Pinta 3.0 Image Editing Program Released With Port To GTK4

([Free Software] 13 April 06:17 AM EDT Pinta 3.0)

One month after GIMP 3.0 was finally released for this popular image editor ported to GTK3 and many other changes, Pinta 3.0 has now been released. Pinta as a reminder is the open-source image editing program inspired by Paint.NET. With the Pinta 3.0 release the image editor has been ported to GTK4 and libadwaita.

DragonFlyBSD Lands "Next-Gen" Disk Encryption Code

([BSD] 13 April 06:05 AM EDT dm_target_crypt_ng)

It's been a while since having any exciting feature development to talk about with DragonFlyBSD but merged this past week was dm_target_crypt_ng, a next-generation implementation of their DM-crypt code for disk encryption.

Qualcomm USB Audio Offloading Poised For Linux 6.16 After Going Through 38 Revisions

([Hardware] 13 April 05:47 AM EDT Qualcomm USB Audio Offloading)

Originally posted back in 2022 were Linux kernel patches for Qualcomm USB audio offloading for Qualcomm SoCs with an audio DSP that can take responsibility for issuing transfers to the USB host controller to free up system resources. After going through 38 rounds of code review the past 2+ years, it looks like Linux 6.16 will finally mainline this Qualcomm USB audio offloading support.

SDL Merges Wayland Multi-Seat Support

([Linux Gaming] 12 April 08:20 PM EDT Wayland Multi-Seat)

An interesting merge this weekend to the Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL) that is widely-used by cross-platform games and other applications for software/hardware abstractions is Wayland multi-seat support. This addition also comes with a developer working on Valve's Linux graphics efforts.

Linux 6.16 Could See AMD SEV-SNP SVSM vTPM Driver Merged For EPYC CPUs

([Virtualization] 12 April 09:16 AM EDT SNP SVSM vTPM Driver)

The Linux 6.16 kernel this summer will likely see the new SNP SVSM vTPM driver introduced for further enhancing the AMD EPYC confidential computing capabilities atop the mainline Linux kernel.

A Fresh Take On Virtual Swap Space Being Pursued For The Linux Kernel

([Linux Kernel] 12 April 06:55 AM EDT Linux Virtual Swap Space)

A request for comments (RFC) patch series sent out this week for the Linux kernel is working on the notion of Virtual Swap Space support. The notion of Virtual Swap Space has been talked about for years and even going back to 2011 there's been efforts to redesign the kernel's swap cache along similar lines.

LibreOffice 25.8 Landing Many Patches For Improving Qt Toolkit Integration

([LibreOffice] 12 April 06:38 AM EDT LibreOffice 25.8 + Qt)

In the past few days there has been an uptick in patches merged for the LibreOffice 25.8 open-source office suite around "Qt Weld" that has been seeing an increasing number of patches over the past few months for enhancing the Qt toolkit integration.

NVIDIA Upstreaming Work For Linux On Their Smart Switch SN4280, SN5610, SN5640

([NVIDIA] 12 April 06:22 AM EDT NVIDIA Smart Switch SN4280)

One of many Linux kernel patch series that NVIDIA has been working on recently to upstream to the mainline Linux kernel are the adjustments needed for Linux running on their newest Smart Switch networking products for the data center.

KDE Plasma 6.4 Lands Initial Support For The Wayland Session Restore Protocol

([KDE] 12 April 06:46 AM EDT Wayland Session Restore)

It's been a very exciting week in the KDE Plasma space with the start of a big new feature landing for the Plasma 6.4 desktop.

GNOME Now Has A Second Core App Written In TypeScript

([GNOME] 11 April 08:35 PM EDT Move Over Rust?)

GNOME 48 made Decibels the desktop's official audio player and in doing so also became the first GNOME core application written in the TypeScript porting language. There's now a second core app for GNOME written in TypeScript.

AMD Releases ROCm 6.4 Without Any Official RDNA4 Support

([AMD] 11 April 03:01 PM EDT ROCm 6.4)

After several ROCm 6.3 point releases, AMD today rolled out ROCm 6.4 as the next update to their open-source GPU/accelerator compute stack and ahead of their big Advancing AI event in June where they will talk about future ROCm work.

Running Linux 6.15 vs. 6.14 Performance With The AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360

([Linux Kernel] 11 April 01:42 PM EDT Linux 6.15 Benchmarks)

So far my testing this week of the Linux 6.15 kernel in its early, post-RC1 state has been going well. No major upsets, yet to uncover any significant performance regressions, and overall has been going smoothly with the many new features/changes in Linux 6.15.

Intel Preps VRR Refactoring For Linux 6.16, More Xe3 Panther Lake Display Enablement

([Intel] 11 April 11:24 AM EDT Intel DRM Driver)

Intel graphics driver engineers today sent out their first batch of feature updates to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the next Linux 6.16 kernel cycle.

Ubuntu 25.04 vs. Fedora Workstation 42 Performance On AMD Strix Point

([Operating Systems] 11 April 09:00 AM EDT 37 Comments)

With both Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42 releasing this month you may be curious how these two Linux distributions are competing for performance. Well, it's a very tight race for common Intel/AMD x86_64 hardware. In this article are some benchmarks looking at clean installs of Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora Workstation 42 on AMD Strix Point.

OpenVPN DCO Driver For The Linux Kernel Revised A 25th Time To Boost VPN Performance

([Linux Networking] 11 April 08:42 AM EDT OpenVPN DCO)

For those relying on OpenVPN for your virtual private networking (VPN) needs, one of the most exciting innovations in recent times besides transitioning to the WireGuard alternative is the OpenVPN DCO kernel driver. This "data channel offload" driver has the potential to provide significant performance advantages over the current OpenVPN performance.

IBM z17 Open-Source Compiler Support Now Being Officially Recognized

([LLVM] 11 April 05:24 AM EDT IBM z17 Is Arch15)

Earlier this week IBM announced the z17 mainframes powered by Tellum I processors. But months prior we've seen IBM patches for an "arch15" target for SystemZ within the open-source compilers that we expected was z17. IBM has now confirmed such and has begun updating the open-source compilers to acknowledge this z17 compiler support.

Linux 6.15 Fixes Intel Graphics Flickering Issue, Adds AMDGPU DMEM Cgroups Support

([Linux Kernel] 11 April 06:19 AM EDT DRM Fixes)

With being just one week past the Linux 6.15 merge window, a lot of fixes have been flowing into the mainline tree as is usual for the early stages of the kernel cycle. Merged overnight were a number of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) fixes that include some notable alterations for the Intel and AMD Radeon kernel graphics drivers.

Haiku OS Continued Improving Hardware Driver Support In March

([Operating Systems] 11 April 06:04 AM EDT Haiku OS)

The Haiku OS open-source operating system inspired by BeOS has issued their newest monthly development report.

Linux 6.15 Lands Patches To Further Clean Up Its Spectre RSB Mitigations

([Linux Security] 10 April 08:49 PM EDT Return Stack Buffer)

Merged today was this week's batch of x86 fixes ahead of the Linux 6.15-rc2 release on Sunday. Notable with these x86 fixes are landing several patches to fix and clean-up the Spectre Return Stack Buffer "RSB" mitigation handling as well as introducing a new document to clarify the overall state and current mitigations.

Fedora 42 Will Be Released Next Tuesday

([Fedora] 10 April 04:56 PM EDT Releasing Early!)

Well here is a pleasant surprise, especially for those that recall the days long ago where Fedora Linux releases tend to be notoriously delayed... Fedora 42 is cleared for releasing next week Tuesday, 15 April, in meeting its "early target" release date.