The first release candidate for Mir 2.31.0 has been tagged, freezing the public API across all nine shared libraries. Between the 2.30.0 release and this RC, roughly 359 commits landed from nearly 20 contributors, including a new ext_foreign_buffer_v1 Wayland protocol for privacy-preserving screen capture. The release also wires up output configuration, supports libinput 1.32 circular scrolling, and continues hardening Mir's mandatory Rust build. It's a stabilization cycle rather than a disruptive one, so expect the final 2.31.0 to ship once testing confirms the API is solid.

The merge window for Linux 7.4 opened this week, with feature work already landing steadily ahead of a late-December release target. The cycle's standout improvements include a boot-time memory operation that drops from roughly 268 seconds to 50 milliseconds, workqueue flushing that speeds up by orders of magnitude, and a long-awaited cleanup removing the unsafe __get_user() and __put_user() helpers. Rust also took a small but symbolic step forward by replacing and deleting Google's C-language Binder driver rather than merely running alongside it. Timing remains the main risk, since Torvalds spent the initial merge window on his annual vacation and the stable release could slip into mid-January 2027.

Valve shipped SteamOS 3.9 to stable users, landing across the Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and compatible third-party hardware. The update rebases the Linux kernel on version 7.2 and bumps KDE Plasma to 6.7.3 in Desktop Mode, while also improving idle battery life on the handheld. It adds early hibernation support (gated behind a driver bug on the Deck), fixes a wide range of WiFi, display, and game crashes, and improves Steam Frame wireless adapter support. A key part of the release also revokes the compromised eMudhra CA certificates tied to the late-October security scandal.

Critical ca-certificates advisories landed today across nearly every major distro, distrusting eMudhra's intermediate CA and dropping emSign roots that can break pinned services. A shared cluster of Go CVEs drove rebuilds across grafana-pcp, podman, ipp-usb, and go-toolset, though much of it is the same binary with a newer compiler. Several genuine RCE bugs stand out, including pgvector index-build code execution, hplip's dozen CVEs on AlmaLinux 8, Apache httpd's eleven CVEs on Oracle Linux 9, and SUSE's php8 and Emacs TRAMP holes. Clear the cert fixes first, then chase the RCE-worthy packages, since the Go and cert churn alone cover a large chunk of what shipped today.

Eight reviews dropped in a single day, led by the iPhone 18 Pro Max, which earned HotHardware's Editor's Choice for its A20 Pro chip, variable aperture camera, and Google-matching Siri AI at prices from $1,299. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 drew the boldest praise, with a reviewer calling it "possibly the best Call of Duty ever" thanks to its cinematic campaign, revived DMZ, and classic multiplayer. The loudest trend came from two AI peripherals, the $99.99 Logitech MX Keypad and the $169.99 Razer Basilisk V4 Pro, each adding programmable AI shortcuts to their designs. Tying the batch together are a push toward efficiency over raw specs, heavy reliance on ecosystem lock-in, and rising prices that make even strong drives like the Golden Award-winning KIOXIA EXCERIA G3 feel pricey.

BakAndImgCD 53.0 shipped October 23, 2026 as the newest update to a tiny 4MLinux-based Linux backup-and-imaging distribution. At just 84.9 MB, it boots in BIOS or UEFI and does two things well: saving files and disk images, and rescuing failing drives, powered by tools like FSArchiver, GNU ddrescue, and Partclone. The version tracks the upstream 4MLinux release cycle and inherits its beta-era toolchain, though the announcement itself is deliberately terse with no changelog. It remains a niche tool with modest weekly downloads, competing against Clonezilla and friends by trading size and flexibility for a much smaller footprint.

KDE Plasma 6.9 is locking in several meaningful features, chief among them stable Picture-in-Picture support under Wayland, per-screen window memory, and tighter controls over legacy X11 apps. This momentum comes as Plasma 6.8, the 30th Anniversary Edition, absorbs a flood of bugs users found after upgrading to its X11-free, Wayland-first design. The week also delivered broad performance and polish fixes across System Monitor, the login screen, and the built-in remote desktop server. 

Bazzite has pushed a new stable image tagged 44.20261023, built October 23 and landing on its usual brisk weekly cadence. The build bumps the core gaming stack, moving Gamescope to 3.16.31^6. On the same day, the project opened public testing for the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X20 and the Acer Predator Atlas 8, both still missing features like RGB lighting and gyroscope support. Existing users can rebase to the new image via bazzite-rollback-helper or the Bazzite Portal, with images retained for 90 days.

Strata, the open-source local AI engine, released version 0.2.4 today, letting you run the 763-billion-parameter DeepSeek V4.1-Flash model on a PC with a single 12 GB graphics card and 46 to 64 GB of RAM. It does this by spreading the workload across your GPU, CPU, RAM and SSD, keeping the most-used parts in memory and streaming the rest from your drive. The model is Terminal-only in this release, comes in three heavily compressed sizes from 239 GB to 274 GB, and tops out at roughly 8 to 10 tokens per second on a mid-range RTX 3060. It's free under MIT with no telemetry, though output stays slow on 12 GB cards and the desktop app doesn't get DeepSeek until a later update.

OBS Studio 33.0.0 went stable on October 23, capping off a major milestone release that most users won't even notice directly. The biggest changes are a massive CEF browser-engine jump from version 127 to 150 and a complete redesign of how plugins load and install. Casual users get small-but-real perks like improved source snapping, better numeric input fields, and new audio-monitoring hotkeys, while plugin authors get a harder deadline since legacy plugins must be updated by 34.0.

MangoWM, the lightweight Wayland compositor built on dwl and wlroots, published its 0.18.3 patch release on October 24th. The update brings no new features or breaking changes, just two optimizations to multi-monitor animations and fullscreen blur, alongside three targeted bug fixes. Those fixes address scratchpad ratio sizing, drag-and-drop lag under global VRR, and a community-patched pointer enter issue that had broken slurp's crosshair. Buildable from source, MangoWM also ships packages through Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, Void, and Guix.