Intel today published their 20260811 CPU microcode updates to fix a variety of issues for existing processors, including shipping the first new microcode images for Bartlett Lake and Wildcat Lake. The new microcode updates stretch back to Intel Core Gen10 processors.

OpenAI announced today they have brought their ChatGPT Desktop application to Linux and is currently in preview form.

As part of my recent Linux testing of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro I had recently benchmarked six Linux distributions on the Framework Laptop 13 Pro. CachyOS was the fastest to not much surprise but arguably the most surprising aspect was finding Fedora Workstation 44 typically running slower than the five other modern Linux distributions benchmarked. Here's a follow-up to that with more Fedora Linux benchmarks and the cause/workaround for Fedora's slower performance on the Intel Panther Lake laptop.

Flatpak 1.19 was released today as a new development release along with the Flatpak 1.18.1 stable point release. Both of these releases ship a number of newly-discovered security issues with this app sandboxing and distribution tech.

GNOME interaction designer Tobias Bernard has shared some of the plans and ideas for long-term GNOME Shell improvements they have been eyeing for future GNOME releases.

Linux developer Rik van Riel has pulled off some nice Linux kernel optimizations over the years and the Meta engineer has been working on another one around batching of look-ups with Linux's follow_page_mask() that is used for translating virtual addresses to the corresponding struct page.

One of the Raspberry Pi device drivers that has remained elusive from the mainline Linux kernel has been for the performance monitoring unit (PMU) for the Broadcom AXI on all Raspberry Pi 1 through Raspberry Pi 5 models. Thanks to the work of a Google engineer, there is a new effort working to get a mainline Linux driver for the Raspberry Pi AXI PMU.

FastFlowLM is the open-source software for getting vision, audio, embedding, and MoE large language models up and running on AMD Ryzen AI NPUs. FastFlowLM 1.0 released today and is also now part of the AMD ROCm software umbrella.

With the recent release of Mesa 26.2 the Rusticl OpenCL driver now supports OpenCL 3.1 on RadeonSI, LLVMpipe, Zink, Intel Iris, and Apple Asahi. But the work is not over and more improvements to this Rust-based, modern OpenCL driver continue to land.

The HP OmniBook X Flip 14-kc0xxx is an AMD Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" powered laptop. While most AMD Strix Point laptops work fine on modern Linux distributions, with this particular HP OmniBook X there is no working audio with current mainline Linux kernel builds. With Claude Opus 5 acting as a debugging assistant and coding agent, patches are now pending to correct the audio support for this HP OmniBook X Flip 14 laptop to function on Linux.

Sent to DRM-Next this week was the DRM Rust core and driver changes targeting the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window. There continues to be a lot of DRM core infrastructure work happening for Rust integration plus two leading Rust DRM drivers of Nova for open-source NVIDIA GPU support as the successor to Nouveau and then Tyr as the in-development Arm Mali driver.

Fedora's CoreOS as their container-optimized operating system will be moving to enable systemd-oomd by default with Fedora CoreOS 45. Additionally, swap on zRAM will be enabled by default too.

In addition to more ASUS motherboards having working sensors with Linux 7.3, this next kernel version will also get several more Lenovo laptop models to be reporting their fan sensor information under Linux.

Expected to be merged during the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window is a Kernel Control Flow Integrity (KCFI) improvement intended to benefit older Intel processors.

The Qt Group has been working on various AI integrations for the Qt toolkit in recent times like a QML profiler skill for agentic development to help with performance profiling. They have also worked on Qt AI coding assistants and AI agents in the Qt Creator integrated development environment. Their latest AI use is now preparing to introduce a new module in the Qt toolkit itself for edge AI inferencing.

HP recently launched their Z4 G6i workstation that I have been testing out the past few weeks. The HP Z4 G6i is powered by Granite Rapids WS with the review unit specifically being powered by the Intel Xeon 678X. As the unit shipped with Microsoft Windows 11 Pro and this being the first time I've had my hands on Granite Rapids WS, I took the opportunity to run some Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS performance benchmarks to see how the operating system performance compares for this 48 core / 96 thread workstation processor.

Linux Mint is out today with their July 2026 status update that highlights all the improvements made to their distribution over the past month.

The Meta Superintelligence Labs announced this morning they have released Muse Glimmer as their next large language model featuring 30 billion parameters for always-on local agent workflows. Muse Glimmer features open-source model weights under an Apache 2.0 license.

A minor performance optimization is on the way to the Linux kernel for roughly two decade old CPUs that have SSE but lack SSE2. Among those CPUs to benefit are the AMD Athlon XP series, some early Sempron models, and some Intel Celeron and Pentium III models.

In addition to Linux 7.3 slated to receive initial Apple M3 Pro / Max / Ultra SoC support, this next version of the Linux kernel is also set to bring some minor power savings for the Apple M1 series that remains the best supported Apple Silicon on Linux.