The first beta release of the FreeBSD 15 operating system is now available for testing.

Following last week's extra alpha release , FreeBSD 15.0 Beta 1 was announced overnight in the latest weekly snapshot for working toward this BSD operating system release due out in early December.

FreeBSD 15.0 continues shaping up to be a very significant OS update with reproducible builds and many other new features and hardware support. One of the recent notable efforts in the FreeBSD space has been to better enhance the FreeBSD on

Merged today for the Mesa 25.3 graphics driver code is enabling support for more PowerVR Imagination GPUs within the "PVR" Vulkan driver albeit not officially supported nor in active development. Your mileage may vary but for some users with certain GPUs may work out well enough.

Merged for Mesa 25.3 is adding the necessary device information bits for more supported and unsupported GPU cores. This includes some additional PowerVR Series 6XE, 6XT, 8XE, and B-Series GPUs. This complements the PVR

The Linux 6.18 merge window is winding down this weekend ahead of Linux 6.18-rc1 expected on Sunday. Merged today were some remaining x86 core updates, which includes a Retpoline optimization patch intended to help out Intel E core CPUs.

Return trampolines " Retpolines " are needed for Spectre Variant Two mitigations. Intel engineer Peter Zijlstra landed a patch for optimizing the x86 patch_retpoline() code within the kernel. He explains with the patch :

Currently the very common retpoline

The Solus Linus project is preparing for an "epoch bump" so they can make breaking / high-impact changes to in effect bump the binary version of their package repository.

With this next epoch for Solus Linux they are aiming to complete their /usr merge transition. Last year they took care of moving executables from /bin and /sbin to within /usr but symlinks remain. They haven't dropped those symlinks to avoid any potential user issues.

At the same time as completing their /usr merge they are

Last week during the Intel Tech Tour in Arizona , the Intel XPU Manager 1.3.3 software was released. Intel XPU Manager is a management and monitoring tool focused on Intel data center GPUs for simplifying administration, reliability, and maximizing utilization. Somewhat surprisingly, the Intel XPU Manager now deprecated the Data Center GPU Max Series as well as the Data Center GPU Flex Series.

The Intel XPU Manager provides a command-line interface and various APIs to assist in GPU discovery and associated information reporting. It also supports GPU

Intel engineer and Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki posted a set of patches this week to simplify the energy model used by Core Ultra hybrid systems with a mix of P and E cores while lacking SMT support, such as with the current Lunar Lake SoCs and upcoming Panther Lake.

Wysocki realized that the energy model used by the Intel P-State driver on these newer Intel hybrid laptops is much more complicated than necessary and so he took to simplifying the code. He summed up of the new energy model:

"The

Besides last-minute breakage with some executables over the switch to Rust Coreutils , Ubuntu 25.10 ended up shipping with broken Flatpak support.

Reported in early September but not fixed in time for the Ubuntu 25.10 release this week was errors when trying to install Flatpaks. The issue was found last month to be an issue with AppArmor and specifically its fusermount3 profile. Workarounds have been available but nothing fixed properly in time for the Ubuntu 25.10 release day. From Canonical'

For going along with the recent release of the GNOME 49 desktop, Phosh 0.50 has been released for this Wayland compositor focused on mobile devices.

Phosh 0.50 is now available for this mobile phone shell/compositor. The new release is designed to work with GNOME 49 while now adding workspace support, on-screen keyboard enhancements, visual updates, and other changes.

KDE developer Nate Graham describes this week as having seen a "massive amount of stability work" for the Plasma 6.5 desktop. Among the many fixes to land this week for this next Plasma desktop release were fixing the second and third most common causes of Plasma crashes. Additionally, the most prolific common crash scenario was discovered to be caused by third-party code.

The number one common cause of Plasma crashes is reported to be within the KDE wallpaper engine and has been attributed to more than five thousand crashes in