The beta release of Linux Mint 22.2 "Zara" is now available for testing of this popular desktop Linux distribution built atop an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base.

Intel today announced their August 2025 Software Update to Project Battlematrix and the release of the LLM-Scaler 1.0 container for optimized AI inference support on Intel Arc B-Series graphics hardware.

Even prior to the Linux 6.17-rc1 release on Sunday I already had kicked off some Linux 6.17 Git benchmarking in being eager to see how the performance is beginning to shape up for this next kernel release that is set to power the likes of Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43. There is some good news and bad news with my early testing on the ZBook Ultra G1a for AMD Strix Halo.

The Linux Foundation's Alliance for OpenUSD "AOUSD" and the Academy Software Foundation "ASWF" announced today an updated Inclusive Language Guide.

For over a year now Intel has been working on a new DRM sharpness property for making use of Lunar Lake's new adaptive sharpening filter capabilities built into its display engine. This new sharpening filter with Lunar Lake and future SoCs can hep with sharpening blurred or upscaled content and over the past year has gone through several rounds of code review. The latest patches were sent out last week for this DRM sharpness property.

While there is already MoltenVK for Vulkan implemented over Apple's Metal graphics API, the graphics engineers at LunarG have announced KosmicKrisp as a Mesa-based driver implementing Vulkan over Metal.

Recently we looked at the performance of the AMD EPYC 4545P that is a 16 core 65 Watt processor in the EPYC 4005 "Grado" series. This is quite an interesting processor for those after low-power servers, edge AI deployments, and other purposes with no similar Ryzen 9000 series processor or competition from Intel offering sixteen performance cores at around 65 Watts. Complementing all the performance and power data from that review article, here are some additional tests putting its performance and efficiency compared to the original AMD EPYC 7601 flagship processor that ushered in the EPYC family eight years ago.

Intel engineer Chen Yu posted a fresh round of Linux kernel patches working on cache-aware scheduling/load-balancing for this functionality being sought after both by Intel and AMD. The new patches should address some performance regressions observed in the prior patches.

For those making use of the Network File System (NFS), the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel is bringing some nice improvements both for the NFS server and client code.

For hybrid CPU core designs from recent Intel Core (Ultra) processors to ARM big.LIITTLE, a patch series was posted today in seeking to enhance the generic ACPI processor idle driver around processors with multiple types of CPU cores.

While there was previously talk of Blender 5.0 likely defaulting to using the Vulkan API for rendering but keeping the OpenGL driver around, those plans look like they may be changing. OpenGL-by-default looks to now be on the table for Blender 5.0 due out later this year.

With the increased popularity of Linux gaming these days, a patch has been proposed to improve the hardware support for the Logitech G13 gameboard under Linux. The only problem is the hardware is now 16 years old and since been discontinued.

Back in May the Ubuntu engineers at Canonical announced plans to ship Ubuntu 25.10 with Linux 6.17 given their recent commitment to always shipping with the latest upstream Linux kernel version. They still are committing to it even if it means the kernel and Ubuntu schedules don't perfectly align and Ubuntu 25.10 out-of-the-box may end up being on an unstable "-rc" kernel.

The upcoming FFmpeg 8.0 release continues to increase in excitement with this weekend Vulkan hardware acceleration for Apple's ProRes RAW codec being merged.

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.17-rc1 kernel a few hours ahead of his typical release regiment due to currently being in Europe. That marks the end of the Linux 6.17 merge window with many exciting changes merged this cycle. This is notable with Linux 6.17 expected to power Ubuntu 25.10 and other late 2025 Linux distribution releases.

Debian 13.0 released yesterday while already Debian developers are beginning to think about Debian 14 as the next major release due out in 2027. Debian 14 is codenamed Forky and among the changes expected is LoongArch64 "Loong64" CPU port support being improved.

In preparing for the GNOME 49 beta release, GNOME Shell this weekend released 49.beta.1 with a few changes worth highlighting.

Ahead of the Linux 6.17-rc1 release due out in the coming hours, the Turbostat updates for that tool living within the kernel source tree were merged.

Amid the ongoing discussion over what will happen too Bcachefs in the mainline Linux kernel, an interesting anecdote around Btrfs was mentioned.

Debian 13.0 "Trixie" is now officially out as the newest two-year stable release to Debian GNU/Linux.