FFmpeg developers are preparing to soon release FFmpeg 8.1 with some great new features and other improvements.

Merged back in 2018 for Linux 5.0 was support for the Apple Magic Trackpad 2. Merged this week for the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel is fixing battery reporting for those using the Magic Trackpad 2 under Linux.

Merged this week for Mesa 26.1 are the initial Nova Lake P "NVL-P" device bits for Intel's ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D drivers. But this support isn't yet exposed by default and not yet ready for end-users with more driver changes still to be published.

This week's batch of "x86/urgent" patches that were merged overnight for Linux 7.0 contain some fixes and other adjustments worth highlighting for both AMD and Intel.

The newest open-source concern around AI that is seeing a lot of interest this weekend is when large language models / AI code generators may rewrite large parts of a codebase and then the "developers" claiming an alternative license incompatible with the original source license. This became a real concern this week with a popular Python project experiencing an AI-driven code rewrite and now published under an alternative license that its original author does not agree with and incompatible with the original code.

The KDE/Qt-aligned digiKam software for managing RAW digital photos is out today with the big digiKam 9.0 release.

The Linux event poll "epoll" code for efficient I/O multiplexing and monitoring of file descriptors for seeing when I/O is possible has a new optimization merged today for Linux 7.0.

Out today is Budgie 10.10.2 as the latest minor update to this open-source desktop environment that began as part of the Solus Linux project.

AMD's GAIA open-source framework for building AI agents that run locally on Ryzen AI hardware via the Radeon iGPUs and/or NPUs is up to version 0.16. With this new GAIA release is support for developing AI agents purely in C++ with no longer needing to depend upon Python.

The effort around improving FreeBSD on laptops continues full speed ahead in 2026. The upcoming FreeBSD 15.1 remains on track with not only having a KDE desktop option from FreeBSD's text-based installer UI but also improved Realtek WiFi adapter support is on the way, updating of the graphics drivers from Linux, and more.

Maui.Gtk is a new open-source project providing a GTK4 Linux back-end for Microsoft's .NET MAUI.

In addition to the 3mdeb firmware consulting firm porting Coreboot with AMD openSIL to an EPYC 9005 "Turin" Gigabyte motherboard, their developers have also been working on a similar Coreboot + openSIL port to an AM5 Ryzen consumer motherboard.

Resources, the modern GNOME GTK4/libadwaita-based GUI application for system resource monitoring and an alternative to GNOME System Monitor, is out with a new update. Resources 1.10.2 brings some nice improvements for those running GNOME on modern Intel hardware.

Nate Graham and John Veness are out today with the newest issue of This Week in Plasma. Notable for KDE Plasma 6.6.x~6.7 development this week were a lot of bug fixing -- including multiple crash fixes -- and some UI polishing too.

Wine 11.4 is out today as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software that powers Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and allows for Windows games and applications to run on Linux and macOS.

Ahead of the GNOME 50 desktop release coming up in less than two weeks, GTK 4.22 is out today as the newest stable version of the GTK4 toolkit.

A pull request sent out today and already merged to Linux Git ahead of Sunday's Linux 7.0-rc3 has some new hardware driver support additions for the likes of ASUS, HP, Dell, and OneXPlayer.

For those looking for a low-power, well-built small office / home office Linux server with interesting connectivity options, the ZimaBoard 2 is an interesting option that has been available for some months now and powered by the Intel N150 processor. Besides the interesting single board hardware and well built aluminum chassis, the offering is rounded out by being preloaded with ZimaOS as a Linux-based "personal cloud OS" to easily get hosting for your own SOHO server needs.

Sent out today was this week's batch of Slab allocator fixes for the Linux 7.0 development kernel. Making this pull notable is fixing a "severe performance regression" with a ~64% performance drop having been noted in late February.

Patches were posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list for enabling a new feature called AMD CPPC Performance Priority as a new hardware feature being found with "future AMD processors".... Which given the timing of these patches, almost certainly means the upcoming Zen 6 processors.