Merged today to Mutter ahead of next month's GNOME 49 release is an important improvement for those making use of Variable Rate Refresh (VRR).

It's been 15 years already since the Illumos project was formed as based on the OpenSolaris codebase after Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems and closing down OpenSolaris. Illumos Cafe is a new effort akin to BSD Cafe aiming to be a resource and helping to reinvigorate interest in Illumos-based platforms.

The SDL3 library that is widely-used by cross-platform games has landed new code for revising how it selects the high performance GPU in multi-GPU systems.

Ahead of the next Intel Compute Runtime oneAPI/OpenCL release, a new version of the Intel Graphics Compiler "IGC" has been released for Windows and Linux.

The newest hardware offering announced by Raspberry Pi today is a 5-inch variant of the Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2.

Linux 6.17-rc2 is now available to facilitate the latest weekly testing of the Linux 6.17 kernel.

Last week I ran some early Linux 6.17 benchmarks showing some improvements and regressions when testing with AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo". Since then there have been some performance regression fixes along with addressing other early fallout from this fresh kernel code. Repeating the tests now on the latest Linux 6.17 Git state ahead of today's Linux 6.17-rc2 tagging is showing some nice improvements and fixes from the code churn this week.

One of the new exciting security features with Linux 6.17 is Attack Vector Controls as a means of easier managing CPU security mitigations depending upon the system/server use-case. It drastically simplifies CPU security mitigation management for only activating the mitigations relevant to intended use. With the Linux 6.17-rc2 kernel due out later today, Attack Vector Controls refines its logic around the Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO) mitigation.

Merged this week as part of the sound fixes for the Linux 6.17 cycle and now to be back-ported to the stable kernel versions is a headset detection fix/workaround for the Framework 13 Laptop powered by the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series.

Released last month was Shotcut 25.07 with many improvements to this popular open-source and cross platform video editor. Released today was Shotcut 25.08 to provide more fixes atop that latest video editor release.

While a proposal to replace the upstream X.Org Server with the XLibre fork was ultimately withdrawn prior to voting by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo), a Fedora Copr repository has now surfaced for those wanting to try out this alternative X Server implementation on Fedora Linux.

Released on Friday were the Linux 6.16.1 and Linux 6.15.10 stable kernel point releases. Notable there is an Intel i915 kernel graphics driver performance regression fix with some users having reported as much as a 30% performance hit on prior Linux kernel versions.

In addition to yesterday's GNOME 49 beta release marking the 28th birthday of GNOME, a lot of other exciting GNOME developments materialized this week.

Building off yesterday's Wine 10.13 release following the month-long summer release hiatus, Wine-Staging 10.13 is out today with some 300 patches atop the upstream codebase.

KDE Plasma developers this week focused a lot on improving performance, fixing bugs, and enhancing the user interface. KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly report to highlight all of these interesting Plasma changes for the week.

The GNOME 49 beta release is out this Friday evening as the next stepping stone on the path to GNOME 49 in September. Making the GNOME 49 Beta release even more notable is that it's the 28th birthday of GNOME.

With the Linux 6.17-rc1 release this past Sunday, the Linux 6.17 merge window is over. Here is a look back at the most exciting changes that made it for Linux 6.17.

One month has passed since the Wine 10.12 release. While typically new Wine development releases are on a bi-weekly release cycle, summer holidays typically interfere for one release per year with the Wine project. Thankfully Wine 10.13 is out today to start the cycle anew.

While the Raspberry Pi 5 is a great and popular Arm single board computer, some elements of getting the hardware support upstream have lagged behind just as was also the case with prior generations of the Raspberry Pi SBC. One of the enablement bits now inching its way toward the mainline kernel is Ethernet support on the Raspberry Pi 5.

The Ubuntu Release Management Team is pursuing a new concept called "Dangerous" Desktop Images that will ship leading-edge Snaps atop the latest Ubuntu daily development images.