With the various Linux distributions derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), we're beginning to see more features to distinguish between them rather than just "RHEL clones". It was just days ago talking about AlmaLinux restoring old hardware support that's been deprecated by upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now over on the Rocky Linux side, CIQ as the principal organization behind them is rolling out support for upstream Linux kernels.

There is a new post on the GTK blog outlining some of the recent enhancements to this open-source toolkit for benefiting the graphics/GPU offloading capabilities.

System76 software engineers continue working heavily on their COSMIC desktop that is Rust-written and to debut with their Pop!_OS 24.04 release later this year.

MPV as the popular open-source media player forked from MPlayer/mplayer2 and leveraging FFmpeg is out with its newest release.

Wayland Protocols 1.35 is out today as the newest update to this collection of Wayland protocol specifications.

LXQt 2.0 is now available for this lightweight desktop environment that has now been ported to the Qt 6.6+ toolkit. Additionally, much of the LXQt components are ready to be used under Wayland compositors.

Following last year Nouveau receiving support for running with the NVIDIA GSP firmware and initial GeForce RTX 40 series accelerated support, Ben Skeggs of Red Hat unexpectedly resigned as the Nouveau kernel driver maintainer. It turns out this longtime open-source Nouveau driver developer is now employed by NVIDIA Corp and continuing to work on the open-source Linux graphics driver.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved RPM 4.20 to land for the Fedora 41 cycle that will debut in H2'2024. RPM 4.20 is a significant update for this widely-used packaging format.

Queued as part of the ARM64 patches in the various "-next" branches ahead of the Linux 6.10 merge window is a script for being able to build Flat Image Trees (FITs). A Flat Image Tree is the compiled Linux kernel paired with the associated DeviceTree content that is compressed and easily then distributed and executed by capable bootloaders.

Merged on Tuesday into GNOME Mutter is NVIDIA secondary GPU copy acceleration support that allows for much better performance of hybrid laptops featuring integrated graphics paired with a discrete NVIDIA GPU.

As expected, the first release candidate of the forthcoming XWayland 24.1 is now available ahead of its planned stable debut in May.

The much anticipated ROCm 6.1 has now been released! ROCm 6.1 is heavy on new features as well as expanding official operating system coverage to include the latest Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS point release.

The Linux Foundation along with industry stakeholders like Intel, Red Hat, Hugging Face, MariaDB, Cloudera, and others have launched the Open Platform for Enterprise AI (OPEA) as a new enterprise AI collaborative effort.

For those wondering about the OpenZFS root file-system support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, it's in-place with the Ubuntu desktop installer. Not only is it still there but now there's also the ability to easily setup Ubuntu atop an OpenZFS encrypted root file-system.

Last month the Linux Foundation along with industry stakeholders such as AWS, Google Cloud, Snap, Oracle, and others formed Valkey as an open-source Redis fork following Redis moving to Redis Source Available License v2 and SSPL v1 licensing. Today they've released Valkey 7.2.5 as the first stable release for this open-source Redis fork.

It's been three weeks since the Plasma 6.0.3 point release while today KDE has shipped Plasma 6.0.4 as its April bug-fix release.

Following the launch of the Ryzen 8000G series processors earlier this year as well as the Ryzen 8840 series mobile processors, AMD has now announced the associated "PRO" parts for business customers.

The Khronos Group on Monday released OpenXR 1.1 as the latest version of this industry standard for open, cross-platform development for virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) devices.

At the start of April Mesa 24.1 saw Vulkan explicit sync support for Wayland implemented. Now hitting Mesa 24.1-devel today is Vulkan explicit sync support for X11/X.Org.

In addition to Vulkan explicit sync under X11, another merge request hitting Mesa 24.1 overnight that's worth mentioning is the open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver now supporting VK_EXT_image_compression_control.