The OpenGL API is still seeing new extensions introduced in 2026. Merged today to the OpenGL Registry is a new extension intended to help Wine usage for 32-bit Windows games/apps on 64-bit Linux systems.

It's been a while since most of you probably thought about the Opera web browser, but these days they have been catering their "Opera GX" web browser to gamers. Today they have finally delivered this Opera GX gaming-focused browser for Linux users.

Drew Fustini sent out DeviceTree patches this past weekend for enabling the HDMI display controller on the T-Head TH1520 RISC-V SoC. Additionally, there's a patch for lighting up the HDMI display support on the LicheePi 4A RISC-V board.

With Ubuntu 26.04 LTS quickly approaching release next week, Canonical is beginning more of their road-mapping for Ubuntu 26.10 and beyond. To help in plotting future work, Canonical is interested in feedback for features or improvements that developers/users would like to see around their Mir project.

The fourth iteration of patches implementing Virtual Swap Space for Linux were sent out on Wednesday. This stems from ideas going back years for an abstraction to better separate a swap entry from its physical backing storage.

AMD engineers are experimenting with a proof-of-concept implementation of a Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) implementation atop the DRM_GPUSVM framework.

An Intel project developed the past several years was kAFL-Fuzzer as a hardware-assisted feedback fuzzer for x86 virtual machines (VMs) to help with security. While it saw a lot of work in prior years, development activity slowed down last year and now the project has been formally ended.

GNOME 50 is out today, on-schedule and just in time for being the default desktop of the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44.

While Fedora 43 was released at the end of October and there is just one month to go now until the release of Fedora 44, Fedora Asahi Remix 43 debuted today as this spin of Fedora Linux for Apple Silicon Macs.

Last week I provided a look at the EXT4 and XFS performance from Linux 6.12 LTS through Linux 7.0 in its current development form. As mentioned in that article and as requested by many Phoronix readers, benchmarks have since wrapped up looking at how the Btrfs copy-on-write file-system performance has evolved since that late 2024 period and all major Linux kernel releases past that Long Term Support version.

Last week it was security issues with AppArmor to worry about on Ubuntu Linux while this week a "high" rated vulnerability for Ubuntu's Snap daemon has been revealed.

It's been a while since having any improvements to talk about for the MGLRU multi-gen LRU functionality for the Linux kernel to optimize page reclamation and help with system performance especially when enduring memory pressure. But this week a Tencent engineer posted some very promising patches for further enhancing this kernel feature.

Samba continues strong in 2026 for this leading open-source SMB protocol re-implementation for Microsoft Windows file and print services interoperability. Samba 4.24 brings more features, including remote password management support.

Google engineers have been spending the past number of months developing Sashiko as an agentic AI code review system for the Linux kernel. It's now open-source and publicly available and will continue to do upstream Linux kernel code review thanks to funding from Google.

The widely-used GRUB bootloader is now being developed on FreeDesktop.org with a modern GitLab-based workflow.

A new platform feature being worked on by Arm engineers for the Linux kernel is Live Firmware Activation to allow for updated firmware components to be deployed without requiring a system reboot.

For those that happen to have the Logitech MX Master 4 wireless mouse or are considering this high-end ~$120 USD Bluetooth mouse, better support for it was merged yesterday to Linux 7.0.

Version 4.3 of the CMake software development tool / build system was released today. Notable with CMake 4.3 is support for importing and exporting packages described using the Common Package Specification (CPS) for greater interoperability in the ecosystem.

Systemd 260 was just released as the newest stable version of this widely-used Linux init system and service manager. Systemd 260 brings yet more features to this critical open-source project and to be incorporated into H1'2026 Linux distributions.

OpenJDK 26 is out today as the newest GA reference version for the Java SE platform. With Java 26, it's finally time to say a goodbye to the Java Applet API.