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Another highly influential Linux kernel engineer, David Hildenbrand, is leaving Red Hat after a decade of major contributions to memory management, virtualization, and VirtIO. His recent kernel patch updates his maintainer info to a kernel.org address, signaling his departure. He hasn't yet said where he's headed next. Phoronix reports: David Hildenbrand serves as a reviewer for the HugeTLB code, s390 KVM code, and memory management reclaim code. He also serves as an upstream maintainer for the Linux kernel's core memory management code, Get User Pages (GUP) memory management code, kernel samepage merging (KSM), reverse mapping (RMAP), transparent hugepage (THP), memory advice (MADVISE), VirtIO memory driver, and VirtIO balloon driver. Hildenbrand had been employed by Red Hat the past decade in Munich working on QEMU/KVM virtualization, Linux kernel memory management, VirtIO, and related low-level areas. Just this year alone so far in 2025 he's authored or been mentioned on more than one thousand mainline Linux kernel patches.

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The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Colin Percival has announced the availability of the first release candidate for the upcoming FreeBSD 15.0, scheduled for final release in early December. The new version will introduce a large number of changes, including the deprecation of fdisk in favor of gpart. Also new in this release is....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux distribution for system administrators, based on Debian's "Testing" branch. The project's latest version, Finnix 251, introduces OCI container images: "Finnix 251 is the first release to distribute official OCI container images. The official Finnix container contains all the same software as....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. This week in DistroWatch Weekly:
Review: Zorin OS 18
News: NetBSD experiments with sandboxing, postmarketOS unifies its documentation, OpenBSD makes system upgrades more resilient, Canonical offers 15 years of support for Ubuntu, Debian publishes updated media for Trixie
Questions and answers: Deleting a file with a weird name
Released last week:....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Red Hat, Inc. has released two updated versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) - 10.1, the first point release of the distribution's latest stable release, and 9.7, an updated build of RHEL's legacy 9.x branch. "During the excitement of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (RHEL) launch....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Uri Herrera has announced the release of Nitrux 5.0.0, a major update of the Linux distribution that aims to be "disruptive by design". This is the project's first build featuring an immutable base and the Hyprland Wayland compositor (dropping KDE Plasma in the process). Although Nitrux is built....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Paweł Pijanowski has announced the release of SparkyLinux 8.1, the latest stable release of the project's set of Linux distributions based on Debian 13: "This is a quarterly update of the SparkyLinux 8 'Seven Sisters' stable release. SparkyLinux 8 is based on and is fully compatible with Debian....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The Volumio team has announced the release of Volumio 4.067, a major update of the project's single-purpose Debian-based Linux distribution designed and fine-tuned exclusively for music playback. This release updates the underlying system to Debian 12: "Today marks something special for us and for everyone who loves what....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. This week in DistroWatch Weekly:
Review: Fedora 43
News: Debian introduces Rust dependency into APT, Redox ports process monitors and web engine, Kubuntu website goes off-line, Mint introduces new troubleshooting tools, FreeBSD improves reproducible builds, Flatpak resumes development
Questions and answers: Size and stability of the Linux kernel
Released last week:....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The MX Linux team has announced that version 25 of its distribution is now available. MX Linux 25 is based on Debian 13. The release announcement shares the key new features: "MX Linux 25 is now available for use. MX 25 is built from Debian 13 'Trixie' and....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The PorteuX development team has release PorteuX 2.4, the latest version of the project's set of lightweight and stripped-down Linux distribution featuring a number of popular desktop environments. This release presents a new desktop option, the COSMIC desktop developed by System 76: "This release brings the COSMIC desktop....

Blender 5.0 has been released with major upgrades including HDR and wide-gamut color support on Linux via Wayland/Vulkan, significant theme and UI improvements, new color-space tools, revamped curve and geometry features, and expanded hardware requirements. 9to5Linux reports: Blender 5.0 also introduces a working color space for Blend files, a new AgX HDR view, a new Convert to Display compositor node, new Rec.2100-PQ and Rec.2100-HLG displays that can be used for color grading for HDR video export, and new ACES 1.3 and 2.0 views as an alternative to AgX and Filmic. A new "Jump Time by Delta" operator for jumping forward/backward in time by a user-specified delta has been introduced as well, along with a revamped Curve drawing, which better supports the new Curves object type and all of their features, and a new Geometry Attribute constraint. Also new is a "Cylinder" option for curve display type that allows rendering thicker curves without the flat ribbon appearance, support for the Zstd (Zstandard) fast lossless compression algorithm for point caches, as well as a new "Curve Data" panel in edit mode that allows tweaking built-in curve attribute values. A full list of changes can be found here. You can download from the official website.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple's Power Mac and Mac Pro towers used to be the company's primary workstations, but it has been years since they were updated with the same regularity as the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. The Mac Pro has seen just four hardware updates in the last 15 years, and that's counting a 2012 refresh that was mostly identical to the 2010 version. Long-suffering Mac Pro buyers may have taken heart when Apple finally added an M2 Ultra processor to the tower in mid-2023, making it one of the very last Macs to switch from Intel to Apple Silicon -- surely this would mean that the computer would at least be updated once every year or two, like the Mac Studio has been? But Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says that Mac Pro buyers shouldn't get their hopes up for new hardware in 2026. Gurman says that the tower is "on the back burner" at Apple and that the company is "focused on a new Mac Studio" for the next-generation M5 Ultra chip that is in the works. As we reported earlier this year, Apple doesn't have plans to design or release an M4 Ultra, and the Mac Studio refresh from this spring included an M3 Ultra alongside the M4 Max. Note that Gurman carefully stops short of saying we definitely won't see a Mac Pro update next year -- the emphasis on the Mac Studio merely "suggests the Mac Pro won't be updated in 2026 in a significant way," and internal sources tell him "Apple has largely written off the Mac Pro." The current Mac Pro does still use the M2 Ultra rather than the M3 Ultra, which indicates that Apple doesn't see the need to update its high-end desktop every time it releases a suitable chip. But all of Apple's other desktops -- the iMac, the Mac mini, and the Studio -- have skipped a silicon generation once since the M1 came out in 2020.

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Microsoft says SQL Server adoption on Linux is 'phenomenal', ends support for SUSE distro  Neowin

VKD3D-Proton Adds FSR 4, Even for Older Radeon GPUs  TechPowerUp

VKD3D-Proton Adds FSR 4, Even for Older Radeon GPUs  TechPowerUp

VKD3D-Proton Adds FSR 4, Even for Older Radeon GPUs  TechPowerUp

Q4OS Linux brought my old laptop back to life and you mustn't ignore it  XDA

Intel LASS Feature Looks Like It Will Be Upstreamed For Linux 6.19  Phoronix

Updated new member bonuses. Wings Financial Credit Union continues to expand aggressively with a $300 checking bonus plus a doubled $100 refer-a-friend bonus for new members (along with some other promotions). Please note that each bonus has its own separate set of requirements.

Here are their official membership requirements, but anyone can join Wings Financial via partner organization (Wings Financial Foundation). When I joined, they even paid the $5 membership fee for that partner organization on my behalf. I did experience a hard credit check, which is (unfortunately) common amongst credit unions.

$300 Checking Bonus

• Join Wings and open a new checking account by 12/31/25.
• One offer per person; valid for U.S. residents only. Must be 18 years or older.
• Must use promo code WINGS25 at account opening.
• Within 60 days of account opening, have recurring Qualified Direct Deposit(s) totaling at least $3,000 to earn the $300 bonus.
• Complete at least 5 net PIN or signature-based debit card or credit card transactions over $25 each on your Wings Visa Debit Card.
• Enroll in Wings digital banking.
• Enroll in eDocuments. You must do this manually after logging into your account online, and they will send you an e-mail confirmation afterward. Enrollment in eDocuments must also be active on the Bonus Payout Date.

$100 Refer-a-Friend Checking bonus

• Register your information at member’s referral link (that’s mine). I have already registered on my end, and successfully referred members in the past. This form is independent of the $300 bonus above and does not require a promo code, and was stackable for me. I recommend you register your information at this link first, and then open the accounts with the proper promo code from above added.
• Become a Wings Financial member and open a Share Savings Account (minimum balance of $5.00 required)
• Open a new Wings Checking account (First Class or High-Yield).
• Enroll in eDocuments. You must do this manually, and they will send you an e-mail confirmation afterward.
• Complete one (1) direct deposit of $1,000 or more into new checking account OR complete five (5) debit card purchase transactions of $25+ each. (ATM transactions excluded.)
• Both referring and referred parties will receive a $100 Visa Reward card mailed to them upon completion. Wings has fulfilled this referral bonus as promised for me in the past, stacking with the new checking bonus.