performance control between the OS and platform, while right now it's just exposed by a limited number of systems. Here's more from Ashwin's description:
CPPC is the new interface for CPU performance control between the OS and the platform defined in ACPI 5.0+. The interface is built on an abstract representation of CPU performance rather than raw frequency.

“Freya inherits core components from Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS such as the Linux kernel (version 3.13), hardware drivers, and graphics stack. This includes support for EFI stub-loading, which is a kernel feature that enables booting directly from (U)EFI, without the need for an additional bootloader such as GRUB. Ubiquity does not yet have support for this configuration, but one of our developers has created a guide for a GRUB-free install of Freya on modern Mac computers using rEFInd.”

Michael Tremer, a developer for the ipfire.org team, has announced that IPFire 2.13 Core 81, a new stable build of the popular Linux-based firewall distribution, bringing quite a few security fixes.