FreeBSD 15.0 Alpha 4 is out today as the newest weekly test release in working toward the FreeBSD 15 stable release in early December.

FreeBSD 15 is introducing many new features and much better hardware support for this major BSD operating system release. As far as changes specific to this week's FreeBSD 15.0 Alpha 4, the highlights include:

- Base system packages now contain descriptions.

- When installing FreeBSD from release media, pkg is now installed.

- The installer is now able to

When it comes to open-source games, Unvanquished remains one of the most promising and interesting open-source FPS games from a technical perspective. With its next release, Unvanquished has been ported to the SDL3 library and is working well natively on Wayland.

The project announced today that their next release is ready to run on the SDL3 layer and at the same time is now in good shape for Wayland, in large part due to the SDL3 usage. Porting to SDL3 came alongside updating various other libraries

Thirteen years after the AMD GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" GPUs initially launched as the Radeon HD 7000 series, recently there has been an effort to improve the support for both GCN 1.0 and the GCN 1.1 graphics processors with their open-source Linux driver stack. This recent effort has been led by one of the developers on Valve's Linux graphics team.

As noted back in July, a Valve Linux engineer has been working on big improvements for old AMD Radeon GPUs from

Linux engineer at Microsoft Christian Brauner sent out his set of 12 pull requests touching the VFS portion of the Linux kernel. These changes for the Linux 6.18 kernel include one pull request that touches the writeback code to address a situation of lockups being reported by users when systemd units read lots of files.

The problem at hand with these lockups will manifest when a systemd unit reads lots of files from a file-system mounted with the "lazytime" mount option. Lazytime being the option for only initially updating

Among the early pull requests submitted already to Linus Torvalds in advance of the Linux 6.18 merge window opening soon is the Btrfs file-system updates. Btrfs for Linux 6.18 has a few items worth calling out but no major features this cycle.

First up, there is a performance improvement for Btrfs in Linux 6.18 around ready-heavy workloads. Btrfs will now search data checksums in the commit root to avoid locking contention. Btrfs maintainer David Sterba notes this should improve parallelism of read

The sched_ext scheduler framework that allows creating kernel thread schedulers via BPF programs is ready with some updates for the Linux 6.18 kernel.

Sched_ext for Linux 6.18 is bringing code cleanups, new helpers, some debugging enhancements, and a variety of other improvements.

Also standing out with this sched_ext pull is preparations for cgroup sub-scheduler support.

- Code organization cleanup. Separate internal types and accessors to ext_internal.h to reduce the size of ext.c and

Following last week's KDE Plasma 6.5 beta release , the focus has shifted to bug fixing ahead of the October release of Plasma 6.5.0. There have been some minor features to still squeeze in, a lot of bug fixing has commenced, and also some early feature work around Plasma 6.6.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly summary of all things Plasma. KDE Plasma highlights this week include:

- The color blindness correction filters for KDE Plasma 6.5 now have

Following last week's GNOME 49 release , This Week in GNOME is out with their latest weekly summary of all interesting GNOME developments. Notable now for this post-49.0 time is libadwaita adding an adaptive sidebar widget.

AdwSidebar has been added to libadwaita as an adaptive sidebar widget. There is also AdwViewSwitcherSidebar as a view switcher variant. These libadwaita additions are intended to be a replacement to GTK's GtkStackSidebar widget.

Back in June it was announced by Canonical that for the Ubuntu 25.10 release they would be raising the RISC-V baseline to the RVA23 profile even with barely any available RISC-V platforms supporting that newer RISC-V profile. That change is still going ahead and leaves Ubuntu 25.10 on RISC-V currently only supporting the QEMU virtualized target.

Ubuntu 25.10 and beyond mandates the RISC-V RVA23 profile even with a lack of RISC-