Andrew Morton on Tuesday sent out all of the memory management "MM" updates for the Linux 7.3 merge window. The MM pull was particularly heavy as he noted 1,250 "added-to-MM" emails were sent out this cycle compared to 920 the prior cycle. With a lot of patch churn, he also turned to Google's Gemini AI for writing his patch summaries. In going through the very verbose AI-generated summary, there are two patch series that get me excited on the performance front with Linux 7.3...

Garuda Linux Temeraire arrives with a new CachyOS-based kernel, Plasma Login Manager, revamped Hyprland setup, and major tooling changes.

Here is a simple KDE Plasma rice with an "Abandoned Machine" vibe that features a clean setup, easy customization, and is perfect for daily use. Just a quick note to be transparent: I actually created this setup about five months ago, but I am finally sharing it now. For the visual components, I used the Layan Global Theme paired with the Layan Breath Kvantum Theme, the Gruvbox Plus icon pack, and the KDE Modern Clock widget.

Once you get past what can best be described as an interesting default desktop photo, Poland's Linux Q83's latest offering makes one wonder: With one this solid, why is this Debian-based distro ranking in the 90s on Distrowatch.com when it should be much higher?

COSMIC Desktop 1.6 adds per-application sound controls, compositor protocol improvements, terminal enhancements, and fixes across core desktop components.

COSMIC Epoch 1.6 was released this evening as the latest milestone for this open-source, Rust-based desktop environment led by System76 as part of the work on their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...

Following the release of Mozilla Firefox 154 today, the Mozilla Thunderbird 154 open-source email, calendar, news, chat, and address book client has been released with various new features and improvements.

There was a proposal under discussion the past few months on building x86-64-v3 packages for Fedora 45 while retaining x86-64-v1 packages. The hope was building the Fedora packages with x86-64-v3 where AVX/AVX2, FMA, BMI2, and other newer ISA features can be assumed in the name of better performance. Unfortunately, the x86-64-v3 plans are now delayed but may be reconsidered next year with Fedora 46...

Mozilla Thunderbird 154 is now available with optional system tray support, Microsoft Graph integration, improved search behavior, and more.

Merged earlier this year for Linux 7.1 was extended attributes on sockets support as a feature sought after by the likes of GNOME and systemd for helping with Varlink IPC usage and other purposes. A limitation though of the functionality has been no efficient means for a BPF program to read those user extended attribute labels back. But with Linux 7.3 that's being addressed with the new bpf_sock_read_xattr() kernel function...

Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF93M1 Development Kit is now available through multiple distributors, providing a platform for evaluating the company’s nRF93M1 LTE Cat 1 bis cellular module. The board combines the modem with an nRF54L15 host MCU and includes USB-C, onboard J-Link debugging, power-measurement support, and a preloaded SIM card. The nRF93M1 DK pairs the nRF93M1-LABA modem […]

Modular, the AI startup founded by Chris Lattner of LLVM and Swift fame, has open-sourced their Mojo systems programming language! This comes following the recent acquisition of Modular by Qualcomm...

With the release of Firefox 154 rolling out to all supported platforms, Mozilla promoted the next major release, Firefox 155, to the beta channel for public testing, so it’s time to take a look at the new features and improvements.

As part of the VFS pull requests now merged to the Linux 7.3 development kernel was an improvement to the IOmap framework used by various file-systems for mapping logical file byte offsets in memory to their physical locations on storage. With the now-merged code, this modern block mapping framework is allowing better performance at least for the EXT4 file-system...

Configuring Fedora Rawhide Server using a combination of Btrfs and OverlayFS creates a secure testing environment. This configuration isolates critical for tracking rapidly evolving Rawhide packages from developers allowing the server to load read-only Btrfs base snapshots while using the OverlayFS layer as a storage layer for writing and temporary data. If an update disrupts the OS, the base snapshot remains intact, allowing for rollback after a single reboot. Same configuration may also work and vice versa way. Btrfs-assistant running inside Overlay instance booted via corresponding option of Grub Submenu allows to recover from crash main instance via selection required "ro" snapshot using it's own GUI.

Oracle released VirtualBox 7.2.16 today as the eighth maintenance update to the latest VirtualBox 7.2 series of their open-source, free, and cross-platform virtualization software for Linux, Solaris, macOS, and Windows.

Merged today to Mesa 26.3-devel is a nice performance boost for Intel graphics with Valve's Steam Play when using DXVK for Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 over the Vulkan API. The open-source Intel ANV driver is seeing up to 5% better performance with DXVK...

Crowd Supply recently featured the USBridge-KVM 2.0, a compact IP-KVM designed for remote system administration, debugging, and bare-metal recovery. The device provides HDMI video capture, USB keyboard and mouse emulation, virtual media, hardware power control, BIOS text recognition, and an integrated display while operating independently of the target computer’s operating system. The USBridge-KVM 2.0 is […]

A new month, a new LTM dose for you! It may not be perfectly monthly, but it keeps coming, and as always, it’s a carefully cooked roundup with ingredients ranging from migrating from Windows to Linux, desktop customization, and user-friendly Hyprland tools to critical security fixes and more. So, I’m sure you’ll find at least one section in this newsletter that you’ll enjoy.

Among the early pull requests merged today by Linus Torvalds for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle were removal of some ancient file-systems while adding in a new pseudo file-system...