The release candidate phase has begun for the upcoming openSUSE Leap 16.1 in-step with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16.1. Most notable with the openSUSE Leap 16.1 is the introduction of its new immutable mode.

Now queued up for introduction in the Linux 7.4 merge window later in October is the steal governor driver for preferred CPUs and steal-driven vCPU backoff for today's virtualized world.

Following the earlier Shotcut 26.9 beta at the beginning of September, the open-source developers behind the open-source non-linear video editor are out with the Shotcut 26.9 stable release.

In working toward the stable Linux 7.3 kernel release hopefully on 18 October, out today is Linux 7.3-rc5 as the newest weekly test candidate.

Budgie 10.10.3 is out today as the newest point release to this open-source desktop.

In addition to the Linux kernel's Zstd compression code being improved, the LZ4 compression code within the kernel tree is also seeing a separate set of enhancements.

Adding to the features expected to land for Linux 7.4 is a significant performance optimization for the memory hotplugging speed for adding additional RAM. In particular, the memory hotplugging being most applicable for cases like expanding the amount of memory for VMs or in today's CXL world for adding additional system memory.

For those considering Lenovo's recently launched and beautifully crafted ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14 laptop powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake", one of the lingering missing features under Linux will hopefully soon be addressed: its second web camera.

Earlier this year developers at LINBIT began working toward a goal of upstreaming ~15 years worth of their Distributed Replicated Block Device changes into the mainline Linux kernel. That major update has yet to land but sent out this week was a new patch series in preparing the trek toward introducing DRBD 9 support in the mainline kernel.

In addition to this week's DRM-Misc-Next pull request introducing some new HDMI 2.0 helpers for the DRM drivers, the pull request also introduced improved GPU reset support for the Broadcom V3D GPU with the VC4 kernel driver.

GNOME developer Jordan Petridis published a blog post today to introduce the world to the Toolpak plans for GNOME OS.

Queued this week into the slab/for-next Git branch ahead of next month's Linux 7.4 merge window is a memory management change for refilling pre-filled sheaves from the barn. In some cases this yields wild improvements to specific synthetic benchmarks.

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem fixes for the week are heavier on the side with many fixes to these kernel graphics/display drivers ahead of Sunday's Linux 7.3-rc5 release.

Wisp is a new GNOME Shell extension making it easier to graphically manage Btrfs file-system snapshots.

The AMDXDNA open-source Linux kernel accelerator driver is seeing a fair amount of work for better supporting current-generation NPU3 neural processing units. The AMD NPU3 is what's found in current AMD Ryzen AI 300 / Ryzen AI 300 PRO series SoCs.

Even with this week's KDE Akademy conference and releasing KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta 2, KDE developers still found time to land last minute changes for Plasma 6.8 plus ongoing early work toward Plasma 6.9.

Going back to last year the Igalia open-source consulting firm has been working on enhancing the Linux kernel to help Steam Play gaming on ARM64 and ensuring the FEX emulator is operating efficiently for x86/x86_64 games running on the likes of the Steam Frame. After other kernel work in recent months, there's finally an updated round of the FUTEX get_robust_list2 and set_robust_list2 system call patches.

GDB 18.1 is out today as the newest version of the GNU Debugger that works across C/C++, Fortran, Rust, and other languages like Go, Ada, and more.

The Redox OS open-source, Rust-based operating system has seen a lot of activity in recent weeks with many notable improvements landing.

The coffee window is closing. Going back many years with the time it's taken to compile the Linux kernel has been a well known opportunity for a coffee break or even eating a meal during the lengthy Linux kernel build process. Even when the Linux kernel was much smaller than it is today, with the hardware at the time it would often be a very time consuming process... Thus incredible to think that we are now on the horizon of a ten second clean, default kernel build on Linux x86_64.