Linux Age Laws, Kernel 7.1 Auto-Shutdown, NVIDIA 595, AI Drivers & MORE

A weekly Linux and open source news roundup covering: a severe 64% performance regression in Linux 7.0's slub slab allocator (quickly patched), Linux 7.1 adding automatic shutdown on fatal ACPI errors and expanded ASUS motherboard sensor support, Wayland 1.25 RC1 minor additions, KDE Plasma crash fixes and UI polish, GNOME Mutter 50 RC with major Nvidia performance improvements and HDR support, Linux Mint's new Wayland-compatible Cinnamon screensaver, NVIDIA 595 Linux beta with Vulkan extensions and DRM-KMS support, Wine 11.4 audio and hardware improvements, FEX emulator updates for ARM64 Steam gaming, Steam survey showing Linux usage drop to 2.23% in February, FreeBSD 15.1 laptop improvements, Redox OS progress, Fedora 44 delaying KMSCON switch to Fedora 45, libavif 1.4 release, zlib-rs performance updates, Debian's debate over AI contributions and contributor sustainability, US state age verification laws affecting Linux distributions, and Germany's Sovereign Tech Fellowship expanding to community managers and technical writers.