Linux Mint 22.2 is officially out today as the newest version of this popular desktop Linux distribution built atop an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS package base.

On the same day as beginning to ship the Intel Arc Pro B50 ~$349 USD workstation graphics card, Intel also shipped OpenVINO 2025.3 as the newest feature release for this open-source AI toolkit.

The GNOME 49 release candidate "49.rc" was just released as we close in on the stable GNOME 49.0 release in two weeks.

Well, here is some sad news... After the better part of two decades at Red Hat, Hans de Goede shared today he will be leaving the company next month. Hans de Goede during his time at Red Hat has been responsible for countless hardware improvements especially for Linux laptops, serves as the x86 platform subsystem lead maintainer for the Linux kernel, and has done immense work over the past 17 years for bettering Linux hardware support especially on consumer devices.

SUSE's Lubos Kocman announced today on the behalf of the openSUSE team that they will be providing extended maintenance updates and community support with the upcoming Leap 16 release.

The Rust Foundation today announced the creation of the Rust Innovation Lab that will serve as a stable, neutral home to select Rust projects with governance support, legal and administrative support, fiscal sponsorship, and more.

Ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle, which will likely end up being this year's Long Term Support (LTS) version, the AMD Secure AVIC driver appears ready for merging. The AMD Secure AVIC patches were queued this week into a TIP branch and this likely to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.18 merge window.

Niri 25.08 is out this week as the newest version of this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor. Notable now is adding xwayland-satellite integration for offering legacy X11 app support.

Mesa 25.2.2 is out today as another on-time, bi-weekly Mesa point release managed by Eric Engestrom.

Intel announced the Arc Pro B-Series back at Computex consisting of the Arc Pro B50 and Arc Pro B60 graphics cards. Marking availability today and the review embargo lift is for the Arc Pro B50 for workstations, which provides 16GB of RAM, 70 Watt total board power, and a $349 USD launch price for this workstation graphics card. Here are the preliminary Linux performance benchmarks and open-source driver support metrics for the Intel Arc Pro B50.

One of the planned changes for Fedora 43 was setting an expectation that RPM package builds are reproducible. Much of Fedora's "reproducible builds" effort is already complete but this change has now been deferred to the Fedora 44 release next year.

A patch series for the Linux kernel scheduler code is queued up for expected introduction in Linux 6.18 to defer throttle when tasks exit to user-space. These changes to switch the scheduler to a task-based throttle model and task-based throttle time accounting can provide a latency win and also address a possible deadlock situation for real-time "RT" kernels.

It's not too often hearing PCMCIA these days as that defunct PC card standard for laptops from the 90's and early 00's. Back in 2023 Linux began dropping old PCMCIA drivers from the kernel while coming as a surprise today are some clean-ups for the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (PCMCIA) subsystem code persisting within the Linux kernel.

Merged overnight to Mesa 25.3 is an improvement for the Intel driver's Vulkan Video encode/decode handling that has been in the works the past few months.

The ollama open-source software that makes it easy to run AI large language models (LLMs) across different operating systems, hardware, and models is about to enjoy a nice speed boost.

It looks like the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library widely used by cross-platform games for software/hardware abstractions isn't done enhancing its support for running on the X.Org/X11 Server. Similarly, Valve is still committing resources to enhancing the support.

Due to a "significant portion" of Red Hat's internal QA team responsible for Fedora QA leaving the company or switching to other teams at Red Hat, there are some Fedora ARM release changes coming to deal with the reduced abilities of their quality assurance team.

Two years ago the AMD Linux CPU temperature driver was updated to handle negative temperature reporting. That's for some users with exotic cooling systems and then also use within some industrial applications where the systems may be subject to sub-zero temperatures. The AMD sbtsi_temp driver is also now being similarly updated for handling freezing CPU temperatures.

NVIDIA just released the 580.82.07 stable Linux driver as their newest R580 driver series update.

With LLVM 21.1 having been released last week as the newest half-year feature update to this open-source compiler stack, I have begun benchmarking Clang 21 on a variety of systems for getting a feel for the performance over Clang 20. Eventually it will be extended as well to looking at the Clang 21 performance against GCC and vendor compilers. For some initial Clang 21 benchmarking, here is a look at how the Clang 21 C/C++ compiler is performing on 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" Zen 5 processors compared to the prior release.