Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.9-rc7 and it's looking good like the Linux 6.9 stable kernel will hopefully be out next Sunday.

Intel's power management lead Rafael Wysocki posted a set of patches recently for working out asymmetic CPU capacity on hybrid Core x86 systems.

Cirrus engineers have seen a number of patches queued into the Linux sound subsystem's "for-next" branch for enabling audio support on some new laptops with the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle.

Mesa's Venus Vulkan driver has made cross-device functionality optional in order to enable QEMU support for this open-source driver for virtualized environments.

Synaptics this week published a big update to their out-of-tree graphics driver package for DisplayLink USB graphics.

Ahead of the Linux 6.9-rc7 kernel being released later today, some last minute pull requests for the week have enabled some new bits of hardware support where only new device IDs are necessary and thus safe to add at this late stage of Linux 6.9 development.

While on Linux the desktop environments, graphics stack, and other application software is steadily adopting Wayland support and focusing less on X11/X.Org support, the state of Wayland support and the open-source graphics driver stack in general is less robust among the BSDs. The NetBSD project published a status report around their ongoing dependence and modifications to their X.Org stack.

There's been a lot of improvements coming about in the GNOME desktop space thanks to the ongoing Sovereign Tech Fund and other initiatives toward GNOME 47.

Following yesterday's Wine 9.8 release that fixes a nearly 20 year old bug for installing Microsoft Office 97, Wine-Staging 9.8 is out today as the even more experimental blend of Wine that carries hundreds of extra patches that are going through a testing period toward upstreaming into the main codebase.

In addition to all of the contributions Valve graphics engineers have been making to the open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver, they have also begun investing in improvements to the open-source Mesa NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver too. With pending patches there is now explicit GPU synchronization support working for the NVK driver in conjunction with their Gamescope compositor.

KDE developers have been busy the first few days of May with all eyes shifting to the upcoming Plasma 6.1 desktop.

Wine 9.8 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games/applications on Linux / Chrome OS, macOS, and other platforms.

Google Summer of Code 2024 (GSoC '24) accepted projects have been announced with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) seeing seven student developers engaging this summer with several of them focused on enhancing GCC's Rust front-end.

The FreeBSD project has published its Q1'2024 status report to outline various advancements over the past few months.

FEX as the open-source project to run x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 Linux systems is out with its newest monthly release. With FEX 2405, they are close to having the game Far Cry (2004) running on ARM Linux devices.

LVFS/Fwupd lead developer Richard Hughes has released Fwupd 1.9.19 as the newest update to this open-source firmware updating solution for Linux systems.

Rui Ueyama announced the release of Mold 2.31 today as the newest version of this high speed linker alternative to LLVM LLD and GNU Gold.

Intel software engineer Victor Rodriguez presented at the Open-Source Summit North America last month on their open-source compiler toolchain work for enabling ISA capabilities of upcoming Intel CPUs as well as using simulation tools for helping to test compiler enhancements/optimizations moving forward.

OpenZFS 2.2.4 was released on Thursday evening to provide the latest ZFS file-system support on Linux and FreeBSD platforms.

A patch recently posted to the Linux kernel mailing list is working on implementing ACPI Platform Profile support for modern Dell laptops to allow users to have more control over their balanced / cool / quiet / performance behavior of the laptop and its resulting impact on the fan noise / cooling performance.