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.

In addition to Linus Torvalds doing some vibe coding and more with his new "AudioNoise" project this week, Linux 6.19 kernel development ticked back up with the holidays having passed. A variety of fixes made it into today's Linux 6.19-rc5 release in working toward v6.19 stable in early February.

Ahead of the imminent Linux 6.19-rc5 release, the char/misc pull request was merged earlier today with a notable fix to the Rust Binder driver as well as adding the Intel Nova Lake Point S device ID to the MEI driver.

Some news that slipped under the radar prior to the holidays... Linutronix as the Linux consulting firm that has led the real-time "PREEMPT_RT" work and more within the Linux kernel -- and Linutronix was acquired by Intel back in 2022 as an independent subsidiary -- is beginning a "new chapter".

Increasingly complex RISC-V cores aren't magically immune to the speculative execution / side-channel vulnerabilities that have rattled the x86_64 and ARM64 landscape for years. Following recent work on Spectre V1 handling for RISC-V in the Linux kernel, merged this weekend for Linux 6.19-rc5 is another RISC-V attack vector safeguard.

A new project trying to get off the ground and currently in an "exploratory phase" is GYESME that describes itself as a "design-led" downstream of GNOME with plans ot only fork when needed that is "minimal by default."

In addition to Linus Torvalds' recent comments around AI tooling documentation, it turns out in fact that Linus Torvalds has been using vibe coding himself. Over the holidays Linus Torvalds has been working on a new open-source project called AudioNoise that was started with the help of AI vibe coding.

The Budgie 10.10 desktop has been officially released in marking the open-source project's transition from X11 to Wayland.

The first alpha release of Mageia 10 is now available for this Linux distribution who's lineage traces back to Mandriva and before that the legendary Mandrake Linux.

For those loading Linux on the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X gaming handheld, there is currently audio quality issues, including gaps/dropouts in audio playback. A workaround is in the process of making its way to the Linux kernel until a proper solution can be sorted out.

Debian 13.3 is out today as the newest stable point release for Debian Trixie.

Alice Ryhl of Google has been working on an improvement to the Linux kernel code for inlining C helpers into Rust when making use of a Link-Time Optimized (LTO) kernel build. At least some of the patches are queued up for merging in the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 cycle for helping those enabling the Rust kernel support and also making use of the LLVM/Clang compiler's LTO capabilities for greater performance.

The ollama 0.14-rc2 release is available today and it introduces new functionality with ollama run --experimental for in this experimental mode to run an agent loop so that LLMs can use tools like bash and web searching on your system. It's opt-in for letting ollama/LLMs make use of bash on your local system and there are at least some safeguards in place.

The current incarnation of ZLUDA continues moving along for running unmodified CUDA apps on non-NVIDIA GPUs. Released on Friday was ZLUDA 6-preview.48 with now boasting CUDA 13.1 compatibility.

With new volunteers stepping up for This Week in Plasma, there is a new issue out this week to highlight more development activities going into the upcoming KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop release.

Hitting the "1.0" milestone last summer was the GNOME AI virtual assistant app called Newelle. This third-party GNOME app has continued evolving as an AI-focused assistant on the GNOME desktop and has now rolled out MCP server support to integrate with "thousands" of other apps.