Linux 7.1-rc2 is out for testing with its accumulation of initial bug and regression fixes that have been collected over the past week since the Linux 7.1 merge window was capped off.

With Linux 7.1-rc2 some of the changes that crossed my radar include an audio fix for the Steam Deck OLED after the mainline kernel had broken audio support for the Steam Deck OLED handheld the past two years (Valve's downstream kernel was carrying its own patch/workaround as were other handheld

Brush v0.4 debuted today for this "Bourne Rusty Shell" as a Bash/POSIX-compatible shell written in the Rust programming language.

Brush v0.4 is described by its developers as a "significant" release that was months in the making. There was sizable progress made on its Bash compatibility with more features now implemented and others substantially expanded upon. Brush v0.4 is also now much more robust against difference edge cases. The release announcement highlights some of the specifics as:

"Major

ReactOS as the "open-source Windows" operating system project striving for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows has seen some exciting improvements this week.

ReactOS developers shared with Phoronix that they now have a unified BootCD to replace their previously separate boot/install media and their live CD. The new unified media combines both their traditional text-mode installer and their LiveCD image. Their new ISO aims to support a future first-stage GUI installer and all-around better than their previously separate media while a GUI installer will be more

This week Google announced the selected Google Summer of Code "GSoC" 2026 projects for providing stipends to student developers for engaging in different open-source projects. This year a lot of open-source projects involve AI/LLM adoption but there are also a number of other interesting student projects at large from GNOME Mutter GPU reset recovery to adding new features to FreeBSD.

The GSoC 2026 contributors were announced this week and over the weekend I went one by one checking out the more than one thousand

It's been an interesting 2026 in Linux development with beginning to phase out i486 CPU support , dropping ISDN and amateur "ham" radio support , and other code cleaning in the name of a diminishing user base -- or perhaps even no users left -- for those running such vintage hardware with a modern, up-to-date kernel. Yet ISA sound card drivers have seen an uptick in activity.

Last month was this patch series improving the AMD InterWave ISA sound card driver

One of the interesting GNOME-aligned application developments in recent months has been RustConn as a modern GTK4-based connection manager . RustConn allows managing SSH, RDP, VNC, SPICE, and a variety of other connections from this Rust-written application. It's been steadily tacking on more features and that effort continued with more features landing.

RustConn's latest releases bring " the three biggest features since the project started ", per This Week in GNOME . Among the features are Cloud Sync support for synchronizing connection

One of the most prominent changes with the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel release is the introduction of the new NTFS driver in the Linux 7.1 kernel . This new driver provides more features and better performance than the Paragon NTFS3 driver that's been in the kernel the past few years and far better off than the original NTFS read-only driver that previously was in the kernel and for which this new driver is based. Needless to say it's also a big improvement over the NTFS-3G

It turns out the Steam Deck OLED gaming handheld has not had working audio support with the mainline (upstream) Linux kernel since a change in late 2023 that was merged for Linux 6.8. There was an AMD ASoC audio change that inadvertently broke audio support for the Steam Deck OLED handheld but not affecting the original LCD model. Valve's downstream Steam OS kernel has compensated for this known breakage and other distributions targeting the Steam Deck OLED have carried the patch, but now there is a proper solution

Miklos Szeredi of Red Hat has been developing the FUSEX file-system as an extended/experimental area for File-System in User-Space "FUSE" development.

One of the leading motivators to the development of FUSEX is working to provide a clean codebase for big feature work being spurred on by pursuing the FUSE_IOMAP API. Szeredi added in the patch message:

"The purpose is to provide a clean base for big features like the FUSE_IOMAP api.

It's also a good way to try new