HarfBuzz is the open-source text shaping engine originally born out of the FreeType project and now widely-used by GNOME, KDE, Java, Flutter, Godot, Chromium, LibreOffice, and countless other applications. HarfBuzz 14.0 released today and making this release quite exciting is introducing a GPU-accelerated text rendering library.

HarfBuzz 14.0 released today with the new libharfbuzz-gpu library that supports GPU-based text rasterization via the Slug algorithm. The GPU handles decoding and rasterizing directly in the fragment

What's more annoying: half-baked AI slop open-source patches or April Fools' Day with programmers trying to have some fun? This year, April 1 is seeming more patches than usual.

Besides the Linux patches to allow IPv6-only builds and to allow deprecating "legacy" IPv4 that does carry some elements of actual intent for better separating IPv4 and IPv6 in the kernel, there are also other April 1 patches this year on the Linux kernel mailing list.

There is a patch

KDE Linux as the in-house, leading-edge Linux distribution for showcasing the latest KDE Plasma innovations has promoted itself as being an atomically updated Linux distribution. But these atomic updates didn't quite work out as planned recently with some users finding their system(s) unbootable. But improvements are being made now for better robustness moving forward.

Stemming from a rather serious bug in the new systemd 260 release the update transfer can get skipped, in turn breaking the system with systemd-sysupdate update . KDE

The Rust-For-Linux crew is preparing to raise the minimum supported Rust version for building the Linux kernel and and similarly also bumping the minimum supported version of bindgen, the tool for generating Rust FFI bindings for C code in the kernel.

Rust 1.85 released last year and stabilized the Rust 2024 edition. Rust 1.85 went on to find use as the default version in the likes of Debian 13 "Trixie".

Linux kernel developers last year then shared their plans for

Wayland Protocols 1.48 is out today with the long-awaited XDG Session Management protocol in tow as well as several new experimental protocols.

XDG Session Management was recently merged after in discussion for years and now part of Wayland Protocols 1.48. XDG Session Management allows clients to restore previous window setups, including window positioning and window state. This long sought-after protocol is finally here for improving the modern Linux desktop experience.

Wayland Protocols 1.48 also has updates to the text input protocol for

Last month Dell upstreamed the firmware needed for their XPS 13 935 Snapdragon X1 Elite laptop . This makes the Linux outlook for this ARM-based Dell XPS laptop much better than before in not having to worry about extracting necessary firmware blobs from Windows 11. Now another step forward for the Dell XPS 13 9345 is being made with a new EC driver being posted to enhance the hardware support.

Open-source developer Aleksandrs Vinarskis worked on a new embedded controller (EC) driver for

Longtime Linux developer David Woodhouse sent out a patch series today to "deprecate legacy IP" support within the Linux kernel. While some of his commentary his April 1st-esque, he does acknowledge much of this work has merit. Ultimately it can allow for building a Linux kernel with IPv6-only support and working on allowing "legacy" IPv4 support to be disabled as part of the kernel build.

The set of six patches add a CONFIG_LEGACY_IP option to allow toggling IPv4 support for

Raspberry Pi prices are going up yet again due to the continued memory squeeze on the industry. To help offset the memory prices for some use-cases, Raspberry Pi also announced the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 3GB model at $83 to help fill the void between the 2GB and 4GB options.

The 3GB Raspberry Pi 4 was announced at $83.75 USD for those not needing quite 4GB of RAM and looking to save some memory given the ongoing price increases.

Gaim! Any desktop Linux users from 20+ years ago likely remember the Gaim instant messaging app that was commonly shipped by desktop Linux distributions for interfacing with different instant messaging platforms like AIM, MSN, ICQ, etc. About twenty years ago Gaim was renamed to Pidgin though due to the AOL Instant Messenger trademark. But with the AIM trademark since expired and wanting to take a differing approach from the latest Pidgin, Gaim 3 is under development.

Gaim was a popular desktop Linux app in the days before Slack, Discord