The first release candidate of the LibreOffice 25.8 open-source office suite is now available for testing. This half-year update as the leading free software alternative to Microsoft Office has been working on performance improvements for various file types, dropping support for old versions of Windows, and various other enhancements.

LibreOffice 25.8 remains tracking on schedule for its release in late August. Out this morning is LibreOffice 25.8 RC1 to encourage further testing. Two more release candidates are planned in the

Ubuntu maker Canonical today released Multipass 1.16 stable for this Linux / Windows / macOS means of deploying Ubuntu VM instances using this lightweight VM manager built atop Linux's KVM, Windows' Hyper-V, and QEMU on macOS. Notable with Multipass 1.16 is that it's now fully open-source software.

As outlined last month during the 1.16 RC1 announcement, Multipass is now fully open-source software . Multipass was open-source but with some macOS and Windows

Linux block maintainer Jens Axboe queued up a patch this week to drop the pktcdvd driver from the mainline kernel, which is expected to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.17 cycle. The pktcdvd driver has been in the kernel for over two decades since the Linux 2.6 days for packet-writing CD/DVD support albeit is hardly useful in today's world.

This driver is for packet writing on CD/DVD media and was previously deprecated in the kernel. It was used for CD-RW

The openSUSE project is currently contemplating if it's time to end support for 32-bit ARM devices.

Supporting the 32-bit ARM architecture by openSUSE is "increasingly challenging" given limited upstream support and decreasing maintenance resources around ARMv6 and ARMv7.

This would, of course, mean that 32-bit ARM devices like the original Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi Zero, BeagleBone, and other older SBCs and embedded devices would no longer work with future openSUSE Linux distribution releases.

Peter Hutterer of Red Hat announced today the first release candidate of libinput 1.29, the newest version of this input handling library used across both X.Org and Wayland environments with the modern Linux desktop.

Libinput 1.29 predominantly consists of internal code restructuring but there is also some user improvements like scroll wheel mice having a new heuristic for detecting inadvertent scroll wheel movement. In turn this new heuristic should improve scroll wheel responsiveness for most devices out there.

Wayback began recently as an experimental X11 compatibility layer for non-Wayland desktop environments to leverage Wayland components. While still in early form, the project has already taken off from being a personal GitHub project to now being hosted on FreeDesktop.org alongside other projects such as Wayland and the X.Org Server itself plus other prominent software like Mesa and GStreamer and much more.

Open-source developer Ariadne Conill of the Alpine Linux project began hacking on Wayback as an X11 compatibility layer for leveraging Wayland components for

A big merge today to Mesa Git ahead of next week's Mesa 25.2 code branching is removing the pre-DMA-BUF winsys support and as part of that clearing out all of the old DRI2 driver support.

Direct Rendering Infrastructure DRI2 was replaced by DRI3 a decade ago. All the important and useful drivers support DRI3 these days - and have for years. One year ago in Mesa 24.2 the DRI2 support was gated off by a "legacy-x1

ZLUDA Version 5-preview.43 was released today as this open-source CUDA implementation for use on non-NVIDIA GPUs, with one of the current focuses being on enabling CUDA on AMD Radeon GPUs with ROCm.

Last week was a status report for the current incarnation of ZLUDA for bringing CUDA compatibility to non-NVIDIA GPUs. Good progress continues to be made and there are now two full-time developers working on the effort.

ZLUDA lead developer Andrzej Janik today released ZLUDA 5-preview.43.