FreeBSD 15.0 is working toward its stable release in early December. As part of reaching that major release, FreeBSD 15.0-RC3 released today as what may be the final release candidate before FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE.

Yesterday TUXEDO Computers cancelled their Snapdragon X Elite Linux laptop plans. In their announcement discontinuing work on this X1E Linux laptop, they said they would still upstream the Device Tree support to the mainline Linux kernel. Indeed they posted a new revision of their DT patches on Friday for the Linux kernel, but there is diminishing outlook that they will be accepted upstream for this cancelled product.

Since the start of the new year, there have been patches being posted for proposing a new GCC compiler front-end for the half-century old Algol 68 programming language. Oracle engineer Jose Marchesi has been leading the Algol 68 effort for GCC and this weekend posted a new revision of the patches, which now includes a working modules system implementation.

Sent out today were a set of input subsystem fixes for the near-final Linux 6.18 kernel. A bit of a notable addition via this "fixes" pull is getting both touchscreens working on the AYANEO Flip DS, a dual-screen gaming handheld device that can be loaded up with Linux.

More features continue piling on for the KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop, including an important performance fix this week for those running displays with a higher than 60Hz refresh rate.

Just last week GNOME's Nautilus file manager "GNOME Files" made headlines for finally supporting Ctrl+INsert and Shift+Insert while this week there is more activity worth pointing out. Nautilus in GNOME 50 will be loading thumbnail images much faster than in prior versions.

NVIDIA today issued the 580.94.11 driver release as their newest Vulkan beta driver for Linux customers. Most notable with this beta driver update is adding VK_EXT_hdr_metadata support.

In addition to Valve contributing to the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for enhancing the Linux gaming experience and their AMD-powered Steam Deck, the upcoming Steam Frame VR headset is making use of Mesa's open-source "Turnip" Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics.

Back in mid-2024, the Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers teased plans for developing a Snapdragon X Elite Linux laptop. Initially they hoped to have it out by Christmas 2024. That didn't happen and now approaching Christmas 2025 they confirmed they have stopped their plans for shipping a Snapdragon X1 Elite laptop for Linux customers.

One of the areas I've been meaning to run more benchmarks on this season has been for the recently released Clang 21 compiler. Back in September when LLVM Clang 21 was debuting I ran some initial benchmarks and found it to deliver some nice performance gains on AMD EPYC Zen 5 but then have been busy with other benchmarks/articles for expanding that testing. Recently with having some spare cycles and gratis access still to the Microsoft Azure HBv5 instance for AMD EPYC Zen 4 with HBM3, I ran some Clang 20 vs. Clang 21 performance benchmarks there for those wondering about any performance benefits of this new compiler release on Zen 4.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund / Sovereign Tech Agency has been a godsend the past few years for the open-source community. This funding from the German government has led to significant funding for dozens of prominent open-source infrastructure projects to provide more resources for enhancing security, enabling new features, and more. As the Sovereign Tech Fund prepares for the next phase of growth, they are hiring a new head to lead the efforts.

The upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle is set to introduce support for the Realtek RTL8125K as a forthcoming Ethernet ASIC.

With Lunar Lake and newer Intel graphics there is a new feature called the Common Mode Timing Generator (CMTG) that so far hasn't been enabled by the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver. But patches being worked on are enabling this CMTG feature that will unlock other functionality moving forward.

One of the improvements that Intel software engineers have been working on for the Linux kernel around their Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) functionality for confidential computing VMs is reducing the memory use. That work is under the Dynamic PAMT umbrella and this week brought the latest iteration of patches to help lower RAM use when engaging TDX for confidential VMs.

Expected to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle is the ASUS Armoury "asus-armoury" driver for enhancing support for the ASUS ROG Ally gaming handhelds and other ASUS enthusiast/gaming devices under Linux.

The Servo open-source web browser engine has been making good progress in recent times. Long outside the confines of Mozilla and working as a Linux Foundation Europe project, Servo has been advancing thanks to Igalia and other open-source developers while getting by on around ~$5.7k USD per month thanks mostly to donations from individuals. Servo has now announced sponsorship tiers in hopefully to solicit more donations from larger organizations.

Released tonight was the Intel Compute Runtime 25.44.36015.5 as their roughly monthly update to this open-source GPU compute stack providing Level Zero and OpenCL support for Intel's integrated and discrete graphics hardware.

Dell announced today that their new Pro Max 16 Plus laptop with a Qualcomm discrete NPU is now shipping... That is if you are running Ubuntu Linux while the Windows 11 pre-load option is expected in early 2026. An exciting twist with the Linux version of the Dell Pro Max 16 Plus shipping before Microsoft Windows.

Canonical has been bullish on RISC-V with Ubuntu being one of the most common Linux distributions endorsed by RISC-V board vendors. Canonical also has been bullish on the Flutter toolkit for crafting their desktop installer UI and other modern UI/app interfaces. But these two together haven't panned out with Flutter not currently supporting RISC-V. Canonical has submitted pull requests now for enabling RISC-V support with Flutter.

PHP 8.5 is out today as the annual major feature release for this popular scripting language.