The Linux 7.0-rc6 kernel due for release tomorrow has a lot of audio fixes/quirks to correct a wide variety of different hardware issues, mostly different problematic laptops for their speakers and/or microphone behavior under Linux.

Last year LLVM began landing their Distributed ThinLTO "DTLTO" support as an enhancement to their ThinLTO approach for link-time optimizations. An improvement merged this week to LLVM addresses a performance bottleneck discovered when adding files to the link.

Following the release of GNOME 50, Gedit 50 was released on Friday as the newest version of this graphical text editor aligned with the GNOME desktop. Moving forward the Gedit developers are banning AI / large language model (LLM) driven developments and aim to ship more releases faster.

Fish 4.6 released today as the newest version of this Rust-based interactive shell for Linux and other platforms.

It's been another busy week in the KDE space as Plasma developers continue working on new feature activity for the big Plasma 6.7 release.

Developers behind the Distributed Replicated Block Device "DRBD" for mirroring block devices between multiple host systems are working to resync the upstream Linux kernel DRBD support with the out-of-tree DRBD code they have been maintaining for the past ~15 years out-of-sync. It's a big undertaking but they have begun staging patches for review and testing to get this massive set of changes up to par for mainline.

Framework Computer as the company behind the modular Framework laptops and incredible Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" Framework Desktop has stepped up their support for the KDE community.

Earlier this week I provided benchmarks looking at KDE Plasma 6.6's performance advantage over GNOME 50 for Linux gaming with AMD Radeon graphics. That raised the question if the same was true when using NVIDIA graphics with their official Linux graphics driver stack. Here are such benchmarks looking at the KDE Plasma 6.6 and GNOME 50 performance on Ubuntu 26.04 beta while using the new NVIDIA 595.58.03 Linux driver.

Following the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver pull request landing transparent hugepages for device pages as an SVM win, another round of Intel Xe driver updates were sent out this week ahead of next month's Linux 7.1 merge window. This latest pull request lands a new user-space API for helping the Intel Xe driver better cope with situations of video memory pressure / out-of-memory behavior for vRAM.

With sched_ext there is support for BPF-based CPU scheduling policies for the Linux kernel while now a new initiative is working on BPF-based I/O schedulers.

In addition to this week's ROCm 7.2.1 stable point release, ROCm 7.12 was also released as the newest tech preview in working toward what will presumably be called ROCm 8.0.

An important set of Linux scheduler patches were posted for review on Thursday for improving the SMT-aware asymmetric CPU capacity handling. These patches to improve the Linux kernel scheduler around CPU Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) is needed after NVIDIA engineers discovered up to a ~2x performance drop for CPU-intensive workloads on their upcoming Vera Rubin platform.

Another round of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver improvements were sent out this week as feature development for DRM-Next ahead of Linux 7.1 begins to wind down.

Released today was wlroots 0.20 as this Wayland support library used by some Wayland compositors for doing much of the "heavy lifting" of compositor bring-up. Following wlroots 0.20, Sway 1.12-rc1 was released for testing as this closely-aligned Wayland compositor inspired by the i3 window manager.

Right on schedule the beta for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is now available for testing. This is a great opportunity to help test this release ahead of the official Long Term Support release due out on 23 April.

Merged today was the very first step toward implementing Vulkan support within KDE's KWin compositor as an alternative to OpenGL rendering.

As a few months have passed since our prior round of testing the fully open-source NVIDIA Linux driver stack with the Nouveau kernel driver and Mesa NVK Vulkan driver plus Zink, here is a fresh round of benchmarks using Linux 7.0 and Mesa 26.1-dev compared to the open-source stack shipped by Ubuntu 25.10 (Linux 6.17 + Mesa 25.2) for showing how far the open-source NVIDIA driver has progressed the past few months. Plus testing against the NVIDIA official Linux graphics driver for putting that Nouveau/NVK performance into perspective.

Canonical engineers are planning a switch to ntpd-rs as the newest Rust-based system component for Ubuntu Linux for handling time synchronization.

AMD this morning finally announced the long-rumored Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 flagship processor with 3D V-Cache for both of the CCDs.

Sent out today was a new batch of "drm-xe-next" material of Intel Xe kernel graphics driver improvements ready for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel cycle. Standing out in this pull is enabling Transparent Hugepages (THP) support for drm_pagemap as a big win for those making use of Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) for GPU compute and the like.