KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his customary weekend blog post to summarize all the interesting Plasma desktop developments for the week. Most exciting in recent days is Plasma 6.5 receiving an initial system setup wizard.

Glycin 2.0 Beta 3 was released this week for the GNOME project providing a Rust-based library for decoding, editing, and creating images and associated metadata. Glycin is in turn used by a growing number of GNOME components for imaging needs.

The first release candidate of OpenZFS 2.4 is now available for testing of this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems.

Being worked on for a number of months now is GL_EXT_mesh_shader as an extension for bringing mesh shaders to OpenGL. This is an alternative to NVIDIA's GL_NV_mesh_shader extension being worked on for Mesa drivers and in particular the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

Released on Thursday were new Ubuntu X1E "Concept" install images for installing the modified Ubuntu 25.04 environment on Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 powered laptops.

FFmpeg 8.0 is now available! FFmpeg 8.0 is a magnificent update to this widely-used open-source multimedia library and with this new version is the introduction of an OpenAI Whisper filter for automatic speech recognition, many Vulkan Video improvements for greater GPU-accelerated video handling, and a number of CPU performance optimizations.

FreeRDP as one of the leading open-source / free software implementations of Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is out with a new release. While FreeRDP 3.17 is primarily focused on shipping bug fixes, there is one noteworthy addition: fullchain support.

The Servo browser project has published a monthly status report to outline all of the interesting changes made to this interesting, Rust-based browser layout engine over the past several weeks. Development continues moving along with Servo as more critical functionality continues to be added as well as new performance optimizations and other features to make it a compelling option for future embedded web use and more.

Earlier this month Intel released LLM-Scaler 1.0 as part of their Project Battlematrix initiative. This is a Docker container effort to deliver speedy AI inference performance with multi-GPU scaling and PCIe P2P support and more.

In addition to this week seeing Apple SoC DT updates prepped for Linux 6.18 and Apple laptop lid events and power button driver patches posted for review for the mainline Linux kernel, published today on the Linux kernel mailing list are the request for comments (RFC) on patches for enabling USB3 support with Apple Silicon M1 / M2 SoCs.

Earlier this month we looked at the Linux laptop performance of AMD's Krackan Point using the Ryzen AI 5 340 within a HP OmniBook 5 that can be found for as low as ~$450 during sales. For six Zen 5 cores and RDNA 3.5 graphics, Krackan Point worked well as a budget Linux laptop option. For those wondering how the Linux vs. Windows 11 performance compares for the budget HP OmniBook, here are some benchmarks.

Following the recent Apple SMC driver upstreaming to handle rebooting Apple Silicon Macs under Linux, the latest code volleyed on the kernel mailing list for review is support for handling laptop lid events and power buttons. Plus Apple sensor monitoring driver support too.

Released minutes ago was the newest monthly feature release to the Intel Compute Runtime providing open-source OpenCL and Level Zero capabilities on Intel graphics hardware.

VKD3D 1.17 made its debut this morning as the newest version of this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan API implementation.

The open-source Panthor Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver providing the modern kernel graphics driver support for recent Arm Mali GPUs will be supporting a number of additional GPU models with the Linux 6.18 kernel later this year.

The first Linux kernel patches specific to their next-gen Vera Rubin NLV144 "VR144NVL" were posted today to the public Linux kernel mailing list.

David Rosca who started out as a contractor for AMD working on their open-source video encode/decode capabilities for Linux formally joined the company earlier this summer. He's continued to be quite busy plumbing numerous enhancements into their accelerated video support on Linux, which includes RADV with Vulkan Video.

The Libre-Chip project led by Jacob Lifshay has received a grant from NLNet to develop a prototype/proof-of-concept processor design that can be high performance but not vulnerable to speculative execution vulnerabilities like Spectre.

Systemd 258 is nearing release with many big changes to this init system / service manager. Systemd 258-rc3 was released today with some last minute fixes while also now adding that the next release, systemd 259, will face increased Linux system requirements.

AMD's GPUOpen team just released the FidelityFX SDK 2.0 development kit and with it is now the inclusion of the FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4) upscaling tech to complement the existing FSR 2 / FSR 3 support.