Ahead of the GNOME 49 release candidate being announced in the days ahead, today marked the "49.rc" tagging of the GNOME Shell and Mutter compositor components. Some last-minute user-facing changes have landed along with other improvements for polishing ahead of next month's GNOME 49 stable release.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.17-rc4 as the newest weekly test release of Linux 6.17 in working toward the stable release in late September.

AerynOS 2025.08 ISOs are now available as the third release of the year for this innovative Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS.

This week a new Ubuntu X1E Concept ISO was published for Ubuntu 25.04 ARM64 with the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite/Plus laptop optimizations. With this new ISO the Linux 6.17 kernel is now leveraged for the latest upstream kernel bits. Additionally, the new X1E ISO is finally working again on the Acer Swifth 14 AI laptop that I have used for my Snapdragon X Elite Linux testing.

The Krita digital painting and graphics editing application aligned with KDE/Qt could soon have color management support working on Wayland Linux desktops for enjoying a better creative experience on HDR (High Dynamic Range) displays.

This morning's "x86/urgent" pull request ahead of Linux 6.17-rc4 being released later today has a fix for old Intel Pentium 4 processors as well as an Attack Vector Controls update for handling the Speculative Store Bypass (SSB) mitigation.

Rusticl lead developer Karol Herbst of Red Hat has merged a set of patches for this Rust-written open-source OpenCL driver to reduce the amount of memory allocations that happen and in turn helping reduce CPU overhead.

IceWM Is out this weekend as the newest feature release to this X11 window manager known for its speedy and simplicity.

This week's round of HID subsystem "fixes" for the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel include adding a number of new device IDs and other alterations for supporting new hardware.

Wayfire 0.10 was released this week and its integration with the underlying wlroots rendering code has been overhauled. In turn this opens up Wayfire to having experimental support for rendering using the Vulkan API.

The FreeBSD project on Friday published their quarterly status report to highlight all of the interesting changes for Q2'2025. Among the recent FreeBSD efforts have been on "bsd-user-4-linux" to allow FreeBSD binaries to run unmodified on Linux systems. FreeBSD is also coming up with a policy around AI/LLM usage for contributing to the project. Additionally, Sylve is taking shape as a new web-based unified system management platform for FreeBSD systems.

Philip Rebohle working for Valve just released DXVK 2.7.1 as the newest version of this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 to Vulkan API translation layer. DXVK 2.7.1 enables yet more games to correctly render now with DXVK on Linux.

GTK 4.20 released on Friday as the newest version of this open-source toolkit aligned with the GNOME project. GTK 4.20 brings improved support for Wayland on Linux along with platform enhancements for macOS, Android, and Windows too.

KDE developers remained very busy as they closed out the month of August. In fact, this week saw a 22 year old KDE feature request finally being addressed.

Wine 10.14 is out to end August as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms.

Josef Bacik who is a long-time Btrfs developer and active co-maintainer alongside David Sterba is leaving Meta. Additionally, he's also stepping back from Linux kernel development as his primary job.

It was barely four months ago that the GNOME Foundation announced its new Executive Director, Steven Deobald, who was taking over afterHolly Million stepped down after less than one year. Today Deobald announced he is stepping down as the Executive Director.

Linus Torvalds has finally come to a decision following his plans to part ways with the Bcachefs file-system and then not merging any Bcachefs updates for Linux 6.17.

Fwupd 2.0.14 is out today as the newest version of this open-source firmware updating utility that is widely-used on Linux systems for BIOS/system firmware updates as well as an ever increasing array of different peripheral devices.

For those using Intel Arc A-Series graphics cards on Linux, the i915 kernel driver remains the default but switching over to the Xe driver can yield some incremental performance benefits. For OpenCL / GPU compute workloads especially, switching to the Xe kernel driver can be rather dramatic.