GNOME 50.rc was christened today as the release candidate for the GNOME 50 desktop.

System76 published a statement today regarding the recent laws coming about in California and likely Colorado and New York too around requiring age verification on operating system accounts and ultimately exposing the information (or at least age brackets) to apps and websites. System76's position is interesting given that they sell Linux-loaded desktops, workstations and laptops plus being an operating system vendor with their in-house Pop!_OS distribution and COSMIC desktop environment.

Rust 1.94 was rolled out today as the newest routine stable update for the Rust programming language.

The layoffs and restructuring at Intel in 2025 caused unfortunate hits to their Linux/open-source engineering including various driver maintainers leaving and even their CPU temperature driver being orphaned for lack of maintainers. Sent out today were a number of additional updates to the MAINTAINERS file for the Linux kernel to reflect other Intel departures in recent months. Plus some of the Altera drivers have also been orphaned now for having no upstream maintainers.

With a number of file-system improvements in Linux 6.19 and more file-system optimizations in Linux 7.0, it's past due for running some fresh file-system benchmarks. Here is a look at how the prominent file-system contenders are performing on the latest Linux 7.0 development kernel.

Following the recent NVIDIA R595 driver release for Windows, NVIDIA today released the 595.45.04 driver for Linux users as a beta version in the R595 release stream.

Debian Project Leader "DPL" Andreas Tille provided an update today on various happenings within the project and personal reflections on some recent topics. Among the topics in today's DPL updates were around AI contributions, Debian's need to become more diverse with its contributors, and needing more "thank yous" to show appreciation for contributions.

There were some fairly exciting improvements made by the Redox OS developers over the course of February. They have the Vulkan API working on Redox OS for the first time along with more COSMIC desktop software and even Node.js.

AMD has begun staging AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver improvements for the upcoming Linux 7.1 cycle.

The Intel IVPU accelerator driver will be introducing limits on Intel NPU resource usage by non-root user-space programs beginning with the Linux 7.1 kernel.

The AMD Host System Management Port (HSMP) Linux driver that provides access to various system management features on modern EPYC server processors is preparing for the upcoming EPYC Zen 6 "Venice" processors.

Approaching twenty years after Intel's Poulsbo platform began giving Linux users nightmares due to its Imagination PowerVR SGX graphics IP that blocked open-source 3D driver support, the GMA500 driver that ended up coming about to provide open-source display support at least is still seeing occasional upstream activity for the Linux kernel.

The Alliance For Open Media on Wednesday released libavif 1.4, the latest version of this reference library for encoding and decoding AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) content.

This week at MWC 2026, Lenovo announced the ThinkPad T14 Gen 7 as one of their new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" powered laptops alongside other products. With Panther Lake running rather well on Linux, the new ThinkPad T14 G7 should be in good standing on Linux and especially with a pending Xe graphics driver fix that is on the way.

Update: Everything should be back up now. Thanks!

FEX 2603 as the Valve-sponsored open-source project allowing Linux x86/x86_64 binaries to run on AArch64 Linux -- including the likes of Steam and various games as will become important with the Steam Frame -- is now out with its newest monthly release.

Following the mainline Linux kernel beginning to see Xe3P graphics enablement for upcoming Nova Lake integrated graphics as well as the Crescent Island AI inference accelerator, Intel's Mesa OpenGL "Iris" and Vulkan "ANV" drivers are preparing to begin laying out their Xe3P driver support.

Announced this week at Mobile World Congress (MWC) by the Linux Foundation was the establishing of the OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation for advancing open-source AI-RAN (Radio Access Network) innovations. OCUDU is building a reference platform and innovations around 5G and early 6G network solutions. With OCUDU being benchmark-friendly, I have been putting the early code through some performance tests on current AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon server platforms.

Linux Mint developers recently outlined their work on developing a new Wayland-compatible screensaver for use with their Cinnamon desktop environment. Linux Mint developers announced today that their new screensaver solution is ready for use.

Last week marked the release of systemd 260-rc1 with a new "mstack" feature, a new "FANCY_NAME" field for os-release, dropping System V service script support, and other changes. Out today is systemd 260-rc2 release with more changes in further working its way toward a stable release for empowering 2026 Linux distributions.