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.

AMD Ryzen AI NPUs are now running LLMs on Linux with the recently debuted Lemonade 10.0 server and FastFlowLM 0.9.35 adding Linux support. In addition to those software components, AMD engineers have also been developing MLIR-AIE as a compiler toolchain for AMD AI Engine devices such as Ryzen AI NPUs in leveraging LLVM-based code generation with the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR). Out today is MLIR-AIE v1.3 with some notable new features.

The community-focused, RHEL/CentOS-derived AlmaLinux distribution announced its support today for the RISC-V CPU ISA with AlmaLinux Kitten 10 builds being made available.

The Linux Foundation announced today that $12.5 million USD in grants from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, GitHub, Google, and Microsoft have been collected to invest in strengthening the security of the open-source software ecosystem.

Last week we provided a first look at the new and completely-redesigned System76 Thelio Mira desktop chassis. Today System76 is formally announcing the availability of their new Thelio Mira Linux desktop.

Following this morning's Intel Graphics Compiler 2.30.1 release, the Intel Compute Runtime 26.09.37435.1 is now available for this open-source OpenCL and Level Zero compute stack for Intel graphics hardware on Windows and Linux.

If System76 engineers didn't already have enough going on with recently shipping the COSMIC Rust-based desktop environment and also shipping Pop!_OS 24.04 as their in-house Linux distribution plus completely redesigning the Thelio Desktop, they also recently revised their Launch Keyboard. They have made this leading open-source keyboard design even better with the latest iteration of the System76 Launch Keyboard.

Blender 5.1 is out today with many exciting improvements for this leading open-source 3D modeling software. From AMD GPU hardware ray-tracing being enabled by default at long last to more mature Vulkan support and performance, Blender 5.1 is a great release.