Free Software News Archives

Open-source developer Matthias Klumpp wrote a blog post today outlining his recent work developing pkgcli, a new and modern command-line interface (CLI) around the PackageKit package management abstraction layer.

OpenJPH as an open-source implementation of high-throughput JPEG2000 Part-15 (or JPH or HTJ2K) is now significantly faster for both encode and decode operations thanks to new AVX2 optimizations for Intel and AMD processors.

OpenCV 5.0 released today as a major update to this widely-used, open-source computer vision (CV) library.

Blender 5.2 is now available in beta form for this leading open-source 3D modeling software.

May 2026 is now in the books after writing 275 original Linux/open-source minded news articles and another 20 featured-length benchmark articles / Linux hardware reviews. There was a lot of exciting topics in May to keep the month interesting and as we approach the Phoronix 22nd birthday this week.

For ending out the month of May is a new monthly release of Servo, the open-source, Rust-based browser engine being developed by Linux Foundation Europe stakeholders and the open-source community. There are many nice enhancements on the desktop side with Servo 0.2 while also improving the Android browser UI experience with Servo too.

Rust Coreutils 0.9 was tagged today as the latest major update to this GNU Coreutils implementation in the Rust programming language. Rust Coreutils 0.9 is up to a 90.4% pass rate against the GNU test suite!

Back in 2021 Facebook open-sourced CacheLib as a new caching engine. Back in 2021 it was done to help scale services with non-volatile memory caching to offset increasing DRAM costs at the time. Now in 2026, DRAM memory prices are astronomical compared to 2021 pricing given the AI surge. And, surprisingly, Meta is out with a new CacheLib release after being absent the past two years.

While not as good as repealing AB 1043 outright for requiring operating system providers to ask for a user's age or birth date at device setup, open-source Linux distributions and other open-source OSes may end up seeing some reprieve before this law goes into effect at the start of 2027.

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.

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.

Back in 2022 it was announced DreamWorks Animation was open-sourcing their MoonRay renderer that has been used in production feature films. It ended up being published as open-source in March 2023 as OpenMoonRay and since then has continued advancing with new feature releases and improvements. Now it's being contributed to the Academy Software Foundation as the newest project.

KMSCON 10.0 is out today as the newest feature release to this terminal emulator for Linux that can serve as an alternative to the in-kernel VT.

Valkey 9.1 released on Tuesday as the latest version of this popular fork of the Redis in-memory, key-value database.

Released this week was FluidX3D 3.7, the latest feature update to this computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software that is CPU/GPU accelerated by way of OpenCL.

Memtest86+ 8.10 is out today as a significant update to this legendary open-source RAM testing software.

Last October engineers at Meta announced OpenZL as a format-aware compression framework. OpenZL aims to be speedy yet capable of delivering high compression ratios depending upon what is being compressed. OpenZL is viewed as their next leap in data compression beyond their wonderful work on Zstandard (Zstd). This week there's finally a new OpenZL software release available.

Flatpak 1.17.7 is now available for continuing to advance open-source app sandboxing and distribution on the Linux desktop. Some interesting new features are in tow with this Flatpak update plus there is also an updated XDG-Desktop-Portal release too.

A Devuan developer, the Linux distribution that provides a Debian-based operating system without dependence on systemd, is working on "gtk2-ng" for providing modern fixes and improvements to the old GTK2 toolkit.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency (Sovereign Tech Fund) has provided critical financial resources to open-source software projects and maintainers the past several years. This has proven to be an incredible effort and today they announced their newest initiative as the Sovereign Tech Standards.

7-Zip 26.01 was released on Monday and making this release significant are huge pages support on Linux and some users may be interested in the new options around the path generation mode for the output directory when extracting archives.

LACT, one of the leading open-source solutions to provide a graphics card management GUI that works across AMD / NVIDIA / Intel graphics hardware on Linux, is out with a major update this weekend.

KMSCON 9.3.4 is out today for this virtual terminal (VT) emulator in user-space that runs atop the Linux DRM/KMS APIs for those wanting to enjoy a CONFIG_VT=n Linux kernel experience.

Released at the beginning of the month was a new version of HarfBuzz, a widely-used, open-source text shaping engine. With this HarfBuzz 14.0 release it introduced a GPU-based text rasterization library that supported GLSL shaders as well as HLSL, WGSL, and APple's Metal MSL. Since then this GPU-accelerated library has been seeing more improvements.

Following last month's GIMP 3.2 feature release that was followed by the GIMP 3.2.2 point release at the end of March, out now is GIMP 3.2.4 to ship more fixes to users of this open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop and other imaging applications.

Nginx 1.30 was just released as the newest stable version of this popular web server. Nginx 1.30 incorporates all of the changes from the Nginx 1.29.x mainline branch to provide a lot of new functionality like Multipath TCP (MPTCP).

OpenSSL 4.0 was just released as a big update for this widely-used SSL/TLS and crypto library.

The open-source, Rust-based Servo browser engine has been improving its Servoshell demo browser application while one of the most promising potentials for this engine is around embedded use as an alternative to the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). With the latest moves by Servo developers, they are making for a more compelling story for its use.

For those sticking to absolute free software ideals, Trisquel 12.0 was released this weekend for this Free Software Foundation (FSF) approved distribution for only containing free software and foregoing loadable microcode/firmware and running on the Linux-libre kernel even with its reduced scope in hardware support.

That Flatbox app sandboxing and distribution system is out today with important security updates.

Cloudflare continues to be full of open-source surprises. Today Cloudflare announced EmDash as an open-source "spiritual successor" to WordPress with an emphasis on better security.

HarfBuzz is the open-source text shaping engine originally born out of the FreeType project and now widely-used by GNOME, KDE, Java, Flutter, Godot, Chromium, LibreOffice, and countless other applications. HarfBuzz 14.0 released today and making this release quite exciting is introducing a GPU-accelerated text rendering library.

Gaim! Any desktop Linux users from 20+ years ago likely remember the Gaim instant messaging app that was commonly shipped by desktop Linux distributions for interfacing with different instant messaging platforms like AIM, MSN, ICQ, etc. About twenty years ago Gaim was renamed to Pidgin though due to the AOL Instant Messenger trademark. But with the AIM trademark since expired and wanting to take a differing approach from the latest Pidgin, Gaim 3 is under development.

One of the latest Linux kernel optimizations being worked on by Meta's large kernel engineering team is making reading of /proc/interrupts less costly. Due to monitoring of their servers frequently reading /proc/interrupts, it's actually become a noticeable cost over time with their massive fleet of systems.

Servo 0.0.6 is out today to round out the month with many great improvements made in recent weeks to this Rust-based browser engine advancing with its servoshell implementation and many prospects around using it for embedded browser use cases.

Rspamd 4.0 is out today as a big update to this powerful open-source spam filtering system.

SolveSpace 3.2 was released this past week as the newest feature update to this open-source parametric 3D CAD tool for creating 2D/3D parts and other CAD diagrams.

Here's something that wasn't on my bingo card for this year of the "MKISS" driver for ham radio being modernized in 2026 as opposed to just being dropped. The MKISS code hasn't seen much driver activity since the original Git import of the Linux kernel more than twenty years ago.

It was just two weeks ago that GIMP 3.2 released, one year after the big GIMP 3.0 debut. Out today is GIMP 3.2.2 with various bug fixes, plug-in / file format handling updates, and some minor UI/UX work.

Fish 4.6 released today as the newest version of this Rust-based interactive shell for Linux and other platforms.

FreeCAD 1.1 is out today as the newest feature release for this leading open-source CAD application.

Proposed code for Blender's EEVEE engine can lead to both the OpenGL and Vulkan performance doubling in instancing-heavy scenes that are CPU bottlenecked.

For any holdouts still running SysV Init instead of systemd or other alternatives like OpenRC, SysV Init 3.16 is out as the first release in a half-year and bringing a few refinements.

OpenShot 3.5 hit the web today for this open-source non-linear video editor that describes the new version as one of their "biggest releases" ever in its 18+ year history.

The widely-used GRUB bootloader is now being developed on FreeDesktop.org with a modern GitLab-based workflow.

The Linux Foundation announced today that $12.5 million USD in grants from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, GitHub, Google, and Microsoft have been collected to invest in strengthening the security of the open-source software ecosystem.

Blender 5.1 is out today with many exciting improvements for this leading open-source 3D modeling software. From AMD GPU hardware ray-tracing being enabled by default at long last to more mature Vulkan support and performance, Blender 5.1 is a great release.

Just under one year since the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 release, GIMP 3.2 is out today as the first feature release building off the GIMP 3.0 foundation.

The first alpha release of OpenSSL 4.0 is now available for testing. With OpenSSL 3.0 they are removing support for SSLv3 that has been deprecated for over one decade while also dropping OpenSSL engines and other removals while also adding in some new features.

The Free Software Foundation is hiring a new engineering and certification manager for leading the Respect Your Freedom "RYF" hardware certification program. The FSF RYF program is about certifying hardware that respects the user's freedom and privacy for control over the device, such as no proprietary firmware blobs needed to be loaded at run-time, no digital rights management / digital restrictions, and complies with their other free software ideals.