Along with releasing Plasma 6.7.2 this week, KDE developers continue to be quite busy working on new features and improvements for the Plasma 6.8 release while also furthering along fixes for future Plasma 6.7 point releases.

Most surprising this week is that KDE developers have dropped desktop OpenGL support from the KWin compositor. No, it's not due to the Vulkan renderer of KWin being ready for the spotlight. Rather, Plasma 6.8 is internally just using OpenGL ES now until that Vulkan support

While typically quite rare encountering a GPU reset under Linux in most conditions, currently if encountering one under GNOME your session gets wiped out. But thanks to a Google Summer of Code "GSoC" project this year, GNOME's Mutter compositor is finally seeing real GPU reset recovery handling.

Student developer Toluwaleke Ogundipe has been working on robust GPU reset recovery for GNOME Mutter as part of Google Summer of Code via OpenGL's GL_EXT_robustness extension and similar infrastructure. He's put out a lengthy blog post

In working toward the stable GNOME 51 desktop release due out in September, today marks the alpha release of GNOME 51.

GNOME 51 comes with many changes scattered about its many different components. No one change stands out particularly exciting at this stage but a wide variety of smaller improvements to provide more polish and added functionality over GNOME 50. Some of the GNOME 51 Alpha changes that caught my eye include:

- The Epiphany browser added a keyboard shortcut to copy the current page URL, among other improvements

The UPower abstraction layer used for power management on Linux systems, especially laptops and desktops, is out with an important fix today to avoid inadvertently falling back to the laptop battery "fast" charging mode on some laptops that in turn could degrade your laptop battery faster.

Two months ago a bug report came in about UPower changing the default charge type to "Fast" when disabling the laptop battery charging threshold feature. Typically it would be "standard" as the default and typically what a user would expect unless they explicitly opt

Vulkan 1.4.356 is out today and it's interesting for the lone new extension debuting: VK_EXT_shader_ocp_microscaling_types. The VK_EXT_shader_ocp_microscaling_types is for enabling the Open Compute Project's Microscaling MX data types to help with machine learning workloads with Vulkan.

The Open Compute Project Microscaling Formats (MX) include MXFP4, MXFP6, MXFP8, and MXINT8 for improving the efficiency of AI training and inference

With 3mdeb's Dasharo port of AMD openSIL and Coreboot running on the Gigabyte EPYC motherboard , 3mdeb engineers have been devoting more time to their bring-up of Coreboot+openSIL on the MSI PRO B850-P consumer motherboard for desktop AMD Ryzen. They now even have Microsoft Windows 11 working atop this open-source firmware alternative along with other features implemented.

Beyond bringing Coreboot and the AMD openSIL prototype to the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 motherboard, 3mdeb has also been independently

While the Rust Coreutils offers better memory safety than GNU Coreutils due to being written in the Rust programming language, subtle incompatibilities continue to be spotted in the Rust Coreutils implementations of the different commands. The latest coming to light this week was the Rust Coreutils cp command breaking Ubuntu image builds due to differences in argument handling.

Most kinks have been worked out in Rust Coreutils for compatibility differences with GNU Coreutils since the Rust Coreutils transition in Ubuntu 25.10 last year. There was breakage with some executables , performance shortcomings

On Thursday Intel sent out their first batch of Intel kernel graphics driver changes of new feature material targeting the Linux 7.3 kernel. This first batch of drm-intel-next for v7.3 continues to focus heavily on lining up Nova Lake's Xe3P integrated graphics/display support.

As part of yesterday's pull request of new Intel kernel driver material for Linux 7.3 is enabling Nova Lake's Common Mode Timing Generator "CMTG" for its display block (Intel Display version

NVIDIA's latest Linux kernel mailing list patches are for providing the Device Tree for the baseboard management controller (BMC) of their Vera Rubin VR-NVL server platform. With the Linux kernel patches and also for U-Boot, it's part of the upstreaming effort for supporting the open-source OpenBMC software on their latest hardware.

Sent out today on the Linux kernel mailing list is their 901 line Device Tree file for the VR-NVL BMC. NVIDIA VR-NVL is for the Vera Rubin