In working toward the stable release of Plasma 6.0 at the end of February, today marks the release candidate of Plasma 6.0 along with the updated Qt6-ported KDE Gear apps and KDE Frameworks 6.0 that comprise the "KDE 6th Megarelease" software.

The KDE community has put out the first release candidate of their KDE 6th Megarelease that includes their Qt6/KF6-ported wares and the flagship Plasma 6.0 desktop shell.

Over the earlier alpha and beta releases of the KDE 6th Megarelease, KDE Plasma 6.0 / KDE Frameworks 6 / KDE Gear have all received many bug fixes and polishing to prepare for this major release next month. In particular, many Wayland fixes continue flowing in with Plasma 6 sticking to their plans for defaulting to the Wayland session.

Downloads and more details on the KDE 6th Megarelease RC1 via KDE.org. A second release candidate is planned for 31 January while the actual Plasma 6.0 stable release is penciled in for 28 February.

Eric Engestrom has released Mesa 23.3.3 as the latest stable update to this set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers plus being the first update of the new year.

Given the recent end-of-year holidays and Mesa 23.3 already being in good shape, Mesa 23.3.3 isn't all that big. There are a few open-source Intel driver fixes, a few Radeon RADV fixes, AMD ACO compiler fixes, and also some Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan fixes, among other small fixes throughout. But nothing really exciting or even any really prominent fixes. Mesa 23.3 has been running well and Engestrom continues to do a good job managing the timely releases.

Those curious about any of the particular fixes in Mesa 23.3.3 can find the change-log via the release announcement.

Mesa 24.0 meanwhile is working its way toward release that likely should be around the end of February depending upon how the rest of the release cycle plays out.

Ahead of the planned release at the start of February, the release candidate of LibreOffice 24.2 is now available for this leading free software office suite to rival Microsoft Office predominantly on Linux systems as well as other platforms.

LibreOffice 24.2 is packing many new features besides also shifting to a new "YEAR.MONTH" based versioning scheme. LibreOffice 24.2 features include improved multi-page floating tables, Small Caps for LibreOffice Impress, "save auto-recovery information" is now enabled by default, "always create backup copies" is also now enabled by default, there is now a password strength meter when saving documents with a password, and various other improvements.
The 24.2 release notes provide more insight into all of the changes for this open-source office suite that have been committed over the past six months.

With today's LibreOffice 24.2 RC1 release, there have been 59 issues fixed since last month's beta release.

Those wanting to try out LibreOffice 24.2 RC1 can find the new development builds via the Document Foundation QA blog. LibreOffice 24.2 stable should be formally out the first week of February.

Out for Christmas is Ruby 3.3 as a big update to this dynamic open-source programming language. With Ruby 3.3 the Prism parser is added as well as a new pure-Ruby just-in-time (JIT) compiler.

Ruby 3.3 brings with it the Prism parser as a portable, error-tolerant, and maintainable recursive descent parser. Prism is considered production-ready and can be used now in place of the Ripper parser.

Ruby 3.3 also adds RJIT as a pure-Ruby compiler to replace MJIT. Right now though RJIT only supports x86_64 on Unix-like architectures and is considered for experimental purposes only.

While RJIT is interesting, it's not yet production ready and users are recommended to use the YJIT compiler still. YJIT with this Ruby 3.3 release has received many performance improvements, significantly improved memory usage, and a variety of other enhancements to make this JIT compiler much better than with prior releases.

Ruby 3.3 also goes on to use Lrama as the parser generation to replace Bison, the M:N thread scheduler was introduced, and there are a variety of other performance improvements such as to Ruby's garbage collector.

Downloads and more details on this big Christmas update with Ruby 3.3 can be found via Ruby-Lang.org.