Intel open-source software engineers last week posted a set of patches for a new driver: iXD. The three letter acronym party continues and this time even more difficult to decipher than some of their other obscure driver names.

Eric Engestrom is once again stepping up to manage the next quarterly Mesa driver feature release and thus today we have the on-time branching of Mesa 25.1 from Mesa Git and already the release of Mesa 25.1-rc1. This release brings many improvements to the collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers that should be ready for their stable debut in May.

With today's launch of the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti graphics card, NVIDIA has also introduced their first Linux driver beta in the R575 driver series.

Yesterday NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 5060 "Blackwell" graphics cards as their new, most affordable offering of the RTX 50 series. While the $299 GeForce RTX 5060 isn't shipping until next month, today the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB goes on sale for $379 USD and the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is also hitting Internet retailers today and starting out at $429 USD. I've been testing out the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB the past several days under Linux and have initial GPU compute benchmarks to share today.

Following yesterday's official Fedora 42 release, Fedora 42 for RISC-V is now available. The delay in the Fedora 42 RISC-V builds is due to RISC-V not yet being a primary architecture and the RISC-V builds being unofficial and produced by the Fedora community.

Merged last month to the widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library was an initial Vulkan-based decoder for FFV1 for the FF Video 1 lossless video coding format. Should you be interested in using this FFV1 decoder on AMD GPUs, there's a reported 3x performance improvement with the newest code.

Additional improvements for AMD GFX12 as the graphics engine IP of RDNA4 graphics with the Radeon RX 9000 series have been merged ahead of this quarter's Mesa 25.1 feature release.

Over the past two years Qt has been working to embrace generative AI for enhanced coding capabilities within Qt Creator for Qt/QML/C++ applications. It started with GitHub Copilot integration and has been continuing well beyond that and today marks the debut of the Qt AI Assistant v0.9.

The GNOME Help Browser "Yelp" for viewing HTML / man page / DocBook and other documentation formats from the GNOME desktop is subject to a yet-to-be-patched-upstream security vulnerability that is now public and can allow for arbitrary file reads and could be funneled through your web browser.

The GCC 15.1 compiler release is expected in the coming weeks as the first stable version of GCC 15 as this annual GNU Compiler Collection release. As we approach the finish line, some last minute changes were merged for the AMD Zen 5 "znver5" CPU target.

Adding to the busy week of Linux distribution releases from Ubuntu 25.04 to Manjaro 25.04 and Fedora 42, TrueNAS 25.04 debuted today as a major step forward for this open enterprise storage platform.

Following the recent benchmarking of Ubuntu Server 25.04 in its near final state compared to prior Ubuntu Linux releases, I turned my attention to Fedora Server 42. On the same AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" server I carried out some comparison benchmarks of Fedora Server 42 compared to the prior Fedora Server 41 and other Linux distribution releases for seeing how Fedora 42 is competing with other Linux distributions on this 5th Gen AMD EPYC dual socket server.

With the newest Mesa 25.1-devel Git code merged today the Panfrost Gallium3D and PanVK Vulkan drivers for Arm Mali open-source graphics are supporting Mali 5th Gen gen 1 (v12) and gen 2 (v13) devices.

Fedora 42 is out today as a fabulous update to this prominent leading-edge Linux distribution sponsored by Red Hat. I've been running Fedora 42 on several systems already -- including upgrading my main production system to it -- and it's been working out very well. Fedora 42 is packed full of new features and software updates making it a great H1'2025 Linux operating system release.

There's the possibility raised that the mainline Linux kernel might remove its file-system kernel drivers for Apple HFS and HFS+ this year.

The Intel Video Processing Library GPU Runtime "VPL-GPU-RT" as the run-time component to the Intel VPL API for video processing with a variety of video encoders/decoders and filters is preparing to end mainline support for Intel graphics prior to Tiger Lake.

The Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) intended for online gaming, IP telephony, multimedia streaming, and other online real-time purposes for this transport layer protocol is expected to be stripped out of the Linux kernel with the upcoming v6.16 cycle.

In addition to yesterday's alpha release of the semi-immutable Majaro Summit distribution, Manjaro Linux has now resolved Manjaro 25.0 as the newest version of this (non-immutable) Arch Linux based desktop operating system.

Oracle today debuted the newest version of their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel "UEK" designed to be paired with their RHEL-derived Oracle Linux operating system as a heavily-patched version of the Linux kernel. With today's release of UEK 8 they have rebased atop the current Linux 6.12 long-term support codebase.

After nearly one and a half decades after the packaging request was made, GNOME Shell Frippery extensions have finally worked their way into Debian via the unstable archive for offering a GNOME2-like desktop experience.