As an exciting announcement out of the KDE Akademy 2025 conference kicking off in Berlin, Germany... The KDE Linux distribution is now in alpha! This is their in-house reference Linux distribution for the KDE Plasma desktop.

Linus Torvalds has grown frustrated enough with seeing "Link: " tags within Git commits/patches that often times they are of no value and he's had enough of it. For Linux kernel activity moving forward he's going to be more strict over "useless" link tags in Git commit messages.

As a follow-up to the article last week around the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver "Nouveau" about to become much more reliable following fixes, that code was merged on Friday for Linux 6.17.

Ahead of Akademy kicking off in Berlin, the annual KDE developer conference, there is another weekly Plasma development update. KDE developer Nate Graham shared the latest exciting progress on Plasma 6.5 while more good news will be coming out later today.

As what might be its last test release before declaring the stable release, systemd 258-rc4 was released this week as the latest stepping stone for this dominant Linux init system and service manager.

The long-awaited beta release of the Pop!_OS 24.04 Linux distribution and the closely-aligned COSMIC desktop environment will be happening in late September.

Merged today to Linux Git ahead of the Linux 6.17-rc5 release on Sunday were a few notable x86 platform driver changes. This includes some new hardware support and device quirks.

It has been a lot of fun over the past month looking at the performance of AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ Strix Halo powering the Framework Desktop. The newest area being explored is how the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 is looking compared to the current Ubuntu 25.04 release.

With Wine 10.15 expected to be released next Friday there will be initial support for using the NTSYNC driver found within the Linux kernel.

The newest hardware offering from Raspberry Pi announced today is... a 1TB SSD.

Mozilla announced today that they will be ending 32-bit Linux support for the Firefox web browser in 2026.

The upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle will present better support for Xiaomi Redmibook laptops thanks to a WMI driver being queued into the x86 platform drivers "-next" branch for providing better handling of the keyboards found with these laptops.

Back in May was the surprise but welcoming decision out of AMD that they would begin officially supporting the Mesa Vulkan driver (RADV) and that their proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan drivers would no longer be included in their Radeon Software for Linux releases. This indeed appears to have effectively spelled the end to their AMDVLK driver with Mesa's RADV taking the cake.

Linux kernel patches for supporting RISC-V's Zalasr ISA extension are now under review. This extension provides "real" load acquire/store release instructions for RISC-V processors.

As of today in Mesa 25.3-devel Git, the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver for Linux systems is finally exposing the VK_EXT_shader_object extension.

Linux Kernel Runtime Guard 1.0 has been released. LKRG is a project providing runtime integrity checking of the Linux kernel and is able to detect security vulnerability exploits against the running kernel.

As part of the Rust DRM drivers now having their own development tree, sent out today was the first pull request from the drm-rust-fixes branch.

GCC's --param lto-partitions= compiler flag is used for controlling the number of partitions used during Link Time Optimization (LTO). It had defaulted to 128 for a number of years but given today's rising core counts especially for servers and HEDT/workstation processors, that default partition count is being quadrupled.

In addition to the SR-IOV work for the Intel Xe driver that landed in Linux 6.17 with a focus on Battlemage, additional SR-IOV work is coming for the Linux 6.18 cycle. Plus a variety of other Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes too.

With the Linux 6.17 kernel there are some block allocation scalability improvements for EXT4 on top of other file-system enhancements with this new kernel and other new features. Linux 6.17 performance has been looking good and when drilling down to the EXT4 file-system performance, it's looking extremely good. Here are some benchmarks of EXT4 on Linux 6.17 compared to the 6.15 and 6.16 stable kernels.