Michael Larabel

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

The long-in-development work for a fully-functional multi-threaded FFmpeg command line has been merged! The FFmpeg CLI with multi-threaded transcoding pipelines is now merged to FFmpeg Git ahead of FFmpeg 7.0 releasing early next year. FFmpeg is widely-used throughout many industries for video transcoding and in today's many-core world this is a terrific improvement for this key open-source project.

Ahead of the holidays systemd 255 has debuted as stable and comes with systemd-bsod as a "Blue Screen of Death" service capable of displaying full-screen error messages on Linux. There's also a new tool, systemd-vmspawn, that can be used for spawning virtual machines.

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.

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.

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.

Following a bumpy weekend due to the EXT4 data corruption bug, Linux 6.6.6 is out with just a sole change for dealing with another headache: WiFi regressions.

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".

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.

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.

It looks like GNOME 46 might finally see the dynamic triple buffering support merged for Mutter to enhance the performance particularly for systems with integrated graphics.

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.

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.

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.

Queued up into tip/tip.git's x86/cpu branch ahead of the Linux 6.8 merge window opening in a month is an optimization that should prove helpful in cloud/VM scenarios.

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.

GIMP 3.0 could be finally released in a few months if all goes very well.

The third and final part of the Vulkan enablement code for allowing Vulkan API graphics use within the Wine Wayland driver has been merged to Wine Git.

A Linux kernel mailing list discussion this holiday weekend that is seeing polarized views on the matter is around a new patch series proposed priority-based shutdown support for drivers/hardware.

Due to a problematic patch back-ported from Linux 6.5 causing interference between EXT4 and iomap code, there's the possibility of a data corruption bug on older kernels -- most notably recent Linux 6.1 LTS point releases that can currently be found in the likes of Debian 12.

The crew at System76 published a US Thanksgiving themed status update to their work on the open-source, Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment that will soon be powering their in-house Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

Steam on Linux enjoyed a various nice boost in popularity during the course of November at least as it concerns Valve's Steam Survey.