Latest Linux and open source news from around the web
There is two weeks to go until the GNOME 50 stable release while out today is the release candidate of Mutter 50. This Mutter 50.rc release brings some exciting last-minute enhancements to this Wayland compositor...
Here’s what people were reading the most on FOSS Force during the month of February, 2026. The post FOSS Force’s Top Ten for February, 2026 appeared first on FOSS Force.
KDE Plasma 6.6.2 is now available as the second maintenance update to the latest KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop environment series with more bug fixes.
Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency announced a new and expanded Sovereign Tech Fellowship program that is now open to community managers and technical writers, beyond just FOSS maintainers from the prior round...
Apple announced today the new Fusion Architecture with the M5 Pro and M5 Max SoCs that also feature a next-generation GPU...
Our Independence 2026 Drive has slowed a bit, but readers like Charlie are still going out of their way to keep distro reviews, app coverage, and independent FOSS reporting alive here at FOSS Force. The post Our Fundraising Drive: Like Listener-Supported Radio, Without Breaking Into Programming appeared first on FOSS Force.
Last year AMD and Intel as part of the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group announced ChkTag for x86 memory tagging across processors to better fight buffer overflows and use-after-free errors. In preparing for ChkTag with future processors, Intel has begun adapting their Linear Address Masking (LAM) support to more nicely jive with it...
Intel yesterday sent out their first "drm-xe-next" pull request to DRM-Next of new Xe kernel graphics driver improvements they have readied for their eventual upstreaming into the Linux 7.1 kernel...
AMD open-sourced the ROCprof Trace Decoder "rocprof-trace-decoder", a tool useful for developers targeting the AMD GPU compute stack...
A Linux driver has been published for the ARCTIC Fan Controller to be able to read fan speeds under Linux as well as setting the PWM fan speed for each of the ten fans supported by this controller. Making this driver all the more exciting is that ARCTIC Cooling is directly working on this driver rather than just being a community/third-party creation. Furthermore, ARCTIC Cooling is working on getting this driver to the upstream Linux kernel...
GIMP 3.2 RC3 is now available for testing, giving those interested in trying the image editor’s upcoming features, the chance to do so. This is the third (and likely final) release candidate before the stable GIMP 3.2 release arrives. It’s said to deliver “a number of bug fixes and final polishes” to the many new features added in the development and beta builds. The changes mentioned below are from between RC2 to RC3, not from GIMP 3.0 to GIMP 3.2. If you’ve not tracked development, don’t think that what follows is an overview of what’s new in GIMP 3.2 as […]
Linus Torvalds has announced the first Release Candidate (RC) for the 7.x kernel is available for those who want to test it.
As more governments push age checks into our apps and operating systems, the dystopian future doesn't feel so far off anymore.
There are many applications that need to be able to write multi-block chunks of data to disk with the assurance that the operation will either complete successfully or fail altogether — that the write will not be partially completed (or "torn"), in other words. For years, kernel developers have worked on providing atomic writes as a way of satisfying that need; see, for example, sessions from the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF (LSFMM+BPF) Summit from 2023, 2024, and 2025 (twice). While atomic direct I/O is now supported by some filesystems, atomic buffered I/O still is not. Filling that gap seems certain to be a 2026 LSFMM+BPF topic but, thanks to an early discussion, the shape of a solution might already be coming into focus.
Motorola is partnering with the open source GrapheneOS Foundation to enhance mobile security and develop future devices with GrapheneOS compatibility.
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