Xiaomi crashes the frontier AI party with a fully open model, one of GitHub’s longest-tenured users walks away from the platform, and the Linux kernel bids farewell to 37 years of i486 support. Here’s what matters today.
Xiaomi open-sources MiMo V2.5 Pro — a trillion-parameter model under MIT that beats DeepSeek V4
Xiaomi released MiMo V2.5 Pro on April 28, and it’s immediately one of the most significant open-weight model drops this month. The numbers: 1.02 trillion total parameters (42B active) in a Mixture of Experts architecture, trained on 27 trillion tokens, with a million-token context window. It uses a hybrid attention mechanism that interleaves local sliding-window and global attention at a 6:1 ratio, cutting KV cache storage by nearly 7x. In benchmarks, it outperforms DeepSeek V4 Pro and several closed-source models on agentic tasks, achieving a 63.8% success rate on Claw-Eval while using 40–60% fewer tokens than Claude Opus 4.6 or GPT-5.4 to reach comparable results. The model completed tasks spanning over 1,000 tool calls in a single session without losing coherence. MIT-licensed and available on Hugging Face now — and Xiaomi is offering 100 trillion free API tokens to drive adoption. The strategic context matters: led by Fuli Luo, a former DeepSeek researcher, this puts a consumer hardware giant squarely in the frontier AI race. Coming four days after DeepSeek V4, China’s open-weight AI ecosystem is producing competition at a pace the West’s proprietary labs should find uncomfortable.
Mitchell Hashimoto — GitHub user #1299, who joined in February 2008 and has opened the platform every single day for 18 years — announced on April 28 that Ghostty, his popular terminal emulator, is leaving GitHub. The reason isn’t philosophical; it’s operational. GitHub experienced 65+ incidents in just February and March 2026 (37 and 28 respectively), and Hashimoto says he’s lost confidence in the platform’s reliability for hosting critical open source infrastructure. Where Ghostty will land hasn’t been announced yet. This isn’t the first high-profile open source project to question GitHub dependency, but it carries particular weight coming from the co-founder of HashiCorp — someone who built Vagrant, Terraform, and Vault on GitHub. The broader issue is one the community has been circling for years: as GitHub adds AI features and enterprise complexity, is basic platform reliability suffering? For projects that depend on CI, issue tracking, and package hosting as critical infrastructure, the answer increasingly appears to be yes.
Linux 7.1-rc1 lands with a rewritten NTFS driver and the end of i486 support
Linus Torvalds released Linux 7.1-rc1 on April 27, closing a merge window that pulled in nearly 13,000 non-merge changesets. The headline feature is a completely rewritten NTFS driver by developer Namjae Jeon — four years in the making, passing 326 xfstests compared to ntfs3’s 273, with every ntfs3 test a complete subset. For dual-boot users and anyone working with Windows partitions, this is a material improvement in both performance and reliability. The other milestone: i486 support is being removed. Maintainer Ingo Molnar noted that no known Linux distribution still ships i486 packages, and anyone running such hardware on an upstream kernel “would be incredibly rare.” The config options are deleted in this release; the actual code cleanup will follow carefully. FRED (Flexible Return and Event Delivery) is now enabled by default, modernizing how the kernel handles interrupts and exceptions on x86. Stable release is expected in the second half of June.
Published April 28 by Perforce OpenLogic in collaboration with OSI and the Eclipse Foundation, the 2026 State of Open Source Report surveyed over 700 respondents across industries and regions. The headline finding: less than 2% of organizations decreased their open source consumption, but the challenges have shifted from adoption to governance. Avoiding vendor lock-in is now cited by 55% of respondents as a top reason for choosing OSS — a 68% year-over-year increase — with the trend particularly pronounced in the EU and UK (63% vs. 51% in North America), reflecting the bloc’s push toward digital autonomy under frameworks like the Cyber Resilience Act. Meanwhile, 60% of engineers at large enterprises report spending half or more of their time on maintenance and bug fixes rather than new development. Organizations that failed compliance audits last year overwhelmingly had end-of-life software in their stacks. The report’s thesis is clear: open source success at scale now depends less on what technologies you adopt and more on how you govern and sustain them.
GitHub Copilot moves to usage-based billing — the end of flat-rate AI coding
Announced April 27, GitHub will transition all Copilot plans to usage-based billing effective June 1. Instead of counting “premium requests,” every plan will include a monthly allotment of GitHub AI Credits, with the option to purchase more. This matters for the open source ecosystem because Copilot’s pricing model directly affects how individual developers and small maintainers access AI-assisted coding tools. The move signals that the economics of AI coding assistants are shifting — flat-rate pricing was a growth strategy, and usage-based billing is a sustainability strategy. With competitors like Cursor, Windsurf, and the increasingly capable open-source alternatives (Continue, Cline, Aider) offering different pricing models, this change will reshape how developers choose their tools. The community reaction on GitHub Discussions has been mixed, with concerns about cost predictability for heavy users.
Update: Fedora 44 officially ships with GNOME 50, X11 removal, and Wine NTSYNC
After three briefings tracking its delays, Fedora 44 is officially out as of April 28. The final release ships GNOME 50 and KDE Plasma 6.6, with the X11 session completely removed for both desktop environments — Wayland is now the only option. The toolchain updates are substantial: GCC 16, LLVM 22, Go 1.26, Ruby 4.0, CMake 4.0, and PHP 8.5. Perhaps most interesting for desktop Linux gaming: the Wine NTSYNC kernel module is now enabled automatically for select packages including Wine and Steam, improving Windows game compatibility. Landing five days after Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, this caps the most consequential week for Linux distributions in years.