Some Microsoft Insiders Fight to Drop Windows 11’s Microsoft Account Requirements
Yes, Microsoft announced it’s fixing common Windows 11 complaints. But what about getting rid of that requirement to have a Microsoft account before installing Windows 11? While Microsoft didn’t mention that at all, the senior editor at the blog Windows Central reports there’s “a number of people” internally pushi … ⌘ Read more

mdadm 4.6 Released With Boot Failure Fixes, New Lockless Bitmap
The mdadm utility for managing software RAID on Linux systems is out with a new release that adds new features while addressing some recent boot failure issues that were reported… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Says It Is Fixing Windows 11
BrianFagioli writes: Microsoft says it is finally listening to user complaints about Windows 11, promising a series of changes focused on performance, reliability, and reducing everyday annoyances. In a message to Windows Insiders, the company outlined plans to bring back long requested features like taskbar repositioning, cut down on intrusive AI integrations, and give users more control over upd … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Thanks for the tip-off, fixed!

I hope to have some time this weekend to tease apart my current setup and build a couple of example sites with it (while also writing some docs along the way). But given the rate I’ve been going, it’ll probably be another month. 😢

Linux 7.0-rc4 Released With Hang Fixes, Resolves At Least One Performance Regression
We are down to about one month to go until the Linux 7.0 stable release and out today is Linux 7.0-rc4… ⌘ Read more

Hangs & Performance Regression On Large Systems Fixed For Linux 7.0-rc4
This week’s “sched/urgent” pull request was sent out today of scheduler updates for the ongoing Linux 7.0 cycle. Notable this week are fixing some hangs as well as a possible performance regression on large systems… ⌘ Read more

Debian 13.4 Released With Dozens Of Fixes
Debian 13.4 rolled out today with dozens of security fixes and other general bug fixes with the updated install media for Debian 13 Trixie… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.6.3 Fixing Direct Scan-Out When Using Fractional Scaling
KDE developers continue being very busy working on Plasma 6.7 feature development as well as continuing to drive new fixes and refinements to the current Plasma 6.6 stable series… ⌘ Read more

FreeRDP 3.24 Released With Security Fixes & Improved X11 Client Support
FreeRDP as this open-source and cross-platform Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation is out with FreeRDP 3.24 to ship new security fixes as well as other improvements… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 AMDGPU Fixing Idle Power Issue For RDNA4 GPUs After Compute Workloads
A fix is on the way to the Linux 7.0 kernel today for addressing an idle power issue with AMD RDNA4 GPUs reporting high power consumption and full utilization even after being “idle” following compute workloads like Llama.cpp… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.0.2 Has Plenty Of Graphics Driver Fixes From Intel & RADV Vulkan To Old R300g
Mesa 26.0.2 is now available as the latest bi-weekly stable point release for this set of open-source graphics drivers predominantly used on Linux systems… ⌘ Read more

GCC 16 Compiler Aiming For Mid-April Release Candidate But “Slow” Progress On Fixes
Richard Biener of SUSE published a new status report on the state of GCC 16 development. Regression fixing has been going slow but they are hoping to publish a release candidate by mid-April… ⌘ Read more

Could Home-Building Robots Help Fix the Housing Crisis?
CNN reports on a company called Automated Architecture (AUAR) which makes “portable” micro-factories that use a robotic arm to produce wooden framing for houses (the walls, floors and roofs):

Co-founder Mollie Claypool says the micro-factories will be able to produce the panels quicker, cheaper and more precisely than a timber framing crew, freeing up carpente … ⌘ Read more

Notable Intel & AMD CPU Changes Merged For Linux 7.0-rc3
This week’s batch of “x86/urgent” patches that were merged overnight for Linux 7.0 contain some fixes and other adjustments worth highlighting for both AMD and Intel… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma Saw A Lot Of Bug/Crash Fixing & UI Polishing This Week
Nate Graham and John Veness are out today with the newest issue of This Week in Plasma. Notable for KDE Plasma 6.6.x~6.7 development this week were a lot of bug fixing – including multiple crash fixes – and some UI polishing too… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Slab Fix On The Way For A “Severe Performance Regression”
Sent out today was this week’s batch of Slab allocator fixes for the Linux 7.0 development kernel. Making this pull notable is fixing a “severe performance regression” with a ~64% performance drop having been noted in late February… ⌘ Read more

Intel Xe Linux Driver Ready With Fix For Brand New Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 7 Laptop
This week at MWC 2026, Lenovo announced the ThinkPad T14 Gen 7 as one of their new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” powered laptops alongside other products. With Panther Lake running rather well on Linux, the new ThinkPad T14 G7 should be in good standing on Linux and especially with a pending Xe graphics driver fix that is on the way… ⌘ Read more

FEX 2603 Released With A Partial Fix For The Steam GUI Crashing On AArch64
FEX 2603 as the Valve-sponsored open-source project allowing Linux x86/x86_64 binaries to run on AArch64 Linux – including the likes of Steam and various games as will become important with the Steam Frame – is now out with its newest monthly release… ⌘ Read more

Google Chrome Is Switching To a Two-Week Release Cycle
Google is accelerating Chrome’s major release cadence from four weeks to two starting with version 153 on September 8th. “…our goal is to ensure developers and users have immediate access to the latest performance improvements, fixes and new capabilities,” says Google. “Building on our history of adapting our release process to match the demands of a modern web, C … ⌘ Read more

Yay, groff 1.24.0 is out and this is fixed now (on the left):

Numerous AMDXDNA Ryzen AI Driver Fixes For Linux 7.0-rc2
Sent out today were all of the DRM/accel driver fixes for the week, ahead of the Linux 7.0-rc2 kernel release due out on Sunday… ⌘ Read more

GStreamer 1.28.1 Adds Whisper-Based Speech-To-Text, AV1 Stateful V4L2 Decoder Support
Building off January’s GStreamer 1.28 release with many new features, GStreamer 1.28.1 was released today as a point release bringing various fixes and minor additions to this open-source multimedia framework… ⌘ Read more

AI Can Find Hundreds of Software Bugs – Fixing Them Is Another Story
Anthropic last week promoted Claude Code Security, a research preview capability that uses its Claude Opus 4.6 model to hunt for software vulnerabilities, claiming its red team had surfaced over 500 bugs in production open-source codebases – but security researchers say the real bottleneck was never discovery.

Guy Azari, a former securi … ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.0.1 Released With Important Security Fix For OOB Memory Access From WebGPU
Mesa 26.0.1 is now available as the first point release of this quarter’s Mesa 26.0 series. Besides the usual bug fixing, Mesa 26.0.1 is more pressing than usual since it contains a security fix for possible out-of-bounds memory access in WebGPU contexts from web browsers… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.6.1 Released With Initial Batch Of Bug Fixes
Following last week’s Plasma 6.6 release, KDE developers today shipped Plasma 6.6.1 as the first point release with an assortment of different bug fixes… ⌘ Read more

Intel ANV Driver Sees Several Vulkan Video H.265 Encode Fixes
For those interested in Vulkan Video on the Intel “ANV” open-source Linux driver, merged last week to Mesa 26.1-devel were some H.265 encode fixes… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Credits Now Honor The Creator Of Linux-Next
There’s the usual flurry of last minute fixes and other items being herded into the Linux 7.0 codebase today right ahead of the merge window being closed with the imminent Linux 7.0-rc1 release. Among that last minute work is now recognizing Stephen Rothwell’s contributions to creating and maintaining Linux-Next over the past eighteen years… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Makes Preparations For Rust 1.95
Last week was the main feature pull of Rust programming language updates for the Linux 7.0 kernel merge window. Most notable with that pull was Rust officially concluding its “experimental” in now treating Rust for Linux kernel/driver programming as stable and here to stay. Sent out today was a round of Rust fixes for Linux 7.0 that includes preparations for the upcoming Rust 1.95 release… ⌘ Read more

T2 Linux Restores XAA In Xorg, Making 2D Graphics Fast Again
Berlin-based T2 Linux developer René Rebe (long-time Slashdot reader ReneR) is announcing that their Xorg display server has now restored its XAA acceleration architecture, “bringing fixed-function hardware 2D acceleration back to many older graphics cards that upstream left in software-rendered mode.”

Older fixed-function GPUs now regain smooth window … ⌘ Read more

AppArmor Enhancements Merged For Linux 7.0
The AppArmour security module for the Linux kernel, which most notably is backed by Canonical for Ubuntu, has some small improvements and fixes for Linux 7.0… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Lands More AMDGPU Fixes For Old Radeon Hardware
Following last week’s main set of DRM kernel graphics driver feature updates for Linux 7.0, merged on Friday to Linux 7.0 Git was the first round of fixes to these Direct Rendering Manager drivers. Dominating most of the code changes in this latest pull were AMDGPU fixes, including more enhancements for aging Radeon graphics processors… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.7 Preps More Improvements While Plasma 6.6.1 Fixes Begin Accumulating
This week marked the release of KDE’s Plasma 6.6 desktop as a very successful release that overall is in very robust shape and performing well. While Plasma 6.6 overall is in great shape, there are various bugs - including crash fixes - that have already been queued for the upcoming Plasma 6.6.1. KDE developers are also quite busy on the trek toward Plasma 6.7… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.344 Released With New Extension From Valve
Vulkan 1.4.344 is out today as the latest routine spec update for this high performance graphics and compute API. Besides a handful of fixes and clarifications, Vulkan 1.4.344 brings a new extension courtesy of Valve engineers… ⌘ Read more

Claims That AI Can Help Fix Climate Dismissed As Greenwashing
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Tech companies are conflating traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when claiming the energy-hungry technology could help avert climate breakdown, according to a report. Most claims that AI can help avert climate breakdown refer to machine learning and not the energy-hungry chatbot … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19.2 & Other LTS Kernels Released To Fix Systems Not Booting
Linux 6.19.1 was released earlier today while it’s since been replaced by Linux 6.19.2 to address fallout from that first point release with some systems not booting. This also resulted in new LTS kernel releases too due to the problematic code being picked up there too… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Better Segregates Legacy CardBus Code To Avoid On Modern PCs
The PCI subsystem updates for Linux 7.0 are aplenty as usual and contain a wide assortment of different fixes and code improvements… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19.1 Released To Ship Some Early Fixes & Device Quirks
For those preferring to wait for the first point release of a new Linux kernel version before upgrading, Linux 6.19.1 is out today to address some early bugs that made it into the Linux 6.19 kernel stable release one week ago… ⌘ Read more

600% Memory Price Surge Threatens Telcos’ Broadband Router, Set-Top Box Supply
Telecom operators planning aggressive fiber and fixed wireless broadband rollouts in 2026 face a serious supply problem – DRAM and NAND memory prices for consumer applications have surged more than 600% over the past year as higher-margin AI server segments absorb available capacity, according to Counterpoint Research.

… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.6 Sees Last Minute Fixes, Plasma 6.7 Aims For Painless Samba Shares
KDE’s Plasma 6.6 desktop release is due out next week (17 February) and there’s been some last minute fixes to land. Additionally, KDE Plasma developers continue to be quite active in already landing feature work for Plasma 6.7… ⌘ Read more

Windows 11 Notepad Flaw Let Files Execute Silently via Markdown Links
Microsoft has patched a high-severity vulnerability in Windows 11’s Notepad that allowed attackers to silently execute local or remote programs when a user clicked a specially crafted Markdown link, all without triggering any Windows security warning.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-20841 and fixed in the February 2026 Patch Tuesday upda … ⌘ Read more

Intel CPU Microcode 20260210 Brings Security Updates & Functional Fixes
Intel today for Patch Tuesday released several generations worth of CPU microcode updates for addressing multiple security issues and functional issues… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Brings Support For “Slow” Workload Hints For Intel Panther Lake
The many power management, thermal, and ACPI updates have been merged for the Linux 7.0 kernel. As usual there are many changes coming from fixes to new hardware support and more expansive thermal control capabilities under Linux… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Sees Last Minute Scheduler Regression Fixes
Ahead of the planned Linux 6.19 stable kernel release tomorrow, there have been some last-minute fixes submitted for the scheduler code, including for performance regressions… ⌘ Read more

Waymo is Having a Hard Time Stopping For School Buses
Waymo’s robotaxis have racked up at least 24 safety violations involving school buses in Austin since the start of the 2025 school year, and a voluntary software recall the company issued in December after a federal investigation has not fixed the problem.

Austin Independent School District initially reported at least 19 incidents of Waymo vehicles failing to stop fo … ⌘ Read more

Mesa 25.3.5 Brings Vulkan Driver Fixes & Other Minor Changes – Even For Old The R600g
While Mesa 26.0 stable will be out soon, the belated Mesa 25.3.5 point release is now available for serving as the current latest stable point release… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.6 Fixing Significant Issues With Fingerprint Authentication
There is less than two weeks to go until the official KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop release. Plasma 6.6 is still seeing bug fixes in this final stretch of development while KDE developers are also busy already on Plasma 6.7 feature work… ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.2 Released With More Improvements & 32 Bug Fixes
Wine 11.2 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release in the road toward the Wine 12.0 stable release next January… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Should Fix Nouveau For The Large Pages Support For Better NVK Performance
The Linux 6.19 merge window had introduced support for larger pages and compression with the Nouveau kernel driver, which ultimately should help provide a performance win to this open-source NVIDIA driver. The Mesa NVK driver was ready to make use of that new kernel driver functionality but then it ended up being disabled due to bugs. Fortunately, for the Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel those issues should be resolved so then the Mesa … ⌘ Read more

GNOME Shell & Mutter 50 Beta Releases Bring Stable VRR, Improved Frame Scheduling
Ahead of the imminent GNOME 50 beta release, the GNOME Shell and Mutter components have declared their “50.beta” releases to ship the latest bug fixes, memory leak fixes, and some last minute improvements ahead of the stable release in March… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.0-rc3 Released With More Graphics Driver Fixes
Eric Engestrom is out with another on-time Mesa release. Mesa 26.0-rc3 provides the latest week’s worth of bug fixes as we work toward the stable Mesa 26.0 release as soon as next week… ⌘ Read more