Linux Mint is out today with their July 2026 status update that highlights all the improvements made to their distribution over the past month.

The Meta Superintelligence Labs announced this morning they have released Muse Glimmer as their next large language model featuring 30 billion parameters for always-on local agent workflows. Muse Glimmer features open-source model weights under an Apache 2.0 license.

A minor performance optimization is on the way to the Linux kernel for roughly two decade old CPUs that have SSE but lack SSE2. Among those CPUs to benefit are the AMD Athlon XP series, some early Sempron models, and some Intel Celeron and Pentium III models.

In addition to Linux 7.3 slated to receive initial Apple M3 Pro / Max / Ultra SoC support, this next version of the Linux kernel is also set to bring some minor power savings for the Apple M1 series that remains the best supported Apple Silicon on Linux.

On top of various other Linux drivers for old hardware being removed due to noise generated by AI/LLM coding agents, there are more examples coming with Linux 7.3 as some old Silicon Graphics (SGI) drivers are being removed from the mainline Linux kernel over security concerns.

Linux 7.2-rc7 is now available for testing as we close in on the official Linux 7.2 release hopefully next weekend.

CachyOS is out with its latest media refresh of the year. Beyond the usual desktop improvements for the performance-optimized CachyOS, they continue working toward the upcoming CachyOS Server Edition.

Qualcomm engineers posted a set of 15 patches today for the Linux kernel to enable the Qualcomm Kuno SoC support and their reference development platform.

The Intel graphics compiler code in Mesa 26.3-devel has now enabled the Large GRF mode for Alchemist/DG2 and Battlemage/Xe2 graphics and VRT for Xe3 graphics.

Launched back in 2021 was the Dell Latitude 7320 2-in-1 business laptop/tablet powered by the at-the-time impressive Intel 11th Gen Core "Tiger Lake" processors. Remaining elusive until now has been the web cameras actually working on Linux, but patches posted this weekend finally are cracking that mystery at least for the user-facing web cam.

For those still on the FreeBSD 14 N-1 stable series rather than the latest FreeBSD 15 series, FreeBSD 14.5 is working toward release to deliver various security fixes and backports.

For those with an ASUS ROG Ryujin III all-in-one CPU liquid cooling setup catering to gamers, there are now patches pending to enable this AIO liquid cooling setup to work under Linux for monitoring.

A set of patches from Intel are set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window to enhance the cluster-aware scheduling code so it better handles load balancing on modern Intel Core (Ultra) hybrid CPUs with a mix of P and E/LPE cores.

For those looking to manage the RGB lighting and other features of their Razer devices on Linux, Polychromatic 0.9.8 is now available for that UI front-end that interacts with the OpenRazer kernel drivers for providing a decent albeit unofficial Linux configuration experience.

Making its debut this Saturday rather than the usual bi-weekly Friday release regiment, Wine 11.15 is out today as the newest development release for this open-source software enabling Windows games and applications to run on Linux.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency announced earlier this year a new fellowship program and now as part of that, for the next two years GNOME has a fellow dedicated to working on design and community management.

It's been another busy week in the Linux kernel camp with increased patch activity continuing due to AI/LLM coding agents / bots continuing to uncover different defects in the open-source codebase. The hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem saw many fixes this week for issues mostly raised by the Sashiko AI bot with the issues being described as mostly critical or high severity bugs.

Thanks in part to the power of Claude Opus 5 and Claude Fable 5, a new Windows DirectX 11 driver for QEMU has been created to help improve graphics acceleration for Microsoft Windows guests running under QEMU virtual machines.

The input subsystem fixes for the week include a number of AI-driven patches to address various information leaks, out-of-bounds accesses, validation fixes, and other coding issues that have turned up recently. Plus some device quirks and also adding support for a rather funky gaming controller to the common XPad Linux driver used by many different gaming controllers.

It's been another busy summertime week of KDE developers working toward a great Plasma 6.8 desktop release in October.