Waiting for pulling into the mainline kernel once Linus Torvalds is back online following Portland's winter storms is the sound subsystem updates for Linux 6.8, which include a lot of new sound hardware support...

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution CBL-Mariner that is used for a variety of purposes from Azure to WSL has seen its first release of 2024. While the distribution has at times released up to a few new versions per month, there hadn't been a new release since late November given the holidays...

SQLite 3.45 was released today with the SQLITE_DIRECT_OVERFLOW_READ optimization being enabled by default that can help for apps relying on SQLite and doing a lot of reads of large BLOBs or strings deliver better read performance. There are also query planner improvements while most interesting with SQLite 3.45 is all JSON functions being rewritten to use the new JSONB format...

In addition to the GNOME triple buffering patches that still haven't been merged to Mutter's mainline branch, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and upstream Debian are slated to currently carry a few extra performance optimizations...

While not as notable as the Bcachefs additions, more work on XFS online repair, and other file-system updates for Linux 6.8, the Btrfs file-system driver changes for Linux 6.8 were merged last week...

Libvirt as the virtualization API/toolkit developed by Red Hat for managing virtualization on Linux is out today with its v10.0 release...

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise, but openSUSE today reaffirmed that openSUSE Leap 16 will succeed the current Leap 15 series. OpenSUSE Leap 16 will be based on SUSE's Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) codebase...

Embark Studios' The Finals free-to-play first person shooter has proven quite popular since its release in early December. The Finals is a game powered by Unreal Engine 5 that has been running on Linux thanks to Valve's Steam Play (Proton + VKD3D-Proton). With the latest Mesa driver activity, Intel Arc Graphics on Linux with their open-source driver can now handle this popular game...

Merged last week to the mainline kernel were all of the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem driver updates for the Linux 6.8 cycle, which includes introducing the Gigabyte AORUS Waterforce AIO driver...

Tom Stellard announced plans this past week for releasing the LLVM 18 compiler stack in early March...

KDE e.V. as the German legal organization behind the KDE project is hiring an employee for a new project to promote environmentally-sustainable software and long-term hardware use...

Prior to Linus Torvalds' Internet and electricity being knocked out by a snow storm and thus impacting the Linux 6.8 merge window, his weekend was already in rough shape due to encountering a performance regression with new Linux 6.8 code that was causing his Linux kernel builds to be as twice as long as with previous kernels. An AMD Linux engineer was able to reproduce the regression and with upstream developers there is now a believed fix for this issue in the latest scheduler code...

All of the Input-Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU) subsystem updates were sent out this week for the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel...

Following the recent release of GRUB 2.12, another prominent open-source bootloader project is also out with a new release: Limine 7.0...

Following last month's release of Fedora Asahi Remix 39 for the Asahi Linux project's new flagship distribution for running on Apple Silicon hardware, a lengthy blog post was posted this weekend outlining some of the ongoing development efforts for Apple Silicon on Linux and newly-enabled Fedora Asahi capabilities...

There seems to be two classes of people when reminiscing over Adobe Flash: those that were fond of Flash-games of the time from many years ago and those that cringe over recalling Flash ads and other content requiring that prior proprietary Macromedia/Adobe tech. For those that have good memories from Adobe Flash, the Ruffle open-source project continues working to this day on an Adobe Flash Player emulator...