Merged today for Xfce's Xfwm4 window manager component is a built-in Wayland compositor using wlroots.

Google engineer Eric Biggers took time away from all his impressive crypto performance optimizations to the Linux kernel for modern Intel and AMD CPUs to spend time getting support for hardware-wrapped inline encryption keys into the mainline kernel. Google's Android kernel has been carrying this functionality for several years to help enhance security and will now be found in the mainline kernel too for capable platforms.

Merged for the Linux 6.16 kernel are all of the x86 core enhancements that provide a variety of benefits to Intel as well as AMD processors.

Building off the recent release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0, AlmaLinux 10.0 stable is now available as this RHEL-derived popular community Linux OS alternative.

After being under discussion since January of 2024, the ext-background-effect-v1 staging protocol proposal by KDE developer Xaver Hugl has finally been merged to the Wayland-Protocols repository. This new Wayland protocol is intended for handling effects like background blur on terminals.

This month I have been running many Linux benchmarks of the HP ZBook Ultra G1a with the very exciting Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 395 Strix Halo SoC featuring the powerful Radeon 8060S graphics. While there were the very promising OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks shown so far from AMD Strix Halo on Linux -- including the very compelling performance compared to Microsoft Windows 11 -- many are interested in the ROCm compute aspects for Strix Halo. Here are some of the first benchmarks of the GPU compute performance for the Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO with the new ROCm 6.4.1 release compared to Strix Point as well as Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake on their Compute Runtime stack.

Building off the atomic write preparations that landed in prior Linux kernel versions, merged for the Linux 6.16 cycle is atomic write support for the XFS file-system.

The X86_NATIVE_CPU Kconfig build time option has been merged for the Linux 6.16 merge window as an easy means of enforcing "-march=native" compiler behavior on AMD and Intel processors to optimize your kernel build for the local CPU architecture/family of your system.

Rav1e v0.8 was released on Monday for this self-proclaimed "fastest and safest AV1 encoder" that makes use of the Rust programming language.

The many scheduler updates have been merged for the Linux 6.16 kernel which include a wide assortment of different fixes and new improvements.

The open-source Qt toolkit is deeply rooted in C++ code but over the past decade also has enjoyed Python language bindings. Now thanks to new work by the Qt Group on what they are calling Qt Bridging Technology, the toolkit will be enjoying more robust support across different programming languages.

The Linux kernel Performance Events changes were merged for the newly-opened Linux 6.16 cycle. Most notable are some new additions on the Intel side while AMD also saw a few changes too.

On this first day of the Linux 6.16 merge window, Linus Torvalds merged the locking code changes for the kernel that includes some additions to the FUTEX2 interface.

Among the many VFS pull requests merged today by Linus Torvalds for the now-open Linux 6.16 merge window is support by the power subsystem for being able to initiate file-system freeze/thaw events as part of the system suspend and resume cycle.

While there has been the Sony PlayStation 5 DualSense controller support for Linux going back several years and has been improved upon with more recent versions of the Linux kernel, there's been some shortcomings around the audio jack handling with the DualSense controller. A new patch series out today aims to enhance that capability.

Armbian 25.5 is out today as the newest version of this Debian-based Linux distribution catering primarily to ARM and RISC-V single board computers.

Following last night's release of the Linux 6.15 stable kernel, the FSF Latin America team has released GNU Linux-libre 6.15-gnu for their downstream kernel that strips out the ability to load non-free firmware/microcode and other elements of the Linux kernel deemed for not aligning with their software freedoms.

The Rust project this morning published a status update on some of their top project goals, including for enhancing the async Rust experience to make it closer to the sync programming experience as well as stabilizing the tooling needed for Rust programming use within the Linux kernel.

Among the early pull requests sent out today with the Linux 6.16 merge window now open are all of the Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) subsystem updates.

Mozilla Firefox 139.0 release binaries have been pushed out to mirrors today ahead of the formal announcement tomorrow. With the Firefox 139 browser update comes a few new features worth mentioning.