For those making use of Microsoft's exFAT file-system under Linux, tagged today was exfatprogs 1.3.2 as the newest update to these open-source user-space programs for going along with the Linux kernel's exFAT file-system driver.

Most of the work in exfatprogs 1.3.2 involves improvements to the mkfs.extfat utility for making exFAT file-systems.

The mkfs.exfat utility will now discard blocks prior to write-outs by default. There is also a now

The Fedora 44 Beta release is out today on schedule in working toward the official Fedora 44 release around mid-April.

Fedora Workstation 44 features the latest GNOME 50 desktop components. Or if you are a KDE fan, Fedora 44 delivers on a unified KDE out-of-the-box experience with Plasma 6.6 and is also using the new Plasma Login Manager in place of SDDM. There are also other updated desktop options in Fedora 44 like the Budgie 10.10

FreeBSD 14.4 is out today as the latest update to the aging FreeBSD 14 series for those not yet ready to upgrade to FreeBSD 15 that debuted as stable last year.

FreeBSD 14.4 backports various improvements and fixes to the FreeBSD 14 series for those still planning to use this release branch for a while. FreeBSD 14.4 is bringing a number of application updates, such as minor updates to OpenSSL and OpenZFS and XZ. FreeBSD 14.4 also includes new hardware support

Last week was a statement by System76 regarding recent age verification laws in California and Colorado among other US states that could have a profound impact on Linux distributions and other open-source software. The Colorado legislation is especially pressing to System76 considering that is where they are based. Fortunately, they aren't taking this lightly and there is some hope that at least in Colorado open-source software could be excluded.

System76 CEO Carl Richell commented today on X after meeting with a Colorado State Senator

Last week NVIDIA released the 595.45.04 Linux driver beta as their first release in the R595 series for Linux and it's running very well in initial testing . Today as part of their Vulkan developer beta program, they have released the NVIDIA 595.44.02 driver that brings some new Vulkan API features.

Today's release is the 595.44.02 beta driver compared to last week's 595

With CUDA 13.2 that is now shipping, NVIDIA has provided official support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux compatible distributions/downstreams like AlmaLinux to CUDA. With this official NVIDIA CUDA support for these RHEL-compatible distributions, NVIDIA is also allowing the NVIDIA packages to be distributed directly from the OS package repositories.

AlmaLinux relayed the word today of NVIDIA now officially supporting RHEL-derived but compatible distributions with CUDA:

"NVIDIA has added official support for enterprise Linux compatible distributions, including AlmaLinux, ensuring that our users can get

Canonical for a while has been developing Authd as an authentication service for external cloud-based identity providers. Authd was designed from the ground-up to provide secure management of identity and access for Ubuntu systems while only with next month's Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release is it actually hitting the universe archive.

Authd hasn't shipped in the archive of Ubuntu Linux releases up until now but those system administrators wanting to rely on it have needed to use a Canonical PPA or build from the upstream source.

Intel just published the XeSS 3.0 SDK to GitHub as the newest version of their Xe Super Sampling AI-enhanced upscaling technology for gamers. Sadly though it remains proprietary software and only with native support for Windows.

While Intel XeSS was originally claimed to be "open source" , to date it hasn't been and some of those claims were since removed. The XeSS SDK is on GitHub but depends upon binary-only Windows DLLs that are not open-source. When receiving the GitHub notification that XeSS 3