GTK toolkit developers met in Brussels once again for their annual hackfest during FOSDEM week.

Following their latest GTK 4.21 test build for the GNOME 50 beta , GTK developers at the hackfest were discussing and thinking through some of their plans this year.

While previously there was talk of a possible opt-in unstable API for GTK so developers could test new experimental API features, no firm decision there has been reached yet. They did decide though to bump their C runtime requirement to C11 for the GTK

One of the headaches right now when dealing with the Snapdragon X Elite on Linux is that for a majority of the devices you need to fetch firmware files from the Windows 11 on ARM partition as the necessary firmware bits for Linux use aren't upstreamed to linux-firmware.git . That has gradually improved over time from the qcom-firmware-extract making the process easier to more firmware bits eventually being added to linux-firmware.git.

The latest improvement is Qualcomm adding their QUPv3 firmware to linux-

Engineers Michał Żygowski and Piotr Król of open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb presented at FOSDEM in Brussels on open-source for confidential compute infrastructure. With Intel not making strides to fully open-up their FSP package, the talk was centered around the modern AMD open-source firmware efforts led by their openSIL initiative for open-source CPU silicon initialization to replace AGESA in the Zen 6 timeframe.

With extensively writing about AMD openSIL now for nearly three years, it shouldn't be too much

The GNU Nettle cryptographic library is out with a major new update that introduces support for SLH-DSA, the post-quantum signature scheme selected by NIST for the FIPS 205 standard.

Nettle 4.0 fully supports SLH-DSA signatures for this standard also known as SPHINCS+ algorithm. SLH-DSA is stateless and secure against classic and quantum computing attacks. SLH-DSA can ultimately serve as a replacement to RSA, ECDSA, and similar algorithms.

The Nettle 4.0 release does break some APIs/

Ardour 9.0 is out today as the latest major feature release to this leading open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software for musicians, recording engineers, and other audio editing needs.

Ardour 9.0 ships many new features including piano-roll windows, GUI editing for the contents of MIDI cues/clips, support for directly recording into cue slots, a dedicated real-time perceptual analyzer window, keyboard-driven automation editing, and a lot of other UI/UX improvements. Ardour 9.0

Merged a year ago to the Linux kernel's Xe graphics driver was a change to disable D3Cold across all Battlemage GPUs. This was done due instability issues around the D3cold to D0 power state transition. Finally with the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel cycle that restriction is being loosened with restoring D3cold support with Battlemage GPUs aside from a specific NUC.

D3cold as the lowest-power, deep-sleep substate of D3 has been disabled for all Intel Arc B-Series

LLM scrapers for AI are even hungry for Debian's continuous integration "CI" data. Due to the ongoing abuse of the open web by LLM scrapers, the Debian CI infrastructure is restricting the publicly accessible data with their web server resources being hammered by bots/scrapers.

Paul Gevers on the behalf of the Debian CI team laid out some steps they needed to take in order to survive all of the scraper traffic to the ci.debian.net resource. First of all, the site is no longer publicly browseable

Following the release of TrueNAS 25.10 for this Linux-based, OpenZFS-running operating system focused on network appliances / storage devices, iX systems has shared some of their plans for TrueNAS 26 this year.

TrueNAS 26 will be entering beta in April and will be focused on using the Linux 6.18 LTS kernel paired with OpenZFS 2.4. The OpenZFS 2.4 upgrade will bring hybrid pool improvements and other enhancements for this open-source ZFS file-system.

At the