It was just announced at the end of last year that Holly Million was named as the GNOME Foundation Executive Director. After a little more than a half-year, this previous outsider to GNOME announced she will be stepping down from her post. A new interim executive director will be starting while the search begins for a permanent replacement.

Oliver Smith with Canonical has been communicating a lot in recent months around the great improvements planned for Ubuntu 24.10. Canonical engineers and the Ubuntu community have been working on many significant improvements for the desktop in Ubuntu 24.10. Today is a new blog post by Oliver to highlight some of the recent changes.

Thunderbird 128 "Nebula" is now available as the newest Extended Support Release (ESR) of this open-source and cross-platform mail client.

This week AWS announced that Graviton4 went into GA with the new R8G instances after Amazon originally announced their Graviton4 ARM64 server processors last year as built atop Arm Neoverse-V2 cores. I eagerly fired up some benchmarks myself and I was surprised by the generational uplift compared to Graviton3. At the same vCPU counts, the new Graviton4 cores are roughly matching Intel Sapphire Rapids performance while being able to tango with the AMD EPYC "Genoa" and consistently showing terrific generational uplift.

Over the past year there have been a lot of GTK4 graphics offload improvements including work on its Vulkan renderer. Another round of graphics offload improvements have been recently wrapped up for this open-source toolkit.

openSUSE's Aeon desktop operating system that brings automated maintenance and other features to be a platform that "just works" is preparing for what they describe as comprehensive full disk encryption.

Libavif 1.1 has arrived as the newest feature release to this library for implementing the AV1 Image File Format with image encode and decode capabilities.

Due to the ARM64 maintainer for the Linux kernel going on holiday, the ARM64 port updates have been submitted ahead of the opening of the Linux 6.11 merge window that will likely be on Monday or otherwise the following week depending upon if a 6.10-rc8 is warranted.

There have been ongoing reports from a variety of users and systems around high power use during GPU-accelerated video playback with current-generation AMD Ryzen "Phoenix" laptops. Fortunately, an optimization is coming to benefit Phoenix and forthcoming Strix Point laptops with noticeably lower power consumption during video playback.

One year ago Meta released IGL as the Intermediate Graphics Library as a cross-platform, low-level graphics interface built atop native graphics APIs like OpenGL, Vulkam, and Metal. This MIT-licensed library has seen its first tagged version in the form of IGL 1.0.

The Mold linker is already a high-speed alternative to the likes of LLVM LLD and GNU Gold. Its performance is very impressive while those using it while carrying out debug builds have the ability to achieve an insane speed-up thanks to a new option.

Colin Percival who took over as the release engineering lead for FreeBSD last November has come up with two important changes for this BSD operating system's release engineering process.

Building off last month's release of XWayland 24.1 that brought explicit sync support, improved rootful, and other changes, the first point release has now been issued.

HarfBuzz text shaping engine lead developer Behdad Esfahbod has written a lengthy blog post covering the state of text rendering in 2024. There's a particular focus on text rendering in the open-source world as well as looking ahead to a text stack that will incorporate more of the Rust programming language.

The Rust-written, GPU-accelerated Zed text editor is finally providing official Linux builds!

Updated AMD CPU microcode was published today and subsequently merged into linux-firmware.git for all Family 17h and Family 19h processors, spanning Zen 1 through Zen 4 models.

Set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel cycle is Intel's "Performance Limit Reasons" reporting for indicating why a processor may be downclocking.

LPython is an in-development open-source project aiming to be a very fast Python compiler with multiple back-ends. Released this week was LPython 0.22 as the latest step in this crusade.

JetBrains announced this week that via their 2024.2 Early Access Program that IntelliJ-based IDEs will now offer experimental Wayland support.

Following their acquisition last year of open-source AI provider Nod.ai and other AI investments, AMD today announced they are acquiring Silo AI.