Both the GNOME desktop and Mozilla Firefox browser projects are considering disabling middle-click-paste functionality by default.

A merge request for GNOME's gsettings-desktop-schemas was opened this weekend to disable the primary-paste functionality by default that allows using the middle mouse button for pasting.

Jordan Petridis argued in that GNOME pull request that middle-click paste is an "X11'ism" and that the setting could remain for those wanting to opt-in to enabling the functionality:

"This is an

A developer from Valve working on the RADV Vulkan driver was once again the most prolific contributor to Mesa in 2025 followed by AMD's Marek Olšák with continued improvements around RadeonSI and Gallium3D.

There were a lot of exciting Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan driver developments in 2025 as recapped last week on Phoronix. For those looking to quantify its development pace and compare the activity to prior years, I ran GitStats on the Mesa Git repository for some numbers for the most prolific contributors

Konstantin Seurer as one of the open-source developers working on the RADV driver for Valve has landed another ray-tracing performance optimization for the upcoming Mesa 26.0 release.

Merged today to Mesa 26.0-devel Git for the open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver is optimizing the BVH4 acceleration structure updates. Seurer explains in the merge request :

"It is more efficient to compute the child index of the current node inside the parent node and write the bounds when available. The previous

The newest open-source Apple Silicon driver being submitted for review in working toward its inclusion in the mainline Linux kernel is the Apple Silicon SMC power driver for being able to expose MacBook battery power metrics as well as AC power adapter status reporting under Linux.

Michael Reeves posted the set of patches today for the nearly 900 lines of code power driver for Apple's System Management Controller. This new "macsmc-power" driver allows for the Linux kernel to report the AC charging status as well as battery status

Patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list are hoping to provide mainline support for the Acer Swift SFA14-11 laptop powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite X1E78100 SoC.

It's the seemingly never-ending flow of new Device Tree "DT" patches for enabling more Qualcomm Snapdragon X series laptops to work with the mainline Linux kernel. While new Snapdragon X2 powered laptops are expected to be shown off this week at CES in Las Vegas, the Linux kernel

Intel engineer Francois Dugast today sent out the new patch series for enabling Transparent Hugepages (THP) support within the drm_pagemap code with a focus on the Intel Xe kernel driver usage. This enabling of THP support and in turn 2MB pages by the Xe driver is yielding "significant" performance improvements when using Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) such as for GPU compute workloads.

Dugast describes the patch series as providing " significant performance improvements when using SVM with 2MB pages. "

He further elaborated on one of the

A set of 36 patches sent out overnight is making big improvements to the Linux kernel's AES library. The patches allow for making use of the kernel's existing architecture-optimized AES code for better performance, that code is also constant-time, lower memory use, and all-around a nice improvement over the status quo.

Google engineer Eric Biggers has been responsible for many very nice Linux x86_64 performance optimizations in recent years around the kernel's crytographic "crypto" subsystem

Besides Debian's aging bug tracker interface , another challenge as the Debian Linux distribution project begins 2026 is that all volunteers have left their Data Protection Team. The Debian Data Protection Team deals with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) issues and related data protection/privacy related matters.

A few days ago a call for volunteers was sent out by Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille to join the Data Protection Team. Debian's Data Protection Team was established back in 2018 for dealing with European data

Merged back in December for Mesa 26.0 was RADV now supporting some new performance counters to help game developers and open-source driver developers. That new performance counter support aligned with the AMD GPUOpen Radeon GPU Profiler 2.6 release. At first those new performance counters were wired up for RDNA1 through RDNA3.5 GPUs while now the support has arrived for the latest RDNA4 GPUs.

The new performance counter support with Radeon GPU Profiler 2.6 included the LDS (number of LDS bank conflicts)