KDE released Plasma 6.7 Beta 2 this week while the current Plasma 6.6 stable series continues seeing fixes as does Plasma 6.8 for what will be the follow-on feature release to Plasma 6.7.

One week ago FFmpeg merged decode support for Samsung's Advanced Professional Video "APV" codec. APV is designed for professional-grade video recording purposes and is a royalty-free video codec geared for prosumers. Now arriving within FFmpeg Git is APV video encode support.

Announced today from the PyTorch Conference EU in Paris is word that Hugging Face has contributed their Safetensors project to the PyTorch Foundation, which is an umbrella organization under the Linux Foundation for hosting AI initiatives. Safetensors aims to help mitigate arbitrary code execution risks and more.

Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc6 test kernel due out later today, this week's batch of input subsystem fixes have been sent out that includes enabling a few newer input devices.

Going back to early 2023 there were efforts to disable all the Linux drivers for Microoft's RNDIS protocol. Remote NDIS has proven to be a real security concern while superior, modern alternatives exist.

Building off Friday's release of Wine 11.10 is now the Wine-Staging 11.10 experimental/testing flavor with nearly 300 additional patches atop that upstream code.

For ending out the month of May is a new monthly release of Servo, the open-source, Rust-based browser engine being developed by Linux Foundation Europe stakeholders and the open-source community. There are many nice enhancements on the desktop side with Servo 0.2 while also improving the Android browser UI experience with Servo too.

Zrythm is a wonderful open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) application. Zrythm 1.0 released back in 2024 for this software catering from beginners to audio professionals. It's been a GTK-based application for years but the developers have been porting it to Qt6/QML. Released this weekend is the first Zrythm 2.0 alpha release that moves from GTK to Qt/QML.

The clearcpuid= kernel parameter can be used to disable specific CPUID features for the kernel by specifying the targeted bit numbers of the feature(s) to disable or their flags from the /proc/cpuinfo output. The clearcpuid parameter, for example, has been useful for carrying out AVX-512 comparison benchmarks for apps that check for the presence of the AVX-512 extensions via /proc/cpuinfo. But moving forward the documentation on clearcpuid is being removed to discourage its use.

As expected given AOM Video Model indications last week, the AV2 v1.0 specification was officially released on Friday.

Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc6 kernel due out on Sunday, this week's round of USB fixes have been merged with various new device quirks added as well as some patches as a result of scanning tools.

Rust Coreutils 0.9 was tagged today as the latest major update to this GNU Coreutils implementation in the Rust programming language. Rust Coreutils 0.9 is up to a 90.4% pass rate against the GNU test suite!

NixOS 26.05 is out today as the latest version of this Linux distribution built around the Nix package manager.

On Friday was the latest AMDGPU/AMDKFD pull request landing more kernel graphics/compute driver improvements in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.2 merge window happening in mid-June.

Ahead of the 52nd G7 Summit being held in Evian, France next month, the recently conducted G7 Digital and Technology Ministers’ Meeting came to agreement on shared language around open-source AI and on the importance of open-source in AI.

The latest open-source/Linux patch activity around AMD's next-gen Zen 6 processors is expanding the range of the CPU models detected by the Linux kernel.

GNOME Circle as the initiative for third-party/independent software applications and libraries extending the GNOME desktop ecosystem is taking a stand against AI slop. The GNOME Circle policy has been updated to reject low-effort, vibe coded applications/libraries where the developer is not able to take responsibility for the work.

KDE released Plasma 6.7 Beta 2 this week while the current Plasma 6.6 stable series continues seeing fixes as does Plasma 6.8 for what will be the follow-on feature release to Plasma 6.7.

Genode OS 26.05 is out this week as the latest update for this original open-source operating system framework. With Genode OS 26.05, they have taken various features of their general purpose Sculpt OS operating system and turned them into reusable framework features.

Valve tonight released their beta version of SteamOS 3.8.6 that contains a number of notable enhancements, including native HDMI Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support in initial form.