With FreeBSD having worked on improving its laptop support over the past two years with some big changes and ongoing efforts for making a nice KDE desktop experience on FreeBSD , FreeBSD Foundation's Executive Director has been trying to daily drive FreeBSD on laptops.

Similar to the Linux Foundation Executive Director at least in the past being seen at conferences running Apple macOS, it turns out FreeBSD Executive Director Deb Goodkin until recently hasn't been running FreeBSD as the daily OS on her laptop/desktop hardware. Deb Goodkin presented at last week

Following the process of phasing out Intel 486 CPU support and other old hardware drivers that were dropped in the Linux 7.1 kernel cycle for reducing the kernel maintenance burden, the upcoming Linux 7.2 cycle is continuing the trend of phasing out some of the old hardware support that is very obsolete, likely having no users on the latest upstream kernels, and no one formally maintaining the obsolete drivers.

The latest driver on the chopping block is the Double Talk driver as an ISA speech synthesizer driver. If being

Multikernel Technologies Inc has been working on a multi-kernel architecture for the Linux kernel while in addition to that they have been developing KernelScript as a domain-specific language for carrying out Linux kernel customizations and app-specific optimizations.

Cong Wang as the founder of Multikernel Technologies presented at the Linux Foundation's Open-Source Summit this past week in Minnesota on KernelScript. KernelScript aims to make it easier to write eBPF programs than plain C code and integrate nicely across Linux projects. KernelScript, which is currently considered beta,

While in the past decade or so Linux desktop/laptop users likely have little to complain about boot times and there hasn't been much emphasis around trying to make boot times even faster on the Linux desktop especially in an era where many systems are always-on and suspend/resume working more reliably these days, boot times are still an important factor in the embedded Linux world. Boot-Time Wizard is one of the new efforts aiming to help embedded Linux makers cut-down on their boot times.

Tim Bird

Wild Linker 0.9 was released today as the latest version of this very fast linker for Linux systems that is written in the Rust programming language.

With Wild Linker 0.9 they have worked on porting to other platforms and as a result have done code refactoring around their ELF-specific behavior and other platform-specific bits. Among the porting work for Wild is code currently being drafted -- but not yet ready for use use -- for supporting Mac-O and WebAssembly targets.

Wild Linker 0.9

The Linux Mint project today published their May 2026 status report to outline recent work done to this Ubuntu/Debian-based Linux platform and much of their focus in recent weeks on enhancements to their Cinnamon desktop environment.

Linux Mint continues a lot of work on their Cinnamon desktop and other improvements in working toward the next Linux Mint feature release due out around Christmas 2026.

Some of the Cinnamon work this month includes making their Nemo file manager much faster for loading directories, improving the search functionality within

With Intel having been one of the most dominant open-source contributors for years across the software ecosystem, months after they began sunsetting various software projects no longer aligned with today's Intel, they continue formally sunsetting/archiving different open-source projects.

Days after sunsetting another round of open-source projects , some additional Intel software projects received their formal archival notices this week. That was after the heavy losses in prior months of ending open ecosystem/community evangelism , the sad ending to Clear Linux , the not-

For years already AV2 has been in development as the successor to AV1 for this wonderful open-source, royalty-free video codec. While there was talk about releasing AV2 by the end of 2025 , that didn't happen but now latest indicators are pointing toward its formal debut next week.

VideoLAN recently published the Dav2d code as an open-source AV2 decoder continuing in the spirit of the Dav1d AV1 decoder. Now there's a big indicator of

KDE developers continue to be quite busy in preparing for next month's Plasma 6.7 stable desktop release due out in mid-June while also beginning more feature work toward Plasma 6.8.

This Week in Plasma is out with its newest issue to highlight the interesting developments in recent days. This week some of the Plasma highlights include:

- Coming for Plasma 6.8 and not next month's Plasma 6.7 release is support for the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver within the System Monitor app and