This week saw an updated KDE Plasma 6.3 beta release and more bug fixing taking place there while also beginning to see early feature work toward the follow-on Plasma 6.4 desktop.

Andrew Morton made for an exciting Friday evening by sending out his "MM" pull request for Linux 6.14 as the large collection of memory management related patches for this next kernel version.

The four SoC pull requests were sent out today for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window. These pull requests are principally about various ARM SoC and platform hardware additions/changes but also an increasing number of RISC-V SoC activity too.

Vulkan 1.4.306 was published this morning as the newest routine specification update to this graphics/compute API.

While there have been a lot of GeForce RTX 5090 Windows gaming benchmarks since the review embargo lift yesterday, for those more fascinated by this high-end Blackwell desktop graphics card for its GPU compute potential on Linux, this article is for you. Up today are my very initial GPU compute benchmarks for the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition on Linux with NVIDIA graphics card comparisons across the prior RTX 20, RTX, 30, and RTX 40 series too.

Several of the upstream Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers have become orphaned due to the unfortunately declining health of their lone driver maintainer.

The Common Internet File System (CIFS) as an implementation of the SMB protocol for commonly sharing files with Windows systems will enjoy better read performance with the Linux 6.14 kernel.

While there are many exciting new features in the GNOME 48 Alpha as well as a new app with Decibels becoming the official audio player, there isn't a new official video player for this desktop release.

Now that NVIDIA is rolling out the "Blackwell" GPU driver support, it looks like the NVIDIA Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta generations will soon be moving to a legacy driver branch.

In addition to the Bcachefs features and new Btrfs code for Linux 6.14, the XFS file-system changes were merged on Thursday for this next version of the Linux kernel.

It's not only AI start-ups running into space and power capacity bottlenecks but the Fedora Project has been pushing the limits of its main data center and is preparing for a move to a new data center to allow for more physical space and power capacity. In turn one item mentioned is allowing space for possible RISC-V build systems for Fedora.

The GNOME 48 Alpha release was issued this morning for helping to test this updated desktop environment debuting as stable in March.

Building off last month's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0 beta, Oracle today published the Oracle Linux 10 Developer Preview for a first glimpse at this next RHEL10-derived operating system.

The Linux x86 32-bit PAE kernel support for Physical Address Extensions allows addressing more than 4GB of memory for those still running 32-bit processors or otherwise opting to still run a 32-bit OS. While the Linux x86 32-bit specific code rarely sees new improvements in the past number of years, a set of patches were posted today in looking to enhance the x86 32-bit PAE mode.

Earlier this month was the release of the KDE Plasma 6.3 beta while today a second beta was issued.

All of the power management feature updates for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel were sent out earlier this week and subsequently merged. As we've been seeing with recent Linux kernel releases, AMD continues investing a lot into their AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for better power efficiency on Ryzen processors and since the prior kernel also now being used with the new 5th Gen AMD EPYC server processors too.

For those making use of the source-available Redis in-memory key-value database, the upcoming Redis 8.0 will offer better performance on today's high core count systems and servers.

With Debian 13 freeze dates announced and that Debian 13.0 "Trixie" release working its way toward release likely around August, it's then to be followed by beginning development on Debian 14 codenamed as "Forky". Yesterday when announcing the Debian Trixie freeze dates, the Debian 15 codename was also announced.

Following the unboxing embargo earlier this week for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, today the review embargo lifts for the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition.

The crypto subsystem updates were sent out today for the Linux 6.14 kernel. Notable this time are new x86_64-specific optimizations for the AES-GCM and AES-XTS algorithms. Benefiting the most from these new x86_64 optimizations are recent AMD processors.