FreeBSD 15.0 had aimed to provide a KDE desktop install option from its text-based OS installer to make for a more compelling FreeBSD out-of-the-box desktop experience. That was then delayed to FreeBSD 15.1 but that didn't end up materializing. Now the KDE desktop install option is diverted to FreeBSD 15.2.

Today's Patch Tuesday is a busier one than normal for the quarter. Both AMD and Intel have rolled out new updates for Linux customers among other security disclosures today. Thankfully though the vulnerabilities don't appear to be too widespread or impactful.

DXVK-NVAPI 0.9.2 is now available for this implementation of NVIDIA's NVAPI/NVOFAPI interfaces atop DXVK and VKD3D-Proton that is used in turn by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enhanced NVIDIA Linux gaming support.

An IBM engineer posted the first set of patches enabling the Rust programming language support for the Linux kernel to be built on the s390 architecture.

It's been nearly one year to the week since Intel introduced Project Battlematrix as their initiative for improving their Linux driver support for the Arc Pro B-Series with enhancements such as bettering the multi-GPU support in allowing up to eight Arc Pro GPUs per system as well as other open-source driver optimizations in the era of AI. Recently with the Arc Pro B70 in having four review samples for testing I was finally able to try out the multi-GPU state of the Arc (Pro) graphics cards on Linux with their open-source driver code.

A new driver expected to land in the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is the ARCTIC Fan Controller driver to allow fan speed monitoring and PWM controls for this upcoming ARCTIC product. Making this new driver all the more exciting is that it was worked on by ARCTIC directly compared to the typical workflow for such desktop/consumer hardware peripherals often being left up to the reverse-engineering, open-source community.

Prominent Linux kernel engineer Peter Zijlstra of Intel has been working on a set of scheduler patches to help with enhancing the behavior and delivering better results, especially for aging hardware he described as a "potato" -- an Intel Sandy Bridge desktop CPU with AMD Radeon RX 580 Polaris graphics. Benchmark results are promising from this work for gaming on old hardware while other workloads may ultimately stand to benefit too.

Fresh off the milestone of Dell and Lenovo becoming premier sponsors of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS), there is a new feature release of the Fwupd firmware updating tool for Linux systems.

For years Intel has been developing the Low Power Mode Daemon "LPMD" to help their hybrid laptop and desktop CPUs deliver optimal power efficiency under Linux. Intel LPMD leverages hardware hints and other features for optimizing active idle power of the processor and putting the system into lower power modes where possible. This tool could soon call the Linux kernel source tree its new home.

The open-source Haiku operating system inspired by BeOS is now seeing multi-core symmetric multi-processing (SMP) support on ARM64 that works at least in a virtualized world. Plus an assortment of other improvements made to this open-source OS over the course of April.

The open-source Radeon "R300g" driver living within the Mesa codebase for supporting the aging ATI (AMD) Radeon 9500 "R300" through Radeon X1000 "R500" series graphics processors is going through a big code restructuring as part of a big undertaking in 2026... Yes, 24 years after the ATI R300 GPUs first released, thanks to a devoted open-source developer fan, there is a significant improvement in the works.

Quietly sneaking out at the end of last week was Vulkan 1.4.351 as the newest spec update to this high performance graphics and compute API.

At the beginning of the month was the surprise milestone of AMD posting AMDGPU kernel driver patches for HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link (FRL) support. The HDMI FRL patches have since been updated to also enable HDMI 2.1's Display Stream Compression (DSC) functionality for higher resolutions and higher refresh rates with the open-source AMDGPU driver.

A few weeks back we reviewed the redesigned System76 Thelio Mira with a brand new chassis design and powered by the AMD Ryzen 9000 series. This was an interesting Linux-powered desktop manufactured in Colorado while for those needing a bit more performance, since then the redesigned Thelio Major launched. The new System76 Thelio Major provides an updated Thelio case design like Mira while comes packed with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series and AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics for delivering a very powerful, all-AMD and open-source high-end Linux workstation.

GNOME's help viewer, Yelp, last year was impacted by a serious security issue for arbitrary file reads. There's a new vulnerability affecting the GNOME help viewer that led to the Yelp 49.1 release to address a possible Flatpak sandbox escape vector.

The Intel Graphics Compiler "IGC" 2.34.4 release is out today as this compiler used by the Intel Compute Runtime for Level Zero and OpenCL compute on Intel graphics hardware plus is also used as the graphics shader compiler under Windows.

Introduced in Linux 7.0 was FSERROR as generic I/O error reporting infrastructure. Linux to that point had no standardized mechanism for reporting metadata corruption or file I/O errors to user-space with each file-system doing its own thing. The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is now the latest Linux file-system preparing for FSERROR usage.

The upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel will be adding support for Microchip's Switchtec PCIe Gen6 switches.

Last week's drm-misc-next pull request of new Direct Rendering Manager and accelerator driver feature material destined for Linux 7.2 include some new power management control features both for the AMD Ryzen AI and Intel NPU drivers.

Sculpt OS as the general purpose operating system built off the Genode OS Framework is out with a new feature release.