There are some nice KDE Plasma 6.6 improvements that were merged ahead of Christmas.

Google's Chrome/Chromium web browser code has merged support for Linux printing via the XDG Portal. This is important to allow print support from within Flatpak or Snap sandboxed versions of Google's web browser.

In working toward the Wine 11.0 stable release in January, Wine 11.0-rc3 is out today as the latest weekly release candidate.

For the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel the initial Xe3P_LPD GPU support was merged for the integrated graphics to be found with Nova Lake processors. There were some initial Xe3P_LPD display patches also merged for Linux 6.19 but it looks like for Linux 6.20 (or what may end up being known as Linux 7.0), the display support will actually be functional for driving monitors from Nova Lake.

Five years ago Intel began introducing "workload hints" used for thermal and power purposes with their SoCs and in turn on the software-side being enabled with their INT340X kernel driver on Linux systems. That Intel workload hint coverage was added to the Linux kernel in late 2020 and then a big addition in 2023 with Meteor Lake introducing new workload hint type capabilities. Now patches have been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list for new workload hint functionality coming for upcoming Panther Lake SoCs.

The recently released Linux 6.18 kernel is this year's Long Term Support version. As such it's sure to a see a lot of enterprise and hyperscaler uptake in being the annual LTS kernel version. While Linux 6.12 LTS will be maintained at least through the end of next year, upgrading to Linux 6.18 LTS can be very worthwhile from the performance perspective beyond the extended timeline until it will reach end-of-life. Here are benchmarks showing the performance advantages of upgrading from Linux 6.12 LTS to Linux 6.18 LTS for 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" as well as an early look on the same server for the performance direction Linux 6.19 is bringing the kernel into 2026.

For X.Org Server users there is a new release of xorgproto for the holidays. Xorgproto as the set of headers and specifications for the X11 core protocols and extensions is out with its first new release since March 2024.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds previously referred to file-systems in user-space as for toys and misguided people. But FUSE has shown a lot of interesting use-cases over the years and has grown more capable in the decade since Torvalds' prior comments. Out today is FUSE 3.18 as the latest release for the FUSE library.

Since late 2024 Intel has been working on 5th Gen NPU support for their Linux IVPU driver. That 5th Gen NPU support for Intel Core Ultra "Panther Lake" SoCs was upstreamed back in Linux 6.13. Now today the Intel Linux NPU user-space driver has seen its official support added for Panther Lake.

As we have been covering over the past year, major investments have been made to better the outlook for running FreeBSD on laptop hardware. From WiFi driver improvements to enhancing suspend/resume, power management, graphics drivers, and other features, it's been a big undertaking to make FreeBSD work better on laptops. The FreeBSD Foundation calls 2025 as having brought "transformative changes" for the FreeBSD laptop experience.

Canonical confirmed their Linux kernel plans today for the Ubuntu 26.04 Long Term Support (LTS) release due out in April.

Cloud Hypervisor 50.0 is out today for this cloud-minded, security-focused and Rust-based hypervisor. Cloud Hypervsior began as an open-source Intel project while in more recent times has shifted to being largely maintained by Microsoft, Crusoe, Cyberus Tech, Rivos, and others.

The Mageia development team recently met to solidify their plans for releasing Mageia 10 as the next major release of this LInux distribution with its roots that trace back to the days of Mandrake Linux.

Vulkan 1.4.337 released a short time ago as what could be the last Vulkan API spec update of 2025 depending upon how much time the working group takes off or not around the holidays. In any case, it's a nice holiday treat with the new VK_EXT_texture_compression_astc_3d and VK_EXT_shader_long_vector extensions.

Cryptsetup 2.8.2 released on Thursday for this open-source utility used for setting up disk encryption with dm-crypt on Linux systems, including for LUKS volumes, TrueCrypt, BitLocker, and other formats.

OpenZFS 2.4 is out as stable in time for the holidays! The big OpenZFS 2.4 feature release is now available for FreeBSD and Linux systems to continue advancing the open-source ZFS file-system support.

The Linux Foundation today published their 2025 Annual Report where they offer a glimpse into the finances of the organization for this year.

In addition to the release this week of OpenShot 3.4, released today is a major update to another popular open-source video editing application: Kdenlive. The Kdenlive 25.12 release brings many improvements to help with editing of any year-end / holiday videos.

Spectre V1 mitigations in the Linux kernel are coming for RISC-V with newer RISC-V core designs being vulnerable to Spectre Variant One style attacks.

Merged today to the Mesa 26.0-devel code for the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver is compression support for helping to deliver better performance.