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.

Mutter 50.rc brings great improvements for the NVIDIA R590 Linux driver usage, SDR-Native color mode support, various high dynamic range (HDR) improvements, screen sharing improvements, and more. The Mutter 50.rc highlights include:

- Unblocking the NVIDIA performance

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.

Announced back in 2024 was the Sovereign Tech Fellowship program to support open-source maintainers , especially those that may be supporting multiple open-source projects. Over 2025 they successfully ran the program and are now opening up applications for the next round of the program.

They will be contracting up to 12 fellows

Apple announced today the new Fusion Architecture with the M5 Pro and M5 Max SoCs that also feature a next-generation GPU.

Apple announced the M5 Pro and M5 Max for powering the new MacBook Pro laptops. The Apple Fusion Architecture combines two dies into a single SoC. This includes the CPU, GPU, Media Engine, Unified Memory Controller, Neural Engine, and Thunderbolt 5.

The M5 Pro and M5 Max feature a new 18-core CPU architecture, "super cores" as

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.

ChkTag is going to bring new x86 instructions for detecting memory safety violations and various other controls for lots of flexibility around dealing with memory safety issues. Linear Address Masking meanwhile is

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.

Intel has their first batch of several Xe driver improvements ready ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window coming up in mid-April. The Xe driver improvements for this next kernel include a number of hardware workarounds, SR-IOV changes, "lots of work" on the Xe3(P)

AMD open-sourced the ROCprof Trace Decoder "rocprof-trace-decoder", a tool useful for developers targeting the AMD GPU compute stack.

Developers behind Tinygrad have long been lobbying AMD to open-source rocprof-trace-decoder as one of the few remaining blobs on the CPU side and would be helpful to them in their Tinygrad development of the AMD GPU back-end. Finally that milestone was achieved with the code being made open-source as well as the specification for the trace files.

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.

Aureo Serrano of ARCTIC Cooling posted the hardware monitoring (HWMON) Linux driver for review

Ahead of the stable GIMP 3.2 release hopefully happening soon, GIMP 3.2 RC3 was released this evening for testing.

GIMP 3.2 has been aiming to release within one year of GIMP 3.0 . With GIMP 3.0 having released in mid-March , the stable GIMP 3.2 will hopefully be out around this time if all goes well.