Niri 0.1.9 is out today as the latest update to this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that is written in Rust.

Casilda is a new open-source project by GNOME developer Juan Pablo Ugarte to serve as a Wayland compositor widget. Casilda allows for embedding other processes windows within a GTK4 application.

The EROFS read-only file-system changes have been submitted now for ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window. Notable this cycle is EROFS adding support for file-backed mounts.

Ahead of the Linux 6.12 kernel merge window opening on Monday, the printk updates were submitted in advance given the Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit also taking place next week in Vienna. Notable with the printk updates is finishing up the NBCON console work that is notable as the last major blocker before real-time (PREEMPT_RT) support can be finally mainlined.

KDE developers were busy this week in Germany for their annual Akademy developer conference but they still managed to release a Plasma 6.2 Beta as well as some early feature work toward Plasma 6.3.

GNOME developers have been making progress on being able to individually encrypt user home directories as well as modernizing platform infrastructure as part of the investments made by Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund.

As written about early in the year, future Intel CPUs will be moving past the "Family 6" identification used since the mid-1990s with the P6 micro-architecture. Since then Intel has continued releasing new CPUs under "Family 6" with different model IDs while AMD has been more open to changing its Family ID every Zen generation or two. With Intel using Family 6 for so long it led to a lot of Linux kernel code just relying on Model ID comparisons for determining between Intel CPU generations and the like. Thus a lot of Intel CPU model handling reworks are needed for preparing future Intel CPU generations that will no longer be in Family 6. With Linux 6.12 it looks like that work will be wrapping up.

AMD engineers today posted the first "request for comments" patches in enabling support for Secure AVIC guest handling as a new hardware feature with upcoming processors.

The Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is used on Windows as a shader compiler back-end and both for Windows/Linux as part of their OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero compute stack can now be compiled for RISC-V 64-bit.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku OS is out today with its fifth beta release as it works toward the long-awaited Haiku R1 stable release.

Following the GNOME Foundation Executive Director leaving after less than one year, the GNOME Foundation has formally begun their search for a new executive director.

While not quite as exciting as the latest ARM64 laptops sporting the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 series SoCs, the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s laptop using the older Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 is now available to boot and install using the generic ARM64 images of the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10.

David Kaplan who is a Senior Fellow at AMD focused on security technologies has published an initial set of Linux kernel patches for "Attack Vector Controls" in rethinking the CPU security mitigation handling. The proposed Attack Vector Controls makes it easier to manage desired security mitigations to have enabled/disabled based upon intent of the system rather than having to be knowledgeable about individual CPU security vulnerabilities and the various tuning knobs.

The LoongArch changes for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) have been submitted ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window opening. For enhancing KVM virtualization on these Chinese CPUs is enabling Loongson Binary Translation (LBT) for accelerating ARM/x86 binary translation.

Most of you have fortunately not had to think about Adobe Flash support in years, but for those still having some old assets in Adobe Flash/SWF format or wanting to relive some old games/entertainment based in Flash, the open-source Ruffle project remains one of the leading contenders for dealing with Flash in 2024 and beyond. Ruffle is a Rust-based emulator for Adobe Flash that continues to be actively developed and supporting more features.

The Google Chrome/Chromium web browser merged two notable features yesterday for Linux users.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund is set to make a €688,800 investment into the Samba open-source project that re-implements the SMB networking protocol and focused on better file and print service interoperability with Microsoft Windows systems.

As one of the early feature proposals for Fedora 42, there is a proposal being considered to make for a nice out-of-the-box experience running x86/x86_64 game/application binaries atop Fedora 42 AArch64 hosts.

AMD today committed their GC 11.5.2 firmware to the upstream linux-firmware.git for the necessary firmware binary blobs needed for hardware initialization by their open-source AMDGPU kernel graphics driver with this newer RDNA3.5 variant.

With Fedora 41 working its way to release toward the end of October, some early feature/change proposals for Fedora 42 are being filed for what will be the Fedora Linux release out next spring.