Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.14-rc3 as the newest weekly release candidate for Linux 6.14 that will debuting as stable before the end of March.

A few weeks back the Linux kernel "Faux Bus" was proposed by Greg Kroah-Hartman as a "fake" bus solution for simple devices. Today ahead of the Linux 6.14-rc3 tagging, the faux bus code was merged and comes at the same time both with C and Rust language bindings.

For four years there has been an open bug report for Mozilla Firefox requesting the browser's GTK widget support be updated for GTK4. An independent user/developer has taken it into his own hands and has managed to get Firefox using the GTK4 toolkit up and running on Linux.

The GNOME 48 Beta release was officially announced this morning as the latest stepping stone toward the official GNOME 48 desktop release due out in mid-March.

Btrfs-Progs 6.13 was released this weekend as the newest routine update to the user-space utilities for the Btrfs file-system.

The upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle will be adding support for Intel Killer E5000 Ethernet.

While it's an old language, in recent months there's been a renewed effort over a COBOL language front-end for the GCC compiler. There's been out-of-tree COBOL support for GCC that is working to get into the mainline GNU Compiler Collection codebase. This weekend saw the latest iteration of those patches amounting to 134k lines of new code.

Following last week's FreeBSD 13.5 Beta 1 release to kick off this next FreeBSD 13 point release that will also end the series, FreeBSD 13.5 Beta 2 is out this weekend for testing.

One of the great new features of Linux 6.14 is the NTSYNC driver being completed for better emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives so that software like Wine and Proton (Steam Play) can provide for better performance when running Windows games on Linux. But it turns out an oversight up to now has meant that in practice it's not really too usable out-of-the-box.

Karol Herbst has been a Nouveau driver developer for over a decade working on this open-source, reverse-engineered NVIDIA Linux graphics driver. He went on to become employed by Red Hat. While he's known more these days for his work on Mesa and the Rusticl OpenCL driver for it, he's still remained a maintainer of the Nouveau kernel driver. But today he announced he's resigning as a Nouveau driver maintainer due to differences with the upstream Linux kernel developer community.

KDE Plasma 6.3 released this week as the newest step forward for the KDE desktop. While it was smooth on the whole, there were some early bugs that KDE developers were dealing with this week. KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly development summary for the Plasma desktop.

The nearly three year old Serpent OS Linux distribution started by Ikey Doherty of Solus fame is going to re-brand as AerynOS.

Go 1.24 was released this week by Google engineers as the newest step forward for this popular programming language.

As quite a Valentine's Day treat, the long-in-development dynamic triple buffering support for GNOME's Mutter compositor was just merged ahead of next month's GNOME 48 desktop release!

A change queued up by an Amazon engineer ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle will ensure that PlayStation 5 controllers on Linux load with the correctly desired driver.

Fwupd 2.0.6 is out today as the newest update to this widely-used open-source solution for system and peripheral device firmware updating under Linux.

As a follow-up to the news from last October of Ubuntu considering Dracut to replace initramfs-tools for initrd generation, that work remains ongoing with some improvements since having been prepared for the upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 release but it remains overall an active affair.

If you wish to show your appreciation for all of the Linux hardware reviews, Linux benchmarking, and open-source news provided on Phoronix each and every day, you can join Phoronix Premium this Valentine's Day weekend at a discounted rate.

Stemming from the ongoing discussion around the issues raised with Fedora's Flatpak package of OBS Studio and how Flatpaks should be prioritized within the GNOME Software app center/store, the future of RPM support within GNOME Software raised.

Vulkan 1.4.308 was quietly released last week and besides a few fixes what makes it interesting is the provisional VK_NV_present_metering extension.