Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc4 kernel test release due out on Sunday, a new round of x86 platform driver fixes were submitted for the week.

This week marked the release of the KDE Plasma 6.7 beta and even so there were some last-minute features being squeezed into this popular Linux desktop option. Plasma's built-in remote desktop server enhancements and improved Plasma notification effects are among the changes topping out this week.

A few days ago the widely-used SDL library added support for the new Steam Controller without depending upon the Steam client. Now another improvement for the new Steam Controller has been merged to this widely-used library for cross-platform games/apps with software/hardware abstractions.

ROCm 7.13 was released today as the newest ROCm Core SDK Preview in working toward what will presumably be called ROCm 8.0 later in the year.

Wine 11.9 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release and nearing the half-way point of the development cycle toward Wine 12.0.

Merged today for the Linux 7.1 kernel is some new documentation surrounding what qualifies as a security bug as well as around responsible use of AI for finding kernel bugs.

A new patch for the Linux kernel posted today by Intel has outed "Panther Lake R" as a ruggedized variant of Panther Lake intended for harsh environments.

Following yesterday's disclosure of the ssh-keysign-pwn vulnerability that allows unprivileged users to read root-owned files, a slew of new stable kernel releases are out today to address this latest Linux security issue.

Earlier this year we reviewed the ZimaBoard 2 for building a Linux home storage server. That was a nifty little device but for those looking for a more polished product than assembling your storage devices in cardboard cut-outs and the like, IceWhale has launched the ZimaCube 2. The ZimaCube 2 is a nice and polished, literal cube, to serve as your personal cloud / network attached storage (NAS) device.

In response to the likes of the Dirty Frag and Fragnesia vulnerabilities, Rocky Linux is introducing an optional security repository for shipping important security updates sooner.

3mdeb announced on Thursday their release of Dasharo v0.9 for the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 EPYC server motherboard. This is the first time seeing AMD openSIL and Coreboot available for a readily-available AMD EPYC server motherboard!

For what originally began as an open-source Intel software project, Cloud Hypervisor continues seeing robust development outside the confines of Intel Corp these days with ongoing improvements driven by Microsoft, Cyberus Tech, Ant, and other organizations for this Rust-based VMM for cloud workloads.

Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc4 release due out on Sunday, a variety of HID subsystem patches were merged overnight to Linux Git.

Vulkan 1.4.352 is out today as the latest minor spec update to this Khronos API. Besides just a few fixes/clarifications, there is one new extension and that is a NVIDIA vendor extension for cooperative matrix decode vector support.

Following Dirty Frag, Fragnesia, and other Linux kernel vulnerabilities making themselves known in recent days, the latest now is ssh-keysign-pwn.

Valve's new Steam Controller, which began shipping earlier this month for $99 USD, is a great piece of hardware. This high-end gaming controller is great hardware wise but what some may not enjoy about it currently is the tight integration with the Steam controller and no native OS drivers currently for use outside of Steam. As a big win today, the widely-used SDL3 gaming software/hardware abstraction library has added support for the new Steam Controller that works outside the confines of Steam.

Dynamic EPP is one of the new AMD P-State features in Linux 7.1, but, unfortunately is causing some fallout in early usage of this power-savings related functionality.

With today's KDE Plasma 6.7 beta release there has been a surprising amount of interest in the new revival of Plasma Big Screen as the TV-sized UI for Plasma. I've been trying it out today and it has worked out rather well, a very smooth experience, and in good shape for making its debut in next month's Plasma 6.7 release.

One of the latest Linux gaming handheld drivers being worked on is the MSI Claw Configuration Driver for controller configuration.

With the new System76 Thelio Major workstation review unit having arrived equipped with an AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics card, I took the opportunity of having the extra RDNA4 workstation GPU to satisfy a curiosity over whether there has been any meaningful performance gains from ROCm 7.0.0 released last year to now with the latest ROCm 7.2.3 stable release. Here are those benchmarks results if you are curious about the impact of just updating the user-space ROCm components from the end of last summer to the latest ROCm 7.2.3 milestone.