Linux NewsKDE Plasma 6.6.1 Released With Initial Batch Of Bug Fixes
Following last week's Plasma 6.6 release, KDE developers today shipped Plasma 6.6.1 as the first point release with an assortment of different bug fixes...
CGIT 1.3 Web Frontend For Git Released After Six Years
Jason Donenfeld of WireGuard and Linux cryptography fame has taken a break from that to release a new version of CGIT, the lightweight web interface for Git repositories. CGIT 1.3 is the first new release in six years and comes with a lot of changes...
Ardour 9.2 Open-Source DAW Released with MIDI Note Chasing and Duplication
Ardour 9.2 open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software is now available for download with MIDI note chasing and duplication, as well as bug fixes.
Firefox 148 Released with AI Kill Switch + More
The new Firefox 148 update begins rolling out today with a long-awaited ‘AI kill switch’, letting you finally nix nags to try big-tech chatbots or generate error-prone link summaries. If you turn off AI features in Firefox using the new toggle, Mozilla says future updates won’t undo or second guess your decision as new AI features arrive are added to the browser. Given that Mozilla now measures success by how much revenue it makes from AI features in its products, Firefox included, that stance is a reassuring one. To disable AI features in Firefox go to Settings > AI Controls. […]
GNU Octave 11.1.0 released
Version 11.1.0 of the GNU Octave scientific programming language has been released. This major release contains many new and improved functions. Among other things, it brings better support for classdef objects and arrays, broadcasting for special matrix types (like sparse, diagonal, or permutation matrices), updates for Matlab compatibility (notably support for the nanflag, vecdim and other parameters for many basic math and statistics functions), and performance improvements in many functions. See the release notes for details.
GNU Octave 11 Open-Source Scientific Programming Language Officially Released
GNU Octave 11 open-source high-level language intended for numerical computations, is now available for download with new features and improvements. Here's what's new!
Mesa PanVK Driver Seeing Up To 25.7x Speedup For MSAA
The open-source PanVK driver providing Vulkan support for modern Arm Mali graphics hardware is seeing big speed-ups in the multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) performance in Vulkan tests as a result of new code merged today to Mesa 26.1...
[$] The second half of the 7.0 merge window
The 7.0 merge window closed on February 22 with 11,588 non-merge commits total, 3,893 of which came in after the article covering the first half of the merge window. The changes in the second half were weighted toward bug fixes over new features, which is usual. There were still a handful of surprises, however, including 89 separate tiny code-cleanup changes from different people for the rtl8723bs driver, a number that surprised Greg Kroah-Hartman. It's unusual for a WiFi-chip driver to receive that much attention, especially a staging driver that is not yet ready for general use.
Vlad: Weston 15.0 is here: Lua shells, Vulkan rendering, and a smoother display stack
Over on the Collabora blog, Marius Vlad has an overview of Weston 15.0, which was released on February 19. Weston is the reference implementation of a Wayland compositor. The new release comes with a new shell that can be programmed using the Lua language, a new, experimental Vulkan renderer, smoother media playback, color-management additions, and more. One of Weston's fundamental pillars has always been making the most efficient use of display hardware. Over time, all the work we did to track and offload as much work as possible to this efficient fixed-function hardware has come at the cost of eating CPU time. In the last couple of release cycles, we've focused really hard on improving performance on even the most low-end of devices, so not only do we make the most efficient use of the GPU and display hardware, but we're also really kind on your CPU now. As part of that and to improve our tooling, Weston 15 now comes with support for the Perfetto profiler.
KaOS Explains Why It’s Ending Its 12-Year KDE Plasma Era
After more than a decade focused on KDE Plasma, KaOS has shared the technical and systemd-related reasons for its big desktop change.
Introducing matrixOS, an Immutable Gentoo-Based Linux Distro
It was only a matter of time before a developer decided one of the most challenging Linux distributions needed to be immutable.
OpenClaw Alternatives That You Can Run on Raspberry Pi Like Devices
You don't need a MacMini for running OpenClaw. These alternative projects can run on SBCs and ESP32 microcontrollers.
Linus Torvalds Drops Old Linux Kconfig Option To Address Tiresome Kernel Log Spam
Following yesterday's Linux 7.0-rc1 release, Linus Torvalds authored and merged a patch to get rid of the Linux kernel's WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM Kconfig option. While that option was added with good intentions, on some systems it can yield a lot of unnecessary kernel log spam...
Firefox 148 Is Now Available for Download with AI Kill Switch and Other Changes
Firefox 148 open-source web browser is now available for download with AI kill switch, improved support for screen readers, and other changes. Here's what's new!
Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel-rt and openssl), Debian (ca-certificates, chromium, gegl, glib2.0, libvpx, modsecurity-crs, nova, and pillow), Fedora (chromium, mingw-libpng, mupdf, python-pyasn1, python-PyMuPDF, python-uv-build, python3.13, qpdfview, rust-ambient-id, uv, and zathura-pdf-mupdf), Mageia (freerdp, gnutls, and libvpx), Red Hat (butane and grafana-pcp), SUSE (chromedriver, chromium, cockpit-repos, firefox, kernel, libpng16, postgresql16, postgresql17, postgresql18, python, python311-nltk, snpguest, ucode-intel-20260210, vexctl, and xen), and Ubuntu (djvulibre, evolution-data-server, linux-lowlatency, linux-xilinx, and u-boot).