Following Intel's disclosure less than one month ago of Crescent Island as a upcoming Xe3P graphics card with 160GB of vRAM focused on enterprise-level AI inferencing, Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers have been quick to begin plumbing the Xe kernel graphics driver for this next-generation graphics card.

Sent out last week to DRM-Next was the very preliminary Crescent Island "CRI" enablement for Linux 6.19 in adding the new device ID and platform details while leveraging

In mid-2024, Bavarian PC vendor TUXEDO Computers began teasing a Snapdragon X Elite powered Linux laptop with hopes of having it available by Christmas 2024. As we approach Christmas 2025, there still are no immediate signs of this new ARM-based TUXEDO laptop soon shipping but there are signs of life still with new Linux kernel patches posted for enabling this Snapdragon X Elite laptop.

It looks like TUXEDO Computers is still working to bring their Snapdragon X Elite Linux laptop to market.

Days after the Linux Vendor Firmware Service celebrated 135 million firmware downloads , a new version of the Fwupd utility is now available for firmware updating systems and peripherals under Linux.

Fwupd 2.0.17 comes with a number of new features, many bug fixes, and continuing to broaden the hardware support by this firmware updating utility that pairs with LVFS.

New features of Fwupd 2.0.17 include support for client-side phased update deployments, support for post-quantum signatures, generating NVMe GUIDs

Sent out today to DRM-Next was the latest weekly batch of drm-misc-next patches for enhancing the various smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers within the kernel. Included with this week's update is supporting some additional Mali and Vivante hardware as well as continuing to enhance the in-kernel accelerator "accel" drivers.

On the accelerator driver front, the Intel IVPU driver for their NPUs has added user pointer " userptr " support. The user pointer support is for buffers allocated in user-space by an application

The merge to GNOME Mutter has finally happened that "completely drops" the X11 back-end to make GNOME strictly focused on Wayland-based environments.

The four month old merge request by Bilal Elmoussaoui to drop the X11 back-end was merged a short time ago. The merge request sums it up as:

"Drop the X11 backend

Completely drops the whole x11 backend."

After the X11 path was disabled by default in the GNOME 49 release, the code

LXQt 2.3 is out today as the newest release of this lightwight, Qt-based desktop environment.

A major theme of LXQt 2.3 has been on continuing to enhance its Wayland support for those preferring to use Wayland over X11. The LXQt Panel has better Wayland support, desktop switcher support with more compositors, the custom command plug-in is now more flexible under Wayland, and screen grab functionality has started to work under Wayland.

The LXQt desktop switcher support works with Wayland compositors supporting the ext

Over the past few months the open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb has been porting Coreboot and AMD's new openSIL silicon initialization library to the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1. The Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 is a broadly available motherboard that supports the latest-generation AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" server processors. 3mdeb has been fairly successful in their quest and an early demonstrator for openSIL .

3mdeb was funded by the NLnet Foundation with a grant to work on bringing open

Given this week's release of Flatpak 1.17 for app sandboxing, open-source developer Sebastian Wick published a blog post on Tuesday around the latest Flatpak developments and a look ahead at some of the feature development planned. Arguably most significant of that is the plans for systemd-appd.

Sebastian Wick and Adrian Vovk are planning to develop "systemd-appd" as a new service to allow querying running app instances. The plans for systemd-appd are for being able to authenticate Flatpak instances and working towards