The KDE Plasma 6.6 beta release is available today for helping to test this next iteration of the Plasma 6 desktop.

As expected, Wine 11.0 stable was officially released today. This is a big step forward for this open-source software to run Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms. Wine also serves as the basis for Valve's Steam Play (Proton) that has been critical to the recent successes of Linux gaming.

When it comes to software leveraging Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) functionality in modern Xeon processors, it's largely been limited to AI applications/libraries like oneDNN, OpenVINO, DeepRec, etc. But Intel now has another great open-source real-world AMX demonstrator with their Open Image Denoise library. This open-source library providing high quality denoising filters for images rendered using ray-tracing can end up benefiting big time from AMX-FP16 found with the newest Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" processors. I ran some benchmarks of their new Open Image Denoise library with AMX-FP16 and was honestly blown away by the results.

Building off this past weekend's Debian 13.3 release is now Debian Libre Live 13.3 images for this derivative that ships the install/live media without any of the non-free firmware assets to remain a free software blessed image.

FFmpeg developer Lynne has landed a number of Vulkan-related imporvements to this widely-used open-source multimedia library. Over the past year FFmpeg saw Vulkan shader-based decoding for more video formats, AV1 and VP9 extension work, performance improvements, and other work around Vulkan Video. It will be very exciting to see how FFmpeg delivers in 2026 with Vulkan Video and how the software ecosystem as a whole begins taking up this cross-platform, open industry standard for video encode/decode.

Kent Overstreet has shipped the latest version of bcachefs-tools, the user-space code complementing the Bcachefs file-system kernel driver. There are a number of improvements present in this latest version with Overstreet remaining committed to advancing Bcachefs even with its current out-of-tree kernel status.

Announced today on the Wayland mailing list is wl-proxy as a Rust crate for proxying Wayland connections and intercepting/manipulating Wayland messages.

LLVM/Clang 22 feature development ended overnight with the code now being branched and working toward a stable release likely by the end of February.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project just published a new status report to detail how they ended out the year.

GCC 16 as this year's major feature release of the GNU Compiler Collection should be out in the typical March~April timeframe if all goes well. Today the GCC 16 compiler transitioned to its final stage "stage 4" of development with a focus exclusively on documentation and regression fixing.

Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard relayed on the mailing list today that the plan is to release Wine 11.0 stable tomorrow, 13 January.

When recently carrying out performance benchmarks of Intel Meteor Lake performance on Linux since launch day two years ago, the geo mean came in at 93% the original performance. Finding the performance trending clearly lower with an up-to-date Linux software stack compared to in December 2023 was quite surprising considering the rather nice gains we have seen over time on other Intel/AMD hardware. As noted in that article though, one of the possible explanations there is the Spectre BHI "Branch History Injection" vulnerability and microcode plus Linux kernel mitigations having come out post-launch and affecting Meteor Lake CPUs. Sure enough, follow-up tests looking at the Spectre BHI impact have revealed a measurable cost in a number of workloads for the Core Ultra processor.

Tinygrad 0.12 is out today for this deep learning stack led by George Hotz.

Firefox 147.0 release binaries have hit the Mozilla servers today as the latest monthly update to this open-source web browser. Firefox 147 is exciting for Linux users in finally delivering XDG Base Directory Specification support.

Not to be confused with the Open 3D game engine, Intel's Intelligent Systems Lab Organization released Open3D 0.19 as the latest iteration of this open-source library for 3D data processing in Python and C++.

Released this morning is the Intel Graphics Compiler "IGC" 2.27.10 that comes with initial support for next-generation Nova Lake and Crescent Island Xe3P hardware.

Building off an initial request for comments (RFC) patch series posted during the winter holidays, an updated RFC patch series was posted this weekend for LLMinus. LLMinus is an effort led by NVIDIA Linux kernel engineer Sasha Levin to provide a large language model (LLM) assisted merge conflict resolution tool focused on Linux kernel development.

The LLVM/Clang compiler today introduced support for the Ampere Computing Ampere1C CPU core target.

Auto-CPUFreq 3.0 released this weekend as the newest version of this Linux user-space tool to help you extend your laptop battery life by automatically applying CPU speed and power optimizations. When all goes according to plan, Auto-CPUFreq means extending your battery life without compromises to the user experience.

With Budgie 10.10 released this weekend, Budgie desktop developers have provided an update around Budgie 11 desktop development.