There are some nice KDE Plasma 6.6 improvements that were merged ahead of Christmas.

This last full week before the holidays ramp up brought a large number of improvements to the upcoming Plasma 6.6 desktop. Standing out the most is finally having ambient light sensor support for modern laptops and also fixing HDR issues with Windows games under Wine/Proton.

- Support for ambient light sensors with devices having said sensor. This includes recent AMD Ryzen laptops like the Framework 13 that expose the ambient light sensor via the AMDGPU

For helping with the I/O performance in virtualized environments, merged this week to the DragonFlyBSD development code is multi-queue support for its VirtIO block "virtio_blk" driver.

Multi-queue support is now wired up for DragonFlyBSD's VirtIO block driver to help deliver better I/O performance on modern hardware. There will be as many virtqueues as CPU cores and interrupts available on the system. This DragonFlyBSD addition does allow configuring the number of queues as well via the "hw.vtblk.max_

Google's Chrome/Chromium web browser code has merged support for Linux printing via the XDG Portal. This is important to allow print support from within Flatpak or Snap sandboxed versions of Google's web browser.

Per this issue tracker for Chromium, printing via XDG Portal is needed to handle printing from sandboxed environments. Using XDG Portal also allows for a more native print dialog rather than the default GTK dialog.

In working toward the Wine 11.0 stable release in January, Wine 11.0-rc3 is out today as the latest weekly release candidate.

The code/feature freeze began two weeks ago and thus continuing with just bug/regression fixing until the stable Wine 11.0 release is ready next month.

Some of the new fixes in Wine 11.0-rc3 include fixing the GLX back-end when using the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack, fixing window white/black screen issues

For the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel the initial Xe3P_LPD GPU support was merged for the integrated graphics to be found with Nova Lake processors. There were some initial Xe3P_LPD display patches also merged for Linux 6.19 but it looks like for Linux 6.20 (or what may end up being known as Linux 7.0), the display support will actually be functional for driving monitors from Nova Lake.

Sent out today to DRM-Next was

Five years ago Intel began introducing "workload hints" used for thermal and power purposes with their SoCs and in turn on the software-side being enabled with their INT340X kernel driver on Linux systems. That Intel workload hint coverage was added to the Linux kernel in late 2020 and then a big addition in 2023 with Meteor Lake introducing new workload hint type capabilities . Now patches have been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list for new workload hint functionality coming for upcoming Panther Lake

For X.Org Server users there is a new release of xorgproto for the holidays. Xorgproto as the set of headers and specifications for the X11 core protocols and extensions is out with its first new release since March 2024.

Xorgproto 2025.1 released today as the first new release in a year and a half for this set of X11 protocols/extensions. The main purpose of this new release is adding additional keysyms for newer keyboard keys found on laptop keyboards and more