The Linux Mint developers have been hard at work continuing to develop new features following their recent Mint 22.3 release. There is continued enhancements around keyboard support, a new administration tool for users, and there are also considerations being made around moving to a longer development cycle between Linux Mint releases.

The x86/cpu changes have been merged for Linux 7.0 and include finally setting the default Intel TSX mode to "auto" rather than being off by default.

For those using the open-source OpenVPN for your virtual private networking (VPN) needs, OpenVPN 2.7 is out today with some notable improvements.

Intel today released a new version of their Compute Runtime stack and IGC graphics compiler for Level Zero and OpenCL usage with their integrated and discrete graphics. Separately they also upstreamed more SYCL code this week into mainline LLVM.

The core timer changes to the Linux 7.0 kernel score a rather nice performance improvement in a UDP receive network stress test from inlining a function that compilers haven't been able to tackle with their optimizations.

There were recently patches for getting the Adobe Photoshop 2025 installer to work on Linux under Wine. Those patches were picked up by Wine-Staging and now more traction is coming for getting those patches into the upstream Wine codebase, some of which have now been merged.

The locking code changes have been merged for the Linux 7.0 kernel and it introduces support for a new compiler-driven feature being introduced on the compiler side with the upcoming LLVM Clang 22.

Back in 2022 Google deprecated and then removed JPEG-XL image support from the Chrome/Chromium browser codebase and now in 2026 it's back. Last month I wrote about JPEG-XL decoding merged back to Chromium/Chrome and that has rolled out today as part of today's Chrome 145 stable debut.

Merged today for the Linux 7.0 kernel are some pretty exciting scheduler changes: new features and never-ending work around scheduler performance optimizations and greater scalability with today's increasingly high core count systems.

For programmers fond of the Go programming language, Go 1.26 is out today with two language changes, performance improvements, and other alterations to this Google-backed programming language.

Intel today for Patch Tuesday released several generations worth of CPU microcode updates for addressing multiple security issues and functional issues.

The various SoC and platform Device Tree additions were sent out today for the Linux 7.0 kernel. Easily most exciting on the SoC side this cycle among the ARM and RISC-V changes is getting support ready for the SpacemiT K3 RVA23 SoC.

In addition to introducing nullfs and the OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE support for containers, there were also a number of other interesting VFS updates merged on Monday for the Linux 7.0 kernel.

CodeWeavers just announced CrossOver 26, the newest version of their commercial software built atop Wine for running Windows games and applications under Apple macOS and Linux.

With recently having carried out benchmarks and finding the Intel Xeon 6780E "Sierra Forest" performance has improved ~14% since launch day thanks to open-source/Linux software improvements plus also recently having carried out Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids vs. EPYC 9755 128-core benchmarks using the latest upstream software, here is a look at how the Xeon 6780E "Sierra Forest" dual socket server is comparing up against the AMD EPYC 9965 Turin Dense flagship when both are running up-to-date software.

The open-source Redis 8.6 release is now available and this GA release has brought "substantial" performance improvements and to memory reduction too. Plus various new features like TLS certificate-based automatic client authentication, time series enhancements, and new eviction policies.

In addition to the BPF filtering support for IO_uring that was merged on Monday, the other block device changes and IO_uring updates were also merged for the newly-opened Linux 7.0 merge window.

After the merge request was opened back in 2023 and after going through 628 comments/activity, merged now to Wayland Protocols is the experimental zones "xx-zones" implementation for area-limited window positioning.

The wonderful IO_uring for the Linux kernel for high performance asnyc I/O has picked up a new capability with Linux 7.0: BPF filtering.

Microsoft overnight released Azure Linux 3.0.20260204 as the latest release of their in-house Linux distribution widely used within their Azure environment and elsewhere.