Summary of the week of February 16, 2026

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Acer and ASUS cannot sell laptops in Germany

A German court has ordered to stop marketing Acer and ASUS laptops in the country. It all comes from a dispute by Nokia over the H.265 codec license. The laptops of these brands will remain on sale until retailers run out of stock.

Plasma 6.6 available

The sixth revision of Plasma 6 comes with improvements in customization, OCR built into Spectacle, the ability to adjust the volume of programs individually by hovering the mouse pointer over the task in the task manager, and new features in the settings.

Linux 7.0 drops support for old modems

One of the changes that Linux 7.0 will bring is the abandonment of support for Mwave ACP modems that were mounted on some ThinkPads from the 90s, specifically in the 600E, 600, and 770 models. Users of these machines still have an RS-232 port available where they can connect a compatible external modem.