The Gentoo Linux project has begun transitioning parts of its infrastructure away from GitHub and toward Codeberg, a Git hosting platform built on open-source principles. The move reflects growing concerns within parts of the open-source community about centralized hosting, proprietary AI integrations, and long-term platform independence.

The Xubuntu team is now organizing a wallpaper contest to celebrate the upcoming Xubuntu 26.04 LTS (Resolute Raccoon) release and also Xubuntu’s 20th anniversary as an official Ubuntu flavor.

This week marked the release of KDE’s Plasma 6.6 desktop as a very successful release that overall is in very robust shape and performing well. While Plasma 6.6 overall is in great shape, there are various bugs – including crash fixes – that have already been queued for the upcoming Plasma 6.6.1. KDE developers are also quite busy on the trek toward Plasma 6.7…

Weston 15.0 has arrived, bringing a brand new Lua-based shell for fully customizable window management, an experimental Vulkan renderer, and a host of improvements to color handling, media playback, and display performance.

The ESP32 Bus Pirate project, originally introduced as a modern ESP32-S3 adaptation of the classic Bus Pirate debugging tool, has received a substantial update expanding its protocol support, signal analysis capabilities, and RF experimentation features. The original Bus Pirate is an open-source hardware tool widely used for communicating with and debugging embedded systems over interfaces […]

The Blender Foundation released today the beta version of the upcoming Blender 5.1 series of this powerful, free, open-source, and cross-platform 3D graphics software for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows.

The BleachBit 5.1.0 release adds a cookie manager to selectively remove cookies in browsers including Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. It cleans Chromium when installed as two kinds of Flatpacks, and there are major improvements to cleaners for Opera and LibreOffice. CLI negation makes exception to wildcard arguments. The .deb and .rpm packages are now signed for Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, Mint.

As some good news out of Intel today on the Linux/open-source side following last year’s layoffs, they’re hiring for some new Linux software development roles — including for enhancing their Linux graphics driver stack that also includes a focus on Linux gaming with the likes of Valve’s Proton (Steam Play)…

Drgn is the programmable debugger developed by Meta engineer Omar Sandoval that has proven quite versatile and popular with Linux kernel developers and others. After nearly two dozen releases already, Drgn v0.1 was released this week as another big step forward for this open-source debugger…

When beginning some early Linux 7.0 kernel benchmarking this week for looking at its performance in its early development state, I started off testing on Core Ultra X7 “Panther Lake” in being hopeful for better performance with the maturing Arc B390 Xe3 graphics and the like. But I ended up finding Intel Panther Lake seeing some performance regressions on Linux 7.0. So next up I turned to an AMD EPYC Turin server since if regressions existed there at least it’s much faster to carry out bisecting of the kernel performance regressions. But with that initial testing wrapped up, I didn’t find any regressions like with Panther Lake and standing out were some rather enticing PostgreSQL database server performance benefits when running atop Linux 7.0.

The closed-source chat platform Discord

announced on February 9 that it would soon require some users to verify their
ages in order to access some content — although the company quickly

added that
the “vast majority” of users would not have to. That reassurance has to
contend with the fact that the UK and other countries are implementing
increasingly strict age requirements for social media. Discord’s age
verification would be done with an AI age-judging
model or with a government photo ID. A surprising number of open-source
projects use Discord for support or project communications, and some of those
projects are now looking for open-source alternatives. Mastodon, for example,

has moved discussion to Zulip. There are some alternatives out there, all
with their own pros and cons, that communities may want to consider if they want
to switch away from Discord.

Dianne Skoll, creator and maintainer of the command-line calendar
and alarm program Remind, has
announced
the release of The
Book of Remind. As the name suggests, it is a step-by-step
guide to learning how to use Remind, and a useful supplement to the extensive
remind(1)
man page. The book is free to download.

Following GNOME 50’s Mutter merging sdr-native color mode support for wide color gamut displays this week, another late addition to Mutter has now been merged ahead of next month’s GNOME 50 stable release…

While we are on the horizon of seeing PCI Express 6.0 devices, there are already early Linux kernel patches beginning to surface for PCI Express 7.0…

Ahead of the Linux 7.0 merge window ending this weekend, the PHY updates were merged this week for this next major kernel release. There are some notable PHY additions particularly for Apple Silicon USB Type-C support as well as additions for Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 laptop SoCs…

Canonical engineer Utkarsh Gupta announced today on the behalf of the Ubuntu Release Team that the Ubuntu 26.04 “Resolute Raccoon” has entered its feature freeze…

Cloud Hypervisor 51 is now available for this Rust-based VMM focused on secure cloud computing. For what began as an Intel open-source project years ago is continuing to be largely led by Microsoft, Cyberus Tech, Tencent, Ant Group, and others…

Last year LunarG announced KosmicKrisp as a new Vulkan implementation atop Apple’s Metal API. Initially targeting macOS, KosmicKrisp since was merged to Mesa and has evolved quite nicely as a modern implementation of Vulkan-on-Metal for Apple Silicon. It continues moving ahead with an eye for iOS, more performance optimizations, and completing Vulkan 1.4 support…

All of the Thunderbolt/USB driver changes were merged this week for the nearly-over Linux 7.0 merge window…

Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.2 and 20.04 OTA-12 arrive with VoLTE stability improvements, a fix for Xperia X booting, and multiple bug and security updates.