Following all of the Linux and broader open-source software enablement around Power11 the past three or so years, IBM today formally announced their new Power11 hardware.

IBM announced Power11 today for their next-generation of Power servers for both on-premises and within the IBM Cloud.

IBM is talking up Power11 as delivering 55% better core performance over Power9 and up to 45% more capacity with higher core counts in entry and mid-range servers compared to Power1

The AMD Hardware Feedback Driver has been queued up via a TIP branch for expected merging during the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel cycle. This new open-source AMD driver is designed to help make the kernel's scheduler make better decisions around task placement for heterogeneous processor designs with a mix of the "classic" and "dense" cores.

Being worked on for nearly the past year has been this new AMD heterogeneous core driver for Linux that implements the AMD Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI) for providing better performance

In addition to Intel upstreaming the Xe3 graphics firmware needed for upcoming Panther Lake SoCs to linux-firmware.git so those firmware binaries can get picked up by Linux distributions ahead of Panther Lake laptops shipping, Intel also upstreamed fan control firmware as a first for their graphics card efforts.

It turns out Intel graphics cards at least for the recent Arc B-Series "Battlemage" rely on their own dedicated firmware binaries.

The Ardour digital audio workstation (DAW) software has removed its build support for the GTK+ (GTK2) toolkit in favor of now exclusively relying upon "YTK" as its own localized fork of this toolkit.

In early 2024 the popular Adour digital audio workstation software introduced its own localized, stripped down version of the GTK2 toolkit. The initial motivation for introducing this stripped down version of GTK as "YTK" was due to some Linux distributions removing GTK2 libraries from their repositories. So to

Interestingly a batch of new AMD GPU firmware files were upstreamed to linux-firmware.git yesterday in preparing for the next AMD product launch of hardware featuring RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics.

Merged out of the blue yesterday to this de facto central repository for Linux firmware files were the firmware binaries needed for enabling different new AMD GPU IP blocks. This included enabling GFX/GC 11.5.3, PSP 14.0.5, SDMA 6.1.3, and DCN 3.6.

FEX 2507 is now available for this open-source emulator that allows running x86/x86_64 games and applications atop 64-bit ARM Linux devices whether they be AArch64 servers or ARM64 single board computers and other devices.

A notable milestone with today's FEX 2507 release is implementing enough support for running the Ubisoft Connect launcher and in turn being able to run some Ubisoft game titles. The Ubisoft Connect launcher had been "a thorn

OBS Studio 31.1 is now available for those using this cross-platform free software for screencasting and other screen recording purposes. OBS Studio 31.1 is another great step forward for this open-source software that has a devoted following and user-base across Windows, macOS, and Linux.

For Linux users OBS Studio 31.1 is quite exciting in that it adds explicit sync support for PipeWire screen capture to improve that experience on the modern Linux desktop OBS Studio 31.1 on Linux

U-Boot 2025.07 is out today as the newest version of this popular open-source boot loader that is widely-used among embedded devices across different CPU architectures.

U-Boot 2025.07 brings new and improved hardware support, including for the likes of the Apple M1 and M2 SoCs, NXP i.MX8 / i.MX9, AMD Versal, Raspberry Pi, NVIDIA Tegra, and more. Plus there is also exFAT file-system

The Thunderbird mail client developers today formally announced Thunderbird 140 as the newest Extended Support Release (ESR) for this cross-platform alternative to Microsoft Outlook.

Thunderbird 140 is a big upgrade over the prior Thunderbird 128 ESR release. Thunderbird 140 now automatically adapts to using the dark message mode as part of the dark mode experience, new appearance settings, native OS notifications across Windows / Linux / macOS, easier account adding with the Thunderbird Account Hub, and manual folder sorting support. Thunderbird