Today's the day! KDE developers have just released Plasma 6.7 as the newest version of this leading open-source desktop environment.

KDE Plasma 6.7 is now shipping with its per-screen virtual desktop support, countless Wayland improvements as it gears up for Plasma 6.8 in going Wayland-only, improved printer integration, faster virtual desktop switching in t he Overview screen, Discover software store polishing, Air as a light version of the Oxygen theme has returned, and Union has debuted as the

After Linux 7.1 dropped support for old i486 CPUs and also began removing some old ISA and PCMCIA device drivers , there is some additional old hardware relics being cleared out of the in-development Linux 7.2 driver... The frame-buffer device driver for the old Hercules Monochrome ISA graphics card is now removed from the Linux kernel after decades at play.

The FBDEV subsystem updates typically aren't too interesting these days with more of the display work happening in the Direct Rendering Manager (

After some last minute delays pushing the 15.1-RELEASE back by two weeks, FreeBSD 15.1 is now shipping as the newest stable release of this BSD operating system.

FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE delivers a number of updated user-space packages, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) support is now removed, DTrace now works on 32-bit PowerPC and PowerPC64LE platforms, support for changing different CPU schedulers at boot time via the "kern.sched" tunable, NVMe

In addition to the surprising impact of /proc/filesystems read optimizations for Linux 7.2 , another one of the VFS pull requests for this next kernel version is delivering some nice improvements for EXT4 and XFS around IOmap, the framework that maps file data offsets in memory to their physical locations on storage.

Among the IOmap changes now merged for the Linux kernel is an optimization showing nice benefit for EXT4 and XFS when running with NVMe SSD storage and using IO_uring:

"Skip the memset of the iomap

The community of developers continuing to maintain Ubuntu Touch for smartphones has released the Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 beta ahead of the planned stable release in mid-July.

Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 continues relying on the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS package base as implied by the name but with some notable upgrades like jumping from Chromium 87 to Chromium 134 for its Morph web browser base. The other big change for end users in this Ubuntu Touch

The newest open-source project out of Intel is the Intel Performance Skills project that is providing AI agent skills to help with CPU performance analysis and performance optimizations on Linux.

Intel Performance Skills began coming about in recent weeks to provide AI agents with structured, multi-step workflows for profiling, performance anti-patterns in source code, and more. The Intel Performance Skills can work with GitHub CLI / Copilot, Claude COde, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, and OpenCode.

The MIT-licensed project can detect coding patterns

The FreeBSD Project announced today the launch of an AI-Assisted Vulnerability Discovery Project with grant funding provided by the Linux Foundation backed Alpha-Omega project. Alpha-Mega has sponsors including Microsoft, AWS, Google, Anthrophic, OpenAI, and others who will now be helping with FreeBSD uncovering new vulnerabilities by leveraging AI.

This is anticipated to be a six month project with a goal to reduce the number of exploitable vulnerabilities in the FreeBSD codebase. This is a $250k USD grant for key members of the

Last month a new GCC back-end was proposed for WebAssembly to allow C/C++ code to be compiled to WASM with this GNU compiler toolchain. The GCC Steering Committee has evaluated it and approves the notion of WebAssembly back-end for GCC.

Rather than having to rely on LLVM-based tooling for converting code to WebAssembly, a modern GCC back-end was developed. It's still in early stages of development and not yet feature complete, but at least the concept of WASM back-end

After days of dealing with 1,500+ packages in the Arch Linux AUR containing malware , the latest headache in the Arch Linux User Repository is Russian spam and offensive messages.

Nicolas Boichat with his AI/LLM detection bot detected some questionable messages appearing in AUR content. Russian messages were being added post-install to the bashrc / zshrc / Fish configuration, etc containing offensive messaging. Those commits happened on the 14th, after the recent malware fiasco.