Following December's release of COSMIC Epoch 1 along with the Pop!_OS 24.04 release by System76, today they shared more of their feature plans for the next two major COSMIC desktop updates.

Ahead of the imminent GNOME 50 beta release, the GNOME Shell and Mutter components have declared their "50.beta" releases to ship the latest bug fixes, memory leak fixes, and some last minute improvements ahead of the stable release in March.

Microsoft engineers and other stakeholders have been developing LiteBox as a security-focused library OS written in the Rust programming language and leveraging Linux Virtualization Based Security "LVBS". The design is for LiteBox to operate as a secure kernel protecting the normal guest kernel via virtualization hardware.

You may recall the news last month around no one was left on Debian's data protection team and other volunteer staffing challenges with different Debian efforts in the past. Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille has been looking at the issue of the challenges that arise when Debian's all-volunteer developers quietly drift away either due to time commitments, other interests, or other reasons but don't properly communicate it to the Debian project.

Eric Engestrom is out with another on-time Mesa release. Mesa 26.0-rc3 provides the latest week's worth of bug fixes as we work toward the stable Mesa 26.0 release as soon as next week.

In recent months Intel Linux engineers have been quite active in preparing for next-gen Nova Lake processors. That work has included initial Xe3P graphics support and enabling display support and related display/graphics functionality. The newest now is enabling Nova Lake P including the Xe3P_LPG graphics support.

While link-time optimizations "LTO" can deliver some nice performance benefits out of this compiler optimization technique, it can make debugging said binaries more challenging. Due to various bugs in Mesa being attributed to the use of compiler link-time optimizations when compiling Mesa, the builds are being blocked on using LTO.

With GIMP 3.2 releasing soon, GIMP developer Ondřej Míchal presented at FOSDEM 2026 this past weekend on some of the feature work being eyed for post-3.2 developments.

While Vulkan Video is a cross-vendor, cross-platform video encode and decode API that is beginning to gain traction by multimedia applications and frameworks, the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver has for now taken a step-back on its encode support with newer hardware. Newer Intel graphics hardware is seeing Vulkan Video encode support disabled due to insufficient testing.

Earlier this week Rust Coreutils 0.6 released while out today is GNU Coreutils 9.10 as the de facto standard for this set of core utilities on Linux systems and other platforms.

LibreOffice 26.2 is now officially released as the newest half-year update to this leading open-source and cross-platform free software office suite.

A one-line patch to the HP WMI x86 platform driver for Linux was posted for allowing the HP OMEN Transcend Gaming Laptop 14-fb1xxx to correctly hit its rated TDP limit for allowing better performance outside of the Microsoft Windows confines.

Linux input expert Peter Hutterer of Red Hat announced today the first release candidate of libinput 1.31, the input handling library used by both modern X.Org Server and Wayland desktop environments.

AMD announced today an expansion of their FPGA prodict line-up with the Kintex UltraScale+ Gen 2 for "intelligent, high performance systems" for medical, industrial, and other fields.

While there is the Linuxulator as a kernel-level solution on FreeBSD for running unmodified Linux binaries that can even work for gaming on FreeBSD, running BSD applications on Linux isn't talked about as much. But developers have found that for those wanting to run BSD applications in Linux environments, the urunc lightweight container runtime can work out rather well for efficiently handling BSD apps on Linux.

A few months ago at SIGGRAPH was a demo of Blender with NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) integration. The pull request is now open for landing NVIDIA DLSS support into Blender for better quality upscaling/denoising and performance but concerns persist over the licensing due to NVIDIA DLSS binaries.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee "FESCo" has signed off on the latest batch of Fedora 44 change proposals as they work toward nearing the end of feature work for this spring update to Fedora Linux. Plus some early changes for Fedora 45 have also been granted.

In time for next month's GNOME 50 release are some improvements merged today for the Mutter compositor code adding HiDPI and monitor mode emulation support to the screen-casting API and DevKit.

For those that have been very eager to hear about the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" performance on Linux, today's the day! Last Thursday the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ Evo laptop arrived that is powered by the Core Ultra X7 358H. Here is a look at how that Intel Core Ultra X7 358H competes for performance and power efficiency against a wide range of other laptops on an up-to-date Linux software stack in with around 300 benchmarks.

Merged four years ago to the Linux kernel networking subsystem's Shared Memory Communications (SMC) code was TCP Upper Layer Protocol (ULP) support for allowing applications to replace TCP with the SMC protocol in-place as a transparent replacement. Except for the next kernel cycle it's set to be reverted after realizing it's "fundamentally broken."