GNOME's longtime document viewer, Evince, was recently forked as GNOME Papers and saw its first release a few weeks back. This new GNOME document viewer has been ported from GTK3 to GTK4 and also brings an improved user interface and other refinements.

Apple compiler engineers have contributed Apple M4 CPU support to the upstream LLVM/Clang compiler via the new -mcpu=apple-m4 target. Interestingly the Apple M4 is exposed as an ARMv8.7 derived design.

KDE Plasma 6.1 is preparing for release next week on 18 June. KDE developers this week have thus been very busy with last minute finishing touches to this updated desktop while also already beginning feature work on Plasma 6.2.

Wine 9.11 is now available as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms. With Wine 9.11 we are now roughly at the half-way point before Wine's typical feature freeze and release candidate start that typically begins around early December and this cycle will lead up to the Wine 10.0 stable release in early 2025.

LibreOffice 24.8 is now available in beta form for those wanting to test this open-source, cross-platform office suite alternative to the likes of Microsoft Office.

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has been working with various KDE designers and developers to establish a new set of Human Interface Guidelines (HIG).

The main set of drm-intel-gt-next patches aiming for the Linux 6.11 kernel were submitted this week to DRM-Next. Most notable with this feature update for the next kernel version is enabling a new hardware replay feature for better reproducing GPU hangs.

Last month some of the Ubuntu 24.10 desktop plans were laid out such as NVIDIA Wayland by default, a new welcome wizard, and more. Canonical's Oliver Smith has posted an update today around some of the ongoing Ubuntu 24.10 desktop enhancements.

Intel's open-source Vulkan Linux driver "ANV" has reduced the driver start-up time by about half.

Kernel developer and consultant Johan Hovold spent the last two years working on improving ARM Linux laptop support with a particular focus on the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s powered Qualcomm SoC. Arm funded this Linaro effort and as a result the ThinkPad X13s enjoys pleasant upstream kernel support now. This Arm Linux laptop project has now concluded but sets a nice base for further ARM Linux laptop improvements moving forward.

While for years there has been the Habana Labs AI accelerator driver within the mainline Linux kernel, this "accel" driver has been focused on just supporting training/inference across their products. Now being worked on for the mainline Linux kernel are upstreaming the Habana Labs network drivers that can be used for scaling out the AI workloads across multiple systems.

Being merged to Mesa 24.2 this week is a set of 12 patches that have been four months in the making for supporting the OpenGL/EGL fixed-rate compression extensions.

The first beta release of the Qt 6.8 toolkit is now available for testing with many new features.

For those interested in running Linux on the Ayaneo Kun handheld gaming console alternative to Valve's Steam Deck and the ASUS ROG Ally, among others, a display quirk has been submitted ahead of the Linux 6.10-rc4 release this weekend to fix the display handling.

Here's how an exciting message from a NVIDIA engineer that just hit the mailing list begins: "NVIDIA has been exploring ways to better support the effort for an upstream kernel mode driver for GPUs that are capable of running GSP-RM firmware, since the introduction to Nova."

Fwupd 1.9.21 is now available for this open-source software for facilitating system firmware and device/peripheral firmware updates under Linux and other platforms.

The past few months open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso has been developing an open-source accelerator driver for Rockchip's NPU. The experimental driver has shown the open-source code can compete with Rockchip's proprietary driver and Vizoso has been working to develop an upstream-minded driver for a kernel driver living within the "accel" subsystem and then leveraging Mesa's Teflon for the user-space component. Yesterday the "Rocket" accel kernel driver was posted for the Rockchip NPU.

While the upstream X.Org Server development remains slow with most of the large vendors treating it in maintenance mode and not investing in new features, open-source developer Enrico Weigelt has been one of the few still working to improve the X.Org Server. As part of his work besides pushing new patches and testing of the latest X.Org Server Git state, today he announced the release of the X.Org Testing Ground Toolkit v0.0.1 as a means to help in facilitate testing of the latest X.Org Server Git by making it easier to build it.

Ubuntu maker Canonical put out a news release today around the DC-ROMA RISC-V Laptop II that is an octa-core RISC-V laptop shipping soon with Ubuntu Linux.

Going back to 2022 we've seen work by Intel engineers on adding Meteor Lake SoC support to Coreboot while to date there hasn't been much in the way of actual Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" laptops with Coreboot as a replacement to the proprietary BIOS/firmware. But to be shown later today is one of the first laptop designs using these latest Intel mobile processors and running the Dasharo downstream of Coreboot.