One of the lesser known Fedora spins under the "Fedora Labs" initiative is the Fedora Games Lab that showcases some open-source games and can serve as an easy demonstrator for Linux gaming. Looking forward to 2026 with Fedora 44, there is a proposal to revitalize Fedora Games Lab to become a better showcase for the modern potential of Linux gaming.

GIMP 3.2-RC2 is out today as what could be the last release candidate of GIMP 3.2 before its stable release. This leading open-source image editor/creation alternative to the likes of Adobe Photoshop continues becoming much more refined and polished in the GIMP 3 series.

Stemming from a security researcher and his team proposing a new Linux Security Module (LSM) three years ago and it not being accepted to the mainline kernel, he raised issue over the lack of review/action to Linus Torvalds and the mailing lists. In particular, seeking more guidance for how new LSMs should be introduced and raised the possibility of taking the issue to the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB).

Longtime Red Hat engineer Hans de Goede who worked on many Intel/AMD laptop enhancements over the years left Red Hat and ended up joining Qualcomm. Now it turns out one of his projects at Qualcomm is enhancing the Fedora Linux support for running nicely out-of-the-box on Snapdragon-powered Windows on ARM laptops.

Back in November Flatpak 1.17 released with support for sideloading from OCI images and other improvements in working toward the Flatpak 1.18 stable release. Out today is Flatpak 1.17.1 and was then followed quickly by Flatpak 1.17.2 to fix a mistake in the release artifacts.

With Linux 6.19-rc1 released, the merge window for Linux 6.19 has now concluded. Here is a summary of the interesting Linux 6.19 new features and changes with this kernel version.

Back in July 2024, Ampere Computing announced AmpereOne M on their road-map for Q4'2024 to provide AmpereOne with 12 channel DDR5 memory compared to eight memory channels with the original AmpereOne processors. Then this past May the AmpereOne M SKUs were announced while Ampere Computing stated these "M" processors had been shipping since Q4 of last year. Since then we haven't seen or heard anything more about AmpereOne M nor the AmpereOne MX processors with up to 256 cores. Since then, the acquisition of Ampere Computing by SoftBank also was completed that made us wonder more about impacts to the roadmap and what hardware may or may not make it out to market. Well, today, we are finally seeing AmpereOne M availability in the public cloud with the new Oracle Cloud A4 instances.

Following the Color Management protocol introduced in Wayland Protocols 1.41, out today is Wayland Protocols 1.47 with various revisions to that color management and HDR support.

There's another setback to the open-source driver code around Intel's Gaudi accelerator support on Linux.

Besides Valve funding FEX-Emu for x86_64 binaries to run on AArch64 Linux as part of their Steam Play (Proton) efforts in being able to get Windows x86/x64 games running on AArch64 SteamOS for the Snapdragon-powered Steam Frame, there is also work happening in kernel-space to help this emulated gaming experience on AArch64.

Even before the Linux 6.19 merge window wrapped up this weekend with the Linux 6.19-rc1 release, there was already the first pull request to DRM-Next of the first batch of new material to be queued for Linux 6.19's successor.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developers now have a need to set a policy whether AI / Large Language Model (LLM) generated patches will be accepted for this open-source compiler stack.

As the Linux 6.19 merge window winded down this weekend, I began running this development kernel on more systems. While there are some scheduler regressions currently with Linux 6.19 Git, for HPC workloads especially I am seeing some encouraging results using a flagship AMD EPYC 9965 2P server configuration.

The CentOS kernel modules "Kmods" special interest group (SIG) is now providing NVIDIA Linux Open GPU Kernel Modules for users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its downstreams as well as for CentOS Stream.

The FamFS file-system being developed by Micron hopes to go upstream for Linux in "early-ish 2026".

The widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library has merged initial support for JPEG-XS.

Rust Coreutils 0.5 is now available as the latest milestone for this Rust-based alternative to GNU Coreutils. Rust Coreutils 0.5 continues moving closer to "full GNU compatibility" with nearly a 90% pass rate on the GNU test suite.

The Linux 6.19-rc1 kernel is out to cap off the Linux 6.19 merge window. The kernel release is coming the better part of a day earlier due to Linus Torvalds being in Japan for this past week's Linux Plumbers Conference and Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit.

For those with fond memories of the original Puppy Linux as a lightweight Linux distribution that used to run well back in the day on systems with less than 1GB of RAM, TrixiePup64 is out with a new release of this Puppy Linux based distribution with Debian GNU/Linux components. The new TrixiePup64 11.2 release is based on the latest Debian Trixie sources while continuing to offer separate builds for either X11 or Wayland usage.

Merged during this second week of the Linux 6.19 feature merge window were the many x86 platform driver changes. As usual, much of the x86 platform driver activity surrounds bettering Linux hardware laptop support but also a growing number of handheld computers / gaming devices.