FreeBSD 14.2 Beta 1 is out today as the first tagged test snapshot in working toward this newest FreeBSD 14 point release.

Cloudflare's Pingora Rust framework that was written as a replacement to Nginx and made publicly open-source earlier this year with a focus on building fast and reliable networked systems is out with its newest feature release.

Sculpt OS for what has been working to become a general purpose operating system built off the original Genode is out with a new feature release.

Intel has integrated VVC VA-API hardware accelerated decoding support into the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary of interesting KDE changes in closing out October.

Vulkan 1.3.301 was published on Friday with the lone new extension this release being a rare contribution from Huawei adding HDR Vivid support with VK_HUAWEI_hdr_vivid.

Right on schedule for releasing the Xfce 4.20 desktop in December, the "Pre1" pre-release was posted on Friday for testing.

Earlier this year and through July Steam on Linux was enjoying above a 2% marketshare thanks to the success of the Arch Linux powered SteamOS and Steam Deck offerings. But then for August and September Steam on Linux use was below 2%. After a 0.13% rise in October, Steam on Linux is back to sitting at a 2.00% marketshare.

Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard has laid out plans for releasing Wine 10.0 around mid-January as the annual stable release for this open-source software to run Windows applications and games on Linux and other platforms.

One of the very convenient features for Ubuntu Linux users who want to run the very newest upstream kernel releases or simply test a new kernel build for verifying bug fixes or functionality has been the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA. It's been around for years, backed by Canonical, and very convenient for fetching pre-built AArch64 / ARM / POWER / RISC-V / x86_64 kernel binaries as Debian packages... With options of stable/test kernel versions as well as daily packages. Sadly, it's been broken once again and has been in that manner since mid-September.

With the upcoming Mesa 24.3 release there is a huge improvement coming for those using the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver with the AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 sample app.

The Google Chrome/Chromium web browser code has merged support for linux_drm_syncobj_v1 as the modern Wayland protocol for explicit buffer synchronization.

Intel software engineers have been very busy recently with upstreaming various elements of support into the Linux kernel, open-source compilers and more for the next-generation Xeon Diamond Rapids processors. Following the recent GCC prep patches for Diamond Rapids to work on the ISA additions around AMX-AVX512, AMX-FP8, AMX-FP32, and others, a new patch was posted today for actually exposing the "-march=diamondrapids" compiler target and in turn confirming all of the new ISA capabilities.

October is now in the books after writing 247 original news articles and another 24 Linux hardware reviews / featured multi-page benchmark articles. From the launches of Intel Arrow Lake and AMD EPYC 9005 to other interesting new hardware, the Russian Linux kernel drama, Linux 6.12 developments and early Linux 6.13 patches queuing in "-next" branches, October was an interesting month both for hardware and open-source software.

Ubuntu developer Simon Quigley laid out the plans for hoping Ubuntu packages will move from Qt 5 to Qt 6 so that by the time of the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle in early 2026 that the older version of this graphical toolkit can be removed.

As part of the latest Bcachefs fixes pull request, lead developer Kent Overstreet has provided an update on the bug situation for this advanced copy-on-write open-source file-system.

Miriway 24.10 was released on Halloween as the newest version of this Mir-based Wayland compositor. Miriway is developed by Canonical/Ubuntu developers as a compositor for other desktops like Xfce, MATE, LXQt and others as a way to ease their migration path to Wayland.

The Academy Software Foundation that is made up of many different vendors released OpenVDB 12.0 as the newest major release to this sparse volume data structure library and tooling that is an Academy Award winning library started by DreamWorks Animation.

As a nice Halloween treat for Linux desktop users, System76 has published their third alpha version of the Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment.

This isn't an off-schedule April Fools' Joke or anything like that but an exciting sign of the times: VMware Workstation will be shifting off its proprietary base and onto leveraging the upstream Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) for virtualization needs moving forward.