The beta release of KDE's Plasma 6.5 desktop took place on Thursday as they work toward the stable release expected on 21 October.

Valve is finally pushing the Steam client beyond the 32-bit world, at least for Microsoft Windows.

Canonical today released the Ubuntu 25.10 Beta as they work toward the stable Ubuntu 25.10 release in mid-October.

As announced last month, PCI Express 8.0 is aiming for 256 GT/s speeds for allowing 1 TB/s bandwidth in an x16 configuration. In working towards the goals of PCIe 8.0, the PCI-SIG announced today that the v0.3 specification has been released to members.

One of the exciting elements of Intel's Xeon 6 Granite Rapids launch last year was introducing support for MRDIMMs alongside DDR5-6400 memory support. After the Xeon 6900P series debut I posted some of the first independent DDR5-6400 vs. MRDIMM-8800 benchmarks. One year later, today is a fresh look at the DDR5-6400 vs. MRDIMM-8800 performance for Granite Rapids with new/updated benchmarks, the latest Linux software improvements, and also looking at the impact on power and thermals of MRDIMM memory.

Rust 1.90 is out today as the newest feature release for this popular programming language.

Python 3.14-rc3 is out today as the final test preview ahead of next month's official Python 3.14 stable release.

NVIDIA is making a $5 billion investment into Intel and the two companies will work together on custom data center and client CPUs.

The Fedora Forge has been soft-launched for Fedora contributors to help modernize the development and collaboration tools around the Linux distribution.

Following the recent release of Linux Mint 22.2 as the Linux Mint project's premiere operating system currently built atop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, today marks the beta release of Linux Mint Debian Edition 7.

A new round of platform-drivers-x86 "fixes" were submitted today for the nearly-complete Linux 6.17 kernel cycle. While on the fixes stage of the kernel, the x86 platform driver changes can be interesting when it comes to new device IDs for enabling new products late in the kernel cycle.

One of the new SoCs to be supported by the upstream Linux 6.18 kernel is the Microchip LAN969x.

Beyond shutting down the Clear Linux project, various Linux driver maintainers let go that have even led to some Intel drivers being "orphaned" in the Linux kernel, there is another open-source project that has ended at Intel with the developers departing the company. Though at least this project has found a new open-source home under the NumPy umbrella.

The past few months we have been intrigued by an AMD GFX1250 target added to the LLVM codebase for the AMDGPU shader compiler back-end. GFX12 is RDNA4 and GFX1250 is presumably some "RDNA 4.5" / "RDNA Refresh" part akin to GFX1150 having been for the RDNA 3.5 parts with Strix Halo / Strix Point. The prior LLVM code confirmed GFX1250 is in APU form factor but product details beyond that have been scarce. Today a new AMD GFX1251 target was merged to LLVM.

Released yesterday was the OpenJDK Java 25 release along with Oracle's GraalVM 25 alternative JVM.

While down to AMD Austin yesterday for the Instinct MI355X and ROCm 7.0 launch, I had the chance to chat again with Anush Elangovan. As the VP of AI Software at AMD, talking with Anush is always insightful and technical in nature. One of the questions I posed him was around the length of hardware support with ROCm.

GNOME 49.0 is out today as the latest half-year feature release to the GNOME desktop that will go on to power the likes of Fedora Workstation 43 and Ubuntu 25.10.

When recently carrying out the Windows 11 25H2 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmarks I also ended up carrying out some Llama.cpp AI benchmarks as the first time exploring the AI inferencing performance between Windows and Linux for both CPU and GPU-accelerated deployments. Here are those results for exploring the Llama.cpp performance between Windows and Linux with different large language models.

Yesterday I was invited along with a small group of others to try out the AMD Instinct MI355X accelerator down in Austin, Texas. The AMD Instinct MI355X is fully supported with the newly-released AMD ROCm 7.0.

Systemd 258 is out today as stable as the latest major feature release to this Linux init system and service manager.