The Qt Creator integrated development environment focused on Qt/C++ programming is out today with Qt Creator 20 and this new version is headlined by adding AI agent support.

Merged yesterday to the GCC Git development codebase for next year's GCC 17 release is the initial infrastructure laying out support for -std=c++29 and the like for targeting the C++29 standard not anticipated for release until around 2029.

As part of improving the experience of FreeBSD on laptops and desktops, FreeBSD developers have updated their drm-kmod port against the state of the Linux 6.12 LTS kernel.

While the AppleTalk networking protocols were innovative when they first appeared for their plug-and-play capabilities, Apple itself ended their AppleTalk support back in 2009. Now 17 years later, the Linux kernel is ending AppleTalk support due to a recent surge of AI-generated patches.

Linux 7.2 continues seeing a fair amount of storage-related changes from file-systems to the block device code itself, software RAID, the wonderful IO_uring interface, and more. Here is some of the latest feature work that has been merged for Linux 7.2.

Since the release in May of Firefox 151, Mozilla has been relying on the zlib-rs library for Gzip compression/decompression. This subtle change to use this Rust-based Zlib implementation has yielded some performance benefits and better memory safety but also some headaches when dealing with Intel CPU bugs.

There is no shortage of different file-systems available for Linux. New file-systems continue to come about in the open-source world but ultimately many of them end up not being well maintained or having very limited users and not necessarily innovating enough to make them worthwhile over other alternatives. Given the continued increase in file-systems looking to get into the Linux kernel, such as FTRFS and VMUFAT being some of the most recent and then even having multiple NTFS drivers for Linux, there is now documentation in place to formally lay out criteria for new file-systems to be accepted.

It's been a while since there has been any Slackware news to pass along, but this week they've finally landed the KDE Plasma 6 desktop in this legendary Linux distribution.

The Btrfs file-system feature updates have been merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel with a few noteworthy changes for this copy-on-write file-system.

Wayland developers have prepared the release of Weston 16.0 Alpha 1 for this reference Wayland compositor with new features.

Yet another performance optimization merged for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel is improving the speed of anon_pipe_write, the kernel function used for writing data into anonymous/unnamed pipes such as when using shell pipelines or standard streams from applications.

Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero on their graphics processors has been bringing up Nova Lake support since January. With today's release of the Intel Compute Runtime 26.22.38646.4, the Nova Lake Xe3P support has matured to the state of it being advertised now as under an "early support" status.

A patch series merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel addresses a race condition that can occur when a container is exiting yielding "VFS: Busy inodes after unmount" messages and a possible user-after-free condition. But the patch series also goes further and delivers a very nice optimization to lower the container unmounting latency for environments with heavy I/O load.

Merged as part of the many VFS changes for Linux 7.2 is the new OPENAT2_REGULAR flag for the openat2 system call. This can be used to limit programs to only open regular file-systems and avoid accidentally or intentionally opening up device files or other non-conventional data files on the file-system.

Following last week's Wine 11.11 release that brought alpha modifier support for opacity handling with the Wine Wayland driver, merged this week to Wine is support for fractional scaling with the Wine Wayland driver.

The x86/cpu changes have been merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel with an interesting span of changes covering 36 years from the Intel 486 days up to adding the new "rugged" Panther Lake variant.

The XFS file-system updates for the Linux 7.2 kernel aren't too notable with the exception of its zone allocator being promoted from behind its previously-experimental flag.

The power management changes merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel are aplenty as usual. New hardware support, dropping obsolete hardware support, and various bug fixes and other enhancements throughout this important area of the kernel.

After Linux 7.1 dropped support for old i486 CPUs and also began removing some old ISA and PCMCIA device drivers, there is some additional old hardware relics being cleared out of the in-development Linux 7.2 driver... The frame-buffer device driver for the old Hercules Monochrome ISA graphics card is now removed from the Linux kernel after decades at play.

Today's the day! KDE developers have just released Plasma 6.7 as the newest version of this leading open-source desktop environment.