The Thunderbird mail client developers today formally announced Thunderbird 140 as the newest Extended Support Release (ESR) for this cross-platform alternative to Microsoft Outlook.

One topic we haven't heard AMD talk too much about publicly this year has been their openSIL effort that was announced back in 2023 as their eventual replacement to AGESA and being an open-source CPU silicon initialization effort. They still appear to be working toward making openSIL production-ready for next-generation Zen 6 platforms but some of their proof-of-concept milestones have been running behind schedule. Meanwhile their EPYC 9005 "Turin" proof-of-concept code was recently published.

Being worked on for a number of months now has been the Lenovo Gaming Series WMI Drivers for Linux to expose additional power/performance settings for Lenovo gaming series hardware like the Lenovo Legion Go S gaming handheld with Steam OS. With the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel, the Lenovo WMI Gaming Series Drivers are expected to be finally upstreamed.

The GNOME 49 Alpha "49.alpha" release was just announced as the first formal test release in the road to the GNOME 49 desktop release due out in September.

Merged today for the LLVM/Clang compiler is -mcpu=gb10 support for catering to NVIDIA's forthcoming Grace Blackwell GB10 Superchip.

While coming a few weeks too late for making it into the LibreOffice 25.8 open-source office suite release, merged today to LibreOffice Git for next year's LibreOffice 26.2 is adding initial support for importing Markdown files into the LibreOffice Writer word processor.

With the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel cycle Intel is further building out their Platform Monitoring Technology (PMT) capabilities with the introduction of a new discovery driver.

The AMDKFD "Kernel Fusion Driver" used as the Linux kernel GPU compute driver and necessary part of their ROCm compute stack it turns out can build and run on the Chinese-developed LoongArch systems rather easily.

As a good sign of the progress being made on the Xe3 integrated graphics Linux support and of the Core Ultra Panther Lake launch approaching, the necessary graphics firmware binaries have now been upstreamed to the linux-firmware.git repository.

TornadoVM version 1.1.1 is now available for this OpenJDK and GraalVM plug-in that supports Java offloading to GPUs, FPGAs, and other heterogeneous hardware. The past few years TornadoVM has been making a lot of progress to automatically run Java programs across GPUs and other devices supporting OpenCL, NVIDIA PTX, and Khronos SPIR-V/Vulkan.

Linus Torvalds just tagged Linux 6.16-rc5 as the newest test release of Linux 6.16.

Minutes ago Simon Ser announced the official release of Wayland 1.24.

Well known AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák has been working on a number of improvements to benefit the Next-Gen Geometry "NGG" support within the RadeonSI and RADV graphics drivers for benefiting modern Radeon GPUs under Linux.

A change proposal has been raised to compress the initrd by default using Zstd compression rather than XZ. This change would help provide some disk savings as well as speeding up the boot process on modern systems with Fedora Linux.

Nearly one year after the merge request was first opened, back-ported now to the X.Org Server 21.1 stable branch are a number of GLAMOR 2D acceleration fixes around OpenGL ES 2.x as well as supporting OpenGL ES 3.x shaders for this generic 2D acceleration over OpenGL for the xorg-server and XWayland.

Intel software engineers continue ironing out their Linux support for Bartlett Lake.

Sent out this morning as part of this week's "locking/urgent" pull request is a performance regression fix ahead of today's Linux 6.16-rc5 release. This latest performance regression in the Linux kernel is around the new Futex code merged this cycle with a big performance hit being observed in scheduler benchmarks.

Sent out today by longtime Freedreno/MSM open-source Qualcomm GPU driver developer Robin Clark are the main set of MSM kernel graphics/display driver updates targeting the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window. There are several exciting feature additions coming to this next kernel version for those relying on Qualcomm graphics capabilities.

DXVK 2.7 released today as a major feature update for this translation layer for enabling Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 based games and applications to run atop the Vulkan API. DXVK is a critical piece of Valve's Steam Play (Proton) software stack for enabling Windows games on Linux.

SUSE developers working on their new operating system installer "Agama" have been making steady progress and on Friday debuted Agama 16. With Agama 16 they have moved from X.Org to Wayland for powering their installer UI along with a number of other changes.