As we have been covering over the past year, major investments have been made to better the outlook for running FreeBSD on laptop hardware. From WiFi driver improvements to enhancing suspend/resume, power management, graphics drivers, and other features, it's been a big undertaking to make FreeBSD work better on laptops. The FreeBSD Foundation calls 2025 as having brought "transformative changes" for the FreeBSD laptop experience...

Canonical confirmed their Linux kernel plans today for the Ubuntu 26.04 Long Term Support (LTS) release due out in April...

Cloud Hypervisor 50.0 is out today for this cloud-minded, security-focused and Rust-based hypervisor. Cloud Hypervsior began as an open-source Intel project while in more recent times has shifted to being largely maintained by Microsoft, Crusoe, Cyberus Tech, Rivos, and others...

The Mageia development team recently met to solidify their plans for releasing Mageia 10 as the next major release of this LInux distribution with its roots that trace back to the days of Mandrake Linux...

Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution whose goal is to provide a classic desktop experience with many convenient, custom tools and optional out-of-the-box multimedia support. It also adds a custom desktop and menus, several unique configuration tools, and a web-based package installation interface. Linux Mint is compatible with Ubuntu software repositories. Besides its Ubuntu-based flavour, the project also produces a separate "Debian" edition (called LMDE), based on the latest stable Debian version.

XCP-ng is a CentOS-based Linux server distribution designed to be a high-performance enterprise-level virtualization platform that uses Xen, a free and open-source hypervisor that allows multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently. XCP-ng stands for Xen Cloud Platform - next generation, it is the modern successor to XCP, initially created as an open-source version of Citrix XenServer back in 2010. XCP-ng is a secure platform to run any kind of virtualization workload, while being managed by a central administration console called Xen Orchestra (XO).

Linuxfx (also known as Winux or Wubuntu) is a Brazilian Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. It ships with an intuitive Cinnamon desktop user interface designed to facilitate migration of users from Windows. It includes a video management system called Sentinela, a computer vision software with video analytics and software for access control (facial recognition and automatic number plate recognition), object detection, gender, age and mood detection. Other features of the distribution include a new personal assistant, a WX theme for desktop and system applications, and compatibility with software written for Windows (.exe and .msi) through a Wine port. Following the release of Linuxfx 10.6 the distribution became a commercial offering.

Vulkan 1.4.337 released a short time ago as what could be the last Vulkan API spec update of 2025 depending upon how much time the working group takes off or not around the holidays. In any case, it's a nice holiday treat with the new VK_EXT_texture_compression_astc_3d and VK_EXT_shader_long_vector extensions...

Cryptsetup 2.8.2 released on Thursday for this open-source utility used for setting up disk encryption with dm-crypt on Linux systems, including for LUKS volumes, TrueCrypt, BitLocker, and other formats...

OpenZFS 2.4 is out as stable in time for the holidays! The big OpenZFS 2.4 feature release is now available for FreeBSD and Linux systems to continue advancing the open-source ZFS file-system support...

Unraid OS is a Linux-based commercial operating system designed to provide an easy-to-use and flexible platform for building and managing a Network-Attached Storage (NAS). Some of Unraid's main features include the ability to mix and match drives of different sizes, an easy-to-use web interface for managing storage, virtual machines and Docker containers, protection to safeguard against drive failures, ability to expand the storage by adding more drives.

The Linux Foundation today published their 2025 Annual Report where they offer a glimpse into the finances of the organization for this year...

TUXEDO OS is an Ubuntu-based distribution developed in Germany by TUXEDO Computers GmbH, designed and optimised for the company's own range of Linux-friendly personal computers and notebooks. The distribution uses KDE Plasma as the preferred desktop. Some of the differences between Ubuntu and TUXEDO OS include custom boot menu, the TUXEDO Control Centre, Calamares installer, availability of the Lutris open gaming platform, preference for the PipeWire audio daemon (over PulseAudio), removal of Ubuntu's snap daemon and snap packages, and various other tweaks and enhancements.

TrueNAS CORE (previously known as FreeNAS) is a free and Open Source Network-Attached Storage (NAS) operating system that supports file, block and object storage. TrueNAS CORE is FreeBSD based and is a community-supported branch of the TrueNAS project, sponsored by iXsystems. It also has a commercial branch called TrueNAS Enterprise and a free and HyperConverged storage solution called TrueNAS SCALE. The TrueNAS SCALE branch is based on the Debian Linux distribution.

Flatcar Container Linux is a container-optimized operating system based on Gentoo Linux. It is a minimal operating system image which includes only the tools needed to run containers and it supports all of the popular methods for running containers. The distribution ships an immutable filesystem and includes automatic atomic updates. Flatcar Container Linux runs on most cloud providers, virtualization platforms and bare metal servers.

Spectre V1 mitigations in the Linux kernel are coming for RISC-V with newer RISC-V core designs being vulnerable to Spectre Variant One style attacks...

In addition to the release this week of OpenShot 3.4, released today is a major update to another popular open-source video editing application: Kdenlive. The Kdenlive 25.12 release brings many improvements to help with editing of any year-end / holiday videos...

This is the sale event you've been waiting on isn't it? The Steam Winter Sale 2025 has arrived with a great many thousands of games discounted.

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Merged today to the Mesa 26.0-devel code for the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver is compression support for helping to deliver better performance...

NVIDIA has promoted their R590 driver series to stable with the release today of the NVIDIA 590.48.01 Linux driver as their latest new feature branch version...

The saga continues! A Firefox developer has taken to social media to note there will be some sort of "kill switch" to completely remove AI features.

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As part of the New Feature Branch, NVIDIA driver version 590.48.01 released today for Linux with a few more fixes.

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The Mesa team have released Mesa 25.3.2 as the latest bug-fix release for the current main stable branch of open source Linux graphics drivers.

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They did a Vampire Survivors update, so sure why not Revenge of the Savage Planet too? Two Point Museum has expanded again in a free update.

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