Ubuntu developers decided a few months back to switch from IRC to Matrix for real-time communication needs. The newest fundamental shift being discussed by Ubuntu developers is shifting from mailing list discussions to Ubuntu Discourse for mailing list like written communications.

BLAKE3 as the cryptographic hashing function that is much faster than the likes of SHA-1/SHA-1 while being more secure than SHA-1 and MD5 is out with a new feature update. BLAKE3 v1.7 is now available for the official C and Rust code as the reference implementations to this cryptographic hash function.

The full PCI Express 7.0 specification remains on track for publishing later this year while out today is version 0.9 of the specification as the planned final draft.

Blender 4.4 is out today as the newest version of this incredible, open-source 3D modeling software.

Along with the GraalVM 24 update today, Oracle has formally released OpenJDK Java 24. JDK 24 is now out under general availability status with many new features and changes.

The beta of Fedora Linux 42 is out this morning with countless improvements over the prior release. There is the near-final GNOME 48 desktop packages and a whole host of other software updates for living on the leading-edge of open-source software as well as boasting a number of new innovations that were made by Red Hat engineers.

Ahead of the OpenJDK Java 24 release expected in the coming hours today, Oracle already released "GraalVM for JDK 24 Community 24.0" edition.

Hopefully leading to more timely updates to the Zstd compression code within the Linux kernel is a decision to add on a co-maintainer of the in-kernel Zstandard code.

If you happen to have a rare ARM64 platform with Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) support, with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel there is set to finally be run-time SMT controls similar to the functionality long available on x86/x86_64 processors.

Theora is Xiph.Org's first released video codec designed for use with Ogg. Theora started out based on the VP3 codec. It's been over 16 years since the release of the libtheora 1.0 reference software implementation and tagged this week was libtheora 1.2 beta.

The ollama open-source software that makes it easy to run Llama 3, DeepSeek-R1, Gemma 3, and other large language models is out with its newest release. The ollama software makes it easy to leverage the llama.cpp back-end for running a variety of LLMs and enjoying convenient integration with other desktop software.

A pull request was opened last week for adding web browser dark mode support for Nginx error pages. Unfortunate for those who prefer browsing in dark mode and then shocked when hitting Nginx-served 404 error pages or similar, the change has been rejected.

Some 145 patches for the Rust "gccrs" front-end were posted today and subsequently merged to GCC Git ahead of the upcoming GCC 15.1 stable release.

Last week AMD began shipping the Ryzen 9 9900X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D Zen 5 3D V-Cache desktop processors. We delivered Ryzen 9 9950X3D benchmarks and review for launch day but AMD sadly didn't seed any review samples of the 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X3D processor. Being curious about its performance for Linux developers, enthusiasts, and technical computing workloads, I bought the $600 USD processor on launch day for delivering some Linux benchmarks. Here is a look at the Ryzen 9 9900X3D against the rest of the Ryzen 9000 series stack, the prior Ryzen 7000 series parts, and the Intel Core Ultra Arrow Lake competition under Ubuntu.

The Intel XeSS SDK 2.0.1 was published today to GitHub as their first XeSS 2.0 release being available there and their first released version since the XeSS SDK 1.3.1 update from last July. While on GitHub, the XeSS SDK remains closed-source and Windows-focused.

Raspberry Pi last year announced the RP2350 second-generation micro-controller that debuted within their $5 Raspberry Pi Pico 2 single board computer. Today they announced the RP2350 micro-controller is now available to purchase for your own micro-controller needs.

FFmpeg developer Lynne has landed a number of Vulkan Video improvements today into FFmpeg Git. In addition, there is now an FFV1 Vulkan-based decoder.

It's going to be a light week for development of the Mesa graphics drivers, Wayland, various other X.Org related components, and the dozens of other open-source projects that rely on the FreeDesktop.org GitLab for facilitating merge requests, CI testing, and related infrastructure. The FreeDesktop.org server/cloud migration has begun and may last until next weekend.

The upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 Linux OS release will be enabling NVIDIA Dynamic Boost support by default when using their packaged driver support on capable laptops.

After some 13 years of writing about GIMP 3.0 development, today is finally the day: GIMP 3.0 has been tagged and is in the process of being released.