LACT 0.8.2 is out this weekend as the newest feature release to this Linux GPU control application. This Rust-based software provides a GUI for controlling AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel GPUs under Linux with various monitoring metrics, information reporting, power configuration, thermals configuration, and overclocking with supported hardware.

LACT is one of the few options available for those wanting an open-source GPU control/monitoring app for Intel / AMD Radeon / NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on Linux. Beyond its command line and GUI

With plans to release next Tuesday (21 October), KDE developers this week have been putting the finishing touches on this next open-source desktop update. Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham says he thinks it's going to be "a pretty darn good release" when it officially debuts.

This week in Plasma is out with its latest issue written by Nate Graham. This week he and other Plasma developers focused on wrapping up Plasma 6.5 development. Plus celebrating the 29th birthday of KDE.

Meanwhile

Following the release of Wine 10.16 with initial NTSYNC support from two weeks ago, Wine 10.17 is now available as the latest development release in working toward Wine 11.0 stable in early 2026 .

Wine 10.17 brings some nice changes such as an updated Mono build, improved CPU information reporting on FreeBSD, better support for ANSI ODBC drivers, and now defaulting to the EGL renderer for OpenGL with Wine.

For those interested in scanning files for malware and other threat detection under Linux and using the GNOME desktop, Lenspect is a new GNOME-aligned application that is a GUI powered by VirusTotal for being a Linux-native security threat scanner.

As noted by This Week in GNOME , Lenspect has launched as a security threat scanner built atop Google-owned VirusTotal. In turn users of this GNOME-focused desktop application need to have their own VirusTotal API key.

An interesting technical collaboration between AMD and Intel as well as other industry players like Google, Bytedance, Microsoft, MiTAC, HPE, and others is openSFI. The new openSFI "Open Silicon Firmware Interface" project is aiming to work toward vendor-neutral low-level firmware interfaces for more interoperable firmware solutions across vendors.

The openSFI project was previously announced at the Open Compute Project summit and has been heavily in the works for several months now but happened to slide under my radar until digging through the technical content from this week

Due to Intel CPU microcode sizes continuing to get larger and late-loading new CPU microcode onto a running system can lead to (brief) disruptions/downtime while the update is applied, future Intel CPUs are introducing a microcode "staging" feature to reduce that microcode updating downtime. The Linux 6.19 kernel in the new year is set to support the Intel microcode staging feature with capable processors.

Applying CPU microcode updates while systems/servers are online can lead to brief disruptions. It's long been known

Improvements to the Linux kernel's AES-GCM Galois/Counter Mode crypto block cipher code will yield up to 74% faster performance for AMD Zen 3 processors with the Linux 6.19 kernel in the new year.

For AES-GCM crypto use within TLS, IPsec, WiFi WPA3, HTTP/3, SSH, and other purposes there is much faster performance coming for AVX2 capable processors thanks to a new optimized code path for CPUs lacking AVX-512, like is found with

In addition to the recent Linux kernel patches out of Intel for Cache Aware Scheduling for better performance , separately, another interesting new patch series was sent out this week for the Linux kernel. The patches rework some low-level Linux kernel memory management code and at least for database workloads the early benchmarks are showing possible 14~18% faster database performance with PostgreSQL.

Intel Fellow Thomas Gleixner of Intel-owned Linutronix posted an interesting patch series this week. The 19 patches are a rewrite of Linux's