Amazon released the Kindle 4 back in 2011 with a 6-inch E-ink display, 2GB internal storage, and running a modified version of Linux. In the years since the Amazon Kindle 4 has been jail-broken and there are some customized Linux distributions with a patched kernel to run on the Kindle 4. Now in 2026 there are patches on the Linux kernel mailing list looking to mainline support for that fifteen year old e-reader device.

Here's some very intriguing work taking place by a Google engineer... With the hyperscalers and other cloud providers pushing for zero-downtime, a set of experimental patches for "Orphaned VMs" allow for the virtual machines to continue to run while the host kernel is offline for security updates or rebooting with the Live Update Orchestrator. The experimental patches and request for feedback from other Linux kernel stakeholders was sent out this weekend on Orphaned VMs.

GNU Wget2 is up to version 2.3 today with the first new release of 2026 for this popular command-line tool for non-interactive file downloading and being able to easily fetch website contents.

The AMD BC-250 as the product designed at the time for cryptocurrency mining and based on a cut-down Sony PlayStation 5 APU continues having an interesting second-life being re-tasked for Linux use from general purpose workloads to AI. Sent out this weekend were the latest Linux kernel patches for continuing to enable more of the BC-250.

The Igalia Linux/open-source consulting firm based out of A Coruña, Spain is celebrating twenty five years of contributions to upstream open-soure projects.

A big patch series sent out this weekend for the Linux kernel's perf subsystem removes the embedded Python and Perl scripting in favor of standalone Python scripts with a new Python perf module. This perf module for Python written in C is much faster than the status quo.

Linus Torvalds announced the release today of Linux 7.3-rc4. As usual for recent months, the fixes continue to be quite heavy and scattered all over the place driven in large part by AI/LLMs spotting various code defects. Overall though Linus Torvalds isn't too worried about Linux 7.3-rc4.

Ahead of the Linux 7.3-rc4 kernel release due out in the coming hours, an important batch of x86/x86_64 fixes have been merged to address a few outstanding issues.

Gzip 1.15 is out today for succeeding the Gzip 1.14 release from April 2025. With this release comes a number of fixes for bugs present since the beginning of Gzip.

At the KDE Akademy 2026 conference going on right now in Graz, Austria the three KDE goals for the next two years were unveiled.

From a few months ago you may recall Starling as the new Linux desktop written with its own Wayland compositor, using the Swift programming language, and written in large part via AI with Claude Code. Out today is Starling 0.5 with this desktop now gaining an optional 3D desktop mode.

Vulkan 1.4.363 is out as the latest routine update to the Vulkan API specification and also introduces a new Intel vendor extension.

Sent out this morning were a big batch of input subsystem fixes ahead of the Linux 7.3-rc4 kernel releasing later today. Alongside many bug fixes to different drivers is also expanding the range of supported gaming controllers by the XPad driver.

Merged today were this week's set of Btrfs file-system fixes for the Linux 7.3-rc4 kernel, which include two notable bug fixes.

More than two years in the making, Linux 7.4 is poised to introduce a patch that amounts to a rather simple optimization to avoid unnecessary/duplicative work that can net some nice gains when opening files for reading.

Building off yesterday's Wine 11.18 bi-weekly development release is now Wine-Staging 11.18. This experimental flavor of Wine is presently carrying 273 extra patches over that upstream Git state, including some new patches for helping enhance the WoW64 support.

In addition to this week's GNOME 51 release were several other exciting developments in the GNOME desktop space.

Sent out this week were more Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes targeting the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel cycle. The theme this week was around dealing with video memory health and also being able to better deal with hardware degraded video RAM.

Following last week's Plasma 6.8 beta release, KDE desktop developers have spent this week mostly working on bug fixes as well as some early changes toward Plasma 6.9.

As a very pleasant surprise, the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release will now be powered by the Linux 7.3 kernel rather than their original plans and switch over to the Linux 7.2 kernel.