The modular/upgradeable Framework Laptops employ an open-source embedded controller (EC) firmware derived from Google's Chrome OS EC project. This is great for open-source fans and allows re-using much of the same Chrome OS EC software support that already exists. But there is also vendor-specific commands supported by the Framework Laptop EC and thus a dedicated Linux kernel driver is now being worked on for handling those vendor/device-specific features.

The first beta of FreeBSD 14.1 is now available for testing in kicking off what will be the first point release building off last November's FreeBSD 14.0 release.

There's a new release of the open-source nvidia-vaapi-driver available, the third-party VA-API implementation that in turn targets NVIDIA's NVDEC interface to allow software like Mozilla Firefox that only targets VA-API for video acceleration to work on NVIDIA GPUs.

Dillo 3.1 has been released to succeed the Dillo 3.0.5 release all the way back from 2015... Dillo is a lightweight web browser making use of the FLTK toolkit and is cross-platform, maintains few dependencies, and implements its own rendering engine.

GIMP 2.10.38 was released on Sunday as what might be the "possibly last" GIMP 2 stable release ahead of the upcoming GIMP 3.0 release. GIMP 2.10.38 back-ports more features from the GIMP 3.0 / GTK3 codebase plus other improvements and fixes.

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.