While the Linux 7.2 merge window doesn't wrap up until this weekend as the feature cut-off for new material, I have already begun some early benchmarks of the code currently staged for this next version of the Linux kernel. Linux 7.2 already was looking quite exciting with cache aware scheduling and other exciting new features while an unexpected surprise in my early testing this week was seeing some local network/socket performance improvements.

Over the years while working at Red Hat, Hans de Goede was known for driving many wonderful Linux laptop improvements benefiting AMD/Intel x86_64 hardware. Hans left Red Hat last year and ended up joining Qualcomm to advance their open-source/Linux support. Today he is out with a significant new patch series for consideration that has the potential of significantly improving the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Series laptop Linux support and also important indicators for better Snapdragon laptop support on Linux moving forward.

For those that happen to still be running a 22+ year old Apple Power Mac such as those from 2004 with an IBM PowerPC processor and ATI Radeon 9600 XT or 9800 XT graphics, there are open-source driver improvements for Linux still happening in 2026 to benefit this vintage hardware.

The EROFS open-source read-only file-system has some nice enhancements in place for the

While the Fwupd 2.1 series is the latest stable channel for this open-source firmware updating solution, Fwupd 2.0.21 was released today to backport fixes for more than 250 potential security issues recently uncovered in the codebase.

The Linux 8250 serial driver as the universal/legacy driver for 8250 and 16550 type serial ports has been seeing some modernization work recently with a number of 8250 serial patches having now been merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel.

A seemingly new generation of Hygon x86 processors are on the way with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) seeing support today for the Hygon Model 8 "Suzhou" c86-4g-m8 processors.

Along with the many x86/x86_64 improvements and some ARM64 architecture improvements (albeit slowed down by the AI/LLM noise affecting the development pace), the RISC-V architecture changes were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 7.2 kernel development.

Following last week's major Plasma 6.7 release, Plasma 6.7.1 is now available today with an initial assortment of bug fixes.

As part of today's USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates for the ongoing Linux 7.2 kernel merge window, USB4STREAM was merged as a nifty and exciting addition to opening up some interesting USB4 connnectivity use-cases for high speed, low latency data transfers.

Back in March Intel announced the Optimization Zone as a new initiative for helping server administrators and developers better maximize the performance of different workloads running on Intel hardware. Out today is the Intel Optimization Zone 1.1 release with more workloads now covered for squeezing out the most performance on Intel CPUs.

Valve today finally revealed pricing on their SteamOS Linux-powered Steam Machine living room PC. Given the ongoing RAM and storage pricing pressure, the Steam Machine pricing comes in at the high-end.

Released last week was Bcachefs 1.38.6 with a host of performance improvements to this out-of-tree, copy-on-write file-system. Given all the performance improvements and this being the first release since Kent Overstreet dropped the "experimental" flag on the file-system, I decided to fire up some benchmarks looking at how the Bcachefs file-system performance has changed with this new version.

Over the past half-year, Xfwl4 has been developed as a Wayland compositor for the Xfce desktop environment. Released this weekend was the first preview release of Xfwl4 in alpha form.

It's been 14 years already since Microsoft announced the Surface RT hybrid tablet as their first-generation Surface device for going up against the Apple iPad. All these years later, this NVIDIA Tegra 3 powered device is finally seeing a mainline Linux kernel driver for supporting battery and charger status.

Back in March AMD introduced ROCDXG to improve their Windows Subsystem for Linux support. This improved Windows Subsystem for Linux "WSL" support with the ROCm compute stack is a cleaneer architecture, open-source compared to their legacy WSL code having closed bits, and more robust handling. Today they issued a new ROCDXG library release to further enhance their WSL support.

Miracle-WM 0.10 released on Sunday as the newest feature release for this Mir-based Wayland compositor. With this new release is also acknowledgement they are hoping to cross the "1.0" milestone later in the year.

Merged today to Mesa 26.1 is the Ray-Tracing Inspector "RTI" as a new GUI created by developers on Valve's open-source Linux graphics team. The Ray-Tracing Inspector is designed to help in analyzing and optimizing the Vulkan ray-tracing performance as part of their continued work on further bettering the Radeon RADV RT performance for Steam Play / Linux gaming.

The HID subsystem updates have landed in the Linux 7.2 kernel with some treats that will excite Linux gamers and other desktop users.

Merged last week for the Linux 7.2 kernel were all of the sched_ext changes for this extensible scheduler support that allows loading BPF programs from user-space for handling scheduling tasks. Linux 7.2 continues building out sched_ext's sub-scheduler support.