In development over the past three years has been Newelle as a GNOME-aligned AI virtual assistant. Out this week is Newelle 1.4.5 and it now adds AI image generation support and a redesigned chat interface.

While Plasma 6.7.1 was just released this week following the recent stable debut of Plasma 6.7, there are already a number of fixes piling up for Plasma 6.7.2 due out in July. Plus more feature work and fixes for Plasma 6.8 as the next desktop version going Wayland-only.

Not only is GNOME 51 working to replace GNOME System Monitor with its new replacement, but over in System76's COSMIC space they have been baking their own new system monitor too.

Shotcut 26.6 is out today as the newest major feature release for this popular cross-platform, open-source video editing solution.

One of the limitations of the Intel Linux driver's high dynamic range (HDR) display support is that it currently doesn't work for any DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport "DP MST" connections, such as for daisy chaining monitors or multi-monitor docking stations. But the good news is patches are being worked on to address this Intel Linux kernel display driver shortcoming.

Since delivering NVIDIA Vera CPU benchmarks one month ago and follow-ups like how the ARM Linux server performance has evolved in 8 years or how Vera compares to Ampere Altra that is still quite common in the marketplace, another frequent discussion point and inquiry is about the performance of NVIDIA Vera relative to NVIDIA's GB10 chip. For those curious about the per-core performance and the like, here are some benchmarks of the GB10 up against those initial Vera results.

The many x86 platform driver changes have now been merged for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel. As usual it's mostly made up of driver enhancements for benefiting modern AMD Ryzen (AI) and Intel Core (Ultra) laptops.

One of the limitations of GNOME's current multi-monitor handling is that the same background is used across the displays. For those that want to enjoy per-monitor background selection, some experimental / proof-of-concept code is now working to allow such per-monitor backgrounds to work with the modern GNOME desktop.

Back in early May was the experimental enabling of Vulkan descriptor heaps for the Intel ANV open-source driver. After nearly two months of continued testing and improvements, the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap support for Intel graphics on Linux is now enabled by default.

The PCI/PCIe subsystem changes have been merged this week as we approach the end of the Linux 7.2 merge window.

Intel engineers on Thursday released the newest version of the Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler, ISPC. The ISPC 1.31 supports their variant of the C programming language with extensions for Single Program, Multiple Data programming for leveraging their range of CPU and GPU hardware.

The input subsystem changes were merged this week for Linux 7.2, which is seeing its merge window wrap up on Sunday. Most notable with the input updates is the introduction of the "wacom_w9000" for supporting newer, pen-enabled touchscreens.

Coreboot 26.06 is out today as the latest quarterly feature release for this software project providing open-source system firmware support for a growing number of platforms.

Daily ISOs of Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" continue to be published, but for those preferring something a bit more regulated, out today is Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 2 as the second monthly ISO image.

The Linux Foundation along with others like Amazon, Anthropic, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Red Hat, and others have joined forces to launch Akrites. The Akrites project is aiming to help defend critical open-source software from the brisk pace of new AI/LLM-discovered software bugs and vulnerabilities in ensuring that said issues are effectively addressed before they can be exploited by bad actors.

Philip Rebohle announced the release today of DXVK 3.0 as the latest major feature release for this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 implementation atop the Vulkan API for use by Wine and Valve's Steam Play (Proton).

The Academy Software Foundation that advances open-source efforts for the VFX/cinema industry and more with the likes of OpenVDB, OpenMoonRay, Open Shading Language, and other projects, has announced the formation of a new working group to help with Wayland adoption for artists.

Last week marked the release of an updated Raspberry Pi OS that moved to Linux 6.18 LTS from its former Linux 6.12 kernel base along with making a number of other package updates. Given the jump to the newer Long Term Support kernel and other improvements, I ran some fresh benchmarks on the Raspberry Pi 5 (Raspberry Pi 500+) to see the performance difference out of the updated operating system.

Servo 0.3 released today as the latest version of this modern browser engine developed in Rust. With Servo 0.3 the demo servoshell browser is becoming more useful and supporting additional modern web features while Servo also continues to possess much potential moving forward on the embedded front as an alternative to the likes of the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF).

Linux 7.2 is continuing the trend of removing obsolete hardware drivers for which the code hasn't seen any maintenance in years and there are no believed users left of said drivers, especially those that would be running modern mainline versions of the Linux kernel. The char/misc changes merged dropped two more obsolete drivers from the Linux source tree.