In time for next month's GNOME 50 release are some improvements merged today for the Mutter compositor code adding HiDPI and monitor mode emulation support to the screen-casting API and DevKit.

GNOME 50 is coming in quite heavy on the new features. The latest code to land in Mutter is a merge request that had been in the works by Jonas Ådahl the past three months for HiDPI and monitor mode emulaiton to benefit GNOME's virtual monitor and remote desktop capabilities.

Merged four years ago to the Linux kernel networking subsystem's Shared Memory Communications (SMC) code was TCP Upper Layer Protocol (ULP) support for allowing applications to replace TCP with the SMC protocol in-place as a transparent replacement. Except for the next kernel cycle it's set to be reverted after realizing it's "fundamentally broken."

Back in early 2022 the TCP ULO support for SMC was introduced by an Alibaba engineer but now it's realized to be an inadequate design and

OpenIndiana as the open-source project built atop Illumos that is continuing to maintain and advance the former OpenSolaris code is working on a big ambitions of modernizing the Image Packaging System (IPS) package management solution. As part of that they are working to move from a C and Python codebase over to Rust.

Till Wegmüller as one of the OpenIndiana maintainers presented at FOSDEM this past weekend in Brussels around re-building a next-gen system package manager and image management tool out of IPS.

The key takeaway is

Announced back in October was NTFS Plus as a new Linux driver for NTFS based on the former NTFS kernel driver prior to Paragon Software contributing the NTFS3 driver code. The intent with this new driver is for better performance. more features, public user-space utilities around it, and all-around a nice step forward for those reliant on this Microsoft file-system. Out this week is the sixth iteration of this remade NTFS driver.

This remade NTFS driver has continued picking up more features and as of yesterday is

The X.Org Foundation has announced that this year's X.Org Developers Conference will be taking place in Toronto, Canada and hosted by Arm.

XDC2026 is scheduled to run from 28 to 30 September in Toronto at the Daniels Spectrum cultural hub in Toronto. Arm has stepped up to organize this year's conference.

There isn't much more to share at this time but the initial details can be found via this mailing list post .

Following the Rust Coreutils presentation from FOSDEM this weekend , Rust Coreutils 0.6 is now available as the latest feature release for this Rust programming language re-implementation of GNU Coreutils.

Rust Coreutils is up to passing 622 GNU Coreutils test suite tests, or around 96.28% compatibility. As noted at FOSDEM, the goal remains for a 100% pass rate.

With the concerns raised over comments by Mozilla's new CEO with wanting to evolve Firefox into a "modern AI browser" , the Firefox 148 release due out later this month aims to address some of those concerns by having a new AI controls area within the web browser's settings.

Beginning with Firefox 148 releasing on 24 February, the browser now has an AI controls section whereby current and future generative AI features can be toggled.

The AI controls section will let users opt-out of