Following NVIDIA's announcement back at CES of their GeForce NOW game streaming service coming to Linux as a native desktop application, today's the day. The GeForce NOW Linux-native build is being published and the review embargo has lifted.

Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics team last year addressed remaining issues in the open-source AMDGPU kernel graphics driver so old AMD GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs could transition to using AMDGPU by default rather than the former "Radeon" kernel driver that is largely in maintenance mode for pre-GCN/RDNA GPUs. One caveat though was the GCN 1.1 APU support still having some limitations leading to Kaveri and friends not being able to use the modern AMDGPU DC "Display Core" code. But new patches from Timur take care of those limitations.

With Intel Panther Lake now shipping, open-source Intel engineers working on the client side are turning to tidying up support for their next target: Wildcat Lake. That more cost effective alternative to Panther Lake now has Intel Thermal Daemon support in getting ready for Linux desktops/laptops.

The NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver 0.0.15 was released overnight as this VA-API driver implementation built atop NVIDIA's NVDEC interface used by their proprietary user-space driver stack. The purpose of NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver as this community open-source project continues to be around enabling video acceleration for NVIDIA GPUs with the Firefox web browser on Linux that supports the VA-API interface but not NVIDIA's NVDEC.

Sun Microsystems began developing gettext in the early 1990s and the GNU Project began GNU gettext development in 1995 for this widely-used internationalization and localization system commonly for multi-lingual integration. While GNU gettext is commonly used by countless open-source projects and adapted for many different programming languages, only an hour ago was GNU gettext 1.0 finally released.

Wasmer 7.0 is out today for this WebAssembly "WASM" run-time for enabling lightweight containers that can run "anywhere" from the desktop to cloud and the edge. The security-minded and extensible WASM runtime provided by Wasmer has already proven to be quite robust while with Wasmer 7.0 has become even more featureful.

The upcoming release of GNOME 50 to be found in the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44 will feature improved discrete GPU detection within the GNOME Shell. This effort has been two years coming and finally merged this week.

Following last week's code branching / feature freeze and first release candidate of Mesa 26.0, Mesa 26.0-rc2 is now available with an initial batch of bug fixes for this quarter's feature update to these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

The widely-used FreeType library used for rendering text onto bitmaps has landed a significant optimization for its LCD filtering code path for Microsoft ClearType-like rendering. Thanks to the improvement, the rendering can be around 40% faster.

Ahead of tomorrow's official availability of the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D at $499 USD, today the review embargo lifted. This faster variant to the existing Ryzen 7 9800X3D has been undergoing lots of Linux benchmarking the past two weeks for seeing the performance capabilities of this fastest 8-core 3D V-Cache processor.

Upstreamed to the Nouveau open-source kernel driver in Linux 6.19 was support for larger pages and with that compression support available with the larger page sizes. Subsequently the Mesa NVK open-source Vulkan driver began making use of the larger pages and compressed image support dependent upon the larger page sizes as it should help with performance. But for now it's being temporarily disabled due to a discovered issue.

Raspberry Pi is gearing up to launch another new product: a Raspberry Pi Smart Display Module.

In light of Plasma 6.8 looking to go Wayland-exclusive and retire their X11 session support, SonicDE (formerly "KDE-Lite") is getting off the ground as a fork of the relevant X11 support within the KDE desktop.

FreeRDP 3.22 was just released as the newest version of this Apache-licensed open-source Remote Desktop protocol (RDP) implementation for interfacing with another computer over the network.

A request for comments (RFC) patch series was sent out today for providing Klint integration with the Linux kernel. Klint is a new linting tool written in the Rust programming language that helps with static code analysis for errors/bugs as well as code styling inconsistencies.

While the Asahi Linux project has made good progress on bringing Linux to Apple Silicon hardware, much of the success and in turn upstreaming to the Linux kernel has been around the aging M1 and M2 Macs. Apple M3 and newer has been a struggle but progress is being made. One of the Asahi Linux developers shared the ability now to boot to the KDE Plasma desktop with the experimental Asahi Linux code on an M3 MacBook but without any GPU acceleration yet.

In addition to Mesa 26.1 today seeing Vulkan present timing support finally merged to help reduce game stuttering and separately another long-in-development Mesa merge request for DG2 / Meteor Lake to improve performance as much as 260% in some scenarios, there is another merge today to Mesa Git for enhancing Intel graphics on Linux. For Intel Linux gamers the newest Mesa code adds a new DriConf workaround that is capable of halving the initial game load time for at least one problematic game title.

GStreamer 1.28 is out today as the newest feature release for this widely-used, open-source multimedia framework.

GNU C Library "glibc" developers have decided to move ahead with plans of migrating their core services from Sourcware.org infrastructure over to the Core Toolchain Infrastructure "CTI" project hosted by the Linux Foundation.

Following the KDE Plasma 6.6 Beta from two weeks ago, a second beta of the upcoming Plasma 6.6 desktop is now available for testing. KDE Plasma 6.6 stable remains on-track for a mid-February release.