The second beta release of KDE's Plasma 6.4 desktop is now available for testing ahead of the official release in June.

The cryptography subsystem updates have been merged for the start of the Linux 6.16 cycle. Notable with the crypto updates this round are more performance optimizations for Intel and AMD CPUs with AVX-512 and also enabling next-generation Intel QAT accelerators.

While OpenH264 support coming to Fedora was widely celebrated as part of offering a better codec experience on Fedora Linux, an increasing number of Fedora users have grown frustrated with the OpenH264 packaging in that it's been out-of-date for several months with a high severity security vulnerability.

There is a lot of exciting file-system changes landing for the Linux 6.16 kernel... EXT4 brings a "really stupendous performance" change, Btrfs also brings some performance improvements, XFS landed atomic writes, and Bcachefs continues stabilizing. For the EROFS read-only file-system its changes have been merged and includes support for Intel QAT acceleration.

Canonical is sticking to Ubuntu Linux releases every six months and a Long Term Support (LTS) release every two years, but a new change to their development process is that they are now working to release monthly Ubuntu snapshots of their testing stream.

Intel engineers have added yet more PCI graphics device IDs for Battlemage to their open-source driver code within Mesa for Iris OpenGL and ANV Vulkan driver support.

With the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem updates sent out this week for the Linux 6.16 kernel there is support for a number of newer Intel hardware platforms.

Rusticl as Mesa's Rust-based OpenCL driver implementation for Gallium3D drivers is ending the month of May on a high note... Merged this week was support for the Intel Subgroups OpenCL extension (cl_intel_subgroups) and before getting to that on my TODO list, an even bigger item was merged: Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support.

Oracle engineers have released the first public beta of the upcoming VirtualBox 7.2 virtualization software release for Windows, Linux, macOS, and Solaris systems.

The hearty set of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display driver changes were merged today for the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel. Most notable is preliminary NVIDIA Blackwell and Hopper GPU support atop the mainline kernel with an open-source driver but there are also big ticket items added for the AMD Radeon/Instinct and Intel graphics drivers too as well as the other smaller drivers.

The initial release candidate of Git 2.50 is now available for this widely-used, distributed version control system.

For anyone still happening to have only one CPU core in their system and running a uni-processor "UP" kernel build without any simultaneous multi-processing (SMP) support enabled, a big patch series posted today for the Linux kernel may affect you.

Eric Engestrom just released Mesa 25.0.7 as the newest bi-weekly point release to the Mesa 25.0 series that is also the end of the road for that Q1'2025 release branch.

While the "core/entry" changes for the Linux kernel merge window aren't typically too exciting to write about, there is a new optimization for all CPU architectures worth mentioning for the Linux 6.16 cycle.

Several weeks into testing the AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 395 flagship "Strix Halo" SoC within the HP ZBook Ultra G1a, I continue to be very impressed with its performance capabilities for a wide range of workloads. While the Radeon 8060S integrated graphics easily turn heads and the 16-core / 32-thread Zen 5 cores deliver incredible performance in a laptop form factor, one feature not to be discounted that together really helps make this laptop/SFF SoC an excellent choice for AI use and other scientific computing purposes is the presence of AVX-512. While Intel's current laptop and desktop processors lack AVX-512, Zen 5's efficient AVX-512 implementation does wonders for the Strix Halo performance and power efficiency. Today's article is exploring the performance and power efficiency benefits of AVX-512 usage on the AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO SoC.

All of the sound/audio driver changes have been merged for the Linux 6.16 kernel that include new AMD and Intel hardware support among other new audio hardware as well as various other improvements.

While there is nice out-of-the-box support for the new Intel Arc "Battlemage" graphics cards on the new Ubuntu 25.04 release, if you prefer running the Ubuntu 24.04 Long Term Support (LTS) release there isn't complete support until the next hardware enablement "HWE" update. But Intel in cooperation with Canonical has now published a new graphics driver preview stack for enabling better Intel Arc B-Series support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS users.

Microsoft on Tuesday released a new version of Azure Linux, their in-house Linux distribution that is used for a variety of purposes from the Azure cloud to powering other Microsoft services.

Hobbyists continue to tinker around with the Motorola 68000 "m68k" support within the Linux kernel and even landing a fix now in 2025 for the vintage Macintosh II.

Archinstall 3.0.7 is out today as the newest feature update to this text-based Arch Linux installer that makes it quick and easy to deploy a new Arch Linux installation.