Building off last month's release of XWayland 24.1 that brought explicit sync support, improved rootful, and other changes, the first point release has now been issued.

HarfBuzz text shaping engine lead developer Behdad Esfahbod has written a lengthy blog post covering the state of text rendering in 2024. There's a particular focus on text rendering in the open-source world as well as looking ahead to a text stack that will incorporate more of the Rust programming language.

The Rust-written, GPU-accelerated Zed text editor is finally providing official Linux builds!

Updated AMD CPU microcode was published today and subsequently merged into linux-firmware.git for all Family 17h and Family 19h processors, spanning Zen 1 through Zen 4 models.

Set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel cycle is Intel's "Performance Limit Reasons" reporting for indicating why a processor may be downclocking.

LPython is an in-development open-source project aiming to be a very fast Python compiler with multiple back-ends. Released this week was LPython 0.22 as the latest step in this crusade.

JetBrains announced this week that via their 2024.2 Early Access Program that IntelliJ-based IDEs will now offer experimental Wayland support.

Following their acquisition last year of open-source AI provider Nod.ai and other AI investments, AMD today announced they are acquiring Silo AI.

DXVK 2.4 has been released for this Direct3D over Vulkan API implementation.

Over the years there have been various attempts at getting the open-source RADV Vulkan driver on Windows, Faith Ekstrand of Collabora has been recently hacking on it and achieving success for having this popular Radeon Vulkan API driver for Linux working under Windows.

Adding to the growing list of changes that is making September's GNOME 47 desktop release quite a delight, the Mutter compositor has merged another great feature.

Basemark last week released GPUScore: Breaking Limit as a "groundbreaking cross-platform ray-tracing benchmark" that is scalable from mobile to desktops. They self-describe Breaking Limit as "the world's first true cross-platform benchmark for ray tracing." Given that and the benchmark meeting my benchmarking criteria, I've been trying it out on various AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards under Linux.

AMD's GPUOpen group this morning released the FidelityFX SDK 1.1 version that incorporates FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.1 (FSR 3.1) as the newest version of their game upscaling tech. Plus it introduces new components in the form of the Breadcrumbs Library and Brixelizer.

Merged for Mesa 24.2 is a massive set of patches providing a new platform abstraction for NVK, the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver. With this new platform abstraction it begins to open the door toward running the NVK driver on alternative kernel (DRM) drivers.

Box64 v0.3 is now available as the newest feature release to this user-space x86_64 emulator for Linux binaries on AArch64 (ARM64) hosts. Box64 is one of several promising projects in this area for being able to run x86_64 games and applications under ARM64 with great speed.

With CentOS Stream 10 beginning to take shape as the basis for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, the Hyperscale Special Interest Group (SIG) has begun crafting CentOS Stream Hyperscale 10.

For those using an Apple Magic Keyboard with a T2-secured Mac, the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel will enable working keyboard backlight support.

While Loongson's LoongArch processors have been supported under Linux from the start, there remain some missing/late elements still being pursued by Loongson engineers for better upstream support. One of the areas being worked on recently is a proper CPUFreq driver for Loongson 3 series processors for CPU frequency scaling for better performance and power management.

Mozilla Firefox 128.0 is now available for download ahead of the official release announcement due out in the coming hours.

Fedora Workstation 41 has been granted approval for its installation media (ISOs) to ship with only Wayland GNOME support with the X11 support removed.