Following prominent Linux x86 platform enabler Hans de Goede leaving Red Hat (as recently noted, he recently joined Qualcomm), there is another prominent Linux kernel engineer that will be departing from Red Hat.

Karol Herbst at Red Hat who has been a longtime open-source NVIDIA driver contributor as well as Rusticl developer presented at XDC2025 on the NVK Vulkan driver's cooperatrive matrix extension support. It turns out this Vulkan extension for machine learning / AI is proving fairly competitive with the open-source NVK driver compared to NVIDIA's official driver stack.

Linus Torvalds is out today with the eighth weekly test release of the Linux 6.18 kernel in working toward the stable release at the end of the month.

In addition to showing the need for unifying DRM driver-side APIs within the Linux kernel, NVIDIA's Linux graphics driver team at XDC2025 also showcased the shortcomings of screencasting under Wayland.

The Qt toolkit is moving away from directly relying on the CPU's RDRAND and RDSEED instructions for random number generation and to instead rely on the OS-supplied entropy.

The upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle is set to introduce initial Xe3P_LPD GPU support for Nova Lake as well as beginning to build out support for the Crescent Island graphics card. Now joining DRM-Next with that initial Intel Xe3P_LPD code for Linux 6.19 is being able to drive displays with that Xe3 hardware.

One of the NVIDIA presentations at the recent XDC2025 developer conference was not around the NVIDIA driver itself but the ongoing fragmentation that's happening within the Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem and arguing the need for unifying more driver-side APIs for supporting different Linux DRM clinets.

Following the recent idea floated to consider C++20 as the default C++ language dialect by the GCC compiler rather than C++17, it was discovered that the GNU Compiler Collection itself has problems building in C++20 model.

As part of this week's sound subsystem fixes ahead of today's Linux 6.18-rc6 kernel release is adding some quirks for supporting the PureAudio Lotus DAC5 and other PureAudio audio hardware.

Released minutes ago was the Servo 0.0.2 web browser engine update. Along with this new Rust-based web engine release is also the "servoshell" in tow for the example implementation built around this open-source codebase.

GNOME's Nautilus file manager is finally matching the behavior of other file managers like KDE's Dolphin and Xfce's Thunar with a keyboard shortcut for copying and pasting files.

Debian 13.2 is out today as the latest maintenance update to this current stable version of Debian GNU/Linux.

Posted to the mailing list on Friday were the latest proposed guidelines for tool-generated contributions to the Linux kernel. The coding tools in large part being focused on AI generated content.

NVIDIA engineers continue working a lot on the in-development and in-tree open-source Nova kernel driver for their GPUs. Sent out on Friday night were the Turing enablement patches for this Rust-written Nova-Core driver code.

Stemming from AMD's recently acknowledged Zen 5 issue with the RDSEED instruction and AMD releasing Zen 5 CPU microcode updates to address it, this week brought some additional microcode updates.

The Servo open-source and Rust-based web browser engine made a lot of progress during the month of October. The project has issued its monthly status report to outline all of the exciting new features made on the engine itself as well as its "servoshell" example web browser application.

KDE Plasma 6.6 continues seeing a lot of development activity while the Plasma 6.5 series is calming down after its first few point releases. Plasma 6.6 landed many more features and improvements this week.

Mesa 25.3 is out tonight as the newest quarterly feature release to this set of (predominantly) OpenGL and Vulkan drivers widely used across Linux systems. Mesa 25.3 features numerous Vulkan extensions added to the different open-source drivers, continued enhancements to the OpenGL drivers, and various other changes.

Ahead of the Wine 11.0 code freeze beginning in early December, Wine 10.19 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games and applications on Linux.

Sent out today is likely the last batch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver feature updates ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window getting underway around the start of December. And it's an exciting one too from adding a new SMART POWER OLED feature to switching from the Radeon to AMDGPU drivers by default for aging GCN 1.0 Southern Islands and GCN 1.1 Sea Islands GPUs.