Linus Torvalds just issued Linux 7.0-rc5 as we inch toward the stable Linux 7.0 kernel release in April.

D7VK is the open-source project that began as a Direct3D 7 implementation atop the Vulkan API for Linux gamers and with time expanded to support all the way back to Direct3D 3. Out today is D7VK 1.6 with continuing to enhance this D3D compatibility layer atop Vulkan for enhancing retro/vintage gaming on Linux.

The mdadm utility for managing software RAID on Linux systems is out with a new release that adds new features while addressing some recent boot failure issues that were reported.

For years Electron apps were notorious for continuing to depend upon X11/XWayland and not jive well with the modern Wayland experience on modern Linux desktops. But for the past several months, Wayland has been well supported out-of-the-box on upstream Electron. An Electron blog post this week outlined the technical work done for achieving good Wayland support.

Building off Friday's exciting release of Wine 11.5 with Syscall User Dispatch support, Wine-Staging 11.5 is now available for this experimental/testing build of Wine that at the moment is some 228 patches atop the upstream code.

The Loongson Direct Rendering Manager driver for handling the display controller on LS7A/LS2K SoCs is no longer orphaned with new Loongson engineers stepping up to maintain the code moving forward.

Open-source developer Derek Clark of Valve's Linux engineering team has been responsible for many improvements for gaming handheld devices. Such as Lenovo Legion improvements for Linux, Ayn gaming handheld improvements, and most recently Linux 7.1 set to introduce the new Lenovo Legion Go HID drivers. With the latest Lenovo Legion driver work wrapped up for Linux 7.1, Derek Clark today posted a set of patches providing a OneXPlayer Configuration HID Driver.

A few days ago Google engineers went public with Sashiko with their agentic AI code review for the Linux kernel. The Google Gemini Pro powered AI code review service is automatically monitoring the Linux kernel mailing list for new patch submissions and has proven useful already. Interest continues to build by upstream Linux kernel stakeholders around Sashiko and the latest addition is now covering the Rust-For-Linux mailing list submissions.

A Linux HID driver is being developed for Pulsar branded gaming mice to expose additional information and capabilities.

LibreOffice 26.8 merged initial support for adding a donation banner to its Start Center. This initial UI when launching LibreOffice aims to make users aware of the community-driven focus of the project and to hopefully solicit additional donations from the community.

Merged overnight for Linux 7.0 and set to be back-ported to existing Linux stable kernel versions is a fix for aging AMD GCN 1.0 "Hainan" GPU models. This closes a 2021 bug report that was long neglected and ended up being just a small tweak to fix the issue reported of GPU hangs.

In addition to releasing Plasma 6.6.3 this week, KDE developers remain quite busy working on new features for the Plasma 6.7 desktop while also already queuing some changes for the next Plasma 6.6.4 point release.

The modern Agama OS installer for SUSE/openSUSE is out with its first new release since November. With the time since the prior release, SUSE engineers have been making key improvements to Agama and enhancing its architecture to more align with their original vision for it.

For any holdouts still running SysV Init instead of systemd or other alternatives like OpenRC, SysV Init 3.16 is out as the first release in a half-year and bringing a few refinements.

Cambalache 1.0 released today after more than five years in development as a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) application for creating and editing user interfaces for both GTK3 and GTK4.

OpenShot 3.5 hit the web today for this open-source non-linear video editor that describes the new version as one of their "biggest releases" ever in its 18+ year history.

Wine 11.5 is out today as the latest bi-weekly development release for this software to run Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms. Most exciting with Wine 11.5 is the introduction of the Syscall User Dispatch feature on Linux.

When it comes to using Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops on Linux, one of the big challenges have involved the need to extract the necessary firmware from the Windows 11 partition due to most vendors not providing the firmware in an easily redistributable and public form. The one exception has been the Lenovo ThinkPad with X1 Elite having upstream firmware in linux-firmware.git while now the Dell XPS model has joined the party too.

In addition to last night's Steam client beta with Steam Runtime container support for the client and that SteamRT3 client now a 64-bit build, Valve also released a big preview update to the forthcoming SteamOS 3.8. The SteamOS 3.8 preview release brings initial support for Steam Machine hardware, various handheld gaming device support improvements, various other Steam Deck updates, improved compatibility with newer Intel and AMD platforms, and its KDE Plasma desktop is now using Wayland by default.

Earlier this month was a preview of the Ubuntu 26.04 performance benefits for NVIDIA Linux gaming while today's article is providing an early look at how the open-source AMD Radeon gaming experience is looking for the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release.