Merged on Friday for the nearly-over Linux 6.15 merge window were the RISC-V CPU architecture updates for this next kernel release.

APT 3.0 has been officially released as the first stable version following an interesting development cycle. APT 3.0 has been dedicated to the late Steve Langasek with his many Debian and Ubuntu contributions over the years.

In addition to all the KDE Plasma activity this week, GNOME developers have also been quiet busy working on a variety of improvements to the open-source desktop on their side of the pond.

FEX 2504 is out with its newest monthly feature update for this open-source emulator that allows running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 Linux hosts. This alternative to QEMU and Box64 continues focusing on new performance optimizations to further enhance the appeal and speedy potential of this x86_64-on-ARM64 emulator.

LACT 0.7.3 is out this weekend as the newest feature update to this Linux GPU configuration and monitoring tool. LACT helps make up for the lack of any official GUI-based GPU configuration tool on Linux provided by AMD or Intel. It also works on NVIDIA GPUs too for providing a nice unified app for GPU configuration from all three major GPU vendors.

Intel's Open Image Denoise library that is part of their oneAPI Rendering Toolkit as a set of open-source, high performance denoising filters for ray-traced images is out with a new release. Open Image Denoise is used by applications like Blender and with this version 2.3.3 release is expanded GPU support.

It's been a busy start to April for KDE Plasma developers as they continue working toward the Plasma 6.4 feature release. There have been yet more crash fixes along with other polishing and stability enhancements to kick off the new month.

Wine 10.5 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software that is the basis for Valve's Steam Play and allows Windows games and applications to run on Linux systems and elsewhere.

Vulkan 1.4.312 is out today as the newest routine spec update to this high performance graphics and compute API. In addition to the usual mundane clarifications and fixes, this update brings two new extensions from Qualcomm and NVIDIA.

Along with the staging updates, driver core, and char/misc merges this week for the areas of the kernel overseen by Greg Kroah-Hartman, he also sent out the USB and Thunderbolt updates for the Linux 6.15 kernel.

With Rust turning ten years old this year, they are reflecting and working to draft plans for the next decade. They have started the Rust Vision Survey where they are looking for feedback from all Rust skill-sets as they look toward the future.

With having a new Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 laptop in the lab, a lot of Linux benchmarks are forthcoming from this ThinkPad laptop powered by an AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 SoC. This AMD Zen 5 SoC with Radeon 880M RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics had me curious how the Windows 11 vs. Linux iGPU performance is looking now more than a half-year after launch. Prior to blowing out the Microsoft Windows 11 Pro installation that shipped on the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 and loaded with the latest AMD drivers and Windows 11 updates, I ran some graphics benchmarks for seeing how they stack up against the open-source AMD graphics drivers found on the brand new Ubuntu 25.04 release.

The ZLUDA open-source project for "CUDA on non-NVIDIA GPUs" continues being developed for enabling CUDA like GeekBench and AI workloads on AMD GPUs and other hardware vendors. The ZLUDA project hopes to have PyTorch up and running on it this year along with eyeing 32-bit PhysX support since NVIDIA has dropped support upstream for the 32-bit PhysX libraries with the recent RTX 50 Blackwell launch.

Here is open-source at its finest with a NVIDIA Linux kernel engineer ultimately making a fix to a performance regression that came up for AMD integrated and discrete graphics when running on the early Linux 6.15 kernel code.

The Chinese LoongArch CPU architecture will enjoy slightly better support with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel.

Sven Peter who remains one of the very active Asahi Linux developers and working on upstreaming various elements of Apple Silicon support for the Linux kernel has sent up warning flares around the eventual Apple M4 support.

In addition to all of the memory management "MM" changes merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel, a secondary round of MM updates was submitted and subsequently merged for this next kernel version. Interesting here is using the recent MSEAL system call for being able to now seal system mappings.

Yet another Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite powered laptop seeing new DeviceTree patches for enabling Linux support is the HP EliteBook Ultra G1q.

For those looking to replace their proprietary BIOS with the open-source Coreboot on a supported platform or are already doing so, Coreboot 25.03 is out today to provide the newest capabilities for this open-source BIOS/firmware solution.

AMD software engineers today released AOMP 21.0-0 as the newest snapshot of their LLVM/Clang compiler downstream focused on providing the best OpenMP/OpenACC GPU offloading support to AMD GPUs and Instinct accelerators via the ROCm software stack.