Michael Larabel

The open-source Roundcube webmail software project has "merged" with Nextcloud, the prominent open-source personal cloud software.

Guardrails have been in place where the Firefox browser has enabled Wayland by default (when running on recent GTK versions) but as of today that code has been removed... Firefox will try to move forward with stable releases where Wayland will ship by default!

It's been an exciting week in the KDE space as along with releasing Plasma 6.0 Alpha, they have also committed to shipping Plasma 6.0 with the Wayland session being enabled by default.

In addition to the many x86/x86_64 and AArch64 improvements this round for Linux 6.7, on the RISC-V architecture side are some exciting kernel advancements too.

The latest software offering announced today by Canonical with an enterprise focus and their hopes of driving new Ubuntu Pro and support subscriptions is MicroCloud. Their MicroCloud software aims to make it easy to deploy a private cloud that is a "fully functional cloud in minutes" atop Ubuntu Linux.

While micro-architecture specific optimizations are rather common place within the Linux x86_64 kernel for various Intel and AMD CPU families with various performance tricks, the ARM64 Linux kernel maintainers are against introducing new micro-architecture specific optimizations as it affects new ARM processors.

The Linux 6.7 merge window has been downright exciting with additions like Nouveau GSP support and the Bcachefs file-system being added. It's also been downright massive as one of the largest merge windows in recent history in terms of code changes. Here's some statistics of the Linux 6.7 merge window ahead of today's Linux 6.7-rc1 release.

Firefox 121 is aiming to ship with Wayland support enabled by default rather than falling back to XWayland on modern Linux desktops. So far things are looking up for this indeed remaining the case for next month's Firefox 121 stable release.

While more applications continue enabling Wayland support and getting into a shape by default, the PCSX2 open-source PlayStation 2 emulator recently moved in the opposite direction: disabling Wayland support for their distributed builds.

Debian's MIPS64EL that is a 64-bit little endian port using the N64 ABI is at risk due to declining access for building the Debian 64-bit MIPS packages. MIPS64EL is now being treated as an "out of sync" architecture due to lacking sufficient build daemon resources for timely building new packages and if the situation doesn't improve, it may not be suitable as a release architecture for Debian 13 "Trixie".

One of the great niche features of Ubuntu Linux has been the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA that's been maintained by Canonical for providing daily kernel builds of the Linux Git kernel state as well as of all point releases and release candidates. Sadly it's now been broken for one month for this very convenient feature.

Back during the Linux 6.3 kernel support for a number of legacy DRM drivers was removed and now patches have been volleyed for taking things one step further by now eliminating the infrastructure for supporting these older user-space mode-setting graphics/display drivers.

Ahead of the official release announcement due out tomorrow, the Mozilla Firefox 120.0 release binaries are now available.

The LLVM project is now employing profile-guided optimizations (PGO) when building their x86_64 Microsoft Windows release packages. Making use of PGO is able to make their Clang build a stunning 22% faster.

In addition to the OpenZFS code this week landing sync parallelism to improve write performance scalability, another shiny new feature was also merged: RAIDZ expansion.

As mentioned last week, merged for the Linux 6.7 kernel is NVIDIA GSP firmware support in the Nouveau driver so that these NVIDIA firmware blobs can handle hardware initialization and power management related tasks. This support is optional right now for the GeForce RTX 20 / RTX 30 series hardware with Nouveau but necessary if wanting better performance via re-clocking the GPUs. The GSP firmware is a mandatory requirement for Nouveau with the NVIDIA RTX 40 GPUs and moving forward.

Red Hat has formally confirmed what many were thinking: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 will be doing away with X.Org Server support aside from XWayland.

While the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver is well received by the community, one of the longest sought features has been an official GUI control panel for managing the driver settings and the like under Linux with ease. AMD for their part exposes much of the same tunables available under Windows but is left to just command-line controls or software to poke different ioctls directly. LACT is now the newest open-source option for those wanting an AMD graphics driver control panel for Linux.

The KDE Plasma 6.0 feature freeze is quickly approaching and the Plasma Wayland showstopper bug list is nearly cleared out for being able to endorse the Plasma Wayland session over X11.

Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers announced this morning the launch of the TUXEDO Sirius 16 Gen1, their first all-AMD powered Linux gaming laptop.

Last week OpenZFS 2.2.1 was released with a reported fix for a data corruption issue that was initially blamed as being a block cloning bug for a new feature introduced in the v2.2 release. Well, it turns out that the block cloning feature isn't the root cause and that v2.2.1 is still prone to data corruption and pre-v2.2 releases are also vulnerable to this file-system data corruption issue.

Wine 8.20 is out today and it takes care of quite a vintage bug report... A feature request from 2010 to be able to register URL protocol handlers under Linux.

The Canonical-developed Netplan has served for Linux network configuration on Ubuntu Server and Cloud versions for years. With the recent Ubuntu 23.10 release, Netplan is now being used by default on the desktop. Canonical is committing to fully leveraging Netplan for network configuration with the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release and in turn also marking the Netplan 1.0 release.

Slint as a reminder is a Rust-written open-source graphical toolkit that on Linux uses Qt currently underneath. Slint has been making good progress on its goals and today marks the availability of Slint 1.3.

A recently posted Linux kernel driver patch by Lenovo is for a new "ultra-performance capability" with their latest ThinkPad laptops for ensuring their hardware achieves the best Linux performance when in the "performance" ACPI Platform Profile while conserving the most power in the balanced and power-saving mode.