Software — Open Source — October 26th, 2025

Debian Establishes Archive Operations Team, Licensing & New Packages Team
Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille announced today that their "FTP Master" team is being disbanded and instead establishing the Debian Archive Operations Team "Archive Team" and DFSG, Licensing and New Packages Team "DFSG Team" in its place.
October 26, 2025 — Source

EXT4 Patches Enable Block Size Greater Than Page Size Support
EXT4 is preparing patches to enable support for block sizes larger than the kernel's page size, improving BIO write performance by around 50%.
October 26, 2025 — Source

FFmpeg Introduces Vulkan Acceleration For Apple ProRes Video Decoding
The talented FFmpeg developers continue to be quite innovative with their performance optimizations and other features for this widely-used, open-source multimedia library. The latest addition to FFmpeg this weekend is introducing Vulkan accelerated video decoding for Apple ProRes content.
October 26, 2025 — Source

Intel Sends Out Initial Graphics Driver Patches For Multi-Device SVM
Intel has released initial patches for multi-device Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support within their Linux graphics drivers, part of Project Battlematrix, enabling up to eight Intel Arc Pro GPUs.
October 26, 2025 — Source

Linux Prepping For "Extreme" Mode On Lenovo Legion Devices
A new Linux patch series is preparing Lenovo WMI GameZone drivers for an "Extreme" platform profile, addressing performance issues and BIOS bugs on some Lenovo Legion devices.
October 26, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — October 25th, 2025

FreeBSD 15.0 Beta 3 Brings Working Support For MediaTek MT76 WiFi
FreeBSD 15 at large has been working on progress around reproducible builds, better hardware support especially among laptops and WiFi devices and more, various desktop experience enhancements, and a ton of other updates both for kernel and user-space. With FreeBSD 15.0 Beta 3 are yet more fixes while also now having working MediaTek MT76 WiFi support.
October 25, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.6 Will Cater To Windows Power Users With "winver"
Plasma 6.5 debuted this week that KDE developers and users have been celebrating. But it's already on to working out fixes for Plasma 6.5.1 as well as new feature activity toward Plasma 6.6.
October 25, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA Starts Posting Open-Source Nova Driver Patches To Prep For Next-Gen GPUs
NVIDIA is taking the open-source and upstream "Nova" kernel graphics driver quite seriously for their hardware. Hitting the mailing lists on Friday night were initial patches in beginning to make preparations toward "next-gen GPU" support. Digging into the comments, it's indeed for post-Blackwell GPUs.
October 25, 2025 — Source

OpenAI Atlas Omnibox Is Vulnerable to Jailbreaks
Researchers have discovered that a prompt can be disguised as an url, and accepted by Atlas as an url in the omnibox.
October 25, 2025 — Source

Resources 1.9 Brings Intel Xe GPU Support & Other System Resource Monitoring For GNOME
Resources 1.9, a GNOME system resource monitoring app, now supports Intel Xe GPUs, WiFi link information, and includes various performance and detection enhancements.
October 25, 2025 — Source

Servo's Demo Browser Adds Experimental Mode & More Performance Improvements
The Servo open-source browser engine is out with their September 2025 development highlights. This Rust-based browser engine originally started by Mozilla continues making steady progress as well as to the "servoshell" demo/example browser implementation.
October 25, 2025 — Source

Zen Browser 1.17.3b released
Zen Browser version 1.17.3b has been released with improvements to user experience and stability. The latest update includes a redesigned control center layout that provides faster access to frequently used features for better navigation. Additionally, several bugs have been addressed, including issues with the bookmarks popup and a memory leak in glance tabs.
October 25, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — October 24th, 2025

AMD EPYC Turin versus Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids versus Graviton4 Benchmarks With AWS M8 Instances
With Amazon recently launching their M8a AWS instances powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin", for their M8 class instance types there now are all the latest-generation CPU options with AMD EPYC Turin (M8a), Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids (M8i), and their in-house Graviton4 processors (M8g). After recently looking at the M7a versus M8a performance with Amazon EC2, many Phoronix readers expressed interest in seeing an M8a versus M8i versus M8g performance showdown so here are those benchmarks.
October 24, 2025 — Source

Asahi Linux Still Working On Apple M3 Support, m1n1 Bootloader Going Rust
The Asahi Linux developers involved with working on Linux support for Apple Silicon M-Series devices have put out a new progress report on their development efforts.
October 24, 2025 — Source

Claude AI Memory Rolls Out To Pro & Max Users to Help Simplify Complex Projects
What if your AI assistant could remember your preferences, projects, and conversations, just like a trusted colleague? With the rollout of Claude's new Memory feature to all paid subscribers Pro and Max users, this vision is now a reality. Imagine never having to re-explain your goals or reintroduce your work context during every session. Whether you're managing a complex marketing campaign, drafting a research paper, or collaborating on a design project, Claude's ability to retain and recall information transforms it from a helpful tool into a true partner in productivity.
October 24, 2025 — Source

Claude Code comes to the web — so you can pay to manage the AI that's taking your job
Anthropic brings its AI coding assistant to the browser, making Claude Code more accessible than ever.
October 24, 2025 — Source

Clear Kubernetes namespace contents before deleting the namespace, or else
Our Kubernetes platform test suite creates namespaces with their corresponding contents, then deletes everything during cleanup. We noticed a strange problem: namespace deletion would sometimes get stuck indefinitely. The root cause was surprising — we had to clear the contents before deleting the namespace! We also learned that getting stuck isn't the only issue that can occur if we don't do this.
October 24, 2025 — Source

Fedora 43 is coming next week following Go/No-Go meeting
Unlike some Linux distributions, Fedora has quite a fluid release cycle where planned launch dates are known to slip. It has been the case with Fedora 43, where the initial target date was set for October 21, but this wasn't met. Now, however, Fedora 43 has been cleared for release on October 28 following a Go/No-Go meeting.
October 24, 2025 — Source

Intel Xe3P Spotted In Latest Linux Kernel Patches, Confirms Pairing With Nova Lake CPUs
The latest Linux patches reveal that the Xe3P graphics is tied to Nova Lake, Intel's next-gen CPU family for desktop and mobile.
October 24, 2025 — Source or Source

Linux Lands Fix For "Serious Performance Regression" Affecting Some Intel Chromebooks
Merged this week to Linux Git ahead of Linux 6.18-rc3 this Sunday were the latest power management fixes for the kernel. Standing out in the power management code is a fix for a "serious performance regression" affecting some Intel-powered Chromebooks.
October 24, 2025 — Source

Linux's Kconfig Is No Longer Orphaned
Kconfig, a Linux kernel configuration system, was previously orphaned but now Nathan Chancellor and Nicolas Schier are its official maintainers.
October 24, 2025 — Source

New Code Allows VCE 1.0 Video Acceleration To Work On AMDGPU Driver For GCN 1.0 GPUs
A Valve contractor has enabled Video Coding Engine 1.0 (VCE 1.0) support for older AMD GCN 1.0 GPUs, improving AMDGPU driver functionality.
October 24, 2025 — Source

OBS Studio 32.0.2 released
OBS Studio 32.0.2 has been released, addressing two significant issues affecting macOS users' experience. The update resolves a critical login issue with service integrations that caused system crashes and another issue with Syphon Client sources appearing blank or transparent.
October 24, 2025 — Source

Patina 13.0 Released As Rust UEFI Firmware Implementation
Patina 13.0 is now available as this Rust implementation of UEFI firmware. Patina has been working to replace the core UEFI firmware components in a pure Rust implementation to avoid the use of C code.
October 24, 2025 — Source

Updated AMD ISP4 Driver Posted For Linux With Fixes & Improvements
AMD's ISP4 image signal processing IP is so far just used by the HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop but will presumably be used by more of the higher-end AMD Ryzen next-gen laptops. AMD engineers today posted their fifth iteration of their open-source Linux driver for enabling the ISP4 use.
October 24, 2025 — Source

Vulkan 1.4.330 Released With Five New Extensions
Vulkan 1.4.330 is out today with a few specification corrections/clarifications plus five new extensions.
October 24, 2025 — Source

Why open source may not survive the rise of generative AI
Generative AI may be eroding the foundation of open source software. Provenance, licensing, and reciprocity are breaking down.
October 24, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — October 20th, 2025

AMD Ryzen 9 9950X versus 9950X3D On Windows 11 & Ubuntu Linux
For those wondering how the AMD 3D V-Cache performance with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D is looking on Linux relative to Microsoft Windows, a few weeks back I carried out some comparison benchmarks of Windows 11 25H2 against Ubuntu Linux both the Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS release and an Ubuntu 25.10 development build using both the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9950X3D processors.
October 20, 2025 — Source

Europe's plan to ditch US tech giants is built on open source - and it's gaining steam
One topic dominated the recent 2025 OpenInfra Summit Europe, and it wasn't AI.
October 20, 2025 — Source

GE-Proton10-21 released
GloriousEggroll has released GE-Proton10-21, a major update to their compatibility layer that brings several significant changes. This release incorporates the latest development version of Wine and the current state of DXVK and VKD3D-Proton from their respective Git repositories. Fixes for issues in Black Desert Online (news loading) and Blue Protocol (player count crashing) have also been implemented, along with a restoration of write copy options for Battle.net, Uplay, and EA App that were previously removed.
October 20, 2025 — Source

Initial Intel Xe3P Graphics Support To Be Submitted For Linux 6.19
Initial Intel Xe3P graphics support is expected to be merged into the Linux 6.19 kernel, with preliminary code focused on Nova Lake.
October 20, 2025 — Source

Initial Tenstorrent Blackhole Support Aiming For Linux 6.19
It looks like the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel could land initial Tenstorrent vendor support and provide initial support for the Blackhole SoC with the initial Blackhole P100/P150 PCIe accelerator cards.
October 20, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18 sees large second release candidate, but everything is on track
Linus Torvalds, the founder and maintainer of the Linux kernel, has just released the second release candidate of Linux 6.18. Torvalds said this week contained no huge surprises, which is certainly promising for a stable development cycle and timely release. With that said, there were a number of regressions found in the first release candidate so some of those needed to be fixed, luckily some turned out to be trivial configuration issues.
October 20, 2025 — Source

LMDE 7 Now Available
Linux Mint Debian Edition, version 7, has been officially released and is based on upstream Debian.
October 20, 2025 — Source

Napster's next act is an AI assistant made for the Mac
Napster thinks AI is the solution to your search for good help.
October 20, 2025 — Source

NPM Ecosystem Suffers Two AI-Enabled Credential Stealing Supply Chain Attacks
The Node Package Manager (npm) ecosystem has suffered from two major supply chain attacks in recent months, affecting hundreds of packages and exposing developers to credential theft and data exfiltration. The attack vector of these incidents shows an AI-enabled evolution of how open-source software dependencies can be compromised.
October 20, 2025 — Source

NTFSPLUS Announced: A New Linux Driver For NTFS With Better Performance, More Features
Well this wasn't on my bingo card for 2025... There is now yet another NTFS file-system driver for Linux. There's long been the read-only NTFS driver in the Linux kernel, the more capable NTFS FUSE driver in user-space, and then in recent years the NTFS3 driver that was upstreamed to the Linux kernel by Paragon Software. NTFS3 offers read/write support and other improvements over the prior kernel driver. Now there is "NTFSPLUS" as a new driver with read/write support and claiming to offer better performance and features than NTFS3.
October 20, 2025 — Source

OpenAI Codex IDE Extension: The AI Partner Every Developer Needs Right Now
Imagine a world where your code editor doesn't just passively display your work but actively collaborates with you, anticipating your needs, offering solutions, and even tackling tedious tasks on your behalf. This isn't some far-off vision of the future; it's the reality that OpenAI Codex IDE brings to developers today. By embedding itself seamlessly into popular IDEs like Visual Studio Code and Windsor, Codex transforms your coding environment into a dynamic partner, capable of generating boilerplate code, debugging with precision, and explaining complex functions in real time.
October 20, 2025 — Source

Ready to ditch Windows? I found a powerful mini PC that's optimized for Linux
The Kubuntu Focus NX Gen 3 comes preloaded with one of my favorite Linux distributions and takes only minutes to set up.
October 20, 2025 — Source

Servo 0.0.1 Browser Engine Released
It was to much surprise waking up this morning and seeing the Servo 0.0.1 release for this Rust-based web layout engine that began as a Mozilla project and is now being developed independently via Linux Foundation Europe and other parties.
October 20, 2025 — Source

Xubuntu downloads section injection threatens users with crypto infection
Attempted exploit was a feeble effort to target Windows users
October 20, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — October 17th, 2025

AES-GCM Crypto Performance Up To ~74% Faster For AMD Zen 3 With Linux 6.19
Improvements to the Linux kernel's AES-GCM Galois/Counter Mode crypto block cipher code will yield up to 74% faster performance for AMD Zen 3 processors with the Linux 6.19 kernel in the new year.
October 17, 2025 — Source

AnduinOS 1.4 released
Built on top of Ubuntu 25.10, AnduinOS has released version 1.4, a Linux distribution that mimics the look and feel of modern Windows. This new version includes various improvements, such as the introduction of the Pytxis terminal, updated GNOME 49, and Linux kernel 6.17 for optimal system performance and security.
October 17, 2025 — Source

Big Tech is paying millions to train teachers on AI, in a push to bring chatbots into classrooms
Major technology companies are investing millions to fund AI training for teachers, aiming to integrate AI tools like chatbots into classrooms. Teachers unions are partnering with these companies to develop training hubs and online resources, with educators leading the design and delivery. The initiatives seek to enhance instruction and AI literacy, while addressing concerns about privacy, safety, and the evolving role of teachers.
October 17, 2025 — Source

Boris Johnson confesses: He's fallen for ChatGPT
As OpenAI allows chatbot to spout erotic content, former British prime minister makes true feelings known
October 17, 2025 — Source

Britain's AI gold rush hits a wall -- not enough electricity
Energy secretary Miliband promises renewable utopia for green and pleasant land... filled with datacenters
October 17, 2025 — Source

Empowering Parents, Protecting Teens: Meta's Approach to AI Safety
Today, we're sharing our vision for supporting parents as they help their teens navigate AI, including announcing new controls that let parents see -- and manage -- how their teens are interacting with AI characters. Every day, teens use our platforms to stay in touch with friends and explore their interests, and AI can unlock even more of these opportunities, empowering them to learn new skills, like coding or graphic design, or helping them with tricky subjects after school.
October 17, 2025 — Source

Chromium, Linux Kernel, PgPool2 updates for Debian
Debian released security advisories (DSA-6026-1, ELA-1543-1, DLA-4334-1) addressing vulnerabilities in Chromium, the Linux kernel, and pgpool2.
October 17, 2025 — Source

Fedora Cloud Looks To Switch /boot To Btrfs Subvolume
Fedora 44 may switch Fedora Cloud images' /boot to a Btrfs subvolume for better space and smaller images, pending approval and bug fixes.
October 17, 2025 — Source

Gemini Live Brings Native Audio Support to Android for More Natural Conversations
Google is rolling out native audio support for Gemini Live on Android, enhancing how the AI adapts its tone and emotion to user speech. The feature, exclusive to paid Gemini users for now, makes conversations feel more human-like and allows customization of accent and voice speed.
October 17, 2025 — Source

GNOME Has A New Security Threat Scanner Powered By VirusTotal
For those interested in scanning files for malware and other threat detection under Linux and using the GNOME desktop, Lenspect is a new GNOME-aligned application that is a GUI powered by VirusTotal for being a Linux-native security threat scanner.
October 17, 2025 — Source

Google's Deepmind Gemini 3.0 Capabilities Tested for Coding, Research & Design
What if the most powerful AI model ever created wasn't just a distant dream but a reality you could access today? Imagine a tool so advanced it could solve unsolvable mathematical problems, automate intricate coding tasks, and even conceptualize futuristic designs, all at a fraction of the cost of its competitors. Enter the Gemini 3.0 Pro, the latest breakthrough from Google DeepMind, a model that doesn't just set new standards in artificial intelligence, it obliterates them.
October 17, 2025 — Source

How Anthropic's Claude AI now enhances Outlook, Teams, and OneDrive — here's what you need to know
Microsoft's AI diversification continues as it pulls away from overreliance on OpenAI.
October 17, 2025 — Source

Kernel and Libsoup updates for AlmaLinux
The AlmaLinux Security team has released two security updates: one for kernel (moderate severity) and one for libsoup3 (important severity). The kernel update fixes four vulnerabilities, including ones that affect HID, eventpoll, ALSA, and crypto components. The libsoup3 update addresses a single vulnerability related to an out-of-bounds read in cookie date handling in the HTTP library.
October 17, 2025 — Source

Linux Graphics Driver Fixes Readied For Linux 6.18-rc2
Ahead of the Linux 6.18-rc2 release on Sunday, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) fixes for the week were sent out today. There is the usual assortment of different kernel graphics driver fixes, mostly with the Intel and AMD drivers as usual. In particular a few Intel driver fixes make this week's pull worth mentioning.
October 17, 2025 — Source

Intel Vulkan Driver Adds Support For Xe Driver's Low Latency Hint
One of the early changes merged for the in-development Mesa 26.0 is adding support to Intel's "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver for supporting the low-latency hint supported by the modern Intel Xe kernel graphics driver.
October 17, 2025 — Source

Massive AI data center buildouts are squeezing energy supplies — New energy methods are being explored as power demands are set to skyrocket
A perfect storm of massive data centre buildout and new innovations in energy could materially change what our supplies look like in the future.
October 17, 2025 — Source

MCP versus gRPC: Comparing AI Protocols for Real-World Applications
What happens when innovative AI agents meet the challenge of connecting to real-world tools and data? The answer lies in the protocols that bridge the gap between static training models and dynamic, ever-changing environments. Enter Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Google Remote Procedure Call (gRPC)—two frameworks that are transforming how large language models (LLMs) interact with external systems.
October 17, 2025 — Source

Mesa 25.3.0 Release Candidate 1 released
Mesa 25.3.0 has reached a big milestone with the release of its first release candidate. This is the start of the testing phase for the next version, which will add new features and improve performance for many graphics standards, such as OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Vulkan, OpenCL, and others.
October 17, 2025 — Source

Meta previews new parental controls for its AI experiences
Meta on Friday previewed its upcoming parental control features for teens' conversations with AI characters on its platforms. The features, which will be rolled out next year, include the ability to block certain characters and monitor conversation topics.
October 17, 2025 — Source

New Linux Kernel Patches From Intel Delivering +18% Database Performance
In addition to the recent Linux kernel patches out of Intel for Cache Aware Scheduling for better performance, separately, another interesting new patch series was sent out this week for the Linux kernel. The patches rework some low-level Linux kernel memory management code and at least for database workloads the early benchmarks are showing possible 14~18% faster database performance with PostgreSQL.
October 17, 2025 — Source

OpenAI Blocks Users From Making AI Videos of Martin Luther King Jr.
The company says it's adding new "guardrails" to protect historical figures from AI misuse.
October 17, 2025 — Source

OpenAI pauses AI media generation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after misuse
OpenAI recently posted on X that it worked with the Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. (King, Inc.) to ensure that the late civil rights icon's image is treated with integrity on its platforms. At the estate's request, OpenAI has currently paused any Sora generations depicting Dr. King while it says it is implementing stronger guardrails to prevent misuse.
October 17, 2025 — Source

Samba, Kernel, ImageMagick, Python311-LDAP updates for SUSE
SUSE Linux has released several security updates for its users. The updates include critical patches for Samba, which are essential to secure network file sharing and authentication. Additionally, other security updates have been released for the Linux Kernel and ImageMagick, as well as a non-critical update for openSUSE's python311-ldap package.
October 17, 2025 — Source

Samba, Redis, Subversion, .NET, MuPDF updates for Ubuntu
Ubuntu has released several security notices to address vulnerabilities in various packages. The affected packages include Samba (USN-7826-1), Redis (USN-7824-3, USN-7824-2, and USN-7824-1), Redict (USN-7824-2), Apache Subversion (USN-7818-2), .NET (USN-7822-1), and MuPDF (USN-7825-1). These vulnerabilities affect various Ubuntu releases, including 25.10, 25.04, 24.04 LTS, 22.04 LTS, 20.04 LTS, 18.04 LTS, 16.04 LTS, and 14.04 LTS.
October 17, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — October 15th, 2025

AMD EPYC 9005 Brings Incredible Performance To The Cloud With Amazon M8a Benchmarks
Last week Amazon/AWS announced the new EC2 M8a instances as their latest-generation, general-purpose compute instances now powered by AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors. Amazon announced the M8a as having up to 30% higher performance and up to 19% better price performance over M7a. With my testing of both at 32 vCPUs, the new AMD EPYC Turin instance provided 1.59x the performance over the prior-generation EPYC Genoa instance!
October 15, 2025 — Source

AMD HIP-RT Is Stable For Blender 5.0 But Will Be Off By Default Until Blender 5.1
AMD's HIP-RT is used by the Blender 3D modeling software for GPU-accelerated ray-tracing on Radeon GPUs. For Blender 5.0 the AMD HIP-RT support is expected to be declared "stable" but will not be enabled by default until Blender 5.1.
October 15, 2025 — Source

Apple Announces M5 With Much Faster GPU For AI
Apple today announced the M5 SoC as the newest in the Apple Silicon family and with claims of 4x the peak GPU compute performance for AI of the M4.
October 15, 2025 — Source

Basic HDR Support For AMD Radeon Accelerated Video Processing On Linux
David Rosca at AMD continues leading the efforts for improving the open-source Radeon video acceleration support under Linux with the Mesa Gallium3D code. This is especially important now that AMD is encouraging customers to no longer use the AMD Multimedia Framework (AMF) on Linux but resort to using VA-API and the Mesa multimedia capabilities instead.
October 15, 2025 — Source

Commodore Tells Windows 10 Users Shunned By Microsoft To Join Its Linux Sanctuary
Commodore is attempting to come to the rescue for hundreds of millions of users who are still running Windows 10, which has now reached official EOL (end of life) status. In a message posted to social media platform X, Commodore pitched its free Linux-based Vision 3.0 OS as a sanctuary for those left behind, calling it not just an upgrade, but a "reset." It also took a shot at Microsoft.
October 15, 2025 — Source or Source

Godot 4.5.1 released
Godot 4.5.1 has been released by the development team, addressing issues and bugs reported since the previous version. This update includes over 90 fixes contributed by around 50 people, improving performance, fixing bugs, and making the engine easier to use. The update resolves various problems across different departments, including 2D graphics, animation, audio, core, documentation, editor improvements, export, and rendering, making the engine more stable for developers.
October 15, 2025 — Source

I found the easiest way to transfer files to and from my Linux PC - and it's so fast
Once you start using QuickDAV, you'll find this simple app indispensable for easy file transfers from any OS to Linux.
October 15, 2025 — Source

Intel begins laying the groundwork for Xe3P GPUs on Linux
Just as the open-source drivers for Intel's Xe3 graphics devices are reaching maturity, the company's Linux development team is already gearing up for the next generation. The first batch of patches to enable the Xe3P graphics architecture has been fired off, marking the beginning of the long road to supporting Intel's upcoming GPUs on Linux.
October 15, 2025 — Source

Intel ISH Firmware Upstreamed Ahead Of Intel Panther Lake Laptops
In preparation for Panther Lake laptops shipping in early 2026, after Intel appears to have largely wrapped up work on the Linux driver enablement they are now ensuring the necessary firmware bits are out in time.
October 15, 2025 — Source

Intel Wildcat Lake "-march=wildcatlake" Added To GCC & LLVM Clang Compilers
While the open-source GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers saw Panther Lake support added in early 2024, only overnight was support upstreamed to GCC and Clang for the similar Wildcat Lake target.
October 15, 2025 — Source

Linux Gains Tool For Defragmenting exFAT Filesystems
A new release of exfatprogs is now available as the user-space programs on Linux for the exFAT file-system to complement the in-tree kernel driver for the Microsoft exFAT support.
October 15, 2025 — Source

Linux Kernel 6.12.53, 6.6.112, and 6.1.156 released
The Linux Kernel has released several new versions, including 6.12.53, 6.6.112, and 6.1.156, which bring various important updates to make the system faster, more stable, and safer. Some key changes include improved handling of interrupt handlers, addition of support for DMA handles, and fixes to security holes in the USB 9pfs transport layer that could cause heap buffer overflows. Other notable updates include validation to prevent attackers from exploiting packet size inconsistencies and a fix to a use-after-free problem that occurred on certain M2 Mac mini systems.
October 15, 2025 — Source

Linux Kernel 6.17.3 released
The Linux Kernel 6.17.3 has been released, featuring several important patches and fixes for various parts of the operating system. The release includes better performance for the VCN dump buffer, the CDNSP-PCI driver, and the USB network settings, along with fixes for a data race in the CDNSP-PCI driver and a security issue in the USB 9pfs transport layer. Additionally, the kernel has added ACPI support for FSL-MC and fixed various other issues, including use-after-free bugs, NULL pointer dereferences, and potential memory leaks.
October 15, 2025 — Source

Mesa 25.2.5 Released With Very Important Intel Driver Fix
Mesa 25.2.5 is out today as the newest bi-weekly point release for these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. Particularly if you are on Intel graphics of Battlemage or Lunar Lake and potentially older, Mesa 25.2.5 contains a very important bug fix for various rendering issues and potential game hangs/crashes.
October 15, 2025 — Source

Mesa's Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Driver Lands Mesh Shader Support
The GL_EXT_mesh_shader extension for OpenGL, the first new extension in a while, has been finalized. Mesa's Zink driver now fully supports it.
October 15, 2025 — Source

NordVPN's GUI app for Linux is now open source
Back in May, NordVPN released a graphical user interface for its Linux app, finally giving users an alternative to the command line. With features like Dedicated IP, Double VPN, and Threat Protection via DNS filtering, the GUI eliminated the need for most users to ever open a terminal to secure their connection.
October 15, 2025 — Source

Open 3D Engine O3DE 25.10 Brings Build Improvements, Vulkan & Linux Fixes
It's been four years now since the Open 3D Engine was born out of Amazon's Lumberyard project and hosted by the Linux Foundation. Today marks the release of the Open 3D Engine "O3DE" 25.10 release with the newest features and fixes for this cross-platform game/graphics engine.
October 15, 2025 — Source

Raspberry Pi OS, LMDE, Peppermint OS join the Debian 13 club
Downstream Linux projects line up behind the latest release
October 15, 2025 — Source

Samba 4.23.2, 4.22.5, and 4.21.9 released
Three new versions of Samba, 4.23.2, 4.22.5, and 4.21.9, have been released with critical security updates to fix serious flaws in the open-source SMB and Active Directory protocols. The updates address two vulnerabilities: CVE-2025-9640, which can lead to data breaches by exposing uninitialized memory, and CVE-2025-10230, a WINS support issue that allows attackers to send malicious commands to compromised hosts. These issues highlight the importance of keeping Samba systems up-to-date to prevent security problems.
October 15, 2025 — Source

Tinygrad Gains A Mesa NIR Backend - Initially Supporting NVK/NAK & LLVMpipe Execution
Merged today to the Tinygrad deep learning framework is a Mesa NIR back-end to allow targeting that common intermediate representation used by these open-source Linux GPU drivers. Initially supported with this Tinygrad NIR back-end is the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver "NVK" with its Rust-based NAK compiler as well as the CPU-based LLVMpipe driver.
October 15, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — October 13th, 2025

Blender Experimenting With Vulkan Ray Queries
As part of Blender continuing to build out the Vulkan API capabilities for this open-source 3D modeling software, a proof of concept merge request was opened for beginning to make use of Vulkan ray queries.
October 13, 2025 — Source

Box64 0.3.8 Brings DynaCache As Disk Cache For Generated Native Code From x86_64
Box64 0.3.8 is now available for this x86_64 user-space emulator for Linux that allows ARM64 and RISC-V 64-bit and LoongArch 64-bit systems to enjoy running x86_64 games and applications. Box64 along with the likes of FEX-Emu are the leading options for those needing to run x86_64 programs on ARM64 and elsewhere.
October 13, 2025 — Source

GNOME's Flatpak Runtime Drops 32-bit Compatibility Extension
With last month's GNOME 49 release, the 32-bit Compatibility extension for the GNOME Flatpak Runtime is no more. This is part of the broader effort of phasing out 32-bit support.
October 13, 2025 — Source

Intel Removing AMX-TRANSPOSE From The GCC Compiler
One year ago updated Intel documentation noted AMX-TRANSPOSE as one of the new ISA additions for Diamond Rapids. But in updated Intel architecture documentation last month, it oddly removed all references to AMX-TRANSPOSE. Confirming that the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) addition for TRANSPOSE is now dead, an Intel engineer posted a patch to remove AMX-TRANSPOSE from the GCC compiler.
October 13, 2025 — Source

ReactOS Making Progress On Windows WDDM Driver Support
The ReactOS project that continues striving toward being an "open-source Windows" ABI compatible operating system has been seeing some activity recently around supporting Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) display drivers as the newer evolution of XDDM drivers.
October 13, 2025 — Source

Updated Intel Patches For Cache Aware Scheduling Net A 44% Win For AMD EPYC
In the works the past number of months has been cache-aware load balancing / cache aware scheduling support for Linux. The latest iteration of those patches by Intel were posted this weekend and are enjoying the most uplift on AMD EPYC Genoa and newer platforms.
October 13, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — October 10th, 2025

AI Chatbots Use Emotional Farewells to Keep Users Engaged: Study
Asking something like "You're leaving already?" can manipulate a user into sticking around.
October 13, 2025 — Source

AI Is the 'Biggest Driver' of Electricity Use in North America, a New Energy Report Shows
By 2040, AI data centers alone will account for 12% of North American electricity consumption, according to a report on the global energy transition.
October 13, 2025 — Source

AI-Assisted Kubernetes Diagnostics: A Practical Implementation
Proof-of-concept tool using GPT-4 to detect failing Kubernetes pods, analyze logs and events, and suggest fixes with human approval for common issues.
October 13, 2025 — Source

AMD ROCm 7.0.2 Released With Radeon RX 9060 Officially Supported
AMD today released ROCm 7.0.2 as the newest update to the ROCm 7.0 compute stack.
October 13, 2025 — Source

Bazaar 0.5.5 released
The newest version of Bazaar, 0.5.5, has been released with several improvements to its user interface and functionality. The update includes visual changes such as a new design for transaction dialogs and sidebars, as well as updates to translations in various languages. Additionally, the app size dialog now provides users more control and information about package sizes, while texture caching has also been improved for a smoother user experience.
October 13, 2025 — Source

GCC Patches Posted For C++26 SIMD Support
One of the exciting additions on the way for the C++26 programming language is a standardized library around Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) operations. This portable SIMD implementation makes it easier to leverage SIMD and data parallelism in C++ for better performance and to work across SIMD architectures like AVX-512.
October 13, 2025 — Source

Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 (LMDE) released
Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 (LMDE) has been released with improvements made in Linux Mint 22.2 and an updated Debian GNU/Linux 13 package base. LMDE 7 offers support for OEM installations, allowing users to set up their systems for specific hardware configurations. This release showcases Linux Mint's dedication to crafting an adaptable, user-friendly operating system that caters to diverse needs. By combining the stability of Debian with the polish of Linux Mint, LMDE is an excellent option for those seeking a reliable and feature-rich platform.
October 13, 2025 — Source

Linux Now Disabling TPM Bus Encryption By Default For Performance Reasons
Linux is disabling TPM bus encryption by default in kernel versions 6.18 and later due to performance overhead, though it remains available for those who want it.
October 13, 2025 — Source

Microsoft Hyper-V Support Further Improved With Linux 6.18
Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization support within the Linux kernel continues to be steadily enhanced and it's inched along further for Linux 6.18.
October 13, 2025 — Source or Source

New Input Drivers Merged For Linux 6.18
In addition to last week's HID subsystem pull that brought haptic touchpad support and other exciting additions for Linux 6.18, the input subsystem pull was merged this week to introduce a few new input drivers.
October 13, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA Posts Latest Linux Driver Patches For Open-Source vGPU Support
NVIDIA recently revised open-source Linux driver patches for vGPU support, aiming for upstream integration with their Nova driver and demonstrating functionality on Windows 11.
October 13, 2025 — Source

OpenSSH 10.2 released
OpenSSH version 10.2 has been released and is now available for download from its official mirrors. The new release includes important fixes, such as correcting terminal connection handling when ControlPersist is active and resolving issues with CA signing operations in ssh-keygen(1). Additionally, due to known flaws in the SHA1 hash function, SHA1 SSHFP records will be deprecated starting from the next release, with a default change in ssh-keygen -r to only create SHA256 SSHFP records.
October 13, 2025 — Source

Proton 10.0-3 RC released
Valve has released the release candidate for Proton 10.0-3 for testing, which aims to improve PC game performance on Linux and the Steam Deck. The new build is available as a beta branch in the Steam client, allowing users to test its features. Proton 10.0-3 includes numerous fixes and improvements, enabling previously unplayable games like Mary Skelter: Nightmares and Grim Fandango Remastered to run smoothly.
October 13, 2025 — Source

Python 3.12.12, 3.11.14, 3.10.19, and 3.9.24 released
Python releases four new security updates: 3.12.12, 3.11.14, 3.10.19, and 3.9.24, addressing vulnerabilities in XML parsing and improving handling of archive and ZIP files. The HTML parsing capabilities have been significantly enhanced to align with the HTML5 standard, resolving various issues related to tag name recognition, attribute handling, CDATA section parsing, and comment termination. Better support for non-ASCII whitespaces, disregard for unnecessary characters, and more accurate parsing of attributes, tags, and comments are among these improvements.
October 13, 2025 — Source

Python 3.14 Performance Looking Good In Benchmarks
With this week's release of Python 3.14 bringing performance improvements, debugging improvements, a new Zstd compression module, and other enhancements I have been eager to run some benchmarks seeing how Python 3.14 compares to prior Python releases.
October 13, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu 25.10 Questing Quokka suffers Flatpak installation failures, fix issued
Canonical only released Ubuntu 25.10 Questing Quokka yesterday, but a major issue has already been found (and thankfully fixed); users couldn't install or update Flatpak applications. According to a bug report on Launchpad, Flatpak installs were failing, displaying a critical error.
October 13, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — October 8th, 2025

4 ways KDE Plasma 6.5 beta is shaping up to be a beautiful, customizable Linux desktop
One of Linux's most popular desktops is getting a huge upgrade.
October 8, 2025 — Source

Alpine 3.19.9, 3.20.8, 3.21.5, and 3.22.2 released
Alpine Linux has released new stable versions—3.19.9, 3.20.8, 3.21.5, and 3.22.2—including security fixes for OpenSSL.
October 8, 2025 — Source

AOMedia Will Be Talking More About The AV2 Video Codec Later This Month
Last month the Alliance for Open Media "AOMedia" began teasing that the AV2 video codec will release later this year. They have now sent us word that later this month will be a virtual event talking more about this successor to AV1.
October 8, 2025 — Source

Blender 5.0 Beta Builds Available Ahead Of Next Month's Official Release
Beta builds of Blender 5.0 are now available for testing, focusing on bug fixes. The stable release is planned for around November 11, featuring animation enhancements and other improvements.
October 8, 2025 — Source

GCC 16 Compiler Shifting To "Stage 3" Development Next Month
The GNU Compiler Collection will shift to "stage three" development in November, prioritizing bug fixing and new ports. AMD Zen 6 support is hoped for in GCC 16.
October 8, 2025 — Source

KVM Virtualization Sees Several Exciting Improvements For AMD & Intel In Linux 6.18
Linux 6.18 brings numerous KVM improvements for AMD and Intel, including virtualization support, performance enhancements, and security features across various CPU architectures.
October 8, 2025 — Source

My 5 favorite cloud sync tools for Linux - including free options
If you're looking to sync your folders and files to a cloud storage account, you'll find plenty of options in Linux.
October 8, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18 Block Code Introduces Lockless Bitmap For Software RAID
Last week the block subsystem and IO_uring updates were merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel with a few items to draw attention to.
October 8, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18 exFAT Driver Lands An Enticing Optimization
Linux 6.18 includes notable updates to the exFAT driver, optimizing bitmap loading time by up to 16.5x, alongside support for file-system labels and remount options.
October 8, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18 RISC-V Default Kernel Builds To Support Front Panel Shutdown/Reboot Buttons
Linux 6.18 updates for RISC-V include standardized interface support, boot logo enablement, and default GPIO keyboard/event device support for shutdown/reboot buttons.
October 8, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18 USB Brings Intel USBIO Drivers, Offload Improvements
In addition to the Linux 6.18 kernel bringing initial bindings for writing Rust USB drivers, the main USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates for Linux 6.18 brought a variety of other enhancements.
October 8, 2025 — Source

Linux Fair DRM Scheduler Graduates Out Of The "RFC" Phase
Tvrtko Ursulin of Igalia has been leading the work on developing a "fair" DRM scheduler for Linux kernel graphics drivers. This scheduling algorithm is inspired by CFS and aims to improve the experience of running interactive graphical clients in parallel with heavy GPU workloads. This scheduler is inching closer to being ready for the mainline Linux kernel.
October 8, 2025 — Source

Open-source software advances design of offshore structures by testing wave-structure interactions
A Cornell doctoral student has developed an open-source software package that could transform how engineers design floating offshore structures for renewable energy and other ocean applications.
October 8, 2025 — Source

PixiEditor 2.0.1.17 released
PixiEditor 2.0.1.17 has been released, addressing a specific crash that users may have encountered. PixiEditor is a powerful universal 2D editor designed to cater to all your graphical needs, from creating sprites for games to editing images and logos. Its intuitive interface and comprehensive toolsets, including pixel art, painting, and vector tools, provide an unparalleled level of flexibility and precision. PixiEditor also comes equipped with advanced animation capabilities, including a built-in timeline and node-based render system that enables users to bring their creations to life.
October 8, 2025 — Source

System76 Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta Performing Well In Early Benchmarks
Last week System76 released the Pop!_OS 24.04 beta along with the beta COSMIC desktop. This long overdue update to Pop!_OS re-bases against the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base while featuring their modern, Rust-based desktop environment. For those curious I ran some benchmarks of Pop!_OS 24.04 beta compared to the current Pop!_OS 22.04 stable release.
October 8, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — October 3rd, 2025

Free Software Foundation Names New President
A new Free Software Foundation president has been elected.
October 3, 2025 — Source

Intel NPU Linux Driver 1.24 Released
Intel released NPU Linux Driver 1.24, validated on Core Ultra Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake, and Lunar Lake SoCs, with updated firmware and components.
October 3, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18 Device Tree Prepares For Arm C1 Nano / Pro / Premium / Ultra CPUs
The Linux 6.18 kernel's Device Tree now includes support strings for upcoming Arm C1 Nano, Pro, Premium, and Ultra processor cores, replacing Cortex-A and Cortex-X branding.
October 3, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18 Non-MM Pull Request: "A Mere 150x Speedup Was Measured..."
Andrew Morton on Thursday submitted his collection of "non-MM" patches for areas of the kernel he oversees. There is one patch series that stands out in this pull request for Linux 6.18.
October 3, 2025 — Source

Qualcomm Iris Driver Adds H.264/H.265 Encode, Sadly No AMD ISP4 Driver For Linux 6.18
All of the multimedia subsystem feature updates have been merged for the Linux 6.18 merge window.
October 3, 2025 — Source

Red Hat fesses up to GitLab breach after attackers brag of data theft
Red Hat confirmed attackers accessed and copied data from a dedicated consulting GitLab instance, claiming the incident was limited and notifying authorities.
October 3, 2025 — Source or Source

Rusticl Performance For AMD Strix Halo Against ROCm OpenCL
After recently carrying out ROCm 7.0 benchmarks on AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo", I ran some complementary tests looking at the OpenCL performance. In particular, the ROCm OpenCL performance compared to using the Mesa-based Rusticl OpenCL driver on Strix Halo. It was an interesting benchmark battle with some healthy competition.
October 3, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — September 29th, 2025

5 Reasons You Should Move To Linux Instead Of Windows 11
You've likely heard people talking about Linux as a more stable, secure, and customizable operating system than Windows 11. That might be hard to believe, but in some cases, it's true. If you're tired of Windows' endless updates and slowdowns, you should consider taking a look at Linux, which has never been easier to download and run.
September 29, 2025 — Source

Blender 5.0 Vulkan Render Tests Passing On AMD & NVIDIA But Failing For Intel
Blender 5.0 is working its way toward an official release in mid-November and is soon transitioning from its alpha to beta stage. Among the key changes with Blender 5.0 are its Vulkan renderer being in good shape overall, HDR support when using Vulkan and Wayland on Linux, and other enhancements. Today some brief details were shared around the current state of the Vulkan support for Blender 5.0.
September 29, 2025 — Source

elementary OS 8.0.2
Elementary OS is a Linux distribution that offers a sleek, accessible alternative to Windows and macOS. Its signature interface, Pantheon, is designed with simplicity and consistency in mind. Unlike many Linux setups, which emphasize heavy customization, elementary focuses on a curated, cohesive user experience.
September 29, 2025 — Source

GNU Linux-libre 6.17 Deblobs The New Intel IPU7 Driver, Adjusts Existing Drivers
Building off yesterday's release of Linux 6.17, the GNU Linux-libre 6.17-gnu kernel is now available for this downstream kernel variant that strips away support for loading non-free microcode and other elements not aligned with the Free Software Foundation principles. This ultimately ends up limiting the hardware support available with most of today's modern hardware requiring microcode/firmware but alas here is the latest release with a fresh round of de-blobbing.
September 29, 2025 — Source

Intel Releases New LLM Scaler Betas For GenAI On Battlemage GPUs
Back in August Intel released LLM-Scaler 1.0 as part of Project Battlematrix for help getting generative AI "GenAI" workloads running on Arc (Pro) B-Series graphics cards. Out today are two new LLM Scaler beta releases for further enhancing the AI capabilities on Intel Battlemage GPUs.
September 29, 2025 — Source

IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 198 is available for testing
IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 198 has been released for testing, bringing significant improvements to the IPFire Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and an upgraded toolchain. The enhanced IPS now offers advanced reporting capabilities, including real-time email notifications, scheduled PDF reports, and remote syslog forwarding, which dramatically enhance its auditability and accountability. Additionally, the update includes an upgrade to Suricata 8.0.1, caching for compiled rules, sturdier memory handling, and expanded protocol support.
September 29, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18 Power Management Brings Panther Lake Power Slider & New Drivers
Linux ACPI and power management maintainer Rafael Wysocki today sent out all of the feature updates and changes intended for the now-started Linux 6.18 merge window. There are some new Intel additions as well as for the growing range of different ARM-based SoCs and other hardware.
September 29, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18 Updating The Baseline For Marking Intel CPU Microcode As Outdated
Introduced this year with the Linux 6.16 kernel was the new functionality for reporting to users when running on outdated Intel CPU microcode since it can pose security vulnerability issues and/or functionality problems. The Linux kernel support for propagating this "old_microcode" reporting via sysfs relies on a static list of microcode versions corresponding to different Intel CPU generations. For the Linux 6.18 kernel this list is being updated to reflect modern baselines for Intel recommendations on CPU microcode.
September 29, 2025 — Source

Microsoft to remove crucial SQL Server on Linux VM images, forcing temporary manual installs
Microsoft is removing all Linux-based SQL Server VM images from the Azure Marketplace. The Redmond giant said these images will no longer be available in the Azure SQL hub, CLI, Azure Portal, or PowerShell scripts for new virtual machine (VM) provisioning. The deprecation is expected to start soon and be finished over the next couple of months, during which time images may be unavailable. For those with existing deployments using old images, these should continue working properly.
September 29, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA, Disney & Google Contribute Open-Source Newton Engine To The Linux Foundation
Earlier this year NVIDIA announced Newton as an open-source physics engine focused on robotic simulations. This physics engine was developed by NVIDIA in cooperation with Google DeepMind and Disney Research. Today it's been contributed to the Linux Foundation.
September 29, 2025 — Source

PikaOS 25.09.26 released
PikaOS 25.09.26 has been released as the latest version of a cutting-edge Linux distribution focused on gaming and optimization. Built on Debian with custom-compiled packages, PikaOS achieves a balance between stability and up-to-dateness, delivering seamless gaming experiences out of the box with exceptional performance. The operating system boasts high compatibility due to its Debian SID base with custom patches, supporting various software and hardware configurations.
September 29, 2025 — Source

RISC-V With Linux 6.18 Brings Support For MIPS Vendor Extensions
Back during the Linux 6.17 merge window the RISC-V changes were rejected as "garbage" for being submitted too late in the merge window and with some code choices that upset Linus Torvalds. With lessons learned, the RISC-V changes for Linux 6.18 were submitted today during the first official day of this new kernel cycle.
September 29, 2025 — Source

Ryzen AI Max+ With Framework Desktop, File-System Tests & EPYC 4005 Dominated Q3
With Q3 coming to an end this week, here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews and featured multi-page benchmark articles during the third quarter of this year on Phoronix.
September 29, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — September 26th, 2025

Features Expected For Linux 6.18: File-System Improvements, Sheaves, New Drivers & More Perf
With Linux 6.17 expected for release this weekend, the Linux 6.18 merge window will in turn kick-off for its usual two week dance. Here is a look at some of the features on our radar that are expected to be merged for Linux 6.18, which is also likely to be the 2025 LTS kernel version.
September 26, 2025 — Source

Intel Returns To Working On The Habana Labs AI Accelerator Linux Driver
After being on a hiatus for more than one year and going through several rounds of Habana Labs driver maintainers due to Intel layoffs, there finally is some updated "habanalabs" AI accelerator kernel driver code slated to go into the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle. There is some new feature work but still no Gaudi 3 support for the upstream Linux kernel.
September 26, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.17 Gets Ready For Release With Intel Panther Lake & More Performance
The Linux 6.17 kernel is tracking well for its planned stable release on Sunday. Here is a look back at some of the most interesting changes to find with this next kernel version.
September 26, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18 Landing Patch For Old AMD Bulldozer CPUs With XOP Instruction Set
The Linux 6.18 kernel is bringing a new patch to benefit those using the decade-old AMD Bulldozer processors and wanting to make use of Linux's X86_NATIVE_CPU build option for enhancing performance in some areas by optimizing the kernel build for your particular processor/ISA capabilities.
September 26, 2025 — Source

PHP 8.3.26 and 8.4.13 packages for Fedora/RHEL released
Remi Collet has announced the availability of RPM packages for PHP versions 8.3.26 and 8.4.13, which can be accessed through his repositories on Fedora 41 or higher and Enterprise Linux systems version 8 or higher. The new PHP versions include bug fixes and performance improvements in various areas such as core, CLI, date functionality, DBA, DOM, FPM, Intl, opcache, OpenSSL, and Phar. Users can install the latest PHP versions using dnf on their system, with options to replace the default version or install it as a software collection.
September 26, 2025 — Source

Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Beta released
System76 has released the first beta for Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS, a long-term support version of its Linux distribution featuring the new COSMIC Desktop Environment (DE). The COSMIC DE includes several improvements and new features, but users can expect some bugs and minor issues due to the beta phase. To use the beta version smoothly, users may need to configure their browsers and make some adjustments to work with certain applications and games.
September 26, 2025 — Source

Samba 4.23.1 released
Samba 4.23.1 has been released, addressing several critical issues in the previous version. The update includes fixes for bugs such as incomplete bind configuration and winbind crashes, ensuring improved stability and performance.
September 26, 2025 — Source

System76 Releases Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Beta Alongside COSMIC Desktop Beta
Overnight the Linux PC vendor System76 released their long-awaited Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Beta operating system along with the beta milestone of their COSMIC desktop environment.
September 26, 2025 — Source

Today Is The Last Day On Our Autumn Deal To Help Support Linux Hardware Reviews
Just a friendly reminder that today is the last day for those wishing to join Phoronix Premium at a discounted rate. Less than 1% of readers currently do so for helping to support the site and its Linux hardware testing and open-source news operations over the past 21 years.
September 26, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu 25.10's Move To Rust Coreutils Is Causing Major Breakage For Some Executables
I noticed a number of benchmarks failing to run on Ubuntu 25.10 this week with reported checksum errors on the files... I quickly realized it's due to the recent Rust Coreutils transition for Ubuntu 25.10 causing some major breakage for those relying on Makeself archives.
September 26, 2025 — Source

Vulkan 1.4.328 Published With Copy Memory Indirect Extension
Vulkan 1.4.328 is now available as the latest specification update to this high performance graphics and compute API from The Khronos Group.
September 26, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — September 25th, 2025

AMD Radeon Software for Linux 25.10.4 released
AMD has released its Radeon Software for Linux 25.10.4, which introduces support for the AMD Radeon PRO W7900D and preliminary ROCm support on the Ryzen AI Max 300 platform. Starting with version 25.20, AMD will shift focus to officially supporting the Mesa Vulkan driver, Mesa OpenGL, and multimedia support, while eliminating proprietary drivers from its releases. Users are advised to transition from AMD Media Framework (AMF) to VA-API/Mesa Multimedia for seamless media processing, as demonstrated by the provided ffmpeg use cases.
September 25, 2025 — Source

Archinstall 3.0.11 has been released.
Additionally, the release includes a quick adjustment that aligns with systemd's recommendations for enabling services during installation. Overall, these enhancements aim to provide a smoother and more efficient user experience for Arch Linux installations.
September 25, 2025 — Source

Bcachefs goes DKMS after Torvalds' kernel banishment
Performance of new version mostly good, but future uncertain
September 25, 2025 — Source

BPF With Linux 6.18 To Support Signed Programs & Deferred Task Execution
Queued this week into the BPF subsystem's "bpf-next" Git branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window are some exciting feature additions.
September 25, 2025 — Source

Fractal 13 Beta released
A new beta version of Fractal, a Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust, has been released for testing. The latest beta release introduces a brand-new audio player, streamlined user profiles, and a more visually appealing design using GNOME document and monospace fonts. Fractal 13 beta is available for installation via Flathub Beta, with contributors' efforts resulting in other enhancements, fixes, and new translations.
September 25, 2025 — Source

GE-Proton10-17 released
GloriousEggroll has released GE-Proton10-17, a minor update to the GE-Proton series. This release serves as a hotfix or refresh, ensuring that users have the latest version of key components. Specifically, it updates DXVK and other main components, which should resolve issues such as the Warframe crash.
September 25, 2025 — Source or Source

Intel Media Driver 2025Q3 Prepares For Panther Lake
The Intel Media Driver 2025Q3 release is available today as the quarterly update to this open-source Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver used by Intel hardware under Linux for video encode/decode.
September 25, 2025 — Source

Intel Posts New Linux Patches To Reduce Overhead Of VMSCAPE Mitigation
Earlier this month the VMSCAPE CPU security vulnerability was made public and affecting both AMD and Intel processors. VMSCAPE can lead to leaking information from a user-space hypervisor via speculative side channels. An Intel engineer today posted a new set of patches for helping to reduce the mitigation costs of VMSCAPE protections on modern Intel processors.
September 25, 2025 — Source

Intel Releases IGSC 1.0 For Applying Firmware Updates To Graphics Cards
Overnight Intel released IGSC 1.0 as their library for handling graphics system firmware updates for rolling out firmware updates to Intel discrete graphics card devices.
September 25, 2025 — Source

KDE neon 20250925 released
KDE neon 20250925 has been released, offering users the latest KDE updates built upon Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. This unique Linux distribution caters primarily to tech-savvy users who want instant access to the latest KDE innovations and serves as a testing ground for adventurous Linux enthusiasts. While KDE neon provides cutting-edge KDE software, it may not be suitable for users with stringent reliability requirements due to its rolling nature and potential system stability issues.
September 25, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18 Linear RAID "md-linear" To Support Atomic Writes
Building off the work in months prior around Device Mapper atomic write support and related infrastructure, the md-linear target for linear software RAID support will enable atomic write support with the upcoming Linux 6.18 merge window.
September 25, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.1.154 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.154 is now available:
September 25, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.6.108 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.108 is now available:
September 25, 2025 — Source

Linux Kernel 6.12.49 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.49 is now available:
September 25, 2025 — Source

Linux Kernel 6.16.9 released
Linux Kernel 6.16.9 has been released with various bug fixes and improvements to its functionality. The release addresses critical issues such as a bug in the io_uring subsystem, memory management leaks, and incorrect clock rate readbacks. Additionally, patches have been applied to fix problems in serial drivers, mptcp, crypto, smb clients, and other kernel components.
September 25, 2025 — Source

MariaDB 12.2 Preview released
MariaDB 12.2, a preview version of the popular open-source relational database, introduces several new features and improvements to its functionality. The update includes compatibility features such as the TO_NUMBER() function, TRUNC() function, global temporary tables, and enhanced replication capabilities between tables with different structures. Additionally, MariaDB 12.2 offers improved optimizer hints for query performance optimization and additional information in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA table for better database management.
September 25, 2025 — Source

Open source to closed doors: RubyGems control fight erupts
Ruby Central is accused of ousting maintainers from core gems under pressure from Shopify
September 25, 2025 — Source

PostgreSQL 18 released
PostgreSQL 18 has been released, bringing significant performance improvements, new features, and enhanced security measures to the world's most advanced open-source database. Key enhancements include a novel I/O subsystem with asynchronous operations that boost overall throughput, faster major-version upgrades, and improved query and general performance through optimizations for indexing and table joins.
September 25, 2025 — Source

PostgreSQL 18.0 Released With Async I/O, Performance Improvements
PostgreSQL 18.0 is out today as the annual major feature release for this widely-used SQL database server. PostgreSQL 18 is a big one with many exciting performance optimizations and other new features.
September 25, 2025 — Source

Qualcomm Begins Posting Linux Patches For Snapdragon X2 Elite, 8 Elite Gen 5 SoCs
Yesterday at the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoCs for upcoming laptops. In addition Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 mobile platform too. With those announcements out there, the Qualcomm open-source engineers have been busy in rolling out their latest patches for beginning to enable these new platforms with the Linux kernel.
September 25, 2025 — Source

Raspberry Pi 500+ Benchmarks: Mechanical Keyboard Computer, 16GB RAM & NVMe SSD
Last year Raspberry Pi launched the Raspberry Pi 500 for taking their Raspberry Pi keyboard computer into the Raspberry Pi 5 world. Today they are announcing the Raspberry Pi 500+ as an upgraded version of the device now with a mechanical keyboard, LED lighting, 16GB of RAM, and NVMe SSD storage.
September 25, 2025 — Source

Wild: A Very Fast Linker Written In Rust, Aims To Outperform Mold Linker
While the Mold linker has been very impressive for its speed the past few years compared to the linkers out of the LLVM and GNU toolchain projects, there is a new high speed linker on the scene and it's written in Rust: meet Wild.
September 25, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — September 22nd, 2025

A Major Trading Firm Has Open-Sourced The Latest Linux File-System: TernFS
XTX Markets as one of the largest algorithmic trading firms that handles $250 billion in daily traded volume and relies on around 650+ petabytes of storage for its price forecasts and other algorithmic trading data has open-sourced its Linux file-system. XTX developed TernFS for distributed storage after they outgrew their original NFS usage and other file-system alternatives.
September 22, 2025 — Source

AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" Performance With ROCm 7.0
With last week's official release of ROCm 7.0 failing to mention the AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" SoCs on the supported GPU list, a number of Phoronix readers and from elsewhere were inquiring whether or not Strix Halo works with the new ROCm release. Various AMD folks have mentioned Strix Halo with ROCm, so I decided to run some benchmarks for myself of ROCm 7.0 on Ubuntu Linux with the AMD Ryzen AI Max 395 with Radeon 8060S Graphics on the Framework Desktop.
September 22, 2025 — Source

Firefox and Python 3 updates for RHEL
Updates are available for Firefox and Python3 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. The Firefox update has been rated as Important by Red Hat Product Security, while the Python 3 update has been rated as Moderate.
September 22, 2025 — Source

FreeBSD 15.0 Alpha 3 Brings WiFi Driver Updates
FreeBSD 15.0 continues hiking toward a stable release in December. This is the third of four planned alphas before moving on to the beta and release candidate phases. It's also in early October when FreeBSD 15.0 will be branched in the development tree.
September 22, 2025 — Source

How to rebase to Fedora Silverblue 43 Beta
Fedora Magazine published a tutorial on how to rebase to Fedora Silverblue 43 Beta, an operating system built on Fedora Linux that offers advantages such as being able to roll back in case of problems. The tutorial provides steps to update from a previous version and how to revert if anything unforeseen happens during the process. Users are advised not to skip versions during rebase but rather update one version above at a time to avoid errors and have specific instructions for users with RPM Fusion layered on their Silverblue installation.
September 22, 2025 — Source

Kdenlive 25.08.1 released
Kdenlive 25.08.1 has been released, focusing on stability and polish with numerous bug fixes and usability improvements. This update addresses various issues, including crashes triggered by user actions or project conditions, and resolves problems related to rendering, audio signals, and macOS compatibility. The Kdenlive development team has also worked on refining the user interface, allowing curve editors to occupy the full width of their panels and improving the appearance of icons in UI components.
September 22, 2025 — Source

Linus Torvalds releases Linux 6.17-rc7 with a mix of bug fixes
The seventh release candidate of Linux kernel 6.17 has just landed. The good news is that this will be the final release candidate before the official 6.17 release next week, as long as no unexpected issues arise. The Linux founder, Linus Torvalds, described the week as "normal" with "mixed random small changes." This week doesn't seem to include an "obvious big concentration of fixes anywhere."
September 22, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18 Adding A New Power Savings Option For The Intel Graphics Driver
Queued up into DRM-Next is a last batch of Intel Xe kernel graphics driver improvements ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window that is expected to begin next week. With this last minute Intel Xe driver activity is also a new power management knob for those wanting to run their Intel graphics slightly more efficient.
September 22, 2025 — Source

Linux has the lineage to out-evolve the deadliest of cyber threats, given the right push
Darwin would understand microkernels. We need microkernels that understand Darwin.
September 22, 2025 — Source

Linux Kernel 6.17-rc7 released
Linus Torvalds has announced the availability of Linux Kernel 6.17-rc7, marking the seventh release candidate before the final version. This update includes over 700 commits from more than 100 contributors, addressing various issues and improving performance across different areas of the kernel, including device drivers, networking, filesystems, and core kernel code. The KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) subsystem has seen significant improvements with a large number of commits aimed at enhancing its performance.
September 22, 2025 — Source

MX Linux 25 Beta 1 released
MX Linux has released the MX-25 "Infinity" beta 1, built from Debian 13, which combines elegant desktops with high stability and performance. This release includes various updates, such as Qt6 migration for MX Tools, new deb822 format support, and improvements to the installer, including UEFI Secure Boot support. Users can test the beta 1 and provide feedback on areas like the installer and MX tools, particularly for popular app entries in MX Package Installer.
September 22, 2025 — Source

OpenAI GPT-5 Codex: Agentic Coding Model MCP Tested
What if coding wasn't just a skill but a conversation, one where your AI collaborator anticipates your needs, adapts to your workflow, and executes complex tasks with precision? OpenAI's GPT-5 Codex is reshaping this vision into reality. As one of the most advanced AI-driven coding tools to date, it promises to streamline multi-component processing (MCP) and redefine how developers interact with code. Imagine seamlessly transitioning between AI models or generating intricate video segments without a hitch, GPT-5 Codex claims to make such scenarios not just possible but routine.
September 22, 2025 — Source

OpenLovable Open Source AI: Build Apps With Ease Without Coding
What if building your next app or website didn't require endless hours of coding or expensive subscriptions? Imagine a tool that lets you describe your vision in plain language and transforms it into functional code, no technical expertise required. Enter OpenLovable, a new open source platform that's reshaping the way developers approach projects. Developed by Firecrawl, OpenLovable combines innovative technologies like React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS with an intuitive chat interface, offering a seamless, self-hosted solution for development.
September 22, 2025 — Source

PAM, FFmpeg, Jq, Shibboleth-SP updates for Debian
Multiple security advisories have been issued for various Debian GNU/Linux packages, including pam, ffmpeg, jq, and shibboleth-sp. Attackers could exploit vulnerabilities such as denial of service, privilege escalation, SQL injection, and heap buffer overflows, which these advisories address. The affected packages include pam (CVE-2024-22365 and CVE-2025-6020), ffmpeg (CVE-2025-1594, CVE-2025-7700, and CVE-2025-10256), jq (CVE-2025-48060), and shibboleth-sp (CVE-2025-9943).
September 22, 2025 — Source

Prometheus-Podman-Exporter and Podman-TUI updates for Fedora
Fedora has released security updates for several packages, including prometheus-podman-exporter and podman-tui. The updates address a memory leak vulnerability (CVE-2025-58058) in the xz library used by these packages. Updates are available for Fedora 41, 42, and 43 Beta.
September 22, 2025 — Source

ProtonUp-Qt 2.14.0 released
ProtonUp-Qt 2.14.0 has been released with improved features and enhanced compatibility tools for Linux systems. This update allows users to install various compatibility layers, such as Proton-GE and Luxtorpeda, for gaming platforms like Steam, Lutris, and Heroic Games Launcher. The release has also undergone testing on Ubuntu 18.04 or newer, Fedora 34, and Manjaro 20.2, ensuring its stability across different platforms.
September 22, 2025 — Source

Qt Creator 18 Beta Brings Development Container Support
The beta release of the Qt Creator 18 integrated development environment is now available for testing for this Qt/C++-focused IDE.
September 22, 2025 — Source

Raspberry Pi Releases M.2 HAT+ Compact For $15
Raspberry Pi today announced the M.2 HAT+ Compact as a new smaller version of their M.2 HAT+ for these single board computers.
September 22, 2025 — Source

Rke2 update for SUSE
A security update is available for openSUSE Tumbleweed that resolves one vulnerability. The update addresses an issue fixed in the rke2-1.33-1.33.5+rke2r1-1.1 package, which is classified as having a moderate rating. The affected product is openSUSE Tumbleweed, and the relevant security reference can be found on Suse's website regarding CVE-2025-1974.
September 22, 2025 — Source

RPM 6.0 Released With OpenPGP Improvements & Enforces Signature Checking By Default
RPM 6.0 is out today as the newest major update to the RPM Package Manager as the package management system most commonly associated with Red Hat / Fedora, openSUSE, Mageia / OpenMandriva, and others.
September 22, 2025 — Source

Sparky 2025.09 Special Editions released
SparkyLinux 2025.09 Special Editions have been released, offering three distinct versions: GameOver for gamers, Multimedia for web developers and multimedia enthusiasts, and Rescue for system rescue operations. Built on Debian 14 testing, this release includes Linux kernel 6.16 and updated packages from Debian and Sparky testing repositories.
September 22, 2025 — Source

Why ZorinOS 18 might be the new best Linux distro - and I've tried them all
The team behind ZorinOS has released the beta version of the open-source operating system, and it's not only stunning but also more user-friendly.
September 22, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — September 19th, 2025

2025 year of Linux? Data suggests unsupported Windows 11 users overwhelmingly choosing one
This week, The Restart Project, a right-to-repair activist group published new statements regarding the upcoming end of support for Windows 10. The group once again urged Microsoft to consider extending the support for the OS and also reminded users about its "End of Windows 10 toolkit". One of the recommendations of the group is that users install Linux on systems that are deemed ineligible for a Windows 11 upgrade due to the hardware not meeting the OS requirements.
September 19, 2025 — Source

Fedora Linux 43 Beta Now Available for Testing
That's right, my friends, the beta of the latest iteration of your favorite RPM-based distribution is now available for testing. The final release before the stable release is made available this fall, Fedora Linux 43 Beta has plenty of improvements and additions.
September 19, 2025 — Source

I've been using Linux for a quarter of a century, so why do I keep coming back to Ubuntu?
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
September 19, 2025 — Source

IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 197 released
IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 197 has been released, marking a significant milestone for this professional-grade open-source firewall and security platform. The update includes a comprehensive overhaul of OpenVPN to version 2.6, bringing improved security, client compatibility, and codebase modernization, as well as fine-tuned system performance to reduce energy consumption while maintaining lightning-fast speed. Additionally, IPFire has been rebased on Linux 6.12.41, features new mitigations against Transient Scheduler Attacks, and includes numerous package upgrades and add-on updates.
September 19, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.5 beta is out bringing KNightTime module, Wayland PiP support, and more
The KDE team has announced Plasma 6.5 Beta today, meaning you can finally test out all the changes and improvements that have been in the works, some of which we've covered in our previous "This Week in Plasma" coverage. The final release is scheduled for October 21.
September 19, 2025 — Source

Lubuntu 25.10 Questing Quokka beta arrives with controversial Rust-based core changes
Lubuntu has released the beta version of Lubuntu 25.10, codenamed Questing Quokka, which will be the 29th release overall and the 15th with the LXQt desktop (LXDE was used before). While still a big update, it is an interim release between long term versions and has a shorter lifespan. It will be supported for nine months with the end of life occurring in July 2026.
September 19, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.1.153 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.153 is now available:
September 19, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.6.107 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.107 is now available:
September 19, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.12.48 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.48 is now available:
September 19, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.16.8 released
Linux kernel version 6.16.8 is now available:
September 19, 2025 — Source

Linux Mint unveils anticipated LMDE 7 "Gigi" beta release
Linux Mint has released the beta for LMDE 7, codenamed Gigi. The project's goal is to ensure Linux Mint's user experience can be maintained even if Ubuntu, on which Linux Mint is usually based, were to become unavailable. LMDE also serves as a development target to ensure the software built by the team is compatible outside of the Ubuntu base. As it's not based on Ubuntu, LMDE uses the package base provided by Debian.
September 19, 2025 — Source

Python 3.14.0rc3 released
Python 3.14.0rc3 is the final release candidate available for testing ahead of its scheduled release on October 7th, 2025. This version introduces significant new features including support for free-threaded Python, deferred evaluation of annotations, and template string literals for custom string processing. Major updates also include improved error messages, a built-in implementation of HMAC with formally verified code, and better color support in various command-line interfaces.
September 19, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu Linux 25.10 Beta released
Ubuntu Linux 25.10, codenamed Questing Quokka, has reached its beta stage, which constitutes an important step towards the final release expected in October 2025. The beta release includes images for various Ubuntu products and community-developed flavors, featuring updated kernel version 6.17 (release candidate) and other new features.
September 19, 2025 — Source

Ungoogled Chromium 140.0.7339.185-1 released
Ungoogled Chromium is a lightweight browser built upon the latest Chromium 140.0.7339.185 release, designed to provide enhanced security and privacy by eliminating Google dependencies. The browser maintains a standard interface experience while introducing tweaks that promote user control and awareness of their online activities. Key features include disabling or removing functionality related to Google domains, blocking internal requests, and stripping unnecessary binaries from the source code.
September 19, 2025 — Source

VSCodium 1.104.16282 released
VSCodium, a community-driven project based on Microsoft's VS Code repository, has released its latest version built upon VS Code 1.104.1. The new release addresses several critical issues, including a fix for the CVE-2025-10585 security vulnerability and various bugs related to user experience, API fixes, and authentication problems.
September 19, 2025 — Source

"Windows alternate" Zorin OS 18 claims even better performance, adds huge features list
If you are a fan of Linux and were hoping that with the upcoming end of support for Windows 10, there would be a user exodus towards Linux as they won't officially be able to upgrade, you are in for disappointment. That is because the latest JPR data has suggested that that is simply not the case.
September 19, 2025 — Source

Zorin OS 18 Beta released
Zorin OS 18 Beta has been released, featuring a visually stunning redesign with a refreshed default theme and innovative user interface enhancements. The operating system introduces Advanced Window Tiling, Seamless Integration with Web Apps, and OneDrive file integration, catering to users who have migrated from Windows.
September 19, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — September 16th, 2025

AMD ROCm 7.0 Begins Rocking Out On GitHub
As a pleasant surprise waking up this morning is AMD ROCm 7.0 release tags beginning to appear on GitHub, indicating the likely imminent official release of the ROCm 7.0 compute stack as the open-source AMD Radeon/Instinct software stack aimed to be the open alternative to NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem.
September 16, 2025 — Source or Source

Bazaar 0.4.11 released
Bazaar 0.4.11 has been released. The release addresses a few critical bugs, including disabling the curated tab when there is no content to display and improving blocklist handling. Additionally, Arabic and Italian translations have been updated, while untranslated strings have been fixed by community contributors
September 16, 2025 — Source

Fedora 43 Beta ISOs Released For Testing This Leading-Edge Linux OS
Fedora 43 Beta ISOs are now available for those wanting to help in testing this next major Fedora Linux release. Fedora 43 is powered by the Linux 6.17 kernel, GNOME 49 is powering Fedora Workstation 43, and there are a wealth of updates as covered in countless Phoronix articles.
September 16, 2025 — Source

Fedora Linux 43 Beta released
The Fedora Project has released the beta version of Fedora Linux 43, a crucial step towards its final official release in October. The beta build includes various desktop environments with updates that benefit users and developers, such as the XFCE 4.20 and LXQt 2.1, which now use Wayland for improved performance and functionality. For developers, Fedora Linux 43 Beta introduces features like Copilot Runtime Verification Framework, Ruby 3.4, PHP 8.4, and updates to the GNU Toolchain with GCC 15 and Binutils 2.44.
September 16, 2025 — Source

Fedora Workstation 43 Beta Is Running Well On AMD Strix Halo / Framework Desktop
Fedora 43 Beta is releasing today as we work toward the official release in either late October or early November. I have been testing out the Fedora Workstation 43 Beta candidate to great success on the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" powered Framework Desktop. Here are some benchmarks of Fedora Workstation 42 compared to the Fedora Workstation 43 Beta.
September 16, 2025 — Source

FEX-2509.1 released
FEX 2509.1, a powerful tool that enables running x86 applications on ARM64 Linux devices with broad compatibility for both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries, has been released to address some minor regressions from the initial 2509 version, providing a more stable experience for users. FEX supports seamless integration with Wine/Proton to play Windows games on Linux systems, leveraging API call forwarding to native libraries like OpenGL or Vulkan
September 16, 2025 — Source

Godot 4.5 released
Godot 4.5 has been released, focusing on making game development more accessible and feature-rich with various enhancements across rendering, visuals, scripting, and development workflow. Key improvements include advanced visual effects, improved performance, and enhanced user experience through features like screen reader support, custom loggers, and a dedicated 2D navigation server. The update also includes platform-specific enhancements for Android, Linux, macOS, Windows, and Web, as well as significant overhauls of systems such as animation, import, input, navigation, physics, rendering, and XR.
September 16, 2025 — Source

Here's how I multi-task in the Linux terminal with Tmux
Elevate your sys admin powers!
September 16, 2025 — Source

Intel USBIO USB IO Expander Drivers Expected To Be Merged For Linux 6.18
Queued up in the past few days to the USB subsystem's "usb-next" Git branch are the Intel USBIO drivers for Linux 6.18. These drivers are needed to support the web cameras on various newer Intel laptop models.
September 16, 2025 — Source

Intel Xeon 6980P "Granite Rapids" Linux Performance One Year Later
Next week marks one year since the launch of the Xeon 6900P series Granite Rapids server processors. Given the occasion and a new server in the lab, here is a look at how Intel's Granite Rapids top-end Xeon 6980P server processors are performing one year after the original introduction with a production-grade server platform as well as incorporating all of the Linux software improvements over the past year.
September 16, 2025 — Source

Linux Mint picks up the pace with LMDE 7 and Wayland-ready Cinnamon
Devs sketch plans for two more releases this year, blending Debian foundations with modern display tech
September 16, 2025 — Source

Linux Security Tools Bypassed by io_uring Rootkit Technique, ARMO Research Reveals
Security researchers at ARMO have uncovered a significant vulnerability in Linux runtime security tools that stems from the io_uring interface, an asynchronous I/O mechanism that can completely bypass traditional system call monitoring. The research demonstrates how attackers can exploit this blind spot to operate undetected by most existing security solutions.
September 16, 2025 — Source

Python-Django and Node-SHA.js updates for Debian 11 LTS
Two security updates have been issued for Debian GNU/Linux 11 (Bullseye) LTS. The first update addresses a potential SQL injection attack in the Django web development framework, which has been fixed in version 2:2.2.28-1~deb11u8. The second update fixes an improper input validation vulnerability in node-sha.js, a popular streamable SHA hashes implementation, which has been addressed in version 2.4.11-2+deb11u1.
September 16, 2025 — Source

ROCm 7.0.0 released
ROCm 7.0.0 is a major release that brings significant updates and new features across its comprehensive platform, focusing on expanded hardware support, enhanced deep learning framework integration, improved compiler capabilities, and refined tooling. The release introduces support for AMD Instinct MI355X and MI350X GPUs, expands OS compatibility to include Ubuntu 24.04.3 and Rocky Linux 9, and enhances support for popular deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow.
September 16, 2025 — Source

SQLite, JSON-XS, Vim, RubyGems updates for Ubuntu
Ubuntu has released several security notices (USN) to address vulnerabilities in various packages. The affected releases include Ubuntu 25.04, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. The vulnerabilities include a JSON-XS issue that could cause a denial of service by crashing if it parses specially crafted JSON data, as well as issues with SQLite, cPanel-JSON-XS, Vim, and RubyGems that could potentially lead to code execution or resource consumption.
September 16, 2025 — Source

The Open Source Initiative's executive director departs - what it means for the OSAID debate
Will the OSI continue with its current AI definition path? This issue continues to be debated in both AI and open-source circles.
September 16, 2025 — Source

Transform Your Raspberry Pi 5 Into a Desktop Powerhouse with Alpine Linux
Have you ever wondered how to turn your Raspberry Pi 5 into a sleek, ultra-lightweight desktop system? While many Linux distributions promise simplicity, few can match the sheer efficiency of Alpine Linux. Known for its minimalistic design and server-first approach, Alpine Linux is a hidden gem for tech enthusiasts who value performance and customization. But here's the catch: transforming this lightweight OS into a functional desktop environment isn't a plug-and-play affair.
September 16, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — September 9th, 2025

7 most Windows-like Linux distros - if you're ready to ditch Microsoft
These Linux distributions will let you revive your PC after Windows 10 ends, without the learning curve.
September 9, 2025 — Source

AlmaLinux 10.1 will ship with CRB enabled by default
AlmaLinux is a community-owned and governed, free, and open-source Linux distribution that is binary-compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The project started after Red Hat announced in 2020 that it was discontinuing the stable CentOS Linux release.
September 9, 2025 — Source

AlmaLinux OS 10: Enhancing User Experience with CodeReady Linux Builder Repository
AlmaLinux has announced that the CodeReady Linux Builder (CRB) repository will be enabled by default in AlmaLinux OS 10, aiming to resolve common issues with installing packages from Fedora Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL). This change is designed to simplify the user experience and reduce the number of erroneous bug reports filed with EPEL maintainers.
September 9, 2025 — Source

AMD openSIL Production Phase Reaffirmed For 2026
One of the AMD software initiatives we have been most excited about in recent times has been openSIL. AMD openSIL is working toward open-source CPU silicon initialization that will jive better with the likes of Coreboot and ultimately replace their existing AGESA implementation. AMD openSIL is expected to span AMD's wide gamut of processors from client/embedded through server offerings. It's still looking to be on track for production readiness in 2026.
September 9, 2025 — Source

Fedora 44 Considering Additional Kernel Hardening For Better Security
A change proposal has been filed to mitigate additional kernel vulnerabilities/attacks via additional kernel tuning by default.
September 9, 2025 — Source

Fedora's Modern OS Installer UI Working Well & Expanding Scope Before Deprecating GTK UI
The long-in-development web-based user interface for the Anaconda installer used by Fedora (and Red Hat Enterprise Linux) continues maturing well and expanding its usage before eventually seeing the Anaconda GTK-based UI deprecated in the future.
September 9, 2025 — Source

FEX 2509 Delivers More Performance For x86 Binaries On ARM64 Linux
FEX 2509 is out today as the latest monthly update to this open-source emulator allowing unmodified x86/x86_64 games and applications to run in ARM64 Linux environments.
September 9, 2025 — Source or Source

FEX 2509 released
The latest version of FEX (2509) has been released, providing improvements to ensure smooth execution of x86 applications on ARM64 Linux devices. Key features include an advanced binary recompiler, custom IR generation, and a per-app configuration system for optimized performance settings. FEX 2509 boasts various JIT enhancements, Mono performance hacks, and fixes for specific issues like black screen rendering in games.
September 9, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.4.5 Released With Fix For "Extreme Stuttering" On Intel Graphics
KDE Plasma 6.4.5 is out today as the newest monthly point release for the current Plasma 6.4 desktop series. Making this month's Plasma 6 point release notable are a number of KWin compositor fixes.
September 9, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.4.5 released with multiple bug fixes for KWin, Plasma Addons, and more
KDE Plasma 6.4.5, the fifth bug fix release for version 6.4, is now live, addressing bugs in different components like KWin, Discover, and Dr. Konqi.
September 9, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.5 Beta Released With KNightTime, Rounded Bottom Window Corners
The beta release of KDE's Plasma 6.5 desktop took place on Thursday as they work toward the stable release expected on 21 October.
September 9, 2025 — Source

Linus Torvalds warns Linux devs: Stop cluttering patches with automated, useless links
'Stop this garbage already.'
September 9, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 5.4.299 released
Linux kernel version 5.4.299 is now available:
September 9, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 5.10.243 released
Linux kernel version 5.10.243 is now available:
September 9, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 5.15.192 released
Linux kernel version 5.15.192 is now available:
September 9, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.1.151 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.151 is now available:
September 9, 2025 — Source or Source

Linux Kernel 6.6.105 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.105 is now available:
September 9, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.16.6 released
Linux kernel version 6.16.6 is now available:
September 9, 2025 — Source

Linux Sensor Driver Coming For GPD Handhelds
The upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle is likely to see the new "gpd-fan" driver merged as a hardware monitoring driver for the increasing number of GPD gaming handheld devices.
September 9, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit 13.0 Update 1 Brings Some Performance Enhancements
Released just over one month ago was the general availability of CUDA 13.0 while out this week is CUDA 13.0 Update 1 as the first incremental step forward to CUDA 13.
September 9, 2025 — Source

PHP 8.4.13 RC1 released
The release candidate for PHP 8.4.13 has been announced, which addresses numerous bugs and security vulnerabilities across various components of the PHP ecosystem. The update fixes over 20 issues, including core, CLI, date, DBA, DOM, FPM, Intl, Opcache, OpenSSL, PGSQL, Phar, and Streams-related problems. Key fixes include resolving memory leaks, potential use-after-free errors, and integer overflow issues, as well as improving error messages and handling for various scenarios.
September 9, 2025 — Source

PixiEditor 2.0.1.13 released
PixiEditor 2.0.1.13, a powerful 2D graphics editor offering tools for all 2D needs, including pixel art, painting, and vector creation. This latest version introduces a timeline and animation capabilities, as well as a node render system that enables customization and procedural art/animations. The release includes several fixes and improvements, such as enhanced shape selection and symmetry features, improved resize undo functionality, and compatibility with various formats.
September 9, 2025 — Source

Rust Coreutils 0.2.2 Released With Faster base64: Outperforming GNU's base64
It was just a few days ago that Rust Coreutils 0.2 released with "massive" performance gains and production-ready Ubuntu support. Rust Coreutils 0.2.2 is out today and is delivering a few more enhancements -- most excitingly is a faster base64 command that can now outperform the GNU Coreutils version.
September 9, 2025 — Source

Samba 4.21.8 Now Available
Samba 4.21.8 is now available for download, marking a new stable release in the 4.21 series. This open-source implementation of SMB and Active Directory protocols provides secure, fast file and print services to clients on Linux and UNIX-like systems. The latest release addresses several critical issues, including improved netlogon functionality, fixes for kinit command errors, and resolved conflicts between shadow copy and virusfilter module
September 9, 2025 — Source

This Fedora spin is perfect for one particular kind of new Linux user
With Windows 10 support ending, you might be looking for an alternative. If you like the idea of Fedora, but are afraid it isn't user-friendly enough, Nobara has your back.
September 9, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu's Launchpad Deprecating Code Imports From CVS & Subversion
Canonical's Launchpad service that is closely aligned with the Ubuntu project is finally deprecating code imports from CVS and Subversion repositories that go through the defunct Bazaar.
September 9, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — September 5th, 2025

A First Look At Ubuntu 25.10 Performance On AMD Strix Halo / Framework Desktop
It has been a lot of fun over the past month looking at the performance of AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ Strix Halo powering the Framework Desktop. The newest area being explored is how the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 is looking compared to the current Ubuntu 25.04 release.
September 5, 2025 — Source

Firefox Ending 32-bit Linux Support Next Year
Mozilla announced today that they will be ending 32-bit Linux support for the Firefox web browser in 2026.
September 5, 2025 — Source

Four Months Have Passed Since The Last AMDVLK Driver Release
Back in May was the surprise but welcoming decision out of AMD that they would begin officially supporting the Mesa Vulkan driver (RADV) and that their proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan drivers would no longer be included in their Radeon Software for Linux releases. This indeed appears to have effectively spelled the end to their AMDVLK driver with Mesa's RADV taking the cake.
September 5, 2025 — Source

Intel's Vulkan Linux Driver Finally Exposes VK_EXT_shader_object
As of today in Mesa 25.3-devel Git, the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver for Linux systems is finally exposing the VK_EXT_shader_object extension.
September 5, 2025 — Source

KDE neon 20250904 released
KDE neon 20250904 offers the latest and greatest software from the KDE community, providing users with cutting-edge features directly from the developers. This distro is ideal for adventurous KDE enthusiasts who want to experience new software releases as soon as they become available. With KDE neon, Plasma Desktop and KDE applications are continuously updated, allowing users to customize their desktops with the latest visuals and work patterns.
September 5, 2025 — Source

Linux Mint 22.2 polishes the desktop, but kernel updates are the real deal
Point release brings Cinnamon tweaks, shiny apps, and Ubuntu's Hardware Enablement stack
September 5, 2025 — Source

Liquorix Linux Kernel 6.16-4 released
Liquorix Linux Kernel 6.16-4, based on Kernel 6.16.5, has been released. Liquorix is a custom kernel designed for desktop, multimedia, and gaming workloads, offering improved responsiveness at the cost of throughput and power usage. It features various optimizations, including a different scheduler (bfq), improved virtual memory management, and enhanced CPUFreq settings to improve system performance under heavy loads.
September 5, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA's Open-Source Nova Driver Now Explicitly Requires 64-bit Support
The first batch of changes from the drm-rust-fixes branch for the Linux 6.17 kernel include one item worth highlighting: the open-source NVIDIA "Nova" driver now is explicitly requiring 64-bit kernels for building and using the driver. In reality this shouldn't impact any users with real-world workflows. The Nova driver just works with the NVIDIA Turing (RTX 20) and newer GPUs due to the dependence on the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP).
September 5, 2025 — Source

RISC-V Zalasr Support Now Under Review For The Linux Kernel
Linux kernel patches for supporting RISC-V's Zalasr ISA extension are now under review. This extension provides "real" load acquire/store release instructions for RISC-V processors.
September 5, 2025 — Source

Samba 4.23.0rc4 Release Candidate Now Available for Testing
Samba 4.23.0rc4 is now available for testing, featuring several new enhancements and improvements, including enabled SMB3 Unix Extensions by default and support for SMB3 over QUIC. The release also includes modern write-time update logic, an initial version of the smb_prometheus_endpoint utility, and updated CTDB features.
September 5, 2025 — Source

Linux Kernel Runtime Guard 1.0 Released For Security Vulnerability Exploit Detection
Linux Kernel Runtime Guard 1.0 has been released. LKRG is a project providing runtime integrity checking of the Linux kernel and is able to detect security vulnerability exploits against the running kernel.
September 5, 2025 — Source

Wine 10.15 To Feature Initial Support For Using NTSYNC On Linux
With Wine 10.15 expected to be released next Friday there will be initial support for using the NTSYNC driver found within the Linux kernel.
September 5, 2025 — Source

Xiaomi Redmibook Laptops To See Better Support With Linux 6.18
The upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle will present better support for Xiaomi Redmibook laptops thanks to a WMI driver being queued into the x86 platform drivers "-next" branch for providing better handling of the keyboards found with these laptops.
September 5, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — September 4th, 2025

Fedora 44 Change Proposal Aims To Ensure A Nice Wine/Proton + NTSYNC Experience
A change proposal filed for next year's Fedora 44 release wants to aim for a nice experience when running Wine or the Proton variants supporting the Linux kernel's NTSYNC driver for better emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives.
September 4, 2025 — Source

GNOME 49.rc released: The final release is imminent
The latest development version of the GNOME desktop environment, GNOME 49.rc, has been released, signaling that the final release is imminent. This version includes a wide range of updates and changes across various modules, with key enhancements detailed for several applications and core components. The updates focus on improving performance, stability, security, and user experience, with fixes for numerous bugs and deprecations of outdated code.
September 4, 2025 — Source

HIP-RT Update For Blender 5.0 To Deliver Improved Ray-Tracing On RDNA4 GPUs
AMD engineers have submitted a HIP-RT update for Blender developers ahead of the big Blender 5.0 release to enhance the RDNA4 ray-tracing performance.
September 4, 2025 — Source

Intel Releases OpenVINO 2025.3 With More GenAI Enhancements & Arc Pro B-Series Support
On the same day as beginning to ship the Intel Arc Pro B50 ~$349 USD workstation graphics card, Intel also shipped OpenVINO 2025.3 as the newest feature release for this open-source AI toolkit.
September 4, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 5.4.298 released
Linux kernel version 5.4.298 is now available:
September 4, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 5.10.242 released
Linux kernel version 5.10.242 is now available:
September 4, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 5.15.191 released
Linux kernel version 5.15.191 is now available:
September 4, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.1.150 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.150 is now available:
September 4, 2025 — Source

Linux Kernel 6.6.104 released
Linux kernel 6.6.104 has been released.
September 4, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.12.45 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.45 is now available:
September 4, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.16.5 released
Linux kernel version 6.16.5 is now available:
September 4, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.17 With EXT4 Showing Some Nice Performance Improvements
With the Linux 6.17 kernel there are some block allocation scalability improvements for EXT4 on top of other file-system enhancements with this new kernel and other new features. Linux 6.17 performance has been looking good and when drilling down to the EXT4 file-system performance, it's looking extremely good. Here are some benchmarks of EXT4 on Linux 6.17 compared to the 6.15 and 6.16 stable kernels.
September 4, 2025 — Source

Linux Lite relief: 7.6 keeps it simple, shiny, and mostly slim
Ubuntu 24.04.3, with a prettified Xfce 4.18
September 4, 2025 — Source

Linux Mint 22.2 Officially Released With Fingwit, UI Tweaks
Linux Mint 22.2 is officially out today as the newest version of this popular desktop Linux distribution built atop an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS package base.
September 4, 2025 — Source

Linux Mint 22.2 Zara arrives as a long term support release backed until 2029
Popular Ubuntu-based distribution Linux Mint has been updated to version 22.2, codenamed Zara. This new long term support version promises updates until 2029.
September 4, 2025 — Source

Linux Mint 22.2 'Zara' makes my favorite distro even better - what's new
For those who want a Linux desktop that works and keeps getting better, release after release, Zara is the upgrade you've been waiting for.
September 4, 2025 — Source

Linux Mint 22.2 'Zara' now available, here's everything that's new
Linux Mint is a particularly popular distribution, and one that is often highly recommended for Windows users who want to get a taste of Linux. In May, we learned that Linux Mint 22.1 Xia's successor is going to be called Linux Mint 22.2 Zara. Subsequent beta releases brought support for native fingerprint login, better themes, Wayland fixes, and a more "comfortable" desktop. Now, Linux Mint 22.2 Zara is generally available.
September 4, 2025 — Source

Microsoft Building Out Its "OS Guard" Functionality For Azure Linux
A new feature Microsoft has been working on for its Azure Linux operating system is OS Guard as a container-host platform that enforces immutability, code integrity, mandatory access control, and other features. Microsoft quietly revealed more about OS Guard last month and yesterday's release of Azure Linux 3.0.20250822 builds out more of the OS Guard functionality.
September 4, 2025 — Source

Node.js v20.19.5 (LTS) released
Node.js v20.19.5 (LTS) released
September 4, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA Posts Initial Linux Patches For Extended GPU Memory "EGM" Virtualization
NVIDIA engineer Ankit Agrawal today posted a request for comments (RFC) patch series working on Linux virtualization support for Extended GPU Memory (EGM).
September 4, 2025 — Source

OWASP CRS 4.18.0 released with enhanced security features
The OWASP Community Repository (CRS) has released version 4.18.0, featuring enhanced security features and threat detection capabilities. The update includes new rules to detect malicious attacks on web applications protected by ModSecurity or similar firewalls, such as SSH command detection and support for 'application/reports+json' content-type headers. Additionally, fixes have been implemented to remove unnecessary patterns, prevent false positives, and improve overall system accuracy.
September 4, 2025 — Source

pgAdmin 4 v9.8 released with Debian Trixie support
The pgAdmin Development Team announces the release of pgAdmin 4 version 9.8, featuring numerous bug fixes and exciting new enhancements. Notable additions include menu items for truncating foreign tables, support for Debian Trixie as a platform, and the ability to configure security-related parameters for Gunicorn.
September 4, 2025 — Source

PostgreSQL 18 eyes analytics boost and distributed future
Async I/O and UUID v7 highlights of the September release, though some SQL features are delayed
September 4, 2025 — Source or Source

PostgreSQL 18 Release Candidate Now Available
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has announced the availability of the first release candidate (RC) for PostgreSQL 18, with a planned general availability date of September 25, 2025. To upgrade from earlier versions, users will need to employ a major version upgrade strategy such as pg_upgrade or pg_dump/pg_restore. Several bug fixes were applied since Beta 3, including improvements to vacuumdb and guidance on reindexing full-text search indexes after upgrading. The RC is expected to be nearly identical to the final release, with minor fixes made before its general availability.
September 4, 2025 — Source

Ready to ditch Windows 10? I debunked 7 Linux myths so you can switch with confidence
No, Linux isn't ugly. Let's bust this and several other myths that might keep you from adopting it as a Windows 10 replacement.
September 4, 2025 — Source

Ruby on Rails 8.1.0 Beta 1 released
Ruby on Rails 8.1.0 Beta 1 has been released and introduces significant updates across its core components, including Active Support, Active Record, Action View, Action Pack, and Active Job. The release brings improvements to performance, security, and developer experience, with features such as better cache management, enhanced validation and attribute handling, and improved support for parallel testing and database configuration.
September 4, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu 25.10 Proceeding With Its Rust Coreutils Transition
Canonical engineer Julian Andres Klode announced that the rust-coreutils transition is landing within a release pocket later today. This is as part of their transition from GNU Coreutils to using the Rust Coreutils "uutils" project as part of further leveraging Rust within Ubuntu Linux system components.
September 4, 2025 — Source

Virtualizing your infrastructure (ITSAP.70.011)
Virtualization is a method of hardware abstraction that allows the creation of software versions of IT systems and services which are traditionally implemented on separate physical hardware. These software versions, or virtual instances, can dramatically increase efficiency and decrease costs. Virtualization uses hardware to its full capacity by distributing its capabilities among many different services.
September 4, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — September 1st, 2025

AMD Linux Testing Captured All Top 10 Spots For Our Most-Viewed Articles In August
Over the course of August on Phoronix were 267 original news articles and 17 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Coming somewhat as a surprise, AMD Linux testing articles and hardware reviews managed to capture all top 10 spots for the most viewed content... Something no single vendor has pulled off in the past 21 years of Phoronix. But with the launch of the Framework Desktop, AMD Krackan Point Linux testing for sub-$500 laptops, Threadripper 9000 series, and other hardware excitement, that feat happened in August.
September 1, 2025 — Source

Bazaar 0.4.5 released
A new version of Bazaar, a cutting-edge app store for FlatPak apps, is now available. This small release addresses keypresses incorrectly initializing search and includes other UI fixes to ensure an even smoother user experience.
September 1, 2025 — Source

Exim 4.99-RC1 released
The first release candidate for the Exim 4.99 Mail Transport Agent has been released for testing, marking a new milestone towards a major update with numerous improvements and fixes since Exim 4.98. The release candidate is available for testing as a tarball or directly from Git. Notable features and enhancements include support for JSON, LDAP lookup, loadable modules, and improved security fixes for CVE-2025-26794 and CVE-2025-30232.
September 1, 2025 — Source

Gentex PLACE Any Space PL1AS / PL1K As A Replacement For Nest Protect Smoke Detectors
Not your typical review on Phoronix today but rather a brief look at the Gentex PLACE Any Space smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors. For those facing ten years on their Nest Protect smoke detectors and looking for an end-of-life replacement to these smoke detectors discontinued by Google, the Gentex PLACE smart smoke detectors are an interesting and capable alternative.
September 1, 2025 — Source

Linux gaming OS Kazeta promises 'console gaming experience of the 1990s' for PC users — supports almost any DRM-free game, past or present
With the Kazeta OS you just 'insert cart, power on, play.'
September 1, 2025 — Source

Linux Lite 7.6 is the perfect Windows 11 alternative for older PCs
Linux Lite has released version 7.6, an update to the superb Ubuntu-based distribution aimed at Windows users seeking a simple Linux alternative. If you're using aging hardware or just fed up with Windows 11, this might be the lightweight Linux distro you've been waiting for.
September 1, 2025 — Source

Linux Sensor Monitoring Coming For The ASUS Pro WS WRX90E-SAGE SE
For those looking at assembling an AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO workstation and interested in having working system sensor monitoring support, the ASUS EC Sensors hardware monitoring (HWMON) driver is in the process of introducing support for the Pro WS WRX90E-SAGE SE motherboard.
September 1, 2025 — Source

Linux's exFAT File-System Driver Optimization Leads To 16.5x Speedup For Loading Time
A patch queued up into the Linux exFAT driver's development tree optimizes the allocation bitmap loading time. For cases of small cluster sizes on large partitions this can yield around 16x faster loading times.
September 1, 2025 — Source

New EC Driver Coming For The Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen6 With Snapdragon X Elite SoC
The Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen6 is one of the best supported Snapdragon X Elite laptops under Linux thus far. Thanks to active developer engagement and cooperation from Lenovo there are firmware files in upstream linux-firmware.git and Lenovo's generally robust Linux support make it one of the better choices for the Snapdragon X laptops currently out there. In further enhancing the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen6 on Linux, a new EC driver has been posted for supporting this Snapdragon powered laptop.
September 1, 2025 — Source

Open-Source NVIDIA Linux Driver Usage About To Become Much More Reliable
For those using the upstream open-source NVIDIA Linux driver "Nouveau", with a pending fix coming for Linux 6.17 and existing kernel releases it should be a much more stable and reliable experience.
September 1, 2025 — Source

Redox OS Gets COSMIC Reader Working, Other Improvements To This Rust OS
The open-source Redox OS operating system project written in the Rust programming language is out with its status update covering August 2025.
September 1, 2025 — Source

Rusticl Driver Lands Support For OpenCL Semaphores
In addition to working on new OpenCL performance optimizations, Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst just landed another important feature into Rusticl: OpenCL semaphores.
September 1, 2025 — Source

Top Metrics to Watch in Kubernetes
Explore the most impactful Kubernetes metrics that drive better observability, reduce downtime, and help teams scale clusters with confidence.
September 1, 2025 — Source

Zen Browser 1.15.3b released
Zen Browser 1.15.3b has been released, offering several new features and enhancements aimed at boosting productivity. The update includes improved functionality for closing pending pinned tabs with wheel clicking, integration of system accent colors, and fixes to resolve issues like memory management problems and startup freezes. Additionally, the browser's compact mode stability has been improved, and the URL bar hover bug has been addressed.
September 1, 2025 — Source

Zotac Zone Pro Ryzen 9 Linux Gaming Handheld Set To Challenge ROG Xbox Ally
Zotac's Zone handheld, launched last year, was an interesting device, with an 800 cd/m² HDR AMOLED display and dual touchpads like the Steam Deck, and it also made use of standard AMD Ryzen laptop chips instead of the handheld-targeted Ryzen Z family. The company's trying again with the Zone Pro handheld, this time powered by "Strix Point" instead of "Phoenix".
September 1, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — August 29th, 2025

Armbian 25.8.1 Brings Expanded Board Support, Linux 6.16 Option For Many Boards
Armbian 25.8.1 is now available as a significant update over the Armbian 25.5 release for this Debian-based Linux distribution focused on offering broad support for ARM64 and RISC-V single board computers as well as other devices.
August 29, 2025 — Source

Btrfs Developer Josef Bacik Leaving Meta & Stepping Back From Kernel Development
Josef Bacik who is a long-time Btrfs developer and active co-maintainer alongside David Sterba is leaving Meta. Additionally, he's also stepping back from Linux kernel development as his primary job.
August 29, 2025 — Source

Fwupd 2.0.14 Brings New Framework & SteelSeries Hardware Support
Fwupd 2.0.14 is out today as the newest version of this open-source firmware updating utility that is widely-used on Linux systems for BIOS/system firmware updates as well as an ever increasing array of different peripheral devices.
August 29, 2025 — Source

Genode OS 25.08 Introduces New Kernel Scheduler, Updates Linux Drivers
Version 25.08 of the Genode OS Framework has been released for this open-source operating system framework designed for software safety and security.
August 29, 2025 — Source

GNOME Executive Director Steps Down After Four Months
It was barely four months ago that the GNOME Foundation announced its new Executive Director, Steven Deobald, who was taking over afterHolly Million stepped down after less than one year. Today Deobald announced he is stepping down as the Executive Director.
August 29, 2025 — Source

Godot 4.5 Beta 7 released
Godot 4.5 Beta 7 has been released, featuring significant improvements, including the addition of debug symbols for Android platforms. The latest snapshot includes regression fixes, such as correcting audio playback position on web platforms and treating missing shader variants as cache misses.
August 29, 2025 — Source

LibreOffice 25.8.1 released
The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 25.8.1, a minor update that addresses nearly 100 bug and regression fixes over the previous version. This release addresses critical issues, including an application crash related to the NoteBookBar UI option and bugs affecting document opening in Microsoft proprietary formats.
August 29, 2025 — Source

Linus Torvalds Marks Bcachefs As Now "Externally Maintained"
Linus Torvalds has finally come to a decision following his plans to part ways with the Bcachefs file-system and then not merging any Bcachefs updates for Linux 6.17.
August 29, 2025 — Source

My top 6 productivity apps for Linux that are lesser known - but shouldn't be
Linux has a ton of applications you can install, some of which you may not have heard of. These obscure apps are waiting to help improve your productivity.
August 29, 2025 — Source

OBS Studio 32 Beta Introduces A Plugin Manager, Hybrid MOV Support
Released overnight in beta form is OBS Studio 32.0, the next feature release for this widely-used, open-source and cross-platform application for desktop streaming/recording.
August 29, 2025 — Source

Qualcomm Packet Processing Engine "PPE" Going Upstream For Linux 6.18
Recently queued into the Linux networking subsystem's net-next branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window is the Qualcomm PPE driver to support their Packet Processing Engine on select SoCs.
August 29, 2025 — Source

RefreshOS 2.5: The Debian remix that borrows from every desk in the house
A remarkable mixture of different components, but it works
August 29, 2025 — Source

Samba 4.23.0rc3 released
Samba 4.23.0rc3 is available for testng. The new version introduces several key features, including SMB3 Unix Extensions enabled by default, support for SMB3 over QUIC, modern write time update logic, and an initial version of smb_prometheus_endpoint for Prometheus-compatible metrics. Additionally, CTDB now supports loading tunables from a new directory, and per-share profiling stats are available with some configurations removed from the smb.conf file.
August 29, 2025 — Source

Switching From i915 To Xe Linux Drivers Can Yield Some Big Gains For Intel Arc A-Series
For those using Intel Arc A-Series graphics cards on Linux, the i915 kernel driver remains the default but switching over to the Xe driver can yield some incremental performance benefits. For OpenCL / GPU compute workloads especially, switching to the Xe kernel driver can be rather dramatic.
August 29, 2025 — Source

Zen Browser 1.15.2b released
Another Zen Browser update has been released, which includes a remedy for an issue that prevented folder renaming from working when using the double toolbar feature. This update addresses a specific bug, making it more stable and user-friendly.
August 29, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — August 25th, 2025

Arch Linux Project Responding to Week-Long DDoS Attack
The Arch Linux Project has been targeted in a DDoS attack that disrupted its website, repository, and forums.
August 25, 2025 — Source

Check out PCWorld's new Linux podcast, the Dual Boot Diaries
Dual Boot Diaries is a limited series where Adam and Will try out Linux options... and make a big decision.
August 25, 2025 — Source

Firefox, Kernel, Webkit2GTK3 updates for RHEL
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has received several security updates, including fixes for Firefox, kernel, and webkit2gtk3 vulnerabilities. These updates have been rated by Red Hat Product Security as having a security impact ranging from Moderate to Important, with some providing additional details through CVSS base scores. The affected versions include the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and 9 series:
August 25, 2025 — Source

Google Veles is a New Open-Source Secret Scanner Powering GCP
Google Veles is a newly released open-source secret scanner, launched as part of Google's broader OSV-SCALIBR (Software Composition Analysis LIBRary) ecosystem. Veles integrates seamlessly with other OSV-SCALIBR tools and also powers secret scanning in Google Cloud, while remaining available as a standalone module.
August 25, 2025 — Source

Happy Birthday, Linux
On August 25, Linux officially turns 34.
August 25, 2025 — Source

Iperf3, Unbound, Firebird updates for Debian
Multiple security updates have been released for Debian GNU/Linux systems, including iperf3, unbound, and firebird3.0, to address vulnerabilities such as heap buffer overflows, shell code injection, and denial of service attacks via specially timed DNS queries and answers. The affected versions include 3.9-1+deb11u3deb9u1 for iperf3 and 1.9.0-2+deb10u2deb9u6 for unbound, both for Debian 9 (Stretch) ELTS; 1.9.0-2+deb10u6 for unbound on Debian 10 (Buster) ELTS; and 3.0.7.33374.ds4-2+deb11u1 for firebird3.0 on Debian 11 (Bullseye) LTS:
August 25, 2025 — Source

Kernel, ProFTPD, PAM, cmake3, FFMpeg updates for SUSE
Security updates have been released for several SUSE Linux packages, including the Linux Kernel and proftpd. The updates address various vulnerabilities and are categorized as important (kernel, proftpd), moderate (pam, ffmpeg-4), or low (cmake3):
August 25, 2025 — Source

Linux 5.15 LTS To 6.17 Benchmarks: Four Years Of Kernel Improvement Net 37% Improvement On AMD EPYC
Stemming from a request by a Phoronix Premium reader wondering about some fresh historical kernel performance comparison numbers, today's benchmarking is looking at the performance of the LTS and latest stable Linux kernel versions going back to Linux 5.15 LTS in 2021.
August 25, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.18 Will Begin Preparing For ASPEED AST2700 BMC Support
The upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel will begin upstreaming hardware enablement for the ASPEED AST2700 as the next-gen baseboard management controller "BMC" that will likely appear in the majority of future generation servers.
August 25, 2025 — Source

Linux Foundation says yes to NoSQL via DocumentDB
PostgreSQL implementation of document-oriented NoSQL datastore adopted under permissive MIT license
August 25, 2025 — Source or Source

Linux is 34 years old today — Linus Torvalds meekly announced this free new OS in the comp.os.minix newsgroup on this day in 1991
From its roots of being 'just a hobby, [which] won't be big and professional like GNU' it has come a long way.
August 25, 2025 — Source

Linux's Floppy Disk Driver Code Sees Some Cleanups In 2025
On this 34th birthday since the Linux kernel was announced, coincidentally there's a new patch series out there for one of the oldest drivers: the floppy disk driver.
August 25, 2025 — Source

Liquorix Linux Kernel 6.16-2 released
Liquorix Kernel 6.16-2, a custom kernel replacement designed for desktop, multimedia, and gaming workloads, featuring several major optimizations and tweaks compared to standard kernel configurations, has been released based on the latest Linux Kernel 6.16.3. Some important features are Zen Interactive Tuning, Budget Fair Queue, Hard Kernel Preemption, and TCP BBR2 Congestion Control, which are designed to make the system respond faster and work better in different situations.
August 25, 2025 — Source

My 4 favorite Linux distros for streaming - and why choosing the right one makes a huge difference
If you stream a lot of content, you'll want to use a Linux distribution with certain qualities. Here are my favorite distributions for streaming.
August 25, 2025 — Source

Meson 1.9 Released With New Rust Features, Adds Swift/C++ Interoperability
Meson 1.9 released this weekend as the newest feature update to this build system / build automation tool that works well across different software platforms. With Meson 1.9 there is enhanced Rust support, introducing Swift and C++ code interoperability, and other enhancements to this increasingly used alternative to the likes of CMake and Autotools.
August 25, 2025 — Source

Open Platform For Enterprise AI's GenAI Code Adds Guardrails, AMD EPYC Support
The Open Platform for Enterprise AI "OPEA" that is a sub-project of the Linux Foundation and backed by a wide variety of different organizations to provide open solutions for Generative AI announced today their newest GenAI code examples.
August 25, 2025 — Source

Red Hat Releases TuneD 2.26 For Adaptively Tuning Linux Systems
Red Hat's performance team is now shipping TuneD 2.26 as the latest feature release for this tuning profile delivery mechanism for Linux systems to monitor and adaptively adjust the power/performance characteristics of different system components and more.
August 25, 2025 — Source

The KDE team wants your feedback on the new virtual keyboard coming to Plasma 6.5
Last month, in one of our "This Week in Plasma" coverages, we told you that the KDE team was working on a new virtual keyboard set to release with Plasma 6.5, which will eventually replace the current Maliit. This project was initiated by KDE developer Aleix Pol, who felt that it would be beneficial to develop an alternative using QtVirtualKeyboard.
August 25, 2025 — Source

Zemlin at Open Source Summit EU: Even in the Age of AI, the Software's Future is Still Open Source
During the Open Source Summit Europe keynote, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, revisited the LLM landscape with an emphasis on the effect it has on the industry, the security, quantity and quality of the developed code. He emphasised that DeepSeek's revolution was validated by the gpt-oss release, OpenAI's first open-source model.
August 25, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — August 22nd, 2025

Apache NetBeans IDE 27 released
Neil C. Smith has announced the release of Apache NetBeans IDE 27, featuring a range of enhancements and corrections. The updates include improvements in Gradle, Maven, Ant, Java, PHP, the PHP Editor, Javadoc build on JDK 25, TreeRuleTestBase, fixing external link errors in Javadoc, better handling of module imports, optimizing hints for unused packages, organizing member hints, and updates to the lib
August 22, 2025 — Source

APT36 hackers abuse Linux .desktop files to install malware in new attacks
The Pakistani APT36 cyberspies are using Linux .desktop files to load malware in new attacks against government and defense entities in India.
August 22, 2025 — Source

Arch Linux continues to feel the force of a DDoS attack after two brutal weeks — attackers yet to be identified as project struggles to restore full service
The motive for the attack has not yet been disclosed
August 22, 2025 — Source

Arch Linux remains under attack as DDoS enters week 2 - here's a workaround
Something mysterious is happening to the popular Linux distro's website. Here's what we know so far.
August 22, 2025 — Source

Arch Linux takes a pounding as DDoS attack enters week two
Project scrambles for mitigation as AUR, forums, and main site feel the strain
August 22, 2025 — Source

FFmpeg 8.0 Released With OpenAI Whisper Filter, Many Vulkan Video Improvements
FFmpeg 8.0 is now available! FFmpeg 8.0 is a magnificent update to this widely-used open-source multimedia library and with this new version is the introduction of an OpenAI Whisper filter for automatic speech recognition, many Vulkan Video improvements for greater GPU-accelerated video handling, and a number of CPU performance optimizations.
August 22, 2025 — Source

First release of Kodi 22 'Piers' is available to download NOW
It's been a whopping seven months since The Kodi Foundation rolled out Kodi 21.2 'Omega', coming five months after the previous release.
August 22, 2025 — Source

FreeRDP 3.17 Released With Fullchain Support
FreeRDP as one of the leading open-source / free software implementations of Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is out with a new release. While FreeRDP 3.17 is primarily focused on shipping bug fixes, there is one noteworthy addition: fullchain support.
August 22, 2025 — Source

Intel's New LLM-Scaler Beta Update Brings Whisper Model & GLM-4.5-Air Support
Earlier this month Intel released LLM-Scaler 1.0 as part of their Project Battlematrix initiative. This is a Docker container effort to deliver speedy AI inference performance with multi-GPU scaling and PCIe P2P support and more.
August 22, 2025 — Source

Mesa 25.3 Lands More Changes To Prepare For OpenGL Mesh Shaders
Being worked on for a number of months now is GL_EXT_mesh_shader as an extension for bringing mesh shaders to OpenGL. This is an alternative to NVIDIA's GL_NV_mesh_shader extension being worked on for Mesa drivers and in particular the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.
August 22, 2025 — Source

New Ubuntu Snapdragon X1E Concept ISO Published - Still A Mess On The Acer Swift 14 AI
Released on Thursday were new Ubuntu X1E "Concept" install images for installing the modified Ubuntu 25.04 environment on Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 powered laptops.
August 22, 2025 — Source

Samba 4.23.0rc2 released
The Samba Team has announced the availability of the second release candidate for the upcoming Samba 4.23 release, intended solely for testing purposes. The update encompasses new functionalities, including samba-tool domain backup, CTDB modifications, and per-share profiling statistics.
August 22, 2025 — Source

Servo Lands APNG & Animated WebP Support, Vello Backends For Faster 2D Graphics
The Servo browser project has published a monthly status report to outline all of the interesting changes made to this interesting, Rust-based browser layout engine over the past several weeks. Development continues moving along with Servo as more critical functionality continues to be added as well as new performance optimizations and other features to make it a compelling option for future embedded web use and more.
August 22, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — August 21st, 2025

AI is creeping into the Linux kernel - and official policy is needed ASAP
AI tools can help Linux maintainers, but they can also cause chaos. Here's what needs to be addressed - fast - before things get out of control.
August 21, 2025 — Source

Intel Compute Runtime 25.31.34666.3 Continues Prepping For Panther Lake
Released minutes ago was the newest monthly feature release to the Intel Compute Runtime providing open-source OpenCL and Level Zero capabilities on Intel graphics hardware.
August 21, 2025 — Source

Linux Driver Under Review For Apple Laptop Lid Events & Power Button
Following the recent Apple SMC driver upstreaming to handle rebooting Apple Silicon Macs under Linux, the latest code volleyed on the kernel mailing list for review is support for handling laptop lid events and power buttons. Plus Apple sensor monitoring driver support too.
August 21, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA Begins Linux Kernel Upstreaming Work For Their Vera Rubin NLV144 Platform
The first Linux kernel patches specific to their next-gen Vera Rubin NLV144 "VR144NVL" were posted today to the public Linux kernel mailing list.
August 21, 2025 — Source

Panthor Open-Source Driver To Support Many More Arm Mali GPUs In Linux 6.18
The open-source Panthor Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver providing the modern kernel graphics driver support for recent Arm Mali GPUs will be supporting a number of additional GPU models with the Linux 6.18 kernel later this year.
August 21, 2025 — Source

pgAdmin 4 v9.7 released
The pgAdmin Development Team has announced the release of pgAdmin 4 version 9.7, featuring 22 bug fixes and new enhancements. Important updates include automatic updates for the desktop app on macOS, new options like GENERIC_PLAN, MEMORY, and SERIALIZE for the EXPLAIN/EXPLAIN ANALYZE command, changes to how fast the cursor blinks, filtering by server tags in the Object Explorer, and a built-in locale provider for Issues identified include elevated CPU usage, difficulties in adding breakpoints, resetting custom column widths, and problems with dashboard tables.
August 21, 2025 — Source

Tails 6.19 released
Tails 6.19 has been released and features updates to the Tor Browser, Tor client, and Thunderbird, along with resolved issues. It also eliminates unnecessary error messages during the configuration of bridges in Tor Connection.
August 21, 2025 — Source

Ungoogled Chromium 139.0.7258.138-1 released
Google Chromium, sans integration with Google. Contribute to ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium development by creating an account on GitHub.
August 21, 2025 — Source

VKD3D 1.17 Released With More Improvements For Direct3D 12 On Vulkan
VKD3D 1.17 made its debut this morning as the newest version of this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan API implementation.
August 21, 2025 — Source or Source

Software — Open Source — August 19th, 2025

10 open-source apps I recommend every Windows user download - for free
Open-source might not be the first thing you think of with Windows, but these free tools can seriously boost your productivity.
August 19, 2025 — Source

Apple SoC DT Updates Already Begin Lining Up For Linux 6.18
While the Linux v6.17 merge window only wrapped up earlier this month, Apple Silicon DeviceTree "DT" updates have already begun queuing for the Linux 6.18 merge window that will happen in October.
August 19, 2025 — Source

DripDropper Linux malware cleans up after itself - how it works
This malware will still foul you up; it just doesn't want anyone messing with your servers while it's using you.
August 19, 2025 — Source

Intel Upstreams XeVM Into LLVM
Intel's newest contribution to the upstream LLVM compiler stack is XeVM as their Multi-Level Intermediate Representation "MLIR" dialect catering to modern Intel graphics processors.
August 19, 2025 — Source

Linux Adding Detection For BSD's Bhyve Hypervisor To Support 255+ vCPUs
Bhyve is the BSD hypervisor / virtual machine manager (VMM) developed by FreeBSD that supports a range of operating systems and across CPU vendors. With time Bhyve has also been ported to other BSDs and even Illumos and macOS. The Linux kernel is now in the process of adding guest detection for the Bhyve hypervisor in order to support VMs with 255+ vCPUs.
August 19, 2025 — Source

Pinned Device Memory Patches For Intel's Multi-GPU "Project Battlematrix" Linux Efforts
As part of Intel's ongoing Project Battlematrix efforts that include SR-IOV support for Arc Pro cards as well as multi-device (multi-GPU) support for allowing up to eight Intel Arc Pro graphics cards in a single system, today Intel engineers posted their preliminary Linux driver patches for pinned device memory functionality that is important for multi-GPU usage.
August 19, 2025 — Source

Postfix 3.10.4 and legacy releases 3.9.5, 3.8.11, 3.7.16 released
Postfix has issued multiple updates for its stable release 3.10.4 as well as for the legacy versions 3.9.5, 3.8.11, and 3.7.16. The updates resolve concerns related to postscreen and tlsproxy and aim to minimize process churn. The updates resolve problems related to the previous postscreen process, including the logging of an ENOTSOCK error, maintaining an exclusive lock, incorrect backward compatibility for legacy configuration parameters, and the dereferencing of a null pointer during the handling of tlsproxy client requests.
August 19, 2025 — Source

Rusticl versus AMD ROCm Performance On Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo"
One of the set of tests I have been meaning to carry out for a number of months has been comparing the Mesa Rusticl performance to different dedicated hardware drivers. Rusticl is the Rust-based OpenCL 3.0 driver within Mesa that works across Gallium3D drivers and over the past many months has been maturing rather well. Among the targets I have been wanting to compare is how well Rusticl competes with the AMD ROCm OpenCL implementation for Radeon GPUs
August 19, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — August 17th, 2025

Linux 6.17 Performance Looking Even Better After Early Fallout Addressed
Last week I ran some early Linux 6.17 benchmarks showing some improvements and regressions when testing with AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo". Since then there have been some performance regression fixes along with addressing other early fallout from this fresh kernel code. Repeating the tests now on the latest Linux 6.17 Git state ahead of today's Linux 6.17-rc2 tagging is showing some nice improvements and fixes from the code churn this week.
August 17, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.17-rc2 To Better Tune Attack Vector Controls For SRSO Mitigation
One of the new exciting security features with Linux 6.17 is Attack Vector Controls as a means of easier managing CPU security mitigations depending upon the system/server use-case. It drastically simplifies CPU security mitigation management for only activating the mitigations relevant to intended use. With the Linux 6.17-rc2 kernel due out later today, Attack Vector Controls refines its logic around the Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO) mitigation.
August 17, 2025 — Source

Linux Merges Headset Detection Workaround For Framework 13 Ryzen AI 300 Series
Merged this week as part of the sound fixes for the Linux 6.17 cycle and now to be back-ported to the stable kernel versions is a headset detection fix/workaround for the Framework 13 Laptop powered by the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series.
August 17, 2025 — Source

Shotcut 25.08 Brings More Bug Fixes To This Open-Source Video Editor
Released last month was Shotcut 25.07 with many improvements to this popular open-source and cross platform video editor. Released today was Shotcut 25.08 to provide more fixes atop that latest video editor release.
August 17, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — August 16th, 2025

GNOME Disks Continues Being Ported To Rust
In addition to yesterday's GNOME 49 beta release marking the 28th birthday of GNOME, a lot of other exciting GNOME developments materialized this week.
August 16, 2025 — Source

KDE Breeze Drops Colorful Third-Party App Icons, Plasma Adds Plug-In Device Notification
KDE Breeze Drops Colorful Third-Party App Icons, Plasma Adds Plug-In Device Notification
August 16, 2025 — Source

KDE is removing all of the colorful third-party app icons from its Breeze icon theme
The KDE team has released its weekly update on the work done this week, and unlike previous weeks, it does not contain many new features. The team instead focused on improving things like UI, performance, and, as always, bug fixes.
August 16, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.16.1 Fixes A Large Intel GPU Driver Performance Regression - Up To 30%
Released on Friday were the Linux 6.16.1 and Linux 6.15.10 stable kernel point releases. Notable there is an Intel i915 kernel graphics driver performance regression fix with some users having reported as much as a 30% performance hit on prior Linux kernel versions.
August 16, 2025 — Source

PixiEditor 2.0.1.9 released
PixiEditor 2.0.1.9 is a comprehensive 2D editor tailored for the creation of impressive sprites suitable for games, animations, image editing, and logo design. The software includes three distinct toolsets: Pixel art, Painting, and Vector. These tools are compatible with a single canvas, allowing for integration with raster graphics, and can be exported in multiple formats including PNG, JPG, SVG, GIF, and MP4. The most recent release of PixiEditor 2.0.1.9 features bug fixes, enhancements to native menu functionality, and resolutions for issues related to infinite recursion, pasting on macOS, and invalid indirect return types.
August 16, 2025 — Source

Wine-Staging 10.13 Adds Patch For 13 Year Old Bug
Building off yesterday's Wine 10.13 release following the month-long summer release hiatus, Wine-Staging 10.13 is out today with some 300 patches atop the upstream codebase.
August 16, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — August 10th, 2025

Debian 13 "trixie" release brings RISC-V support plus to the popular GNU/Linux distro, plus thousands of other updates
Debian is a free and open source, Linux-based operating system that's bee around for more than three decades. And computers have changed a lot in that time. So while Debian has a reputation for releasing updates on a slow, steady, and stable basis rather than pushing bleeding edge features, the operating system has made some major changes over the years.
August 10, 2025 — Source

Debian 14 Eyes LoongArch CPU Support
Debian 13.0 released yesterday while already Debian developers are beginning to think about Debian 14 as the next major release due out in 2027. Debian 14 is codenamed Forky and among the changes expected is LoongArch64 "Loong64" CPU port support being improved.
August 10, 2025 — Source

GNOME Shell 49 Beta Finally Brings Media Controls To The Lock Screen
In preparing for the GNOME 49 beta release, GNOME Shell this weekend released 49.beta.1 with a few changes worth highlighting.
August 10, 2025 — Source

Linus Torvalds calls RISC-V code from Google engineer 'garbage' and says it 'makes the world actively a worse place to live' — Linux honcho puts dev on notice for late submissions, too
Pull request got rejected for Linux 6.17. And as a late submission, it already lit Torvald's fuse.
August 10, 2025 — Source

Linux Security Roundup for Week 32, 2025
Here is a roundup of last week's Linux security updates for AlmaLinux, Debian GNU/Linux, Fedora Linux, Gentoo Linux, Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux, and Ubuntu Linux.
August 10, 2025 — Source

Major Intel Linux driver projects are dying due to Intel layoffs and corporate restructuring — compatibility and reliability issues could increase over time
Intel's presence in the Linux community as a driver developer and maintainer is impacted by layoffs.
August 10, 2025 — Source

Turbostat Now Displays CPU L3 Cache Topology Information
Ahead of the Linux 6.17-rc1 release due out in the coming hours, the Turbostat updates for that tool living within the kernel source tree were merged.
August 10, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — August 9th, 2025

AMD Radeon Software for Linux 25.10.2.1 released
AMD Radeon Software for Linux 25.10.2.1 released
August 9, 2025 — Source

GNOME Mutter On Wayland Adds ICC Profile Support, Backlight Improvements
There were a lot of interesting changes that landed in GNOME's Mutter compositor codebase to end out the weekend and ahead of next month's big GNOME 49 release.
August 9, 2025 — Source

GNU/Hurd Now An Official Platform For SDL Cross-Platform Gaming Library
GNU/Hurd has made it as an official platform target within SDL that is the open-source library widely-used by cross-platform games and other applications for software/hardware abstractions across operating systems.
August 9, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.5 Continues Seeing More Features Added & Polishing
Like clockwork KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly recap of all the interesting Plasma changes for the week. There continues to be a lot of feature work and polishing that is building up for the Plasma 6.5 desktop release.
August 9, 2025 — Source

Linus Torvalds Rejects RISC-V Changes For Linux 6.17: "Garbage"
Linus Torvalds has used his authority to reject the RISC-V architecture changes for the Linux 6.17 kernel. The RISC-V updates won't land this cycle and will need to try again for v6.18 later in the year. Linus refers to at least some of the proposed RISC-V code as garbage along with being submitted rather late during the merge window.
August 9, 2025 — Source

OpenAI announces ChatGPT changes following user feedback
Earlier this week, OpenAI announced GPT-5, its most powerful model to date. The rollout of GPT-5 to ChatGPT users drew a lot of criticism, as OpenAI immediately replaced all existing models, including the popular GPT-4o and o3, with the new GPT-5.
August 9, 2025 — Source

The best Linux distros for beginners in 2025 make switching from MacOS or Windows so easy
Why switch to Linux? More security, more privacy, and freedom from vendor lock-in. And these distributions are as simple to install and use as MacOS or Windows.
August 9, 2025 — Source

Vulkan 1.4.325 Released With Untyped Pointers Extension
Vulkan 1.4.325 was released on Friday with one new extension in tow: VK_KHR_shader_untyped_pointers for untyped pointers.
August 9, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — August 8th, 2025

Additional Intel Linux Drivers Left Orphaned & Maintainers Let Go
Well, it's an unpleasant afternoon in Linux land with more signs of the ongoing impact from Intel's corporate-wide restructuring. Just after writing about Intel's CPU temperature monitoring driver now left unmaintained/orphaned, more patches hit the public Linux kernel mailing list to mark additional Intel drivers as orphaned and removing maintainer entries for Linux developers no longer at Intel.
August 8, 2025 — Source

AM 9.8.2 released
The release of "AM" 9.8.2 marks a significant update to the "am-extras" repository, which focuses on AM extensions. The update has assigned the management of all Python AppImage scripts to "am-extras," providing users with greater flexibility in selecting and adding software. This innovative method has streamlined the process for users to submit straightforward AppImages without the need to wait for the author to address the script or authorize a pull request.
August 8, 2025 — Source

AMD ROCm 6.4.3 Released With A Few Fixes
While we eagerly await the release of ROCm 7.0, ROCm 6.4.3 is out today as the newest point release to the ROCm 6.4 open-source GPU compute stack.
August 8, 2025 — Source

Bcachefs Maintainer Comments On The LKML While Waiting To See What Happens
We still don't know what's going to happen for Bcachefs in the Linux 6.17 kernel even with the merge window set to end on Sunday with the Linux 6.17-rc1 release. Linus Torvalds commented over one month ago that they would be parting ways for Linux 6.17. At the start of the Linux 6.17 merge window a Bcachefs pull request was submitted but nearly two weeks later it's still not been pulled and Linus Torvalds hasn't commented on the matter.
August 8, 2025 — Source

Chromium, Libtiff-Devel, Ghostscript, and more updates for SUSE
SUSE Linux has received several security updates, including chromium, libtiff-devel, traefik, libpoppler-cpp2, libIex, traefik, agama, iperf, ghostscript, and kubo:.
August 8, 2025 — Source

Cifs-Utils update for Ubuntu 14.04/16.04 LTS
New Cifs-Utils packages have been made available for Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS and 16.04 LTS to resolve four security vulnerabilities:
August 8, 2025 — Source

DDR5-6400 versus DDR5-4800 R-DIMM Performance For Threadripper 9980X / 9970X CPUs
Last week the Threadripper 9000 series began shipping and as shown in our launch-day Linux testing there was stunning performance with the 32-core Threadripper 9970X and 64-core Threadripper 9980X processors. Beyond the improvements thanks to the Zen 5 microarchitecture enhancements, the new Threadrippers while working as a drop-in replacement to existing TRX50 workstation motherboards now can handle DDR5-6400 R-DIMMs up from DDR5-4800 R-DIMMs with the Threadripper 7000 series.
August 8, 2025 — Source

FFmpeg 8.0 Merges Vulkan AV1 Encoding & VP9 Decoding
Ahead of the upcoming FFmpeg 8.0 release for this widely-used, open-source multimedia library some more last minute features continue to land. Hitting FFmpeg Git today are some Vulkan Video additions.
August 8, 2025 — Source

GCC 15.2 Released With More Than 123 Bugs Fixed
Following the release of GCC 15.1 at the end of April as the first stable version of the GCC 15 compiler, GCC 15.2 is now available with a variety of bug fixes back-ported.
August 8, 2025 — Source

Intel CPU Temperature Monitoring Driver For Linux Now Unmaintained After Layoffs
There is yet more apparent fallout from Intel's recent layoffs/restructurings as it impacts the Linux kernel... The coretemp driver that provides CPU core temperature monitoring support for all Intel processors going back many years is now set to an orphaned state with the former driver maintainer no longer at Intel and no one immediately available to serve as its new maintainer.
August 8, 2025 — Source

Intel Is Reportedly Preparing Arc B380; Adds New Battlemage PCI ID to Linux Kernel
Intel's new offering in the Battlemage lineup is supposedly a budget GPU, which should be succeeding the Arc A380.
August 8, 2025 — Source

KDE Frameworks 6.17 released
KDE has announced the release of Frameworks 6.16.0, continuing its commitment to providing timely and consistent updates for developers. The release introduces new features, including Baloo, which eliminates certain QString is_shared/detach checks, as well as a benchmark for term lists. The update encompasses resolutions for code duplication, DBPostingDB, and the elimination of redundant icons. The release additionally features supplementary CMake modules, including ECMGenerateQDoc and KDECMakeSettings, along with an updated version of KDE Frameworks.
August 8, 2025 — Source

Kernel 6.16 Test Week for Fedora Linux
The Fedora Linux kernel team is currently finalizing the integration of Linux kernel 6.16, which will be released in Fedora Linux shortly. A test week is scheduled for August 10-16, 2025, concentrating on regressions during rebasing and challenges related to USB installations on both virtual machines and bare metal systems.
August 8, 2025 — Source

LVFS Introducing Fair-Use Quota: Asking Major Vendors To Pay Or Contribute Code
The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) is rolling out a "fair use" quota where they will be asking the major hardware vendors (OEMs) to sponsor the project or contribute developer resources for the biggest users that rely on LVFS/Fwupd for serving system and device firmware to customers.
August 8, 2025 — Source

My 4 favorite image editing apps on Linux - and two are free Photoshop alternatives
These image editing apps offer all the tools you'll ever need on Linux. MacOS and Windows not required.
August 8, 2025 — Source

RADV Implements Triangle Pair Compression For AMD RDNA4 GPUs
The latest Radeon RADV driver ray-tracing optimization being merged to Mesa 25.3 is support for triangle pair compression with RDNA4 (GFX12) graphics processors.
August 8, 2025 — Source

ROCm 6.4.3 released
AMD has released ROCm 6.4.3, a significant release that addresses multiple issues, featuring updates for AMD Radeon PRO and Radeon GPU drivers, enhancements to ROCm SMI, and improvements to ROCm documentation. The update addresses a problem that was leading to performance degradation in communication operations due to heightened latency in specific RCCL applications. The update addresses a problem in the AMDGPU driver's scheduler constraints that may lead to failures in queue preemption during workload execution.
August 8, 2025 — Source

PCIe Improvements With Linux 6.17: Intel Panther Lake, Qualcomm, Sophgo SG2044 & More
The PCI changes were merged last week for the Linux 6.17 merge window. There is new PCIe controller support and some other additions worth mentioning with the new PCI feature code.
August 8, 2025 — Source

Star leaky app of the week: StarDict
Fun feature found in Debian 13: send your selected text to China -- in plaintext
August 8, 2025 — Source

Tails 7.0 RC1 released
The first release candidate for Tails 7.0 has been released for testing. This is the first release of Tails, built on Debian 13 Trixie and GNOME 48, featuring updated versions of numerous applications. The release candidate incorporates modifications including the substitution of GNOME Terminal with GNOME Console, the removal of Kleopatra from the Favorites menu, and the elimination of the outdated Network Connection option. The software package comprises updates for the Tor client, Thunderbird, and the Linux kernel, along with resolutions for issues such as selecting the appropriate keyboard for specific languages.
August 8, 2025 — Source

U.S. Judiciary confirms breach of court electronic records
The U.S. Federal Judiciary confirms that it suffered a cyberattack on its electronic case management systems hosting confidential court documents and is strengthening cybersecurity measures.
August 8, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu 24.04.3: Noble Numbat point release slips out quietly
The latest point release of the current Ubuntu LTS is here, with a new kernel and a host of improvements for server and desktop alike.
August 8, 2025 — Source

Zed 0.198.3 released
An update for the Zed editor has been launched, featuring support for GPT-5.
August 8, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — August 4th, 2025

5 of my favorite Linux system-monitoring tools - and why I use them
When I want to monitor my Linux system's performance, I turn to these handy apps to collect more data than I'll probably ever need.
August 4, 2025 — Source

AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 "Krackan Point" Offers Outstanding Value In Sub-$500 Laptops
Over the past three months we have been excitedly testing AMD's Strix Halo SoC with the Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 flagship model as well as the Ryzen AI Max PRO 390 as one step below. Strix Halo offers excellent CPU and GPU performance capabilities at the top-end if your budget allows. But at the opposite end and a step below the Strix Point SoCs that have been available the past year is Krackan Point.
August 4, 2025 — Source

AppArmor For Linux 6.17 Set To Introduce AF_UNIX Mediation, Other Improvements
Canonical engineer John Johansen sent out the AppArmor pull request today for the Linux 6.17 merge window that is heavy on changes for this Linux kernel security module.
August 4, 2025 — Source

Git 2.51-rc0 Makes More Preparations For Git 3.0 Where It Will Use SHA-256 By Default
Junio Hamano announced the release of Git 2.51-rc0 to kick off the new week and the first step toward Git 2.51 as the next milestone for this open-source distributed version control system.
August 4, 2025 — Source

GNOME Shell 49 Beta Brings Restart/Shutdown Support To The Lock Screen
Along with the release of the Mutter 49 beta, GNOME Shell 49 beta was released on Sunday in preparation for the imminent GNOME 49 beta release. Notable here is long sought after support for having the ability to restart or shutdown the computer from GNOME's lock screen.
August 4, 2025 — Source

Google Preparing To Ship Chrome With "--ozone-platform-hint=auto" For Wayland
Google Chrome/Chromium is preparing to ship with "--ozone-platform-hint=auto" functionality by default so the web browser will play nicer out-of-the-box with Wayland.
August 4, 2025 — Source

Heroic Games Launcher 2.18.1 Hotfix #1 released
The release of HeroicGamesLauncher version 2.18.1 Hotfix #1 addresses a significant change for Linux users, specifically the default setting that hides Proton versions other than Proton-GE. The update now exclusively conceals Proton Experimental and operates on an Opt-in basis rather than an Opt-out approach. The update addresses the Environmental variables table and introduces configurations for utilizing WoW64 on Linux.
August 4, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma prepares crackdown on focus-stealing window behavior under Wayland
One of the most interesting things about Wayland is how it handles window focus, unlike X11, where focus stealing can be frustrating and even a security risk. Its main advantage is a mechanism that prevents focus stealing. The protocol that plays a role in this is known as "XDG Activation."
August 4, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.17 Making Kdump Crash Kernel More Reliable, Less Wasted Memory
In addition to the many MM changes merged this weekend for Linux 6.17, Andrew Morton on Sunday also sent out his "non-MM" pull request for this new kernel. Notable there is improving the Kdump code to allow for crash kernel reservation made from the contiguous memory allocator to help yield less wasted RAM and greater reliability.
August 4, 2025 — Source

Mesa NVK Driver Now Exposes Vulkan 1.4 For NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" GPUs
Merged a short time ago to Mesa 25.3-devel Git and marked for back-porting to the Mesa 25.2 series is advertising Vulkan 1.4 conformance for NVIDIA's latest Blackwell GPUs.
August 4, 2025 — Source

New Plague Linux malware stealthily maintains SSH access
A newly discovered Linux malware, which has evaded detection for over a year, allows attackers to gain persistent SSH access and bypass authentication on compromised systems.
August 4, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA 580 Beta Linux Driver Brings Fixes, Wayland fifo-v1 Support With Vulkan
NVIDIA today published the v580.65.06 as their first beta driver version in the new NVIDIA 580 Linux driver series.
August 4, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA CUDA 13.0 Available With Unified Arm Platform Support
Along with today's NVIDIA R580 Linux driver beta, the CUDA 13.0 toolkit is now available to download and depends upon the new R580 Linux driver series.
August 4, 2025 — Source

Project Banana ripens into a pre-alpha for KDE Linux, and you can test it
Desktop project's in-house distro is impressively ambitious, but nowhere near ready
August 4, 2025 — Source

Yes, you need a firewall on Linux - here's why and which to use
Out of the box, Linux is a highly secure operating system, but does that mean you can get by without a bit of help? Let's find out.
August 4, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — August 3rd, 2025

Apple HFS/HFS+ File-System Drivers See Many Fixes In Linux 6.17
Earlier this year there was talk of Linux potentially dropping its Apple HFS and HFS+ file-system drivers as they had been orphaned for a decade and proving to be a maintenance burden. Following that some developers stepped up to better maintain the code for HFS and HFS+ file-system support. In Linux 6.17 we are seeing some of the fruits of that work.
August 3, 2025 — Source

Compute Express Link Code Further Cleaned Up In Linux 6.17
The Compute Express Link code changes landed this weekend for the Linux 6.17 kernel with development continuing to be quite active around this subsystem for supporting latest and next-generation servers.
August 3, 2025 — Source

Corsair HX1200i 2025 Power Supply Monitoring Now Works Under Linux
For those shopping for a high-end desktop power supply for use under Linux and interested in being able to take advantage of sensor monitoring capabilities, the 2025 edition of the Corsair HX1200i PSU can now enjoy working sensor monitoring under Linux.
August 3, 2025 — Source

Intel QuickAssist Hit By Second Demotion In Linux 6.17 Due To Lack Of Kernel Benefit
A few days ago the Intel QuickAssist "QAT" accelerators were demoted by FSCRYPT in the Linux 6.17 development code due to being slow and bug prone with AVX-512 showing to be much faster than leveraging the QAT accelerators in this file encryption framework. With the Linux 6.17 crypto subsystem is a second separate demotion to Intel's QAT support for kernel use.
August 3, 2025 — Source

Linus Torvalds confirms he's still running a Radeon RX 580
While the Radeon RX 580, based on the Polaris architecture, is nearly a decade old, some users still see no need to upgrade. And it's not just any user -- it's the creator of Linux himself, Linus Torvalds.
August 3, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — August 2nd, 2025

FEX 2508 Delivers Major Speedups For x86_64 Binaries On ARM: 39% Faster Cyberpunk 2077
FEX 2508 as the open-source emulator that allows running x86_64 Linux binaries on AArch64, including the likes of Wine and Valve's Steam Play, is boasting some "big juicy" optimizations with its new release. Many games are now significantly faster atop FEX.
August 2, 2025 — Source

FireWire IEEE-1394 Support Further Refined In Linux 6.17
While Apple removed FireWire support from the upcoming macOS 26 "Tahoe" release, Linux support for the IEEE-1394 standard continues. With the in-development Linux 6.17 there is some modernization work on the FireWire subsystem code with plan still being to maintain FireWire support on Linux until at least 2029.
August 2, 2025 — Source

GNOME AI Virtual Assistant "Newelle" Reaches Version 1.0 Milestone
Newelle is a virtual AI assistant developed for the GNOME desktop that supports voice chat and can handle carrying out web searches, terminal command execution, website reading, file management, document editing, and more. Newell v1.0 was released this week for advancing this GNOME AI virtual assistant.
August 2, 2025 — Source

I took a look at AnduinOS, a Linux distro that feels like home for Windows users
AnduinOS is a custom Ubuntu-based Linux distro with one goal: to smoothly transition Windows users to Linux. It achieves this by mimicking the workflows and look of Windows 11.
August 2, 2025 — Source

Intel begins Linux enablement of next-gen Nova Lake series
While Nova Lake is not expected for another year, Intel is already preparing its software infrastructure to support the new platform, which will power laptops, desktops, and potentially gaming handhelds. The new series also marks a significant shift in Intel's product family classification. Family 6, the designation used for Intel CPUs for over 20 years, is now being replaced with Family 18, with Nova Lake as the first product under this new category.
August 2, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.5 Finally Adds Automatic Day/Night Theme Switching
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly report on the interesting Plasma desktop changes for the week. This week a long-sought feature for the Plasma desktop was finally merged.
August 2, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.17 Enables x86 MacBook Pro Touch Bars, Intel THC Wake-On-Touch
All of the HID subsystem device driver updates have been merged for the Linux 6.17 merge window.
August 2, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.17 Memory Management Optimizations, DAMON_STAT & Other Improvements
All of the memory management "MM" changes were merged this week for the ongoing Linux 6.17 merge window.
August 2, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — August 1st, 2025

Another one bites the dust as KubeSphere kills open source edition
Company blames license violations and infrastructure changes for abrupt move
August 1, 2025 — Source

Arch Linux 2025.08.01 released
A new Arch Linux installation image based on Linux kernel 6.15.4 has been released. Arch Linux is a lightweight distribution designed for expert users who want the most up-to-date packages. The installation image, which includes the most important Linux tools, also serves as a recovery or emergency image. The installation image now includes a guided installer.
August 1, 2025 — Source

Attack Vector Controls Land In Linux 6.17 To Better Control CPU Security Mitigations
The Attack Vector Controls work is now in Linux 6.17 for those new tuning knobs worked on by AMD engineer David Kaplan to make it more straight-forward for Linux server administrators and power users to more easily select the CPU security mitigations relevant to their system(s) and intended workloads.
August 1, 2025 — Source

CloudNativePG 1.26.1, 1.25.3 and 1.27.0-rc1 released
CloudNativePG has released versions 1.26.1 and 1.25.3, which focus on bug fixes and stability enhancements for PostgreSQL clusters. Users are strongly advised to upgrade to these versions. The first release candidate of the upcoming 1.27.0 release introduces features like dynamic loading of extensions, logical decoding slot synchronization, primary isolation checks, and experimental failover quorum. Feedback will shape the final release in the coming weeks.
August 1, 2025 — Source

EXT4 Shows Wild Gains With Better Block Allocation Scalability In Linux 6.17
The EXT4 file-system enhancements for Linux 6.17 were merged on Thursday and bring better scalability to the block allocation code as well as fixing the file-system's large folios support. The scalability work can show some wild gains in select areas.
August 1, 2025 — Source

Intel IPU7 Driver Merged For Linux 6.17 For Webcams On Lunar Lake & Panther Lake Laptops
The media subsystem updates were submitted and subsequently merged on Thursday for the ongoing Linux 6.17 merge window. There are several notable media changes for Linux 6.17 but arguably most prominent is the IPU7 driver entering staging for working on web camera support for Intel Lunar Lake and next-generation Panther Lake laptops.
August 1, 2025 — Source

KDE neon 20250731 released
KDE neon 20250731 has been released. KDE neon is a Linux distribution built on Ubuntu, featuring the latest version of the KDE Plasma desktop environment.
August 1, 2025 — Source

Linux Enablement Begins For Intel Nova Lake - The First "Family 18" CPUs
Today the first Linux kernel patch was posted for Intel's Nova Lake as the anticipated successor to the Intel Core Ultra Series 2 "Arrow Lake" processors. Today's patch confirms that Intel Nova Lake will be the first Intel processors under their new "Family 18" umbrella.
August 1, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.6.101 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.101 is now available:
August 1, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.12.41 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.41 is now available:
August 1, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.15.9 released
Linux kernel version 6.15.9 is now available:
August 1, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.17 EDAC Code Supports Several Newer Intel CPUs
The Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" driver improvements were merged earlier this week for the ongoing Linux 6.17 merge window and with that comes a number of Intel hardware platforms now being supported.
August 1, 2025 — Source

Liquorix Linux Kernel 6.15-9 released
Steven Barrett has released a new Liquorix kernel derived from Linux kernel 6.15.9. The Liquorix Linux kernel is an enthusiast Linux kernel that is optimized for low-latency computing in audiovisual production, reduced frame time variations in games, and unparalleled responsiveness in interactive systems. It is available for Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch Linux.
August 1, 2025 — Source

MCP Logic: How to Make It 40x Simpler
MCP requires logic. A declarative approach reduces code 40x using spreadsheet-like business rules. Here's a project comparing procedural and declarative.
August 1, 2025 — Source

More Intel Driver Maintainer Changes In Linux 6.17
Following the recent Intel driver being orphaned due to layoffs at the company and other Intel Linux engineering changes due to the ongoing restructuring at the company, for the Linux 6.17 kernel there are some additional Intel driver maintainer changes spotted.
August 1, 2025 — Source

Vulkan 1.4.324 Adds Experimental AMD Extension To Help With Ray-Tracing
Vulkan 1.4.324 is out today as the first Vulkan API specification update in two weeks with a variety of clarifications/corrections plus a new extension from AMD.
August 1, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — July 29th, 2025

A 10x Workaround & Less Network Egress Downtime Change Submitted For Linux 6.17
The kernel locking changes submitted today for Linux 6.17 contain a temporary change worth discussion for yielding a 10x speed-up of a particular function call and as part of that yielding less network egress downtime until a better solution is developed.
July 29, 2025 — Source

AMD Streaming SDK Updated With Linux Support - But Recommending X.Org Over Wayland
AMD's GPUOpen group today released the AMD Interactive Streaming SDK 1.1 release that now delivers Linux support alongside the existing Microsoft Windows support. The AMD Interactive Streaming SDK is designed to provide pieces for developers to build-out low-latency streaming solutions for cloud gaming, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and embedded applications.
July 29, 2025 — Source

EROFS Metadata Compression Lands Plus A ~2.5x Speedup For Reading Directories
Merged on Monday were the EROFS file-system updates for Linux 6.17. EROFS continues to be a common read-only file-system choice for some mobile/embedded devices as well as container use-cases.
July 29, 2025 — Source

Farewell Benchmarks Of Intel's Clear Linux On AMD EPYC Shows More Performance Left To Tap
Last week I ran the last planned benchmarks of Intel CPU performance on Clear Linux versus Ubuntu with Intel having ceased development of Clear Linux following the restructuring at the company. In today's article is a final look at how the AMD EPYC performance compares on Clear Linux relative to Ubuntu Linux and AlmaLinux.
July 29, 2025 — Source

Huge Speedups For CRC32C With Modern AVX-512 CPUs Merged To Linux 6.17
The CRC32C cyclic redundancy check code path within the Linux kernel for error detection is much, much faster with the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel when running on modern Intel and AMD AVX-512 processors.
July 29, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.16 brings faster file systems, improved confidential memory support, and more Rust support
Linux continues to grow bigger and better. Here's what's new and notable in the 6.16 release, plus what you need to know about 6.17.
July 29, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.17 Lands New file_getattr & file_setattr System Calls
Along with the better handling of multi-device file-systems such as Btrfs' native RAID capabilities and now allowing more efficient writing of zeroes to modern storage devices, the number of VFS pull requests for Linux 6.17 also added some other extra goodies.
July 29, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.17 Will Allow Writing Zeroes More Efficiently To SSDs
In addition to the VFS changes merrged yesterday for allowing multi-device file-systems to better cope with losing a disk, another notable change as part of the VFS pull requests for Linux 6.17 allows more efficiently zeroing out a range on modern NVMe SSDs or SCSI drives.
July 29, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.16 lands without any headline features but 38M lines of code
Mostly minor changes under the hood -- a lot of them
July 29, 2025 — Source

MSI Claw A8 Gaming Performance Review : RYZEN Z2 Extreme
What if the future of handheld gaming wasn't tied to Windows or consoles? Imagine a device that combines the raw power of AMD's Ryzen Z2 Extreme with the open source flexibility of Linux, delivering a portable gaming experience that challenges the status quo. Enter the MSI Claw A8, a bold contender in the handheld market that dares to redefine what's possible for Linux gaming. With its innovative hardware and promising benchmarks, it's easy to see why this device is making waves. But as with any innovation, the road to perfection is paved with challenges—software limitations and incomplete functionality hint at the hurdles still ahead.
July 29, 2025 — Source

This handy Linux tool snitches on sneaky apps - here's why and how it's helpful
OpenSnitch makes it easy to track outgoing internet requests from installed apps, so you can take action if necessary.
July 29, 2025 — Source

TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 15 Gen10 Laptop Announced - Powered By AMD Strix Point
For those shopping for a Linux friendly laptop powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" with Zen 5 cores and integrated Radeon graphics plus allowing up to 128GB of RAM, the 15.3-inch InfinityBook Pro 15 Gen10 was announced this morning.
July 29, 2025 — Source

With Windows 10's fast-approaching demise, this Linux migration tool could let you ditch Microsoft's ecosystem with your data and apps intact — but it's limited to one distro
Operese is a Windows-to-Linux migration tool designed to make the transition seamless, but it is still in its early development phase.
July 29, 2025 — Source

xf86-video-amdgpu 25.0.0 Released With Two Years Worth Of Fixes
It had been two years since the last update to the AMDGPU X.Org DDX driver but now xf86-video-amdgpu 25.0.0 is now available for those relying on this driver/hardware-specific driver for X.Org enabled Linux systems rather than the xf86-video-modesetting generic driver or a Wayland-based desktop.
July 29, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — July 27th, 2025

AMD Kernel Graphics Driver Exceeds 5.9 Million Lines In Linux 6.16
The modern AMD Kernel graphics driver consisting of AMDGPU, the AMDKFD compute code, and associated infrastructure continues to easily be the largest mainline open-source driver. With the Linux 6.16 kernel debuting as stable as soon as later today, the AMD kernel graphics driver cracks the 5.9 million line threshold. In comparison, the entire Linux kernel source tree comes in at
July 27, 2025 — Source

AMD SEV Optimizations Ready For Linux 6.17 Plus A 10x Improvement For Intel TDX
There are a few AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization improvements on the way for the Linux 6.17 kernel worth noting.
July 27, 2025 — Source

Flyoobe (Flyby11) 0.23.28 released
Belim has announced the release of another update for Flyoobe, an enhancement to Flyby11 that offers a more intelligent post-upgrade experience that addresses all aspects following the upgrade, including elements that Windows typically conceals or hastily navigates users through.
July 27, 2025 — Source

GNU Binutils 2.45 Released With Continued Work Around SFrame Stack Tracing
GNU Binutils 2.45 was released on Sunday morning as the newest version of this set of open-source binary tools.
July 27, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.17 Introducing Support For The NVIDIA Tegra T264/Thor, New RISC-V SoCs
In advance of the Linux 6.17 merge window expected to open soon following the Linux 6.16 release, all of the SoC updates have been submitted to Linus Torvalds for this next kernel version.
July 27, 2025 — Source

New Ubuntu Concept Snapdragon X Laptop ISOs Published - Your Mileage May Vary
A few days back I wrote about Canonical releasing new Ubuntu 25.04 "Concept" ISOs for the Snapdragon X laptops with the new install images being re-based to the Linux 6.16 kernel and expanding the device support. But as I found out from my own testing, depending upon the laptop the support was still less than ideal. Since then there have been two more ISO releases and addressing one of my show-stopping problems albeit encountering another.
July 27, 2025 — Source

Shotcut 25.07 Video Editor Brings Numerous Improvements
Shotcut 25.07 is out today as the newest feature release for this prominent open-source and cross-platform video editing solution.
July 27, 2025 — Source

Zen Browser 1.14.9b released
The Zen Browser 1.14.9b has been updated to address a regression issue with closing glance that was present in previous versions.
July 27, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — July 26th, 2025

FFmpeg 8.0 Preparing For Release In August With Many Great Features
We are just a few weeks out from seeing the release of the FFmpeg 8.0 multimedia library with many new features and improvements for this widely-used open-source software.
July 26, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.5 will notify you if your printer's ink is low
This week, the KDE team continued work on the upcoming Plasma 6.5.0 as well as Plasma 6.4's fourth bug fix release, 6.4.4. As usual, both Plasma versions saw several UI tweaks, bug fixes, and performance improvements. The most notable changes are discussed in this article.
July 26, 2025 — Source

Intel oneDNN 3.9 Making More Preparations For Xe3, Nova Lake & Diamond Rapids
Released on Friday was a new version of the oneDNN deep neural network library maintained by Intel and the UXL Foundation. This library used by various deep learning applications continues preparing for upcoming Intel CPUs and GPUs.
July 26, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.17 Sound Code Prepares For Upcoming AMD Hardware
Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE submitted already the sound code feature changes ready for Linux 6.17.
July 26, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.17 To Support Arm's BRBE
One of the new features coming for ARM64 in this next version of the Linux kernel is enabling BRBE support within the Linux kernel's perf subsystem. BRBE is short for the Branch Record Buffer Extension and has been part of the Arm ISA spec the past five years. The Branch Record Buffer Extension allows for capturing a recent sequence of branches for low-compute and low-memory overhead capture/analysis for tracing/debug purposes. Tied into the Linux perf subsystem should be useful for low overhead profiling of AArch64 systems.
July 26, 2025 — Source

Linux's Modern NTFS Driver Will Now Correctly Handle Symlinks Created On Windows
One of the nice Linux kernel accomplishments during the pandemic was getting the NTFS3 driver upstreamed for that modern NTFS file-system read/write driver developed by Paragon Software. In recent times that NTFS3 driver has been seeing occasional fixes and for the Linux 6.17 kernel -- and perhaps then back-ported to existing kernels -- are some notable fixes for those relying on drives formatted with this Microsoft file-system.
July 26, 2025 — Source

OpenAI nearly confirms GPT-5 launch today - how to tune in
The wait for GPT-5 seems to be over. Here's why this model is a big deal.
July 26, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — July 25th, 2025

Ayn Gaming Handhelds To See Better Linux Support With New Open-Source Driver
Ayn is a Chinese brand of handheld gaming devices that have included Arm-based devices shipping Android as well as AMD Ryzen powered handhelds with Windows 11 or even the option of installing Ubuntu. Better support for the Ayn x86 gaming handheld devices is on the way with patches posted for a new Ayn platform driver for the Linux kernel.
July 25, 2025 — Source

Bcachefs Lands Last Minute Fixes For Linux 6.16
Ahead of the Linux 6.16 stable kernel expected to be released on Sunday, some last minute Bcachefs file-system fixes join various other kernel regression/bug fixes landing today in Git.
July 25, 2025 — Source

Fedora 43 Looks To Offer Support For The Hare Programming Language
Fedora 43 is looking to offer packages to support the Hare system programming language.
July 25, 2025 — Source

Fedora Considers Reducing The Scope That BIOS Systems Can Hold Up A Release
Given that non-UEFI BIOS systems are quite old at this point and Intel/AMD systems for the past number of years have all supported UEFI, another change proposal being considered this week by Fedora Linux is limiting the release-blocking status of various (non-UEFI) BIOS systems.
July 25, 2025 — Source

Final Benchmarks Of Clear Linux On Intel: ~48% Faster Than Ubuntu Out-Of-The-Box
Last week Friday the unfortunate news came down that Intel was discontinuing their Clear Linux project effective immediately. For the past ten years Intel software engineers have been crafting Clear Linux as a high performance distribution that is extensively optimized for x86_64 processors via aggressive compiler tuning, various patches to the Linux kernel and other packages, and a variety of other optimizations throughout the operating system.
July 25, 2025 — Source

FreeBSD 15 installer to offer minimal KDE desktop
The FreeBSD Laptop project continues -- and plans to offer a very visible change
July 25, 2025 — Source

Intel Quietly Sunset Its PlaidML Open-Source Deep Learning Software
Another hit to the open-source Intel software ecosystem this year was the company formally archiving/discontinuing work on the PlaidML deep learning software. PlaidML was the deep learning framework that Intel acquired back in 2018 as part of their acquisition of Vertex.AI. PlaidML had a goal of "deep learning for every platform" but unfortunately those ambitions didn't materialize.
July 25, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.16 Is Exciting For Open-Source NVIDIA, OpenVPN DCO & More Performance
The Linux 6.16 kernel is expected to be released as stable this coming Sunday, 27 July, barring any last minute issues that cause Linus Torvalds to have reservations over issuing v6.16 stable and to instead do a v6.16-rc8 test release. With Linux 6.16 imminent, here's a reminder about some of the most interesting features in this next Linux kernel version.
July 25, 2025 — Source

Linux Will Finally Be Able To Reboot Apple M1/M2 Macs With The v6.17 Kernel
While there have been various elements of the Apple M1 and M2 SoC support in the mainline Linux kernel along with support for various Macs, different features have been missing from the upstream kernel such as the Apple GPU kernel graphics driver as one big example. On a more fundamental level, the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel is going to cross off another low-level expectation for Apple Silicon Macs on the mainline kernel: the ability to reboot the system.
July 25, 2025 — Source

Red Hat Has Been Rewriting Bash-Based Greenboot In Rust
Greenboot is a generic health check framework for systemd on RPM-OSTree based Linux distributions. Red Hat engineers have worked on Greenboot as part of the likes of Fedora IoT and their other RPM-OSTree initiatives for checking on the overall system health with ease.
July 25, 2025 — Source

Supply-chain attacks on open source software are getting out of hand
Attacks affected packages, including one with ~2.8 million weekly downloads.
July 25, 2025 — Source

Trump's AI plan says a lot about open source - but here's what it leaves out
The AI Action Plan pretty much frees up AI companies to do what they want, but it also supports the use of open source for AI. What that means is one big open question.
July 25, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — July 22nd, 2025

A Number Of Problems Make Debian & Other Linux Distros A Pain On Snapdragon X Laptops
While downstream Ubuntu is the most popular Linux option for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X powered "Windows on Arm" laptops, that's because of their concept images containing a number of "hacked packages" to lead to a decent user experience. But for upstream Debian Linux the prospects of running it on Snapdragon X Elite/Plus laptops is less than ideal with a number of problems persisting -- similar to other Linux distributions focused on running the mainline Linux kernel and other upstream software.
July 22, 2025 — Source

AMDGPU LLVM Backend Flips On "True16" Mode For All RDNA3 GPUs
A late change to the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end that may help efforts particularly for the ROCm compute support on RDNA3 hardware is finally merging support for using true 16-bit instructions and registers on all RDNA3 GPUs.
July 22, 2025 — Source

Apple Silicon 2SoC/DT Changes Submitted Ahead Of Linux 6.17
Sven Peter today sent out all of the Apple SoC driver and DeviceTree (DT) updates aiming for the soon-to-happen Linux 6.17 merge window.
July 22, 2025 — Source

Arch Linux users told to purge Firefox forks after AUR malware scare
The distro's greatest asset is arguably also its greatest weakness
July 22, 2025 — Source

Arm Preparing Support For Latest Mali GPUs With Panthor Open-Source Driver
Arm engineer Karunika Choo has been leading the effort to enable support for the latest Mali GPUs within the open-source and upstream "Panthor" DRM kernel graphics driver for Linux. This work includes being able to enable the latest Mali 5th Gen GPUs on this open-source graphics driver.
July 22, 2025 — Source

Azure Linux 2.0 reaches end of life, requiring AKS Arc users to upgrade
Microsoft has warned that Azure Linux 2.0, used in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) enabled by Azure Arc, will reach its end of life on July 31, 2025, necessitating users to upgrade. After this date, Microsoft will no longer provide updates, security patches, or support for Azure Linux 2.0. The longer it is used after this date, the more vulnerable systems will become due to a lack of patches.
July 22, 2025 — Source

Fedora 43 Cleared To Ship With Zstd Initrd, Updated Compiler Toolchains & More
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) this week voted to approve a number of new features/changes for the upcoming Fedora 43 release.
July 22, 2025 — Source

Fedora Weighs Dropping Release Criteria For DVD Optical Media
The Fedora project is seeking feedback from its user and developer community over potentially updating its release criteria to no longer block on optical media boot issues (DVD images) as well as whether to continue honoring dual boot issues for Intel-based Macs as release-blocking.
July 22, 2025 — Source

Fwupd 2.0.13 Released With New Hardware Support, Numerous Fixes
LVFS/Fwupd lead developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat today announced the availability of Fwupd 2.0.13 for handling firmware updates on modern Linux systems.
July 22, 2025 — Source

Saying no to Windows 11 just got easier -- Operese automatically transfers your Windows 10 files and settings to Linux
While some users may be considering buying a new computer or paying for extended support, one student developer is offering another path: switching to Linux with the help of a free migration tool called Operese.
July 22, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — July 20th, 2025

Debian 13.0 Ready To Introduce Formal RISC-V Support But Still Bound By Slow Hardware
With the Debian 13.0 release planned for 9 August, one of the notable fundamental features with this Debian "Trixie" release is now supporting RISC-V as an official CPU architecture. This is the first release where RISC-V 64-bit is officially supported by Debian Linux albeit with limited board support and the Debian RISC-V build process is handicapped by slow hardware.
July 20, 2025 — Source

KDE neon 20250720 released
KDE neon 20250720 has been released. KDE neon is a Linux distribution built on Ubuntu, featuring the latest version of the KDE Plasma desktop environment.
July 20, 2025 — Source or Watch Video

Linux Kernel Patches Speed-Up CRC32 Performance For CPUs With "Good" AVX-512
Google engineer Eric Biggers who has been responsible for many great Linux cryptography subsystem performance optimizations in recent years has another exciting patch series. Biggers has done some great work for optimizing various functions for modern Intel/AMD CPUs especially around AVX-512 implementations and now he has another big optimization coming for the CRC32 checksum performance.
July 20, 2025 — Source

SFrame Support Beginning To Materialize For LLVM/Clang
SFrame is the lightweight stack trace format that can overcome some of the performance obstacles for tracing ELF files compared to frame pointers. In addition to the SFrame support coming together in the GNU toolchain, the SFrame support for LLVM/Clang is beginning to reach upstream.
July 20, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — July 19th, 2025

Debian 13.0 "Trixie" Planning For Release On August 9
The Debian release team today shared their final release plans for Debian 13 "Trixie" that aims to be out as stable in less than one month's time.
July 19, 2025 — Source

Intel Shuts Down "Clear Linux" Distribution Development
Linux enthusiasts gather to hear the latest news: Intel is officially shutting down its Clear Linux distribution after ten years of development and optimizations. As many recall, Clear Linux is an Intel-optimized Linux distribution that serves as a high-performance, optimized OS designed to extract every last ounce of performance from Intel hardware, especially Intel Xeons.
July 19, 2025 — Source or Source or Source

KDE Plasma 6.5 Brings Rounded Bottom Corners For Windows By Default
KDE Plasma 6.5 is introducing a change that has been "years in the wanting" and that is rounded bottom corners for windows.
July 19, 2025 — Source

Microsoft stops using China-based engineers to support US defense clients
Microsoft announced on Friday that its China-based engineers can no longer provide technical support to the US military and other defence clients using the company's cloud services.
July 19, 2025 — Source or Source

Open-Source & Rust-Written Burn MATMUL Kernels Can Compete With NVIDIA's CUDA/cuBLAS
The open-source and Rust-based Burn deep learning framework developed by Tracel AI shared that their open-source matrix multiplication kernel performance can compete with and even outperform the NVIDIA CUDA cuBLAS performance. Plus Burn isn't limited to just NVIDIA GPUs but can work on most hardware/drivers, including a Vulkan back-end.
July 19, 2025 — Source

Popular npm linter packages hijacked via phishing to drop malware
Popular JavaScript libraries were hijacked this week and turned into malware droppers, in a supply chain attack achieved via targeted phishing and credential theft.
July 19, 2025 — Source

Rust-Written NOVA Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Being Further Built Out In Linux 6.17
For Linux 6.17 in addition to Intel enabling SR-IOV for Battlemage graphics cards and many other big Intel Xe kernel graphics cards and then more AMD graphics driver features too, the NOVA driver for modern open-source NVIDIA driver support is continuing to be further built out in this next kernel version.
July 19, 2025 — Source

Wayland Color Management For HDR Under Review For Chrome/Chromium
The latest software with pending Wayland color management support for enabling HDR display support is the open-source Google Chromium code for the Chrome web browser.
July 19, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — July 18th, 2025

AMD Announces ROCm-LS, hipCIM As Port Of NVIDIA's cuCIM
Back in May was the announcement by AMD of ROCm-DS as a new toolkit geared for real-world data science problems with various helpers to accelerate data processing on Instinct accelerators. AMD today is complementing ROCm-DS by announcing ROCm-LS and hipCIM.
July 18, 2025 — Source

Arch Linux pulls AUR packages that installed Chaos RAT malware
Arch Linux has pulled three malicious packages uploaded to the Arch User Repository (AUR), which were used to install the CHAOS remote access trojan (RAT) on Linux devices.
July 18, 2025 — Source

Imagination Kernel Graphics Driver Being Extended To AM62P/AM67A/J722S SoCs
The open-source and upstream Imagination Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver for supporting their modern graphics IP and pairing with their PowerVR Vulkan driver within Mesa is now being extended to work on the TI AM62P, AM67A, and J722S SoCs.
July 18, 2025 — Source

Intel Compute Runtime 25.27.34303.5 Brings Support For Wildcat Lake & BMG G31
Intel is out today with its monthly feature update to the Compute Runtime as their open-source GPU compute stack providing Level Zero and OpenCL API support on Windows and Linux systems. This month there is new hardware support, more performance optimizations, and some new features.
July 18, 2025 — Source

Intel QATlib 25.08 Brings Hugepages Support & Other Improvements
Intel engineers yesterday released QATlib 25.08 as the first new update in nearly one year for this QuickAssist Technology library. Intel QuickAssist allows hardware-accelerated offloading of various security authentication and compression operations from the CPU onto dedicated accelerator IP found in recent Xeon processors. Intel's QATlib is the open-source library for enabling that magic to happen from the user-space side.
July 18, 2025 — Source

PhaseFieldX: An open-source tool for simulating material fracture and fatigue
The Python package PhaseFieldX, developed by researcher Miguel Castillón at IMDEA Materials Institute, has been published in the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) in a paper titled "PhaseFieldX: An Open-Source Framework for Advanced Phase-Field Simulations."
July 18, 2025 — Source

PHP 8.3.24RC1 and 8.4.11RC1 packages for Fedora/RHEL released
Remi Collet has released PHP 8.3.24RC1 and 8.4.11RC1 packages for Fedora and RHEL-based Linux distributions.
July 18, 2025 — Source

Servo Web Engine Further Tuning Performance, Screen Reader & Other New Features
The Servo open-source web layout engine continues advancing with its demo Servoshell and continued work around making it suitable for embedding into other software. The Servo project this morning published their latest monthly status update to inform the community what they have been up to the past several weeks.
July 18, 2025 — Source

This new Windows 11 clone is actually Linux and runs faster on your old PC -- get it now
The latest long-term support release of Linuxfx, version 11.25.07 "NOBLE," is now available.
July 18, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — July 17th, 2025

Google Continues Working On "Magma" For Mesa Cross-Platform System Call Interface
Mesa 25.2 entered its feature freeze yesterday with many exciting driver improvements with new features and performance optimizations while one feature that wasn't ready for merging in this quarter's release is Magma, which is a recent effort by Google engineers working on a cross-platform system call interface for Mesa. And it's written in Rust.
July 17, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.17 To Fix AMDGPU Hibernation So It Doesn't Take ~50 Minutes On Large GPU Servers
While late in the Linux 6.16 cycle and hitting the cut-off for when the period to queue new DRM driver feature material for Linux 6.17 ends, an additional drm-misc-next pull request was sent out today with some last minute kernel graphics driver changes for this next kernel cycle. Motivating this extra pull were the recent AMDGPU system hibernation patches.
July 17, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.17 To Upstream Support For The Decade Old Marvell PXA1908 SoC
Launched back in 2014 was the Marvell PXA1908 SoC intended for 4G LTE smartphones and featured four Arm Cortex-A53 cores. Not too impressive for its time and far less so today. Though after a decade of not seeing mainline Linux kernel support and some vendor kernels stuck in the Linux 3.14 era, the upcoming Linux 6.17 cycle is expected to upstream support for this old smartphone SoC.
July 17, 2025 — Source

Linux surpasses 5% market share on US desktops for the first time
Linux's momentum is largely driven by user dissatisfaction with Microsoft's ecosystem
July 17, 2025 — Source

Mesa 25.1.6 released
The bugfix release 25.1.6 is now available for Mesa 25.1 users. The release includes fixes for various issues, such as handling NULL pColorAttachmentLocations in vkCmdSetRenderingAttachmentLocations, lower maxImageDimension{2D,3D,Cube} to match HW caps, and fixing tiling for H.265 and VP9 video surfaces on GFX 12.5+. The release also includes fixes for leaking fences in GetImage/PutImage, radeonsi/video, and radv/video.
July 17, 2025 — Source

OpenAI Has Not Extended A "Material Cash Advance" To CoreWeave (CRWV) Despite Providing A $15 Billion Commitment, Claims HSBC
CoreWeave's current liquidity position looks stretched to HSBC, partially due to a lack of follow through on the part of OpenAI on a $15 billion cash commitment.
July 17, 2025 — Source

PostgreSQL 18 Beta 2 released
The second beta version of PostgreSQL 18 is now available for download, featuring fixes and improvements such as support for prepared statements, foreign key validation, injection point testing, and pg_dump for complex tables. It also addresses stack overflow for OAuth parsers, pg_dump and pg_dumpall default behavior, LOAD $libdir/ functionality, GIN amcheck improvements, and removal of PQservice() from libpq.
July 17, 2025 — Source

Single RunQueue Proxy Execution Appears Ready For Linux 6.17
The long in development work around proxy execution for the Linux kernel appears to be ready for the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window with the Single RunQueue Proxy Execution patches queued into a TIP branch after going through 19 rounds of patch review/revisions.
July 17, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — July 14th, 2025

CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
July 14, 2025 — Source

Debian GNU/Linux 13 Trixie Testing 20250714 Live Images
New weekly Debian GNU/Linux 13 Trixie live testing images are now available, featuring a range of desktop environments such as GNOME 48.2, KDE 6.3.5, Xfce 4.20, Cinnamon 6.4.10, MATE 1.26, LXQt 2.1.0, and LXDE 0.99.3.
July 14, 2025 — Source

Debian's DebConf25 Kicks Off On France - Video Streams Available
Debian's annual Debian Conference "DebConf" started this morning and runs all week in Brest, France.
July 14, 2025 — Source

IceWM 3.8.1 released
IceWM 3.8.1 has been released and addresses issues related to user memory calculation, toolbar reloading, and the positioning of message dialogs above the WindowList. Enhances the speed and memory efficiency of BrowseMenu, while also incorporating Hungarian translations.
July 14, 2025 — Source

Intel Mesa Drivers Add Option To Disable Xe3's Variable Register Thread "VRT" Feature
One of the interesting new additions with the upcoming Intel Xe3 integrated and discrete graphics is the Variable Register Thread "VRT" feature. Making use of Variable Register Thread can reduce register splitting, reduce bandwidth consumption, and improve overall performance. More background information on Intel VRT can be found in that aforelinked Phoronix article.
July 14, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 5.15.188 released
Linux kernel version 5.15.188 is now available:
July 14, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.1.145 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.145 is now available:
July 14, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.6.98 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.98 is now available:
July 14, 2025 — Source

Linux Kernel 6.12.38 released
Linux kernel 6.12.38 has been released.
July 14, 2025 — Source

Linux Mint 22.2 beta to bring fingerprint login, better themes, and Wayland fixes
Clem Lefebvre, head of the Linux Mint project, has announced that the Linux Mint 22.2 "Zara" beta will be released at the end of July or early August. As always, it's a notable upgrade, bringing with it an updated Hardware Enablement (HWE) kernel, which means it'll have better support for newer hardware like CPUs, GPUs, and wireless cards.
July 14, 2025 — Source

LMDE 7 Will Follow Linux Mint 22.2
The Linux Mint developers have put out their monthly status update to outline their work in recent weeks. Over the course of June, Linux Mint developers were primarily focused on Linux Mint 22.2 with the beta release expected soon.
July 14, 2025 — Source

Mesa 25.2 NVK versus NVIDIA R575 Linux Graphics Performance For GeForce RTX 40 Series
A number of Phoronix readers have been interested in seeing some fresh benchmarks of Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver in providing open-source Vulkan API support on NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards as well as the modern OpenGL approach of using Zink for layering OpenGL atop Vulkan. Here are some fresh benchmarks using the very latest Mesa 25.2 code for NVK on the latest upstream stable Linux kernel compared to the NVIDIA R575 official Linux graphics driver stack.
July 14, 2025 — Source

NVMe Controller Data Queue "CDQ" Patches Posted For Linux
New feature patches posted for review today on the Linux kernel mailing list are working to implement the NVMe specification's Controller Data Queue (CDQ) functionality within the NVMe storage driver.
July 14, 2025 — Source

Old Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 GPUs Still Seeing Open-Source Driver Fixes In 2025
In addition to last minute feature work on the latest AMD RDNA4 graphics cards ahead of the Mesa 25.2 code branching, there's also some new fixes going into Mesa for the open-source Radeon driver code... Coming in this Monday morning by surprise are some fixes for the Radeon HD 2000/3000 series approaching two decades old as well as a fix for the Radeon HD 4000 graphics processors.
July 14, 2025 — Source

RADV Vulkan Video Improvements Make It Into Mesa 25.2 For AMD RDNA4 GPUs
Ahead of the Mesa 25.2 code branching / feature freeze expected later this week, last minute feature additions and other changes continue landing in the codebase for these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. One of the additions today worth mentioning are continued Vulkan Video improvements for AMD Radeon graphics.
July 14, 2025 — Source

SFrame Support Upstreamed To GNU C Library For Glibc 2.42
Merged today into the upstream GNU C Library code ahead of next month's Glibc 2.42 release is support for SFrame stack tracing with ELF binaries on x86 and AArch64 architectures.
July 14, 2025 — Source

Zen Browser 1.14.5b released
Zen Browser 1.14.5b has addressed the problem of compact mode deactivating upon window restoration and resolved accessibility concerns related to the use of custom colors.
July 14, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — July 13th, 2025

AMD NGG Improvements Make It Into Mesa 25.2 Ahead Of Next Week's Code Branching
Last week I wrote about a number of patches coming out of AMD for Next-Gen Geometry "NGG" improvements to the AMD OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux. Some of that code hadn't been merged as of writing but fortunately this week the remainder of the NGG improvements were successfully merged to Mesa Git for this quarter's Mesa 25.2 release.
July 13, 2025 — Source

Another Longtime Intel Linux Engineer Leaves The Company
Amid Intel's ongoing financial difficulties and multiple rounds of layoffs some Linux engineers at Intel left last year and there's been at least one prominent departure this week amid the latest round of challenges at the company.
July 13, 2025 — Source

G2Streamer 1.27.1 Release Brings AMD HIP Plugin & Better Vulkan Video
GStreamer 1.27.1 released this week as the first development version toward the GStreamer 1.28 release coming later in the year. GStreamer 1.27/1.28 is bringing a lot of modern feature enhancements for this widely-used multimedia library.
July 13, 2025 — Source

Haiku OS Sees Work On Better App HiDPI Scaling, Better Intel WiFI Driver From OpenBSD
The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS had a busy month of June with a number of enhancements made to this OS. Haiku just published their convenient monthly recap that highlights all of the interesting changes made the past month to this open-source OS.
July 13, 2025 — Source

KDE neon 20250713 released
KDE neon 20250713 has been released. KDE neon is a Linux distribution built on Ubuntu, featuring the latest version of the KDE Plasma desktop environment.
July 13, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.16 Ready With Fixes For Old AMD Hardware "Which Wasn't Even Supposed To Run Linux"
Ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc6 kernel release due out later today, an x86/urgent pull request was sent out today that includes some fixes for old AMD Zen 2 hardware.
July 13, 2025 — Source

Linux Patches Updated For The New Fairphone 6 Smartphone
Last month when the Fairphone 6 smartphone was announced, same-day Linux support patches were posted for this modular and repair-friendly smartphone. That Linux support code with the Device Tree (DT) files have been under review and out today is the second iteration of those enablement patches.
July 13, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — July 12th, 2025

Can a Linux laptop replace my MacBook? This one is off to a good start
Tuxedo Computers' Infinity Book Pro 14 is a sleek-looking laptop with Linux pre-installed. But its performance is backed up by some smart design options.
July 12, 2025 — Source

GNOME Builder & Digital Wellbeing Code Improved This Week
On top of this week's release of the GNOME 49 Alpha, other application improvements and more came about in the past few days.
July 12, 2025 — Source

I put Linux on this 8-inch mini laptop, and it's filled a niche role for me
The Piccolo N150 is a tiny eight-inch laptop with more power than it suggests and a nice display. But as a writer, I've found it to be great for capturing ideas on the go.
July 12, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.5 will let you configure what the rotatable dials on your drawing tablet do
It's the weekend, and you know what that means: a new update from the KDE team on the happenings around the KDE ecosystem. This Week, as with the past few weeks, saw bug fixes, UI improvements, and more across different versions of Plasma, specifically 6.4.3 and 6.5. Let's get into it.
July 12, 2025 — Source

KDE Preps More Crash KWin Crash Fixes, New Feature Work For Plasma 6.5
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development recap of all interesting things and fixes merged for the week to Plasma.
July 12, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.17 Readies EDAC Support For Intel Granite Rapids D, Wildcat Lake, Raptor Lake HX
In addition to Intel preparing Bartlett Lake S EDAC driver support for Linux 6.17, several other recent and upcoming Intel processors are also set to see Error Detection and Correction (EDAC) driver coverage with this next version of the Linux kernel.
July 12, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA Publishes RTXNTC 0.7 Beta For Neural Texture Compression
NVIDIA software engineers ended out the week by releasing a new beta of their RTX Neural Texture Compression (NTC) SDK. The RTXNTC software is NVIDIA's interesting solution for compressing material texture sets with very promising results for helping to reduce game data sizes moving forward.
July 12, 2025 — Source

The price of software freedom is eternal politics
Many don't realize or forget, but the FOSS world has ideological wings, too
July 12, 2025 — Source

Wine Staging 10.12 released
Wine Staging 10.12 has been released and includes several updates, such as a rebase against Wine 10.12, the addition of msxml_normalize_line, a patchset for comctl32_animate_avi, and an update to the msxml3-element_props patchset.
July 12, 2025 — Source

Wine-Staging 10.12 Release Brings Patch For 11 Year Old Bug
It's been a while since there have been any new patches in the Wine-Staging experimental area to note. More patches though have continued working their way from Wine-Staging to upstream/mainline Wine while this weekend Wine-Staging 10.12 is out at 292 patches atop upstream Wine and containing two new patches.
July 12, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — July 11th, 2025

AMD Radeon RX 9070 Ray-Tracing Performance Improving With Mesa 25.2
With the feature freeze and code branching for Mesa 25.2 expected to take place next week and kick off the release process for this quarterly Mesa 3D version to debut as stable in August, I've begun running more benchmarks of this latest code on popular GPUs. As it pertains to the newest AMD Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA4 graphics processors, the most exciting area with Mesa 25.2 are the Vulkan ray-tracing improvements.
July 11, 2025 — Source

Attack Vector Controls Could Be Ready For Linux 6.17 Introduction
The AMD engineering led work on Attack Vector Controls for the Linux kernel could be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel with the remaining patches now being queued within a TIP branch.
July 11, 2025 — Source

GCC 12.5 Compiler Released To End Out The GCC 12 Series With 241+ Bug Fixes
For those who seldom update to new compiler versions, GCC 12.5 was released today as the newest and final update to the GCC 12 compiler that debuted back in 2022.
July 11, 2025 — Source

Improved Debugging Support For AMDGPU Driver Expected For Linux 6.17
Sent out on Thursday along with Intel's huge Xe driver pull request with new features was the drm-misc-next material for the week. Notable with the drm-misc-next code were actually a set of AMDGPU driver patches to enhance the debugging with the information exposed via the DebugFS interface.
July 11, 2025 — Source

KDE ISO Image Writer is finally getting a UI redesign and new features
Now, another GSoC project is on the way that aims to port the KDE ISO Image Writer's UI to Kirigami, add the ability to download operating system images directly, and address a bunch of other issues. The project is led by Akki (@Holychicken), who has been working on it for a while now as part of Google Summer of Code 2025.
July 11, 2025 — Source

QuestDB 9.0 Released For High Performance, Time-Series Database
QuestDB 9.0 debuted today as the latest major update to this high performance, time-series database that is open-source under an Apache 2.0 license. QuestDB continues to be built using a combination of Java, C++, and Rust for being an interesting time-series database.
July 11, 2025 — Source or Source

RadeonSI Begins Upstreaming Its OpenGL Mesh Shader Support
OpenGL doesn't receive nearly as much love these days as the Vulkan API, but over the past several months there's been at least one notable new extension in the works: cross-vendor mesh shader support with the pending GL_EXT_mesh_shader extension.
July 11, 2025 — Source

Smarter Cache Flushing For AMD SEV KVM Guest VMs Expected For Linux 6.17
Going back several months have been patches out of Google to optimize AMD cache flushing for KVM-based Linux guest virtual machines when making use of Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). As anticipated, that AMD SEV cache flushing optimization work looks like it will be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel cycle.
July 11, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — July 10th, 2025

Apache HTTP Server 2.4.64 released
Apache HTTP Server 2.4.64 has been released to resolve multiple security vulnerabilities. The initial issue pertains to the delayed memory release following a vulnerability related to effective lifetime in Apache HTTP Server, impacting versions 2.4.17 through 2.4.63. This vulnerability allows an attacker to compromise an HTTP session by using a TLS upgrade.
July 10, 2025 — Source

Blender 4.5 RC1 Released With Much Better Vulkan Support
The release candidate of the Blender 4.5 3D modeling software is now available for testing. There are many great improvements to find with Blender 4.5 and this new version is all the more important in being the next Long Term Support (LTS) release for this popular cross-platform 3D modeling software.
July 10, 2025 — Source

Canonical Releases Multipass 1.16 As Now Fully Open-Source Project
Ubuntu maker Canonical today released Multipass 1.16 stable for this Linux / Windows / macOS means of deploying Ubuntu VM instances using this lightweight VM manager built atop Linux's KVM, Windows' Hyper-V, and QEMU on macOS. Notable with Multipass 1.16 is that it's now fully open-source software.
July 10, 2025 — Source

FEX-2507 released
The FEX-2507 release encompasses a range of fixes and enhancements for users. The game Horizon Zero Dawn was observed to be operating in slow-motion, with the physics functioning at approximately one-third of the normal speed. This issue arose from a bug in WINE's reliability check, resulting in the game reverting to the CPU's maximum clock speed. The resolution addressed this issue, enabling the game to execute its animations at the appropriate speed.
July 10, 2025 — Source

If you care about privacy stop using this popular Linux email client, sysadmin warns
When it comes to email clients, you have things like Outlook, which has been around forever, but if you're on Linux, there's a good chance you've heard about Evolution, even with its long history starting back in 2000. Some might call it the Outlook of Linux for being a complete open-source personal information manager, not just an email app, and for supporting protocols ranging from IMAP and POP to Microsoft Exchange.
July 10, 2025 — Source

KDE's native virtual machine manager, Karton, inches closer to potential stable release
Nearly two months ago, we told you about Karton, a project by Google Summer of Code student Derek Lin, which is hoped to replace tools like virt-manager and GNOME Boxes as a native option for KDE Plasma users.
July 10, 2025 — Source

libinput 1.29 Improving Scroll Wheel Responsiveness For Most Devices
Peter Hutterer of Red Hat announced today the first release candidate of libinput 1.29, the newest version of this input handling library used across both X.Org and Wayland environments with the modern Linux desktop.
July 10, 2025 — Source

LibreOffice 25.8 RC1 Released With Various File Performance Improvements
The first release candidate of the LibreOffice 25.8 open-source office suite is now available for testing. This half-year update as the leading free software alternative to Microsoft Office has been working on performance improvements for various file types, dropping support for old versions of Windows, and various other enhancements.
July 10, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.17 Looks To Drop The pktcdvd Packet Writing CD/DVD Driver
Linux block maintainer Jens Axboe queued up a patch this week to drop the pktcdvd driver from the mainline kernel, which is expected to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.17 cycle. The pktcdvd driver has been in the kernel for over two decades since the Linux 2.6 days for packet-writing CD/DVD support albeit is hardly useful in today's world.
July 10, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.15.6, 6.12.37 LTS & Other Stable Kernels Deliver TSA Mitigations
Greg Kroah-Hartman just released the Linux 6.15.6 point release as well as the Linux 6.12.37 LTS kernel and new point releases in prior-year Long Term Support kernel versions. The main headline of today's stable kernel releases are picking up the mitigations for the Transient Scheduler Attacks (TSA) mitigations that were disclosed this week for AMD processors.
July 10, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 5.15.187 released
Linux kernel version 5.15.187 is now available:
July 10, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.1.144 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.144 is now available:
July 10, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.6.97 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.97 is now available:
July 10, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.12.37 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.37 is now available:
July 10, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.15.6 released
Linux kernel version 6.15.6 is now available:
July 10, 2025 — Source

New Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Business Developers is available for free
Linux stalwart Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Business Developers. Designed for enterprise development use, the new platform is free of charge as Red Hat seeks to make things easier and more accessible for business development teams.
July 10, 2025 — Source

Nouveau NAK Lands A Big Improvement For NVIDIA Kepler GPUs: As Much As 2.5x Faster
Merged today to the open-source NVIDIA "NAK" compiler code within Mesa 25.2 is Kepler instruction scheduling. This real instruction scheduling support for GeForce GTX 600/700 "Kepler" graphics processors can provide some significant performance benefits in select workloads.
July 10, 2025 — Source

OpenCL 3.0.19 Released With SPIR-V Queries & Android Hardware Buffer Extensions
The Khronos Group today published the OpenCL 3.0.19 documentation as the latest specification for the OpenCL 3.0 compute API.
July 10, 2025 — Source

openSUSE Is Deciding Whether To End 32-bit ARM Support
The openSUSE project is currently contemplating if it's time to end support for 32-bit ARM devices.
July 10, 2025 — Source

pgmoneta 0.18 released
The PostgreSQL database server tool pgmoneta has been updated. The new version 0.18 features the introduction of hot standby directories, online/offline server modes, a cascade option for retention/expunge, and enhanced configuration get/set functionality.
July 10, 2025 — Source

Postfix 3.10.3 released
The Postfix 3.10.3 mail server addresses issues that were introduced in Postfix 3.10. The updates include adding the current TLS security level to the keys used for looking up the SMTP connection and TLS sessions, and making sure that the Postfix SMTP client doesn't try to find TLSA records when the "TLS-Required: no" header is there, which helps prevent unnecessary errors.
July 10, 2025 — Source

Red Hat sweetens the RHEL deal for biz devs -- just don't put it in prod
Up to 25 instances for free, but only to play with
July 10, 2025 — Source

Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
July 10, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — July 7th, 2025

AMD openSIL PoC Still Being Worked On For Phoenix SoCs, Turin Code Published
One topic we haven't heard AMD talk too much about publicly this year has been their openSIL effort that was announced back in 2023 as their eventual replacement to AGESA and being an open-source CPU silicon initialization effort. They still appear to be working toward making openSIL production-ready for next-generation Zen 6 platforms but some of their proof-of-concept milestones have been running behind schedule.
July 7, 2025 — Source

AMDKFD Kernel Compute Driver Used By ROCm Can Work On LoongArch Hardware
The AMDKFD "Kernel Fusion Driver" used as the Linux kernel GPU compute driver and necessary part of their ROCm compute stack it turns out can build and run on the Chinese-developed LoongArch systems rather easily.
July 7, 2025 — Source

Apache 2.4.64-rc1-candidate released
The release candidate for Apache 2.4.64 is available for testing and has implemented several updates, such as the introduction of iobuffersize configured at the worker level for IO buffer size, the removal of $SSLKEYLOGFILE handling for OpenSSL 3.5 builds, adjustments to the log level for message AH01236, enhancements in reusing ProxyRemote connections when feasible, the addition of support for systemd socket activation, and the logging of the SELinux context during startup.
July 7, 2025 — Source

Ceph RBD Turns 15: a Story of Open Source Creation
This year marks fifteen years of RADOS Block Device (RBD), the Ceph block storage interface. Ceph is a distributed storage system. It was started by Sage Weil for his doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and was originally designed only as a distributed filesystem built to scale from the ground-up. Having evolved into a unified, enterprise-grade storage platform and, in addition, to a filesystem interface, Ceph now supports object and block storage.
July 7, 2025 — Source

Debian GNU/Linux 13 Trixie Testing 20250707 Live Images
New weekly Debian GNU/Linux 13 Trixie live testing images are now available, featuring a range of desktop environments such as GNOME 48.2, KDE 6.3.5, Xfce 4.20, Cinnamon 6.4.10, MATE 1.26, LXQt 2.1.0, and LXDE 0.99.3.
July 7, 2025 — Source

Fedora Linux 42-20250701 Updated ISOs released
The Fedora Respins SIG has announced the release of new Fedora Linux 42 live ISO images, incorporating the latest updates.
July 7, 2025 — Source

GNOME 49 Alpha Released With X11 Support Disabled By Default, Many New Features
The GNOME 49 Alpha "49.alpha" release was just announced as the first formal test release in the road to the GNOME 49 desktop release due out in September.
July 7, 2025 — Source

GNOME 49.alpha released
The first alpha version of GNOME 49 has been released, marking the first unstable release in the 49 series and showcasing several significant changes. Applications such as Showtime, Papers, and Manuals have successfully completed the Incubator program. The release eliminates the default X11 Session, introduces a new Gdk-Pixbuf loader based on glycin, and substitutes the built-in fallback session management with systemd's.
July 7, 2025 — Source

Intel VSEC/PMT Discovery Driver Expected For Linux 6.17 To Enhance Telemetry
With the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel cycle Intel is further building out their Platform Monitoring Technology (PMT) capabilities with the introduction of a new discovery driver.
July 7, 2025 — Source

Lenovo WMI Gaming Series Drivers Expected To Debut In Linux 6.17
Being worked on for a number of months now has been the Lenovo Gaming Series WMI Drivers for Linux to expose additional power/performance settings for Lenovo gaming series hardware like the Lenovo Legion Go S gaming handheld with Steam OS. With the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel, the Lenovo WMI Gaming Series Drivers are expected to be finally upstreamed.
July 7, 2025 — Source

LibreOffice Begins Landing Markdown File Import Support
While coming a few weeks too late for making it into the LibreOffice 25.8 open-source office suite release, merged today to LibreOffice Git for next year's LibreOffice 26.2 is adding initial support for importing Markdown files into the LibreOffice Writer word processor.
July 7, 2025 — Source

LLVM Clang Merges -mcpu=gb10 Support For NVIDIA GB10 Superchip
Merged today for the LLVM/Clang compiler is -mcpu=gb10 support for catering to NVIDIA's forthcoming Grace Blackwell GB10 Superchip.
July 7, 2025 — Source

TornadoVM 1.1.1 Released For Java Programming Of Heterogeneous Hardware
TornadoVM version 1.1.1 is now available for this OpenJDK and GraalVM plug-in that supports Java offloading to GPUs, FPGAs, and other heterogeneous hardware. The past few years TornadoVM has been making a lot of progress to automatically run Java programs across GPUs and other devices supporting OpenCL, NVIDIA PTX, and Khronos SPIR-V/Vulkan.
July 7, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — July 5th, 2025

DXVK 2.7 released
DXVK 2.7 has been released with a range of enhancements aimed at optimizing performance and ensuring better compatibility with games. The Vulkan extension VK_KHR_maintenance5 is now mandatory, and the fallbacks enabling older drivers to operate have been eliminated. The upcoming changes will predominantly impact Windows users utilizing AMD Polaris and Vega GPUs, for which AMD has officially ceased driver support.
July 5, 2025 — Source

DXVK 2.7 Released With Many Improvements & Better Support On Newer Intel GPUs
DXVK 2.7 released today as a major feature update for this translation layer for enabling Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 based games and applications to run atop the Vulkan API. DXVK is a critical piece of Valve's Steam Play (Proton) software stack for enabling Windows games on Linux.
July 5, 2025 — Source

Fedora 43 GNU & LLVM 21 Toolchain Updates Planned
It shouldn't be particularly surprising as Fedora Linux has always been known for shipping with a leading-edge compiler toolchain, but the formalities have now been submitted for Fedora 43 to ship with the latest GNU and LLVM toolchain components.
July 5, 2025 — Source

GNOME's Glycin Continues Being Built Out, Papers Ready For Document Viewing
It was another exciting week in the GNOME space to kick off July.
July 5, 2025 — Source

Intel Wildcat Lake HID Support & Dell + ASUS Additions Ahead Of Linux 6.16-rc5
Ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc5 kernel expected to be released tomorrow, a round of x86 platform driver updates were merged this week with several fixes as well as some new device additions.
July 5, 2025 — Source

KDE is fixing blurry screens by snapping almost-1x scale factors back to 1x on Wayland
A new issue of This Week in Plasma is out, and it contains a nice mix of bug fixes for the recently released Plasma 6.4, UI improvements for the upcoming Plasma 6.5, and more.
July 5, 2025 — Source

KDE Working On New Virtual Keyboard, Many Plasma Improvements Kick Off July
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly summary to highlight all of the interesting Plasma desktop developments for the past week.
July 5, 2025 — Source

SUSE's Agama Installer Switches From X.Org To Wayland For Installation GUI
SUSE developers working on their new operating system installer "Agama" have been making steady progress and on Friday debuted Agama 16. With Agama 16 they have moved from X.Org to Wayland for powering their installer UI along with a number of other changes.
July 5, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — July 2nd, 2025

Better Late Than Never: Linux 6.17 To Enable Intel DG1 Graphics By Default
Prior to the DG2/Alchemist discrete GPUs from Intel there was the DG1 graphics processor that served primarily as the initial developer vehicle for facilitating Intel's modern discrete GPU push. DG1 ended up being in the Intel Xe MAX GPU for a small number of laptops and then there's also been a select number of DG1 graphics cards surfacing on eBay in the years since. Only now in 2025 is the upstream Linux kernel driver set to enable Intel DG1 graphics out-of-the-box for modern Linux distributions.
July 2, 2025 — Source

Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.
July 2, 2025 — Source

Firefox 120 To Firefox 141 Web Browser Benchmarks
For those curious about the direction of Mozilla Firefox web browser performance over the past year and a half, here are web browser benchmarks for every Firefox release from Firefox 120 in November 2023 through the newest Firefox 140 stable and Firefox 140 beta releases from a few days ago. Every major Firefox release was benchmarked on the same Ubuntu Linux system with AMD Ryzen 9 9950X for evaluating the performance and memory usage of this open-source web browser.
July 2, 2025 — Source

GNOME Papers Document Viewer Approved To Replace Evince In GNOME 49
GNOME Papers has been in development as a modern GTK4-based document viewer. There have been many improvements made to Papers and now ahead of the GNOME 49 release in September, it's been approved to replace Evince as the official document viewer of the GNOME desktop.
July 2, 2025 — Source

Linux Patches Posted For Axiado AX3000 SoC Support
The newest Arm SoC seeing Linux kernel patches working their way toward the mainline kernel is the Axiado AX3000 as a security processor designed for cloud data center, network gear, and more.
July 2, 2025 — Source

Mesa's Zink Preps NV_timeline_semaphore For Better OpenGL-Vulkan Interoperability
Mike Blumenkrantz with Valve's Linux graphics driver team continues working on enhancements to Mesa's Zink driver for OpenGL implemented over the Vulkan API. A new merge request is further enhancing OpenGL and Vulkan interoperability by supporting the GL_NV_timeline_semaphore extension.
July 2, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA Linux x64 (AMD64/EM64T) Display Driver 575.64.03 released
NVIDIA has released Linux x64 (AMD64/EM64T) Display Driver 575.64.03, incorporating minor bug fixes and enhancements.
July 2, 2025 — Source

PikaOS IV June 2025 ISO released
New PikaOS ISO images have been released and include several notable changes: the introduction of the Pikman Update Manager switch, new Swap Options for automatic partitioning, Refind timeout options, BOOTX64 mode, Jan DGPU Switching patches, and a default Steam update.
July 2, 2025 — Source

Wayback Hopes To Be Ready Next Year With Alpine Linux Planning To Use It By Default
A few days ago Wayback was announced as an X11 compatibility layer for X11 desktops environments leveraging a rootful XWayland server. While currently experimental, the hope is that it will be production-ready next year and Alpine Linux is looking at using it by default for its X11 environment.
July 2, 2025 — Source

Zen Browser 1.14.1b released
Zen Browser version 1.14.1b has been released to address a crash issue associated with third-party tools.
July 2, 2025 — Source

ZLUDA Making Progress In 2025 On Bringing CUDA To Non-NVIDIA GPUs
The ZLUDA open-source effort that started off a half-decade ago as a drop-in CUDA implementation for Intel GPUs and then for several years was funded by AMD as a CUDA implementation for Radeon GPUs atop ROCm and then open-sourced but then reverted has been continuing to push along a new path since last year.
July 2, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — June 30th, 2025

4MLinux 48.1 released
4MLinux 48.1, a minor release in the 4MLinux stable channel, is now available for download on Sourceforge, bundled with the Linux kernel 6.12.34.
June 30, 2025 — Source

AMD Instinct Accelerators With So Much vRAM Have Exposed Linux Hibernation Issues
Too much vRAM and too many Instinct accelerators per server is causing system hibernation to fail on some high-end AMD AI Linux-powered servers. Having eight accelerators each with 192GB of device memory can in turn cause system hibernation to run into problems if the Linux server has only 2TB of system RAM... But a new patch series was posted today in working to address this problem with the Linux kernel for high-end systems failing to hibernate.
June 30, 2025 — Source

Btrfs Preps Experimental Large Data Folios For Better Performance
It looks like Linux 6.17 could end up enabling experimental support for large data folios that could help with bringing some performance improvements under real-world workloads for this copy-on-write file-system.
June 30, 2025 — Source

Cloud lobby warns EU: Clamp down on water rules and we'll evaporate
CISPE floats reforms to avoid new costs, fragmentation, and infrastructure flight
June 30, 2025 — Source

Debian GNU/Linux 13 Trixie Testing 20250630 Live Images
New weekly Debian GNU/Linux 13 Trixie live testing images are now available, featuring a range of desktop environments such as GNOME 48.2, KDE 6.3.5, Xfce 4.20, Cinnamon 6.4.10, MATE 1.26, LXQt 2.1.0, and LXDE 0.99.3.
June 30, 2025 — Source

Fedora 44 Will Not Pursue The Idea Of Ending 32-bit x86 Software Packages
A proposal raised last week for Fedora 44 was to drop i686 support with ending multi-lib and x86 32-bit packages support. But following a fair amount of opposition to the idea, this matter isn't going to be pursued for next spring's Fedora 44 release.
June 30, 2025 — Source

How I easily added Mac-like multitouch gestures to my Linux machine
Here's how to add and configure multitouch gestures on Linux - and why you should.
June 30, 2025 — Source

It's Now Been Three Months Since The Last AerynOS Release
Released three months ago was the first AerynOS ISO release for that Linux distribution led by Ikey Doherty and from there plans were laid to provide "accelerated delivery of milestone ISOs." But now Q2 is ending without any further announcements from this interesting
June 30, 2025 — Source

KDE Improving Its Clock With Wayland Picture-In-Picture Protocol
KDE developers are improving its clock "KClock" app with leveraging the experimental Wayland picture-in-picture protocol support.
June 30, 2025 — Source

The Best Boring Benchmarks: Rocky Linux 10 & AlmaLinux 10 Performance Against RHEL 10
AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux remain two of the most popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivatives that are maintained by the open-source community. With the recent Rocky Linux 10 GA release that followed the recent AlmaLinux 10 release for re-basing against Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance of these popular downstreams compared to RHEL 10.
June 30, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu 24.10 (Oracular Oriole) reaches End of Life on 10th July 2025
Ubuntu Linux 24.10 is scheduled to reach its end of life on July 10th, 2025. Ubuntu Security Notices will cease to provide information or updated packages for this version. The recommended upgrade path is to Ubuntu 25.04, which remains actively supported with security updates and certain bug fixes.
June 30, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu and Tuxedo duke it out for Linux on Snapdragon X Elite laptops
So far, Snapdragon X Elite laptops with super-long battery life have only been able to run Windows. But things are looking hopeful for Linux users.
June 30, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — June 29th, 2025

AMD Prepares Linux Driver Support For New APUs Still Relying On RDNA1 Graphics
It looks like AMD is preparing to introduce some new APUs/SoCs still relying on RDNA1-based graphics with open-source GPU driver patches posted this week extending the "Cyan Skillfish" support to some new APU devices.
June 29, 2025 — Source

AMD Strix Halo, Snapdragon X & Linux Graphics Were Most Popular This Quarter
With Q2 quickly drawing to a close, here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews and other Linux/open-source news for the quarter.
June 29, 2025 — Source

GE-Proton10-5 released
GE-Proton10-5 has been released, primarily updating upstream code. Wine-wayland patches have been rebased, addressing NVIDIA crashes and eliminating the need for the Mesa patch.
June 29, 2025 — Source

KDE neon 20250629 released
KDE neon 20250629 has been released. KDE neon is a Linux distribution built on Ubuntu, featuring the latest version of the KDE Plasma desktop environment.
June 29, 2025 — Source

GNOME Shell & Mutter 49 Alpha 1 Released With More Changes
Released earlier this month were various GNOME 49 Alpha 0 packages including for GNOME Shell and the Mutter compositor while out this weekend are the "Alpha 1" releases.
June 29, 2025 — Source

Wayback Is An Experimental X11 Compatibility Layer For X11 Desktops Using Wayland
Wayback is a new open-source project working on providing an X11 compatibility layer for running full X11 desktop environments using Wayland components with a rootful XWayland server.
June 29, 2025 — Source

Wine-Based Hangover Project Drops QEMU In Favor Of FEX & Box64 For Emulation
Building off Friday's release of Wine 10.11 for running Windows games and applications on Linux is now Hangover 10.11 for this Wine-based software used for running Windows games/applications cross-architecture such as on AArch64/ARM64 systems.
June 29, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — June 28th, 2025

KDE Devs Add Wayland Session Management To Qt 6.10, Inertial Scrolling For Qt Quick Apps
KDE developers this week have been busy with a mix of polishing the recent Plasma 6.4 release as well as taking on more feature development work for Plasma 6.5 coming later in the year.
June 28, 2025 — Source

LACT 0.8.0 released
LACT Linux GPU Configuration and Monitoring Tool version 0.8.0 has been released, introducing enhanced profile management, a process monitor, and additional Nvidia metrics. The tool now facilitates the export and import of profiles to JSON files and is compatible with all three GPU vendors. The update incorporates additional metrics for GPU voltage, GPU hotspot temperature, and VRAM temperature.
June 28, 2025 — Source or Source

Linux 6.16 Extends Cleaner Shader Support To More AMD CDNA/GFX9 GPUs
The past number of months has seen work by AMD Linux driver engineers in enabling cleaner shader functionality for various generations of GPUs to help ensure user/application isolation. Being merged overnight as part of the AMDGPU "fixes" for Linux 6.16 is cleaner shader support for more AMD GFX9 / CDNA hardware, notably to benefit various Instinct accelerators with this security feature.
June 28, 2025 — Source

RADV Ray-Tracing Lands Pointer Flags Support For RDNA3 & Newer
The RADV Vulkan driver's ray-tracing performance has improved a lot over time such as shown within yesterday's RADV versus AMDVLK performance comparison on Strix Point. Coincidentally, merged today is yet another ray-tracing optimization to benefit RDNA3 (GFX11) and newer AMD graphics processors.
June 28, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — June 25th, 2025

4 ways the latest KDE Plasma release is better than ever - and how to try it yourself
KDE Plasma 6.4 is here with quite a few new features and improvements. Here's my favorite changes in the point release, and why they matter.
June 25, 2025 — Source

AVX-512's Enormous Advantage For AMD EPYC 4005 Series Performance
The AMD EPYC 4005 "Grado"" processors launched by AMD in May for entry-level servers offer downright amazing value, performance, and power efficiency over the Intel Xeon 6300 / Xeon E-2400 series competition. Intel's top-of-stack Xeon 6300 (Xeon 6369P) / Xeon E processors fail to compete with even the mid-tier EPYC 4005 series processors in either performance, power, or cost effectiveness. Among the many advantages to these budget-friendly EPYC processors is having AVX-512 support with a full 512-bit data path compared to the Xeon 6300 series only having AVX2.
June 25, 2025 — Source

Before Windows 10 goes EOL, I'm testing three alternative Linux distros to save my 6-year-old laptop from the landfill
As the ship sinks, in which direction should you jump?
June 25, 2025 — Source

Intel Preps Linux PTC "Throttling Control Interface" To Run Hotter For Better Performance
With the Linux 6.16 kernel Intel enabled the new Platform Temperature Control (PTC) interface as part of their int340x thermal driver. Now ahead of the Linux 6.17 kernel Intel PTC is being extended to support a Throttling Control Interface for those that may prefer running their system(s) hotter in order to enjoy better performance.
June 25, 2025 — Source

Mozilla Formally Discontinues Its DeepSpeech Project
One of the interesting projects engaged in by Mozilla that directly wasn't related to their web browser efforts was DeepSpeech, an embedded/offline speech-to-text engine. To not much surprise given the lack of activity in recent years, last week they finally and formally discontinued the open-source project.
June 25, 2025 — Source

PNG Spec Updated For HDR Images & Animated PNGs
While WebP and AVIF generate much of the interest these days from a tech perspective for modern image formats, the PNG image format was just updated with new features.
June 25, 2025 — Source

RADV Driver Introduces Limited Support For NVIDIA Cooperative Matrix Extension
The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has merged support for the VK_NV_cooperative_matrix2 NVIDIA Vulkan extension but it's hidden by default and only partially supported with a focus on helping FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 and VKD3D-Proton.
June 25, 2025 — SourceRed Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) quietly released an official image for WSL — but it's not for most of us
It's OK, though, because for the regular WSL user there is still the official release of Fedora, which sits upstream from RHEL.
June 25, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — June 23rd, 2025

AMD GFX1250 Support Starts Being Built Up Within LLVM
Over the past three days the new AMD "GFX1250" GPU target has started being built out within the upstream LLVM compiler codebase for the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end.
June 23, 2025 — Source

Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds meet for the first time at tech titans' dinner
Dave Cutler, lead architect of the Windows NT kernel, was also there
June 23, 2025 — Source or Source

Firefox 140 Released With "Unload Tab", CSS Custom Highlighting API
Mozilla Firefox 140 release binaries are available today as what's going to be the web browser project's next Extended Support Release (ESR) version.
June 23, 2025 — Source

Fair DRM Scheduler Looking Good For Better Fairness & Scheduling Of GPU Clients
Being worked on for a while has been a "Fair" DRM scheduler inspired by Linux's CFS scheduler and aiming for better performance and scheduling behavior between multiple GPU interactive clients sharing GPU resources.
June 23, 2025 — Source

GIMP 3.1.2 Released As First Step Toward GIMP 3.2
GIMP 3.1.2 was just released as the first development version on the road toward GIMP 3.2 stable.
June 23, 2025 — Source or Source

How I use VirtualBox to run any OS on my Mac - including Linux
This app lets you run guest operating systems - such as Linux, MacOS, and Windows - on your Apple Silicon Mac, and it's free to use.
June 23, 2025 — Source

How to switch from Windows 10 to Linux: A technical guide
Everything you need to switch successfully from Windows to Linux—including hardware, software, and Windows license management.
June 23, 2025 — Source

IceWM 3.8 Brings New Optimizations & Changes
For those preferring an X11-based desktop experience on Linux, IceWM 3.8 released on Sunday as the newest version of this lightweight X11 window manager focused on speed and simplicity.
June 23, 2025 — Source

IceWM 3.8.0 released
IceWM 3.8.0 has been released with several enhancements, including a preview icon for the theme minimize button, improved loading speed, optimized CPU and MEM graphs, an extended Help menu, hotkey conversion, a non-deterministic random number generator, and the suppression of clang warnings.
June 23, 2025 — Source

IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 195 released
IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 195 has been released and features the integration of native support for WireGuard, a contemporary VPN protocol crafted for efficiency and ease of use. The update features a comprehensive interface designed for the configuration and management of WireGuard tunnels via the web user interface. WireGuard serves as a versatile solution for both net-to-net and host-to-net VPN connections, offering a streamlined alternative to IPsec and OpenVPN.
June 23, 2025 — Source

Manjaro 25.0.4 Zetar released
The fourth maintenance release for Manjaro Linux 25 is now available.
June 23, 2025 — Source

Node v20.19.3 (LTS) released
NodeJS 20.19.3 (LTS) has been released, featuring several significant updates. Significant updates include the stable Gradient WebCryptoAPI algorithms, improved root certificates to NSS 3.108, and a timezone change to 2025b. The build incorporates updates to the ICU, Corepack, and SIMDUTF versions. The commits include making FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 work for 32-bit systems, using glob for dependencies in out/Makefile, allowing length=0 for HKDF and PBKDF2 in SubtleCrypto.deriveBits, and updating simdutf to version 6.4.2.
June 23, 2025 — Source

RADV Driver Lands VK_EXT_shader_float8 Support
The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is now the first Mesa in-tree driver supporting 8-bit floating point use within shaders via the new VK_EXT_shader_float8 extension.
June 23, 2025 — Source

This Linux distro routes all your traffic through the Tor network - and it's my new favorite for privacy
I could easily see myself defaulting to Securonis when I need serious security.
June 23, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu could get a new trash icon soon, if everyone can agree
Ubuntu contributors are currently floating designs for a new bin icon that'll sit in the dock possibly as soon as with the release of Ubuntu 25.10 in October. The conversation about the appearance of the trash icon in Ubuntu was going on in 2019 until it was closed in March of that year. The discussion was reopened again this year in May with updated icons being suggested on a regular basis.
June 23, 2025 — Source

UEFI SBAT Support Coming Together Ahead Of Linux 6.17
Support for UEFI Secure Boot Advanced Targeting "SBAT" looks like it could be buttoned up in the mainline kernel for the upcoming Linux 6.17 cycle.
June 23, 2025 — Source

Your jump from Windows 10 to Linux gets easier with KDE Plasma 6.4
Plasma 6.4 also introduces more inclusive features.
June 23, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — June 22nd, 2025

3mdeb Carries Out Experimental Port Of AMD OpenSIL To Zen 1 Platform
The 3mdeb firmware consulting firm recently hosted another one of their virtual events about open-source firmware and beer. There they talked about AMD's ongoing work around OpenSIL for open-source CPU silicon initialization. In addition, they shared work on an experimental port of OpenSIL back to Zen 1 processors.
June 22, 2025 — Source

Closed-Source Meets Open-Source: Microsoft's Founder Bill Gates and Linux's Creator Linus Torvalds Cross Paths For The First Time in 50 Years
Well, in a twist of events, Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds have crossed paths publicly for the very first time, as both of them were spotted out at a presumably "friendly" dinner.
June 22, 2025 — Source

Disabling Intel Graphics Security Mitigations Can Boost GPU Compute Performance By 20%
INTELWhile not talked about as much as the Intel CPU security mitigations, Intel graphics security mitigations have added up over time that if disabling Intel graphics security mitigations for their GPU compute stack for OpenCL and Level Zero can yield a 20% performance boost. Ubuntu maker Canonical in cooperation with Intel is preparing to disable these security mitigations in the Ubuntu packages in order to recoup this lost performance.
June 22, 2025 — Source

KDE neon 20250622 released
KDE neon 20250622 has been released. KDE neon is a Linux distribution built on Ubuntu, featuring the latest version of the KDE Plasma desktop environment.
June 22, 2025 — Source

LLMs delve into online debates to create a detailed map of human beliefs
Large language models (LLMs), such as the model underpinning the functioning of the well-known conversational platform ChatGPT, have proved to be very promising for summarizing and generating written texts. However, they could also be interesting tools for conducting research rooted in psychology, behavioral science and other scientific disciplines.
June 22, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — June 21st, 2025

Dakrtable 5.2.0 released
Darktable 5.2.0 has been released and represents a significant feature release for the darktable platform, enabling users to compare snapshots alongside the current image, display snapshots in two equal panels, and customize metadata modules.
June 21, 2025 — Source

GNOME Fixes Years-Old Bug Of Trash Not Always Being Properly Emptied
This Week in GNOME is out with its latest issue that outlines some UI progress made as well as addressing an aging GNOME bug that could result in not all files/directories being properly removed when emptying the Trash from the GNOME desktop.
June 21, 2025 — Source

Google brings Gemini to all Workspace for Education subscribers
Google has announced that its Gemini app is now accessible to all Google Workspace for Education users, regardless of age. This brings the company's generative AI directly into the suite of tools used by millions of students and teachers. The Workspace for Education platform, if you did not know, already provides a massive suite of tools like Classroom, Docs, and Drive, which are designed to work together in a school setting.
June 21, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.4 Is Looking To Be In Good Shape, Fewer Bugs
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly blog post summarizing all of the interesting KDE Plasma developments for the past week. Notable this week was the debut of Plasma 6.4 stable and from early user feedback appears to be in good shape.
June 21, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu 25.10 Planning To Raise RISC-V Support Baseline To RVA23 Profile
Ahead of the all-important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle, Canonical is looking to raise the required RISC-V ISA baseline for its Ubuntu 25.10 release due out later this year.
June 21, 2025 — Source

XLibre 25.0 Released As Inaugural Version Of X.Org Server Fork
XLibre 25.0 was just released as the first tagged release of this recent X.Org Server fork.
June 21, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — June 20th, 2025

AMD Releases Updated ROCm 7.0 Preview For HIP Testing
Tagged this morning was the newest ROCm build that uses a ROCm 6.4.1 base but incorporating all of the latest HIP Runtime changes planned for ROCm 7.0. Due to breakage with HIP interfaces planned from ROCm 7.0, these early builds are aimed for more developer testing and compatibility work ahead of the ROCm 7.0 stable release due out later in 2025.
June 20, 2025 — Source

Intel's OpenVINO 2025.2 Brings Support For New Models, GenAI Improvements
Intel open-source software developers this week released OpenVINO 2025.2 as the latest update to this prominent free software AI toolkit.
June 20, 2025 — Source

Latest Bcachefs Code Draws Torvalds' Ire Over Late Feature Code
There is some tension on the Linux kernel mailing list with some late Bcachefs feature work sent in as part of "fixes" for the ongoing Linux 6.16 kernel cycle. Established rules aim for only new feature code to be introduced during the kernel merge windows, which ended nearly two weeks ago for Linux 6.16, but Bcachefs wanting to be exempt to continue to allow new feature code to still land for the cycle in the name of data safety.
June 20, 2025 — Source

Linux Delivering Driver Fix For 30 Year Old Creative SoundBlaster AWE32 ISA Sound Card
Thirty-one years after Creative Technology introduced the Sound Blaster AWE32 ISA-based sound card, the open-source driver support within the Linux kernel continues to be worked on... Submitted today for Linux 6.16 is fixing support for this once mighty ISA sound card from the mid 90's.
June 20, 2025 — Source

Microsoft Releases WSL 2.6 As The First Open-Source Release
Microsoft announced back in May at their Build developer conference that WSL would be going open-source. Today Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.6 was released as their first new release now being an open-source project.
June 20, 2025 — Source

Ready to ditch Windows? 'End of 10' makes converting your PC to Linux easier than ever
With support for Windows 10 ending in a few months, the 'End of 10' digital collective has resources and advice for those making the jump.
June 20, 2025 — Source

Ungoogled-Chromium Release 137.0.7151.119-1
Update to Chromium 137.0.7151.119
June 20, 2025 — Source

Vulkan 1.4.319 Published With New Data Graph Extension
Just one week after Vulkan 1.4.318 was introduced with a new Valve extension, Vulkan 1.4.319 released this morning with another new extension.
June 20, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — June 18th, 2025

Alienware "G-Mode" Reverted For Linux: It Actually Hurt Performance
Alienware G-Mode / Game Shift is a feature designed to "enhance gaming performance" on select Dell/Alienware laptops with the press of a key. But at least under Linux with select laptop models it can actually regress performance compared to just running the laptop in the "performance" platform profile.
June 18, 2025 — Source

Arch Linux Moving To WoW64 Wine & Wine-Staging
The Arch Linux project announced this week they are working to transition their Wine and Wine-Staging packages over to pure WoW64 builds. This "Windows on Windows 64-bit" allows for 32-bit Windows applications on 64-bit Linux platforms without needing 32-bit software libraries/prefixes present and overall a big architectural win.
June 18, 2025 — Source

Broadcom BNGE Linux Network Driver Published For BCM5770X
Broadcom has been working on a new Linux Ethernet networking driver dubbed "BNGE" for supporting their new high-end BCM5770X chipset family.
June 18, 2025 — Source

Chaining two LPEs to get "root": Most Linux distros vulnerable (CVE-2025-6018, CVE-2025-6019)
Qualys researchers have unearthed two local privilege escalation vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-6018, CVE-2025-6019) that can be exploited in tandem to achieve root access on most Linux distributions "with minimal effort."
June 18, 2025 — Source

CISA warns of attackers exploiting Linux flaw with PoC exploit
CISA has warned U.S. federal agencies about attackers targeting a high-severity vulnerability in the Linux kernel's OverlayFS subsystem that allows them to gain root privileges.
June 18, 2025 — Source

Framework Laptop 12: An Upgrade-Friendly, Convertible 2-in-1 Linux Laptop
Back in February the Framework Laptop 12 was announced as the company's first 2-in-1 convertible laptop while still being well-built and upgrade-friendly/modular as we have come to enjoy out of their various Linux-friendly laptops. Today the review embargo lifts on the Framework Laptop 12 and thus can share our initial impressions on this Intel-powered 12-inch laptop.
June 18, 2025 — Source

Linux Security: New Flaws Allow Root Access, CISA Warns of Old Bug Exploitation
Qualys has disclosed two Linux vulnerabilities that can be chained for full root access, and CISA added a flaw to its KEV catalog.
June 18, 2025 — Source

Mesa's Rusticl Driver Now Supports sRGB Images
Mesa's Rusticl OpenCL driver has supported various elements of 2D image handling while the latest addition in enhancing this open-source driver's support is for sRGB images.
June 18, 2025 — Source

New Linux udisks flaw lets attackers get root on major Linux distros
Attackers can exploit two newly discovered local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerabilities to gain root privileges on systems running major Linux distributions.
June 18, 2025 — Source

Qt Creator 17 Released With New Default Themes
The Qt Creator 17 integrated development environment released today with a variety of improvements for this primarily C++/Qt focused developer IDE.
June 18, 2025 — Source

Servo Browser Engine Finally Supporting Animated GIFs
The Servo browser engine project born out of Mozilla as an early Rust project and now advanced by open-source developers from various firms continues moving forward. Servo has finally scratched animated GIF support off its TODO list among other features.
June 18, 2025 — Source

Updated AMD ISP4 Driver For Linux Benefits The HP ZBook Ultra G1a, Future Ryzen Laptops
AMD engineers today posted the second iteration of their AMD ISP4 Linux kernel driver, which is for supporting the web-camera with the high-end Strix Halo powered HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop and presumably many AMD Ryzen laptops in the future.
June 18, 2025 — Source

XWayland 24.1.8 & X.Org Server 21.1.18 Further Address Yesterday's Security Disclosures
Released yesterday were X.Org Server 21.1.17 and XWayland 24.1.7 to address another batch of six security vulnerabilities reported by security researchers. Out today is X.Org Server 21.1.18 and XWayland 24.1.8 in order to further button up one of the security issues reported yesterday.
June 18, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — June 16th, 2025

Danish Ministry of Digital Affairs Transitions to Linux
Another major organization has decided to kick Microsoft Windows and Office to the curb in favor of Linux.
June 16, 2025 — Source

FreeRDP 3.16 Released With Better SDL3 Client Support
FreeRDP 3.16 is out today as the newest update to this open-source Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) library and client implementation. This Apache-licensed project continues to be one of the leading implementations of the Microsoft RDP protocol for use outside the confines of Windows.
June 16, 2025 — Source

Kali Linux 2025.2 released with 13 new tools, car hacking updates
Kali Linux 2025.2, the second release of the year, is now available for download with 13 new tools and an expanded car hacking toolkit.
June 16, 2025 — Source

KDE neon 20250616 released
KDE neon 20250616 has been released. KDE neon is a Linux distribution built on Ubuntu, featuring the latest version of the KDE Plasma desktop environment.
June 16, 2025 — Source

Git-Lfs, Firefox, Kpatch-Patch, and more updates for RHEL
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has received several security updates, including Git-Lfs, Firefox, Kpatch-Patch, Go-Toolset, .NET, Podman, Skopeo, Buildah, Grafana-PCP, Container Networking-Plugins, and Grafana:
June 16, 2025 — Source

I've been gaming on Windows for over 30 years, but now I'm giving Linux a shot
Hopefully I can play more than Super Tux Kart
June 16, 2025 — Source

ICU and CJSON updates for Debian
Debian GNU/Linux has received security updates for ICU and CJSON:
June 16, 2025 — Source

Konsole and Sysstat updates for Gentoo
Gentoo Linux has received security updates for Konsole and Sysstat:
June 16, 2025 — Source

Linux Kernel 6.16-rc2 released
Linus Torvalds has announced the second release candidate for Linux kernel 6.16.
June 16, 2025 — Source

Linux Sensor Monitoring Coming For The ASUS ProArt X870E-CREATOR WIFI
For those interested in a high-end motherboard for AMD Ryzen 9000 / 8000 / 7000 series processors that is marketed for creators and equipped with high-end features, the ASUS ProArt X870E-CREATOR WIFI motherboard that retails for $500+ USD will soon see hardware monitoring support under Linux.
June 16, 2025 — Source

Mastering Kubernetes Observability: Boost Performance, Security, and Stability With Tracestore, OPA, Flagger, and Custom Metrics
This guide walks you through using Tracestore, OPA, Flagger, and custom metrics to make Kubernetes more observable, with better tracing, policy control, and performance.
June 16, 2025 — Source

ReactOS Merges Better Support For Fullscreen Applications
ReactOS as the "open-source Windows" project providing an operating system with binary compatibility for Windows software and drivers can finally properly handle full-screen games/apps.
June 16, 2025 — Source

Rust Surveying Developers To Find Biggest Compiler Performance Issues
Rust developers acknowledge lengthy compiler times can be a significant issue that limits the productivity of developers working with this programming language. For helping in determining different combinations of issues around compiler performance, the Rust team has started a survey to collect more information on the issues.
June 16, 2025 — Source

Trying Out The AMD Developer Cloud For Quickly Evaluating Instinct + ROCm
Last week alongside announcing the AMD Instinct MI350X/MI355X and the ROCm 7.0 software preview, AMD also introduced the AMD Developer Cloud as a new means for developers to easy try out Instinct accelerators with their own software and with the ROCm compute stack already setup. Having tried out prior AMD cloud compute environments, as soon as my email invite for the AMD Developer Cloud arrived I decided to give it a try.
June 16, 2025 — Source

Uniwill Laptop Driver Proposed For Linux To Enable Additional Features
For those with a laptop from Taiwanese OEM/ODM manufacturer Uniwill, two new drivers are being proposed to enhance the mainline Linux kernel support for Uniwill laptops by enabling additional functionality to work under Linux.
June 16, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — June 13th, 2025

Denmark ditching Windows and Office for Linux as it may not want to rely on Microsoft, Trump
Back in November 2021, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein announced that it was planning to move away from closed-source Microsoft products like Office and Windows to LibreOffice. About two and a half years later, we received an update on the matter, as state officials confirmed that plans for the migration were still intact. As such, about 30,000 government sector computers would be switching by 2027 or so.
June 13, 2025 — Source

Google Cloud C4D Performance Benchmarks At The Top-End Show 39% Generational Improvement With EPYC Turin
Back in April at Google Cloud Next was the introduction of the new C4D family of VMs powered by AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors. Back on launch day I looked at the C3D versus C4D performance at some of the smaller, more common VM sizes. In today's article is a look at the top-end performance of the C4D family with 384 vCPUs.
June 13, 2025 — Source

I found a Linux distro that combines the best parts of other operating systems (and it works)
BlueStar Linux combines various design elements that work on other platforms into a visually pleasing distro.
June 13, 2025 — Source

Is 2025 finally the year of Linux? We asked shoppers at Micro Center
One interviewee thinks Linux's market share could rise by 40 percent.
June 13, 2025 — Source

Kali Linux 2025.2 released
The release of Kali Linux 2025.2 introduces various enhancements, including a redesigned Kali Menu, updates to GNOME 48, and improvements in KDE 6.3. The Kali Menu has been restructured to align with the MITRE ATT&CK framework, enhancing the ease with which end-users can find new tools. GNOME 48 has been enhanced with features including notification stacking, performance improvements, dynamic triple buffering, an upgraded image viewer, digital wellbeing capabilities, and support for HDR.
June 13, 2025 — Source

LibreOffice 25.8 Beta Released For Testing
LibreOffice 25.8 beta is now available for this popular open-source office suite. LibreOffice 25.8 has been baking many improvements for this popular Microsoft Office alternative and leading office suite option for the Linux desktop.
June 13, 2025 — Source

OpenMoonRay Introduces NUMA Support
Two years ago DreamWorks Animation open-sourced their MoonRay renderer that is an award-winning, state-of-the-art production MCRT renderer used for a number of feature films. Since then they have continued advancing this open-source code as OpenMoonRay and adding more features.
June 13, 2025 — Source

PHP 8.4.8 and 8.3.22 packages for Debian 11 LTS, 12, and 13 released
Ondřej Surý has released updated PHP 8.4.8 and 8.3.22 packages for Debian GNU/Linux 11 (Bullseye) LTS, 12 (Bookworm), and 13 (Trixie).
June 13, 2025 — Source

Sound Open Firmware 2.13 Released With Intel Panther Lake & Wildcat Lake Support
Sound Open Firmware 2.13 debuted today as the newest feature update to this open-source audio DSP stack started by Intel. With Sound Open Firmware 2.13 comes support for new Intel platforms and other enhancements.
June 13, 2025 — Source

Vulkan 1.4.318 Released With A New Valve Extension
Just one week past the notable Vulkan 1.4.317 release, Vulkan 1.4.318 is out with some documentation clarifications plus two new extensions.
June 13, 2025 — Source

Wayland Protocols 1.45 Brings Background Effects, Pointer Warp & Session Management
Wayland Protocols 1.45 was released today with new staging and experimental protocols for Wayland compositors to begin rolling out.
June 13, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — June 9th, 2025

AMD EPYC 4345P 8-Core CPU Performance
Last month with the launch of the AMD EPYC 4005 "Grado" series for entry-level Zen 5 servers we ran benchmarks of the AMD EPYC 4565P and EPYC 4585PX processors as the top-tier 16-core CPUs. They delivered an excellent combination of performance, power efficiency, and most of all value for those looking to assemble an AM5-based budget-oriented server in 2025 and beyond.
June 9, 2025 — Source

AMD Preps Linux Support For User CPUID Faulting
While Intel has supported CPUID Faulting on processors going back to Ivy Bridge and supported this feature in the Linux kernel since early 2017, only now the AMD support is being wired up and making use of the existing Intel code paths.
June 9, 2025 — Source

Automate common and boring tasks with Bash Scripts in Linux
Automate your life with just a few lines of code
June 9, 2025 — Source

ChatGPT resurrects bricked Android tablet with Windows 10 — Is AI the future of DIY tech repair?
A seven-year-old Android tablet destined to become e-waste has been resurrected by a modder, ChatGPT, and a tweaked BIOS.
June 9, 2025 — Source

How To Copy Files and Directories in the Linux terminal
Copy files and directories via the Linux command line
June 9, 2025 — Source

How To Find Files in the Linux terminal
Let's look at how to find files, using commands to search from the terminal emulator
June 9, 2025 — Source

How To Kill a Process in the Linux terminal
Let's look at how to identify and kill specific processes using the Linux terminal.
June 9, 2025 — Source

Liberux NEXX Linux phone now offers cheap(er) options (crowdfunding)
On paper the Liberux NEXX looks like it could be the most powerful smartphone to date that's purpose-built to run free and open source GNU/Linux-based software. But it's kind of a tough sell at this point for a few reasons: the NEXX is the first product from a company that's never shipped anything before. The closest thing to a working prototype so far is just a mainboard.
June 9, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.16 Features From NVIDIA Blackwell To Performance Improvements & Intel APX
Now that the Linux 6.16 kernel merge window closed this weekend, here is a convenient recap of all the interesting features coming in this next kernel release due out as stable around the end of July.
June 9, 2025 — Source

Linux Foundation steps in with neutral solution to WordPress crisis
"Please stop fighting, you pesky WP children"
June 9, 2025 — Source

Linux Foundation unveils decentralized WordPress plugin manager
A collective of former WordPress developers and contributors backed by the Linux Foundation has launched the FAIR Package Manager, a new and independent distribution system for trusted WordPress plugins and themes.
June 9, 2025 — Source

Linux's Turbostat Updated For Intel Diamond Rapids & Bartlett Lake
The turbostat utility that lives within the Linux kernel source tree for reporting processor frequency and idle statistics along with other CPU information saw some last minute updates during the Linux 6.16 merge window.
June 9, 2025 — Source

Mold 2.40.1 Delivers More Performance - Including A New Algorithm Generated By ChatGPT
While a point release, Mold 2.40.1 is another notable step forward for this high-speed linker alternative to GNU LD/Gold and LLVM LLD. Mold 2.40.1 brings yet more performance improvements.
June 9, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA VA-API Driver 0.0.14 Improves Compatibility & Fixes Various Issues
The open-source, unofficial VA-API driver implementation for NVIDIA GPUs is out with a new release. The NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver project continues to build VA-API support atop NVIDIA's NVDEC interface to allow the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack to work with VA-API-only applications like the Mozilla Firefox web browser on Linux.
June 9, 2025 — Source

Open-Source Linux Driver Preps For Qualcomm Adreno X1-45 GPU Support
When it comes to the Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptops on Linux it's been primarily focused on the Snapdragon X Elite support with the X Plus SoC support not being as well off yet. But recently there has been more patches surfacing around the Snapdragon X Plus support, including the Adreno X1-45 GPU used by that lower-tier SoC.
June 9, 2025 — Source

Potential Next-gen AMD EPYC "Venice" CPU Identifier Turns Up in Linux Kernel Update
InstLatX64 has spent a significant chunk of time investigating AMD web presences; last month they unearthed various upcoming "Zen 5" processor families. This morning, a couple of mysterious CPU identifiers—"B50F00, B90F00, BA0F00, and BC0F00"—were highlighted in a social media post. According to screen-captured information, Team Red's Linux team seems to be patching in support for "Zen 6" technologies—InstLatX64 believes that the "B50F00" ID and internal "Weisshorn" codename indicate a successor to AMD's current-gen EPYC "Turin" server-grade processor series (known internally as "Breithorn")
June 9, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — June 6th, 2025

AMD's Kernel Compute Driver "AMDKFD" Can Now Be Enabled On RISC-V
Following all of the Linux kernel graphics driver features merged last week for the Linux 6.16 kernel, sent out this morning were the initial batch of fixes to the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) code. Besides fixes to these graphics / display / accelerator drivers, there is one new feature: the AMDKFD kernel compute driver can now be enabled on RISC-V systems.
June 6, 2025 — Source

Apple M2 Pro / Max / Ultra PCIe Support Upstreamed In Linux 6.16
The many PCI subsystem changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.16 merge window.
June 6, 2025 — Source

AWS Introduces Open Source Model Context Protocol Servers for ECS, EKS, and Serverless
AWS has released a set of open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers on GitHub for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and AWS Serverless. These are specialized servers that enhance the capabilities of AI development assistants, such as Amazon Q Developer, by providing them with real-time, contextual information specific to these AWS services.
June 6, 2025 — Source

Box64 v0.3.6 Brings Better AVX Handling, Volatile Metadata For Windows Executables
Just a few days after the FEX 2506 release for that open-source emulator enabling x86_64 binaries to run on ARM64 (AArch64) hosts, Box64 is out with its newest feature update for this open-source project with similar goals.
June 6, 2025 — Source

Flowblade 2.22 released
A new version of Flowblade, a multitrack non-linear video editor for Linux, has been released
June 6, 2025 — Source

Flux 2.6 GA Release and Security Advancements
The Flux project announced the availability of Flux v2.6.0. This version marks the General Availability (GA) of the Flux Open Container Initiative (OCI) Artifacts features, representing a fundamental shift in how organizations approach GitOps. This release validates the maturation of what the Flux team calls the "Gitless GitOps model," where Flux controllers operate independently of Git repositories, relying entirely on container registries as the authoritative source for Kubernetes cluster desired state.
June 6, 2025 — Source

KDE neon 20250605 released
KDE neon 20250605 has been released. KDE neon is a Linux distribution built on Ubuntu, featuring the latest version of the KDE Plasma desktop environment.
June 6, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.16 NFS Client Exposes LOCALIO State Via sysfs
In addition to the NFS server changes for Linux 6.16 with now supporting larger I/O block sizes, the Network File-System (NFS) client changes were merged this week for this next kernel version.
June 6, 2025 — Source

More KVM Changes Merged For Linux 6.16: AMD "ALLOWED_SEV_FEATURES" Merged
Following the Intel TDX host support for KVM being merged for the Linux 6.16 merge window, another batch of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes were merged for the ongoing Linux 6.16 merge window.
June 6, 2025 — Source

Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite GCC versus LLVM Clang Compiler Performance
Since recently picking up a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop for Linux testing now that the Linux support is starting to evolve into better shape (albeit still with many rough corners limiting the daily usability of such devices with Linux), one of the areas I was curious about was looking at the performance of Linux binaries with GCC versus LLVM Clang. Here are some benchmarks for those wondering how the GCC and Clang compilers are competing on the Snapdragon X Elite with the Oryon CPU cores.
June 6, 2025 — Source

The Performance Gains Brought By Linux 6.15+ & Mesa 25.2 For AMD Strix Halo
While the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Strix Halo SoCs have a nice out-of-the-box experience with modern Linux distributions for the Radeon 8050S and Radeon 8060S graphics, if going for the recently-released Linux 6.15 kernel there are some performance gains to enjoy as well as if opting for the latest Mesa 25.2 development code for the latest RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan driver support.
June 6, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — June 3rd, 2025

6 Best Open Source Password Managers for Windows in 2025
Discover the top open-source password managers for Windows. Learn about the features and benefits of each to determine which one is the best fit for your needs.
June 3, 2025 — Source

AM 9.8 released
"AM" 9.8 is a new release that supports languages apart from the classic English. Users can now download and compile translations for their language using any.po editor, such as Poedit. The source file is source.po, available in the "translations" section of the repository. To use the new option, translate or --translate, users can use a "trusted" language code or switch between languages.
June 3, 2025 — Source

Amazon Open Sources Strands Agents SDK for Building AI Agents
Amazon has released Strands Agents, an open source SDK that simplifies AI agent development through a model-driven approach. The framework enables developers to build agents by defining prompts and tool lists with minimal code.
June 3, 2025 — Source

AMD Upstreams Efficient Malloc Support On GPUs For LLVM libc
AMD compiler engineer Joseph Huber is the one who ported DOOM to run on GPUs atop ROCm + LLVM libc as part of taking standard C/C++ code to run on GPUs and more recently has also been pursuing Flang/Fortran support atop GPUs. The latest in this ongoing quest is implementing efficient malloc support for memory allocation support on GPUs via the LLVM libc library.
June 3, 2025 — Source

ByoWave Modular Proteus Controller Kit Support Lands In Linux 6.16
Valve engineer Pierre-Loup A. Griffais contributed ByoWave Proteus controller support to the Linux kernel. ByoWave Proteus are some modular controller designs that can be adapted based upon the needs of the gamer and even what title you may be playing at the moment. The triggers and buttons are all repositionable for a very customized controller experience.
June 3, 2025 — Source

FUSE Improvements Merged For Linux 6.16 To Enhance File-Systems In User-Space
The FUSE improvements have been merged for the Linux 6.16 in enhancing the capabilities for file-systems implemented in user-space.
June 3, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.16 Brings Many Laptop Driver Improvements, New Dasharo ACPI Driver
The wide assortment of x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the Linux 6.16 kernel due out as stable in July. As is usually the case, there are a number of Intel and AMD platform updates along with a wide assortment of driver improvements primarily for laptops from the major OEMs/ODMs.
June 3, 2025 — Source

NVMe FDP Block Write Streams, IO_uring DMA-BUF Zero Copy Receive Land In Linux 6.16
Merged last week for the Linux 6.16 kernel coming later this summer were the many block subsystem updates as well as the IO_uring feature updates.
June 3, 2025 — Source

Oracle Linux 9 Update 6 released
Oracle Linux 9 Update 6 (9.6) is now officially available for both 64-bit Intel and AMD (x86_64) as well as 64-bit Arm (aarch64) platforms. The release features the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8 (UEK 8) and Red Hat Compatible Kernel (RHCK) options. UEK 8 represents the most recent iteration of Oracle's specialized Oracle Linux kernel, featuring advancements in memory management, improved file system support, networking enhancements, and tailored platform improvements.
June 3, 2025 — Source

OWASP CRS 4.15.0 released
A new version of the OWASP CRS for ModSecurity or similar web application firewalls has come out with improvements and new ways to detect issues, including adding User-Agent and Referer to the targets, updating java-classes.data, and adding ways to block database YAML files.
June 3, 2025 — Source

Samba 4.21.6 released
Samba 4.21.6 has been released with a security-related bug fix identified as CVE-2025-0620. This update addresses an issue in which Samba fails to recognize changes in group membership during the reauthentication of an expired SMB session. This issue arises when Samba retains a cache of associations between a user's impersonation information and the connected shares.
June 3, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — May 30th, 2025

Alpine Linux 3.22 Replaces Gummiboot With systemd-efistub
Alpine Linux 3.22 is now available as the newest version of this Linux distribution popular for use with containers and embedded purposes due to its small, simple, and secure focus.
May 30, 2025 — Source

AMD Virtual TPM Driver Merged For Linux 6.16 To Enhance Confidential Computing
The latest upstream Linux kernel improvement for AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization "SEV" is the introduction of a virtual TPM driver.
May 30, 2025 — Source

AMDGPU High Priority Graphics User Queue Support Merged For Mesa 25.2
For making use of AMDGPU user queue functionality, the latest Mesa user-space side work has been merged for Mesa 25.2 to enable support for high priority graphics user queues.
May 30, 2025 — Source

Coredump Socket Support Merged For Linux 6.16
As an alternative to Coredumps dumping to a file or a pipe connected to a user-mode helper process, Linux 6.16 is introducing the ability to send Coredumps over an AF_UNIX socket.
May 30, 2025 — Source

F2FS Improvements Merged For Linux 6.16
Following the exciting EXT4 performance work, XFS atomic writes, and other exciting file-system pull requests submitted for the ongoing Linux 6.16 merge window, the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) changes have been submitted and merged for this next kernel version.
May 30, 2025 — Source

Intel IPU7 Firmware Binaries Upstreamed For Lunar Lake Webcameras
Overnight Intel upstreamed their IPU7 firmware binaries into the linux-firmware.git repository where Linux distributions will then be able to pick them up for easy consumption. IPU7 is for their latest Image Processing Unit for some web cameras on their latest-generation Lunar Lake platform.
May 30, 2025 — Source

Intel Prepping Linux Driver For Future Data Center GPUs Based On Battlemage
Intel engineers are preparing the Linux kernel for future Data Center GPUs. This work confirms new Intel Data Center GPUs coming based on Battlemage.
May 30, 2025 — Source

Intel SGX With Linux 6.16 Less Likely To Cause Fatal Machine Checks
Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) updates for the in-development Linux 6.16 contain a fix so SGX is now less likely to cause a fatal machine check.
May 30, 2025 — Source

It almost pains me to say it, but Microsoft Edge is great on Linux - you should try it
I'm a longtime Linux fan, and yes, I do use Edge regularly. Here's why.
May 30, 2025 — Source

KaOS 2025.05 Officially Qt5 Free
If you're a fan of independent Linux distributions, the team behind KaOS is proud to announce the latest iteration that includes kernel 6.14 and KDE's Plasma 6.3.5.
May 30, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.4 Beta 2 arrives with multiple bug fixes
The second beta of KDE Plasma 6.4 just landed, and it is packed with fixes as KDE gears up for the final release scheduled for June 17th, 2025. While new features were largely locked down earlier, this beta focuses on squashing bugs and polishing what is already there, ensuring a smoother experience for everyone.
May 30, 2025 — Source

Linux Crash Dump Flaws Expose Passwords, Encryption Keys
Race-Condition Bugs in Ubuntu and Red Hat Tools Could Leak Sensitive Memory Data
May 30, 2025 — Source or Source or Source or Source or Source

Linux Zero-Day Vulnerability Discovered Using Frontier AI
Vulnerability Researchers: Start Tracking LLM Capabilities, Says Veteran Bug Hunter
May 30, 2025 — Source or Source or Source

Radeon Software For Linux Dropping AMD's Proprietary OpenGL/Vulkan Drivers
With how well the open-source and upstream AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver stack is these days between the mainline Linux kernel and Mesa, the Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver releases are not usually notable these days on Phoronix... The packaged Radeon Software for Linux drivers haven't been popular with gamers/enthusiasts in years given how good the upstream support is and those packaged bits mostly useful for those just running enterprise Linux distributions with older versions of Linux and Mesa.
May 30, 2025 — Source

The Essential Linux commands that every user needs to know
They even work on the Raspberry Pi
May 30, 2025 — Source

WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB PCIe Gen 5.0 NVMe SSD Linux Benchmarks
Sandisk earlier this month announced the WD_BLACK SN8100 as what they claim is the current world's fastest PCIe Gen 5.0 NVMe SSD for consumers. Given how well the WD_BLACK SN850X performs under Linux as a PCIe Gen 4.0 drive, I decided to buy a WD_BLACK SN8100 for some Linux testing at Phoronix to compare to various other drives in the lab.
May 30, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — May 28th, 2025

Arch Linux Installer Adds Option To Configure Btrfs Snapshots Post-Install
Archinstall 3.0.7 is out today as the newest feature update to this text-based Arch Linux installer that makes it quick and easy to deploy a new Arch Linux installation.
May 28, 2025 — Source

Archinstall 3.0.7 released
Archinstall 3.0.7 has been released with new features including support for Btrfs snapshots after installation, disk encryption, and various bug fixes. This also resolves concerns related to device mapper names for home partitions, addresses empty strings in the custom_servers configuration, and rectifies the "ValueError: Device path was not set" error.
May 28, 2025 — Source

AVX-512 Performance + Power Efficiency Shines With AMD Strix Halo
Several weeks into testing the AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 395 flagship "Strix Halo" SoC within the HP ZBook Ultra G1a, I continue to be very impressed with its performance capabilities for a wide range of workloads. While the Radeon 8060S integrated graphics easily turn heads and the 16-core / 32-thread Zen 5 cores deliver incredible performance in a laptop form factor, one feature not to be discounted that together really helps make this laptop/SFF SoC an excellent choice for AI use and other scientific computing purposes is the presence of AVX-512.
May 28, 2025 — Source

Big Linux Patch Series Shakes Up The Scheduler Code For Anyone With Only One CPU Core
For anyone still happening to have only one CPU core in their system and running a uni-processor "UP" kernel build without any simultaneous multi-processing (SMP) support enabled, a big patch series posted today for the Linux kernel may affect you.
May 28, 2025 — Source

Git 2.50-rc0 Brings New Improvements
The initial release candidate of Git 2.50 is now available for this widely-used, distributed version control system.
May 28, 2025 — Source

Intel Lists Four New "Battlemage" GPUs For Mesa Graphics Driver On Linux, Indicating Next-Gen Gaming GPUs Are On The Way
Intel added four new Battlemage SKUs for Mesa's graphics driver for Linux, indicating that new consumer GPUs, likely gaming/professional ones, are on the way.
May 28, 2025 — Source

Intel Releases Updated Battlemage Driver Preview Support For Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
While there is nice out-of-the-box support for the new Intel Arc "Battlemage" graphics cards on the new Ubuntu 25.04 release, if you prefer running the Ubuntu 24.04 Long Term Support (LTS) release there isn't complete support until the next hardware enablement "HWE" update. But Intel in cooperation with Canonical has now published a new graphics driver preview stack for enabling better Intel Arc B-Series support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS users.
May 28, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.16 GPU Driver Changes Land: NVIDIA Blackwell, Asahi UAPI, Intel Xe Fan Speeds
The hearty set of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display driver changes were merged today for the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel. Most notable is preliminary NVIDIA Blackwell and Hopper GPU support atop the mainline kernel with an open-source driver but there are also big ticket items added for the AMD Radeon/Instinct and Intel graphics drivers too as well as the other smaller drivers.
May 28, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.16 Merges A Fix For The Macintosh II
Hobbyists continue to tinker around with the Motorola 68000 "m68k" support within the Linux kernel and even landing a fix now in 2025 for the vintage Macintosh II.
May 28, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.16 Will Be Able To Exit User Mode Faster: 2~11% Improvement
While the "core/entry" changes for the Linux kernel merge window aren't typically too exciting to write about, there is a new optimization for all CPU architectures worth mentioning for the Linux 6.16 cycle.
May 28, 2025 — Source

Intel Wildcat Lake Audio Support Merged For Linux 6.16
All of the sound/audio driver changes have been merged for the Linux 6.16 kernel that include new AMD and Intel hardware support among other new audio hardware as well as various other improvements.
May 28, 2025 — Source

Mesa 25.0.7 released
Mesa 25.0.7 is now available, signifying the conclusion of the 25.0 series. Users are advised to transition to the 25.1 series to ensure ongoing bug fixes. The release fixes several problems, such as handling FunctionParameterAttributeNo, OpenCLstd_F, correcting accidental changes to global dirty bits, and creating a link between SF_CL and CC states. Additional enhancements encompass adjustments to the bitstream buffer size, improvements in radeonsi/vce, output quality, and performance in the speed preset, as well as restricting 10bit H265 decode support to Stoney and newer versions.
May 28, 2025 — Source or Source

Microsoft's Azure Linux Preps For NVIDIA GB200 Servers
Microsoft on Tuesday released a new version of Azure Linux, their in-house Linux distribution that is used for a variety of purposes from the Azure cloud to powering other Microsoft services.
May 28, 2025 — Source

Three ways to run Windows apps on a Linux box
Easy, medium, and the sledgehammer approach -- or any combination you fancy
May 28, 2025 — Source

VirtualBox 7.2 Beta Brings Windows 11 Arm Support, Source Code On GitHub
Oracle engineers have released the first public beta of the upcoming VirtualBox 7.2 virtualization software release for Windows, Linux, macOS, and Solaris systems.
May 28, 2025 — Source

VirtualBox 7.2.0 Beta 1 released
VirtualBox 7.2.0 Beta 1 has been released and introduces new features such as a move to global and VM tools, the addition of Arm virtualization in the unified Windows installer package, and guest additions for Windows 11/Arm. Additionally, issues with Arm VMs from VirtualBox 7.1 are fixed, and vboxwebsrv is now included in packages.
May 28, 2025 — Source

Zed 0.188.3 released
Zed 0.188.3 has been released, featuring enhancements for various languages, including the ability to import SSH host names from the SSH config, as well as upgrades to the agent panel. The release features icons for the file finder, excluded_files to pane::DeploySearch, Emacs keymap bindings for Ctrl/Alt-V in selection mode, and a method to import SSH host names from the SSH config. A from_existing_connection flag has been added to the OpenRemote action, enabling the direct opening of the path picker for the current connection.
May 28, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — May 27th, 2025

AMD Releases Linux Drivers for Radeon RX 9060 XT and AI Pro R9700
The company is now officially supporting Mesa Vulkan and OpenGL drivers.
May 27, 2025 — Source

Intel Auto Count Reload & Clearwater Forest PMU Support Merged For Linux 6.16
The Linux kernel Performance Events changes were merged for the newly-opened Linux 6.16 cycle. Most notable are some new additions on the Intel side while AMD also saw a few changes too.
May 27, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.16 Adds "X86_NATIVE_CPU" Option To Optimize Your Kernel Build For Your CPU
The X86_NATIVE_CPU Kconfig build time option has been merged for the Linux 6.16 merge window as an easy means of enforcing "-march=native" compiler behavior on AMD and Intel processors to optimize your kernel build for the local CPU architecture/family of your system.
May 27, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.16 Lands "rt_group_sched" Option, Faster Core Offlining & Scheduler Improvements
The many scheduler updates have been merged for the Linux 6.16 kernel which include a wide assortment of different fixes and new improvements.
May 27, 2025 — Source

Qt Bridges To Take The UI Toolkit To New Programming Languages: Rust, C#, Java & Swift
The open-source Qt toolkit is deeply rooted in C++ code but over the past decade also has enjoyed Python language bindings. Now thanks to new work by the Qt Group on what they are calling Qt Bridging Technology, the toolkit will be enjoying more robust support across different programming languages.
May 27, 2025 — Source

Rav1e v0.8 Released For Rust-Based AV1 Encoding
Rav1e v0.8 was released on Monday for this self-proclaimed "fastest and safest AV1 encoder" that makes use of the Rust programming language.
May 27, 2025 — Source

ROCm GPU Compute Performance With AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ "Strix Halo"
This month I have been running many Linux benchmarks of the HP ZBook Ultra G1a with the very exciting Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 395 Strix Halo SoC featuring the powerful Radeon 8060S graphics. While there were the very promising OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks shown so far from AMD Strix Halo on Linux -- including the very compelling performance compared to Microsoft Windows 11 -- many are interested in the ROCm compute aspects for Strix Halo.
May 27, 2025 — Source

Should you ever pay for Linux? 5 times I would - and why
Linux is free, but that doesn't mean you should never consider spending a little cash on it. But when? I have five points for you to think about.
May 27, 2025 — Source

The elusive goal of Unix -- or Linux -- simplicity
Or, rediscovering the KISS principle, the long way round
May 27, 2025 — Source

XFS Atomic Writes Support Merged For Linux 6.16
Building off the atomic write preparations that landed in prior Linux kernel versions, merged for the Linux 6.16 cycle is atomic write support for the XFS file-system.
May 27, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — May 22nd, 2025

AMD Preparing For Some Nice GPU Reset Improvements Under Linux
Longtime AMDGPU driver engineer Alex Deucher has posted an interesting set of patches on Wednesday for enhancing the GPU reset experience under Linux with RDNA graphics cards.
May 22, 2025 — Source

Canonical Planning For Linux 6.17 To Power Ubuntu 25.10
The Canonical Kernel Team confirmed their plans today that with the Ubuntu 25.10 release in October they are planning to employ the Linux 6.17 kernel.1
May 22, 2025 — Source

CentOS Now Providing Initial RISC-V Support
With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 providing a RISC-V developer preview, CentOS is now in turn also providing initial RISC-V CPU ISA support.
May 22, 2025 — Source

FFmpeg FFV1 Vulkan Encoder Lands +35% Improvement For AMD, +50% For NVIDIA
FFmpeg developers have been working on Vulkan-accelerated FFV1 video encode/decode for that two decade old lossless video coding format. Merged this week to FFmpeg Git were more enhancements to their Vulkan-based FFV1 encoder and yielding big performance improvements for both AMD and NVIDIA graphics processors.
May 22, 2025 — Source

Intel Announces New Xeon 6 CPU Models With SST-TF & Priority Core Turbo "PCT"
Adding on to the Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" CPU family are today three new models focused on delivering enhanced GPU-accelerated AI performance.
May 22, 2025 — Source

KDE neon 20250522 released
KDE neon 20250522, based on KDE Plasma 6.3.5, has been released. KDE neon is a Linux distribution built on Ubuntu, featuring the latest version of the KDE Plasma desktop environment.
May 22, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 5.15.184 released
Linux kernel version 5.15.184 is now available:
May 22, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.1.140 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.140 is now available:
May 22, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.12.30 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.30 is now available:
May 22, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.14.8 released
Linux kernel version 6.14.8 is now available:
May 22, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.6.92 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.92 is now available:
May 22, 2025 — Source

Liquorix Linux Kernel 6.14-10 released
Steven Barrett has released a new Liquorix kernel derived from Linux kernel 6.14.8. The Liquorix Linux kernel is an enthusiast Linux kernel that is optimized for low-latency computing in audiovisual production, reduced frame time variations in games, and unparalleled responsiveness in interactive systems. It is available for Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch Linux.
May 22, 2025 — Source

Maximizing The Performance & Power Efficiency Of AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 With Platform Profiles
Last week I began posting Linux benchmarks of the flagship "Strix Halo" SoC, the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 with powerful Radeon 8060S graphics using the HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop. Both the CPU and GPU results for the data published thus far have been mighty impressive and done at the Ubuntu Linux defaults...
May 22, 2025 — Source

MSI Linux Driver Aims For Parity To Windows App For The Claw Gaming Handhelds
A recently posted patch series for the MSI WMI platform driver is aiming this open-source driver to reach parity with MSI's official Windows application/driver for the MSI Claw gaming handheld systems.
May 22, 2025 — Source

Optimized AMD SEV Cache Flushing For KVM Looked At For Linux 6.17
A patch series is baking for likely upstreaming in the Linux v6.17 kernel cycle later in the year to optimize AMD CPU cache flushing when making use of Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) with KVM.
May 22, 2025 — Source

PoCL 7.0 Released With Official OpenCL 3.0 Conformance On x86_64 CPUs
PoCL 7.0 is out today as the newest version of this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that originally was started for supporting CPU-based OpenCL execution but with time and in leveraging LLVM back-ends has added support for OpenCL atop AMDKFD / NVIDIA PTX / Intel Level Zero and other possible back-ends.
May 22, 2025 — Source

Run Linux scripts unattended with Nohup
Run the command, walk away and let Linux do all the work.
May 22, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu 25.10 Switching To Chrony By Default, Enabling Network Time Security
Ubuntu 25.10 is joining the likes of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise that are using Chrony as their Network Time Protocol (NTP) implementation. Ubuntu 25.10 is switching over to Chrony in enabling Network Time Security (NTS) support on Ubuntu Linux.
May 22, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — May 13th, 2025

5 factors steadily fueling Linux's desktop rise
Linux has been quietly moving from niche to mainstream - and this is why.
May 13, 2025 — Source

10 things I always do after installing Ubuntu to instantly improve the experience
Now that the dust has cleared from the grand unleashing of Ubuntu 25.04, you might be ready to install it. Here's what I recommend you do immediately after.
May 13, 2025 — Source

AMD EPYC 4005 Series Launches For Entry-Level Zen 5 Servers
Last year AMD launched the EPYC 4004 series for taking Ryzen based processor designs into the EPYC segment for entry-level servers with ECC memory support, server designs with BMCs, and various enterprise software certifications and industry qualifications. Today they are launching the EPYC 4005 series as their new Zen 5 based offerings for entry-level / budget server deployments and other instances when not needing as much compute power or connectivity and other high-end features found with the EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors.
May 13, 2025 — Source

AMD EPYC 4565P & EPYC 4585PX Benchmarks Against Xeon 6369P: EPYC 4005 Champions Entry-Level Server Performance
With today's announcement of the AMD EPYC 4005P "Grado" entry-level server processors, up for review today are the EPYC 4565P and EPYC 4585PX processors as the top-end Zen 5 processors for budget server builds and basic bare metal server hosting. With the prior-generation EPYC 4004 series AMD was already leading over Intel's entry-level Xeon E processors that have become rather embarrassing for the company with its stagnate line-up of low-cost server processors.
May 13, 2025 — Source

Branch Privilege Injection Vulnerability Disclosed For Intel CPUs
It was just yesterday that Training Solo was made public as a new speculative execution CPU vulnerability affecting some Intel and Arm CPUs... Today another one is now public for Intel processors: Branch Privilege Injection.
May 13, 2025 — Source

Canonical Provides Status Update For Snapdragon X Elite Laptops On Ubuntu 25.04
Canonical provided a status update concerning the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite powered laptops on the recently released Ubuntu 25.04.
May 13, 2025 — Source

Firefox Source Code Now Hosted On GitHub
The Mozilla Firefox source code is now officially available on GitHub as they work to transition from their hg.mozilla.org servers.
May 13, 2025 — Source

Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
The development team behind Flatpak has unveiled the latest iteration of the universal package manager, which includes a number of enhancements.
May 13, 2025 — Source

Good news for Linux users: NordVPN now offers a GUI for its service
NordVPN has launched a new graphical user interface for its Linux application. This changes things quite a bit because before this, Linux users only had access to the command line interface (CLI). While seasoned Linux users might not mind typing commands, it made the NordVPN app less approachable compared to the simple, clickable versions available on Windows or macOS.
May 13, 2025 — Source

Mesa 25.2 RADV Merges Ray-Tracing Improvements For Radeon RX 9070 Series / RDNA4
Merged for the Mesa 25.2 release next quarter are some further enhancements to the Vulkan ray-tracing support with the RADV open-source driver for AMD's new RDNA4 graphics cards.
May 13, 2025 — Source

NAK Compiler For Mesa's NVK Driver Adds Support For More NVIDIA Kepler GPUs
The Rust-written NAK shader compiler used by Mesa's NVK open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs has merged support for SM32 as the "KeplerB" / Kepler 2.0 graphics processors.
May 13, 2025 — Source

VSCodium 1.100.13210 released
VSCodium 1.100.13210 based on Visual Studio Code 1.100.1, has been released
May 13, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — May 9th, 2025

Debian Looks To Better Address Ill-Maintained / Dormant Packages
Newly re-elected Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille posted today to the project's mailing list a few updates about different happenings in the Debian world ahead of the Debian 13 "Trixie" release due out in the coming months and also with DebConf 25 happening this July in Brest, France.
May 9, 2025 — Source

DeepComputing's DC-ROMA RISC-V Mainboard II For Framework Laptop Launches For $349
The past year we've been looking forward to a RISC-V motherboard option coming to the Framework Laptop 13 via Framework's partnership with DeepComputing. There was early access in late 2024 while this week DeepComputing has formally announced the DC-ROMA RISC-V AI PC Mainboard II now available at $349 USD.
May 9, 2025 — Source

Intel NPU Linux Driver 1.17 Released
Out this morning is the Intel NPU Linux Driver 1.17 release as the newest version of their user-space Neural Processing Unit (NPU) driver code that interfaces with the IVPU accelerator kernel driver.
May 9, 2025 — Source

Intel Xe Driver With Linux 6.16 Brings Controls For PCIe Link Downgrading On Battlemage
In addition to the Intel LOBF feature and some other last minute Intel fixes going into the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) tree ahead of Linux 6.16, a final batch of material for the newer Xe kernel graphics driver was also sent out this week.
May 9, 2025 — Source

It's official: GNOME is replacing Totem Video Player with Showtime in GNOME 49
Nearly a year after replacing the aging default player was deemed a high priority, GNOME Showtime is finally slated to become the core video application for the GNOME desktop. Just recently, GNOME Developers officially completed the merge request to integrate Showtime into the core lineup.
May 9, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 5.15.182 released

Linux kernel version 5.15.182 is now available:
May 9, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.1.138 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.138 is now available:
May 9, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.12.28 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.28 is now available:
May 9, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.14.6 released
Linux kernel version 6.14.6 is now available:
May 9, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.6.90 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.90 is now available:
May 9, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel is leaving 486 CPUs behind, only 18 years after the last one made
Linus Torvalds sees "zero real reason for anybody to waste one second" on them.
May 9, 2025 — Source

Liquorix Linux Kernel 6.14-8 released
Steven Barrett has released a new Liquorix kernel derived from Linux kernel 6.14.6. The Liquorix Linux kernel is an enthusiast Linux kernel that is optimized for low-latency computing in audiovisual production, reduced frame time variations in games, and unparalleled responsiveness in interactive systems. It is available for Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch Linux.
May 9, 2025 — Source

Mesa's Lavapipe Driver Wires Up More Features Used By VKD3D-Proton
Mesa developer Konstantin Seurer has been adding more features to the Lavapipe Vulkan driver for functionality needed by VKD3D-Proton for mapping Direct3D 12 APIs atop Vulkan.
May 9, 2025 — Source

NordVPN Has a Linux GUI App, and Now It May Be My Primary VPN
NordVPN's recently released Linux GUI app makes improving privacy on Linux easier and more accessible, especially for beginners.
May 9, 2025 — Source

RADV Vulkan Driver Lands BFloat16 Support In Mesa 25.2
Introduced at the end of March was Vulkan 1.4.311 with VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 for allowing BFloat16 "BF16" operations within SPIR-V shaders with SPV_KHR_bfloat16. This BFloat16 support can be beneficial for Vulkan machine learning / AI workloads and other use cases moving forward. Now the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is the newest wiring up support for VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16.
May 9, 2025 — Source

Samsung Odyssey OLED G8 G81SF 4K UHD HDR Monitor
With modern Linux distributions beginning to see good support for HDR displays, if you have been looking to upgrade to a high dynamic range OLED monitor, one of the newest options that recently launched by Samsung is the Odyssey OLED G8 G81SF. I've been testing out the Samsung G81SF the past few weeks and it's been working out well paired with the likes of Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42 to deliver a beautiful desktop experience and a great experience for Linux gamers with supporting a 240Hz refresh rate and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro.
May 9, 2025 — Source

The best Linux laptops you can buy: Expert tested for students, hobbyists, and pros
We tested some of the best Linux-compatible laptops from Lenovo, Dell, and more, as Linux continues to grow as a popular alternative to Windows and macOS. Here are our favorites.
May 9, 2025 — Source

Uno Platform Studio and 'Hot Design' Reach General Availability
Uno Platform, a .NET-centric open source project for building single-codebase apps across web, Windows, iOS, Android, macOS, and Linux, this week announced v6.0 of its flagship offering, which introduces a zero-install, web-based IDE for rapid cross-platform development, alongside a modernized app architecture that embraces MVU and .NET-style extensions.
May 9, 2025 — Source

Zed 0.185.14 released
Another Zed editor update has just been released. The new update features enhancements in model selection, debug output, autoscrolling, message editor positioning, profile selector display, resolution of AWS Bedrock issues, and the diagnostic tool for Copilot models. The updates resolve concerns related to model selection, debug output, autoscrolling, message editor positioning, and the deletion of AWS credentials.
May 9, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — May 6th, 2025

4 free project management apps I recommend on Linux - and why you should use one
Need to manage a small to medium-sized personal or business project? Skip the expensive software and use one of these free project management apps.
May 6, 2025 — Source

A Linux-backed project shows how to save unsupported Windows 10 PCs by installing Linux
Microsoft this week announced the final phase of Windows 11 version 24H2 rollout such that the update is now downloadable by everyone.
May 6, 2025 — Source

Ampere Computing Soft Announces AmpereOne M With 12 Channel DDR5 Memory
Ampere Computing last year talked up AmpereOne M for 12-channel DDR5 memory and up to 192 cores up from the 8-channel DDR5 memory found with the initial AmpereOne processors. They said at the time AmpereOne M would be shipping in Q4-2024. Now half way into 2025, it looks like they quietly announced the AmpereOne M processors.
May 6, 2025 — Source

Brilliant Open-Source Projects for Developers, Collaboration and Enthusiasts
What if the tools shaping tomorrow's technology were free, open, and built by communities rather than corporations? Open source projects are doing just that—redefining how we solve problems, innovate, and collaborate. From safeguarding sensitive data to fostering inclusivity in communication, these initiatives are tackling some of the most pressing challenges of the digital age.
May 6, 2025 — Source

Btrfs "CLEAR_FREE" Looks Like It Will Be Ready For Linux 6.16
The Btrfs file-system looks like its new "CLEAR_FREE" feature will be ready to go for the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel cycle.
May 6, 2025 — Source

Can't upgrade to Windows 11? This is the Linux distro alternative I recommend to most people
SDesk is a lightweight Linux distribution designed with a familiar interface, making it an ideal choice for users transitioning from Windows 10 or 11.
May 6, 2025 — Source

Commodore OS 3 is the loudest Linux yet
One distro has to be the most extra -- and here it is
May 6, 2025 — Source

IBM LinuxONE Emperor 5 Announced For Linux Servers Powered By Telum II
Last month IBM announced the z17 mainframe powered by Telum II processors and today they announced the IBM LinuxONE Emperor 5 servers.
May 6, 2025 — Source

Intel RAR TLB Invalidation Being Worked On For Linux - Alternative To AMD INVLPGB
Merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel was AMD INVLPGB support for broadcast TLB invalidation on recent Zen cores. AMD INVLPGB use by the Linux kernel can provide for some nice performance gains while now similar support for Intel processors is coming via a kernel patch series working on Intel RAR TLB invalidation support.
May 6, 2025 — Source

Intel's Clear Linux Demonstrates Software Optimization Benefits On AMD EPYC 9005 Series
With the spring Linux distribution/OS updates upon us, in recent weeks I've looked at the Ubuntu 25.04 performance gains on AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" and also the performance of Fedora Server 42. Following that I expanded the scope of the Linux operating systems (distributions) benchmarks on the latest 5th Gen AMD EPYC server hardware. Here is a look at how the performance of the new Ubuntu and Fedora Linux releases compare to AlmaLinux and Intel's in-house Clear Linux distribution that tends to be at the forefront of open-source performance optimizations.
May 6, 2025 — Source

I've used dozens of distros as a Linux power user, but this one feels truly different
If you're ready for a new approach to Linux, NixOS offers a thoughtful design experience with plenty of customization options.
May 6, 2025 — Source

Jujutsu Git Alternative : Simplifies Version Control for Developers and is Open Source
What if the very tool you rely on every day—Git—was holding you back? For all its ubiquity, Git isn't without flaws: rigid branching structures, frustrating rebases, and the occasional merge conflict that derails your workflow. Enter Jujutsu (JJ), a bold, open source alternative that reimagines version control from the ground up. Built in Rust and fully compatible with Git, JJ introduces a branchless workflow and dynamic change management, offering developers a more flexible, intuitive way to manage code.
May 6, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.3.5 released
KDE Plasma 6.3.5, a bugfix release for May, features numerous enhancements and corrections contributed by KDE's team. The release features bug fixes for Kcursorgen, incorporates the QDebug feature, and resolves the issue with the "Still Looking" indicator in applications. Furthermore, it tackles concerns related to the KScreen, Osd, Kcm, and various other Plasma addons.
May 6, 2025 — Source

Kurchu Tool Taking Shape For Assembling Fedora / CentOS Linux Distro ISOs
As an alternative to the likes of the Pungi tool, Kurchu is a newer project within the CentOS/Fedora space for assembling content collections or ISO images of Linux distribution builds. Kurchu is already seeing use by the CentOS Hyperscale SIG for assembling their images while additional functionality continues to be worked on for those wanting to craft their own Fedora/CentOS install images.
May 6, 2025 — Source

Linux wiper malware hidden in malicious Go modules on GitHub
A supply-chain attack targets Linux servers with disk-wiping malware hidden in Golang modules published on GitHub.
May 6, 2025 — Source

LVFS/Fwupd Talked Up For Linux Servers & Being What Customers Want
Lead LVFS/Fwupd developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat was at the PremDay on-premise computing conference in Paris to talk up this open-source firmware updating solution and being what customers want. The presentation video and slides are now available for those needing additional material in helping sell your organization on the benefits of LVFS/Fwupd.
May 6, 2025 — Source

Manjaro 25.0.1 Zetar released
Since we released Yonada in December 2024 we worked hard to get the next release of Manjaro out there. We call it Zetar.
May 6, 2025 — Source

Microsoft finally makes Fedora an official Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) distribution
Well, it has finally happened. Fedora Linux is now officially available as a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) distribution! That's right, folks, following prior testing, you can now run Fedora 42 natively inside Windows using WSL. As someone who considers Fedora to be my favorite Linux distribution, this is a pretty exciting development.
May 6, 2025 — Source

Microsoft Welcomes Fedora Linux As An Official WSL Distro
Microsoft announced today that Fedora Linux is now treated as an official distribution within their Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) confines.
May 6, 2025 — Source

My week with Linux: I'm dumping Windows for Ubuntu to see how it goes
Here's what it's like to live with Linux as my desktop OS.
May 6, 2025 — Source

Node v24.0.0 released
Node 24 has been released, incorporating several important updates. The V8 JavaScript engine has been enhanced to version 13.6, and npm has been upgraded to version 11.
May 6, 2025 — Source

Proton 10.0-1d Beta released
Valve Software has released Proton 10.0-1d beta, a minor update that addresses regressions in Proton 10.0 and implements specific workarounds for certain games. The change log discusses concerns related to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, the crashing of Jusant on Intel GPUs, and resolves problems with key bindings and layouts.
May 6, 2025 — Source

RISC-V LLVM Scheduler Tuning For SpacemiT-X60 On Clang Yields 4~18% Speedups
The SpacemiT-X60 RISC-V SoC can enjoy some very healthy performance improvements with scheduler definitions now merged for the LLVM/Clang 21 compiler.
May 6, 2025 — Source

This Campaign Wants You to Upgrade Your 'End-of-Life' Windows 10 PC to Linux
After the deadline, Windows 10 will no longer receive free updates or security patches. Installing Linux could be a more practical option than buying new hardware.
May 6, 2025 — Source

Try Fedora 42 In 15 Minutes or Less
Want to test the new Fedora 42 without wiping your Windows install or sacrificing a goat to the dual-boot gods? Think Linux is too Geeky for you and is command line only? You're in the right place.
May 6, 2025 — Watch Video

Ubuntu 25.10 Plans To Use sudo-rs By Default For Memory-Safe, Rust-Based sudo
With Ubuntu 25.10 Canonical is planning to make use of more Rust-written system components and so far most of that talk has been about transitioning to Rust Coreutils "uutils" in place of GNU Coreutils. It's also been firmed up today that Canonical is planning on using sudo-rs by default as a replacement to sudo.
May 6, 2025 — Source

Valve Releases Updated Proton 10.0 Beta For Testing
Last week Valve introduced Proton 10.0 beta as the newest version of their Wine-derived software for Steam Play that enables countless Windows games to run well for Linux gamers on the desktop and with the extremely popular Steam Deck. Out today is another Proton 10.0 beta update with some additional bug and regression fixes over what was shipped last week.
May 6, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — May 5th, 2025

21-Way Intel Core / AMD Ryzen Linux Laptop Comparison On Ubuntu 25.04
As part of fresh re-testing of existing laptops on-hand given the recent release of Ubuntu 25.04 and then also recent Linux reviews of some interesting models like the Framework Laptop 13 with AMD Strix Point and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition, I have been running a lot of Linux laptop benchmarks the past few weeks.
May 5, 2025 — Source

ARM64 Expected To Support Lazy Preemption "PREEMPT_LAZY" With Linux 6.16
Introduced last year for Linux 6.13 was lazy preemption "PREEMPT_LAZY" for a preemption model that is similar to full preemption but less eager to preempt normal scheduler tasks to provide some of the performance benefits found with voluntary preemption. After initially being supported for x86_64 and RISC-V, it looks like Linux 6.16 will support lazy preemption on ARM64 (AArch64).
May 5, 2025 — Source

Debian 13 Trixie Testing 20250505 Live Images
Installable live ISO images for the forthcoming Debian 13 Trixie release are now available for testing purposes. The images are offered in various environments including GNOME, KDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, LXQt, and LXDE, and they include the most recent versions of the packages
May 5, 2025 — Source

I've tested every Linux music player, and this one is my new favorite - here's why
Don't sleep on Tauon. It has all the features you need without bloat.
May 5, 2025 — Source

IO_uring Zero Copy Receive Seeing DMA-BUF Support Slated For Linux 6.16
Merged for Linux 6.15 was IO_uring network zero-copy receive "io_uring zcrx" while now on track for landing in Linux 6.16 is extending it to support passing DMA-BUF buffers.
May 5, 2025 — Source

FFmpeg Integrates Video Encoder For Advanced Professional Video (APV)
One week ago FFmpeg merged decode support for Samsung's Advanced Professional Video "APV" codec. APV is designed for professional-grade video recording purposes and is a royalty-free video codec geared for prosumers. Now arriving within FFmpeg Git is APV video encode support.
May 5, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.1.137 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.137 is now available:
May 5, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.12.27 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.27 is now available:
May 5, 2025 — Source

New Patches Aim To Modernize The Default Linux x86 Kernel Configuration
Longtime Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar sent out a patch series this morning to enable additional kernel features by default for the Linux default configuration "defconfig" on x86-based kernels. The defconfig improvements aim to reflect modern Linux x86 kernel use with various features commonly being enabled by distribution vendor kernels and related improvements.
May 5, 2025 — Source

Vulkan API 1.4.314 Brings One New Extension In Working Toward Vulkan Roadmap 2026
Vulkan 1.4.314 is now available as the newest routine spec update for this high performance GPU graphics and compute API. With Vulkan 1.4.314 there are more early preparations toward Vulkan Roadmap 2026 in aiming for a baseline of high-end smartphones, computers, and more for next year.
May 5, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — May 2nd, 2025

Bcachefs Lands More Fixes As It Works Toward Better Self-Healing & Automatic Repair
This week's batch of Bcachefs file-system fixes have been submitted ahead of the Linux 6.15-rc5 test kernel due out on Sunday.
May 2, 2025 — Source

Continued Work On Attack Vector Controls Ahead Of Linux 6.16
Going back to last year an AMD engineer has been pursuing "Attack Vecotr Controls" to rethink CPU security mitigation handling. Attack Vector Controls aims to make it easier to manage CPU security mitigation settings by focusing on the class/scope of vulnerabilities rather than managing the mitigations at an individual level.
May 2, 2025 — Source

Full Disk Encryption Performance With Ubuntu 25.04 + Framework Laptop 13 Strix Point
For anyone storing personal information on their laptops especially, I definitely recommend making use of Linux LUKS-based full disk encryption capabilities. I've been recommending going with the full disk encryption capabilities for nearly two decades to help protect personal data in case your laptop is lost or stolen.
May 2, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.16 Will Begin Reporting The Cause Of Your AMD Zen System Being Reset/Rebooted
In the event of your AMD Ryzen or EPYC system being randomly reset or unexpectedly rebooted under Linux, the Linux kernel with the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle is gaining the ability to report the reason for that reset. This is making use of a technical capability found going back to the AMD Zen 1 processors that the Linux kernel is now tapping into for reporting the cause of any previous system reset.
May 2, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 5.4.293 released
Linux kernel version 5.4.293 is now available:
May 2, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 5.10.237 released
Linux kernel version 5.10.237 is now available:
May 2, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 5.15.181 released
Linux kernel version 5.15.181 is now available:
May 2, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.1.136 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.136 is now available:
May 2, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.12.26 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.26 is now available:
May 2, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.14.5 released
Linux kernel version 6.14.5 is now available:
May 2, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.6.89 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.89 is now available:
May 2, 2025 — Source

MoltenVK 1.3 Released For Vulkan 1.3 Support On Apple Devices
The MoltenVK 1.3 release candidate didn't end up needing much baking and overnight the MoltenVK 1.3 stable release was issued for Vulkan 1.3 API support on Apple devices that is built atop Apple's Metal drivers.
May 2, 2025 — Source

NATS custody battle ends with CNCF, Synadia sharing nicely
Trademark, domain name, GitHub repos stay under control of open source foundation -- no word on any forking off for now
May 2, 2025 — Source

Open source AI hiring bots favor men, leave women hanging by the phone
Easy fix: Telling LLMs to cosplay Lenin makes 'em more gender blind
May 2, 2025 — Source

Redis returns to open source with AGPLv3 license but not everyone is happy
Redis leadership asserts that the AGPLv3 license strikes the right balance between protecting the company's business interests and supporting the open-source community. We'll see if developers and customers agree.
May 2, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu 25.10 "Questing Quokka" development begins, release timeline has been shared
Canonical has announced the start of development for Ubuntu 25.10 "Questing Quokka", it comes just a few weeks after the release of Ubuntu 25.04 "Plucky Puffin", which came out on April 17. According to the release schedule, Thursday, October 9, will be the release date of Ubuntu 25.10.
May 2, 2025 — Source

Wine 10.7 Brings An Exciting Performance Optimization
Wine 10.7 is out today as the newest bi-weekly release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms.
May 2, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — April 28th, 2025

8 ways to protect your privacy on Linux and keep your data safe
Using Linux is a good start - but it is not enough. These easy privacy tricks could mean the difference between secure and sorry.
April 28, 2025 — Source

AMD Linux Network Driver Prepares For "Crater" Ethernet Device
The AMD-XGBE Linux network driver has seen a set of patches published for it in enabling the "new" AMD Ethernet Device codenamed Crater.
April 28, 2025 — Source

Avocado OS: Open-source Linux platform for embedded systems
Peridio, a platform for building and maintaining advanced embedded products, has launched Avocado OS, an open-source embedded Linux distribution made to simplify the way developers build complex embedded systems. Avocado OS focuses on delivering a smooth developer experience while offering security, reliability, and consistent performance.
April 28, 2025 — Source

GNOME 49 Will Enjoy Better Performance With More Fullscreen Apps
Another change to look forward to with GNOME 49 come September is better/faster direct scanout for more applications thanks to a change that was merged to the Mutter compositor this past week.
April 28, 2025 — Source

New Linux Patches Aim To Customize Out-Of-Memory Behavior Using BPF
A fresh take is being pursued around allowing the Linux kernel's out-of-memory (OOM) behavior to be customized using BPF programs.
April 28, 2025 — Source

This lightning-fast Linux distro will hook you the moment you try it
Everything about Xubuntu is built for speed and simplicity, no matter your experience level.
April 28, 2025 — Source

Trinity Desktop R14.1.4 Continues With The KDE 3.5 Codebase
The Trinity Desktop Environment as a long ago fork of the KDE 3.5 desktop released TDE R14.1.4 on Sunday as the newest maintenance release with various bug fixes and minor feature improvements.
April 28, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu 25.04 Advancing The Performance Of The System76 Thelio Astra With Ampere Altra
With the release of Ubuntu 25.04 this month I've looked at its performance on x86_64 laptops and desktop hardware to nice gains on server. That testing so far was focused on Intel and AMD systems given my abundance of x86_64 platforms. Last week I began testing Ubuntu 25.04 ARM64 on the System76 Thelio Astra powered by Ampere Altra processors.
April 28, 2025 — Source

Wayland Protocols 1.44 Released With Color-Representation
Wayland Protocols 1.44 released on Sunday and with it comes one new protocol addition.
April 28, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — April 25th, 2025

Apache NetBeans 26-rc2 released
The second release candidate of Apache NetBeans IDE 26 has been released for testing, featuring enhancements like better management of const keywords in web JavaScript and the renewal of expired badssl test certificates for unit testing.
April 25, 2025 — Source

Bcachefs Landing Fixes So Its Case Insensitive Support Actually Works
Nearly two years ago patches for casefolding / case insensitive file and folder support on Bcachefs were posted by a Valve/Linux developer. That support was upstreamed into the Bcachefs kernel driver but it turns out that it never properly worked. Patches now set for merging into the Linux 6.15 will fix that case insensitive file/folder opt-in support so that it is now properly supported.
April 25, 2025 — Source

GCC 15.1 Released With COBOL Compiler & Many Other Improvements
GCC 15.1 was just released as the newest annual feature release to the GNU Compiler Collection. This first stable GCC 15 release brings a COBOL compiler front-end, many C and C++ language support improvements, support for new CPUs and ISA capabilities, better Rust programming language support, debugging enhancements, and a whole lot more.
April 25, 2025 — Source

Intel 200S Boost Performance Mode Benchmarks On Linux
This week Intel announced "200S Boost" for Core Ultra "Arrow Lake" K-Series desktop processors as effectively a new overclocking profile rolling out to existing Z890 motherboards via a BIOS update. Enabling the 200S Boost profile is said to help with low-latency workloads like gaming by allowing higher fabric / die-to-die / memory frequencies. While some Windows benchmarks have begun emerging for the Intel 200S Boost mode and some limited gains, I was curious about the performance under Linux so here are some 200S Boost benchmarks with the Core Ultra 9 285K on Ubuntu 25.04.
April 25, 2025 — Source

Intel Enabling Ultra Low Latency Scheduling "ULLS" For Lunar Lake GPU Compute
While last week Intel released an update Compute Runtime for GPU compute with the OpenCL and Level Zero APIs on Windows and Linux, today they released a new preview version for readying a shiny new feature: Ultra Low Latency Scheduling "ULLS" for Lunar Lake Xe2 graphics.
April 25, 2025 — Source

Intel Linux Graphics Driver Patches Updated For DRM Panic Support
One of the interesting new features merged to the Linux kernel last year was the DRM Panic infrastructure so that Linux can display an error screen akin to Windows' "Blue Screen of Death" when encountering problems. With follow-on kernel releases it's been extended to add QR code error messages and other improvements. But DRM Panic does require the support/cooperation of the different Direct Rendering Manager drivers and so far Intel graphics haven't been supported.
April 25, 2025 — Source

Intel Updates Its PyTorch Extension With DeepSeek-R1 Support, New Optimizations
Intel today released a new version of the Intel Extension for PyTorch in order to apply optimizations to PyTorch for benefiting Intel's hardware. With the Intel Extension for PyTorch v2.7 release, there is support for new large language models (LLMs) as well as various performance optimizations and other enhancements.
April 25, 2025 — Source

IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 194 is available for testing
IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 194 has been released for testing, introducing a variety of package updates, new features, and enhancements in security. The update reestablishes the IPFire kernel on Linux 6.12.23, enhancing security and stability. Stephen Cuka has made a significant update to the Pakfire page, enhancing controls and incorporating language translation features.
April 25, 2025 — Source

Linus Torvalds Expresses His Hatred For Case-Insensitive File-Systems
Linus Torvalds is sharing some of his classic and straight-to-the-point wisdom today over file-systems with case-folding / case-insensitive file and folder support.
April 25, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.1.135 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.135 is now available:
April 25, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.12.25 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.25 is now available:
April 25, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.14.4 released
Linux kernel version 6.14.4 is now available:
April 25, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.6.88 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.88 is now available:
April 25, 2025 — Source

Liquorix Linux Kernel 6.14-6 released
Steven Barrett has released a new Liquorix kernel derived from Linux kernel 6.14.4. The Liquorix Linux kernel is an enthusiast Linux kernel that is optimized for low-latency computing in audiovisual production, reduced frame time variations in games, and unparalleled responsiveness in interactive systems. It is available for Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch Linux.
April 25, 2025 — Source

New Linux Patches Propose Removing Support For Old i486 & Early i586 CPUs
A set of Linux kernel patches posted today by longtime Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar are looking to remove support for "ancient" 32-bit CPUs. In particular, if these patches are accepted, the Linux kernel would be ending support for old i486 CPUs as well as early i586 CPU models.
April 25, 2025 — Source

PHP 8.3.21RC1 and 8.4.7RC1 packages for Fedora/RHEL released
Remi Collet has released 8.3.21RC1 and 8.4.7RC1 packages for Fedora and RHEL-based Linux distributions.
April 25, 2025 — Source

Zed 0.183.11 released
Zed 0.183.11 has been released to address an issue with the inline assistant for Gemini models.
April 25, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — April 22nd, 2025

GCC Compiler Adds Targeting Support For XuanTie RISC-V CPUs
One of the early features being merged for what will become the GCC 16 compiler following last week's GCC 15 code branching is CPU targeting support for the XuanTie RISC-V processors.
April 22, 2025 — Source

IceWM 3.7.4 released
The release of IceWM 3.7.4 encompasses features including the X-resource library 1.2, the icesh "toolbar" command, and the -Z filter, as well as various fixes and modifications. The update features support for SVG icons, a fallback for global keybindings, a "Reload toolbar" button, the default theme "icedesert," and enhanced translations in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Chinese.
April 22, 2025 — Source

Intel Core Ultra 9 285K "Arrow Lake" Performance On Linux Has Improved A Lot Since Launch
Today's Linux benchmarking at Phoronix is looking at how the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K performance has evolved since its launch last October. Taking the launch-day benchmarks from October with the same hardware, we are revisiting the Intel Arrow Lake performance under Linux today using the newest system BIOS and the newly-released Ubuntu 25.04 for seeing how the performance has evolved roughly over the past half-year.
April 22, 2025 — Source

Intel Vulkan Linux Driver Begins Prepping For Ray-Tracing Changes With Xe3
Merged yesterday to Mesa Git for next quarter's Mesa 25.2 release is an improvement for the Intel Vulkan ray-tracing code with an eye on next-gen Xe3 graphics hardware.
April 22, 2025 — Source

Kmemdump Proposed For The Linux Kernel To Help With Memory Dumping & Debugging
Eugen Hristev of Linaro sent out a "request for comments" patch series today proposing kmemdump for the Linux kernel as a new means to assist in debugging driver/system problems by making it easier to dump memory for specific areas/regions.
April 22, 2025 — Source

Linux Being Patched For Buggy MWAIT Behavior On Intel Ice Lake Servers
The Linux kernel has seen safeguards for select prior Intel CPU cores due to bugs around the MONITOR/MWAIT implementation with the processors. MWAIT/MONITOR bugs was found to be the cause of annoying issues at boot for Lunar Lake laptops and also previously plagued Goldmont Atom cores. It also turns out that Ice Lake servers can be subject to similar MWAIT/MONITOR behavior.
April 22, 2025 — Source

Node 20.19.1 (LTS) released
Node.js v20.19.1 (LTS) has been released. Significant updates encompass the upgrade of undici to version 6.21.2, the enhancement of c-ares to v1.34.5, and the reinstatement of the DNS query cache TTL.
April 22, 2025 — Source

PHP 8.3.21 RC1 released
PHP-8.3.21 RC1 has been released for testing and addresses multiple issues across several components, including core, filter, GD, Intl, LDAP, libxml, OpenSSL, PDO Firebird, SPL, and Standard.
April 22, 2025 — Source

PHP 8.4.7 RC1 released
PHP-8.4.7RC1 is now available for testing and fixes several problems, such as endless loops when checking old attributes, issues with lazy proxy calls, a memory error in extract(), crashes in array_walk(), and changes to DateInterval properties through dynamic properties. Additionally, it addressed memory leaks in php_scandir, resolved DBA issues, rectified filter bugs, corrected GD issues, mitigated intl overflows, resolved LDAP issues, fixed libxml issues, improved Opcache performance, eliminated JIT segfaults, and rectified OpenSSL issues. The update also resolved issues related to PDO Firebird, PDO Sqlite, PgSql, and SPL, while also addressing resource leaks in iptcembed().
April 22, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — April 20th, 2025

FreeType Fixes Inefficient Code Causing 10x Startup Time Hit When Loading Arial TTF Font
The FreeType library for rendering text onto bitmaps that is widely used by a variety of applications has landed a set of three patches today providing an important performance improvement to address a significant inefficiency within the existing FreeType codebase.
April 20, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.13 Series Ends With The Linux 6.13.12 Release
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released a few new Linux kernel stable point releases today for Easter and also capping off the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle in the process.
April 20, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.12.24 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.24 is now available:
April 20, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.13.12 released
Linux kernel version 6.13.12 (EOL) is now available:
April 20, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.14.3 released
Linux kernel version 6.14.3 is now available:
April 20, 2025 — Source

LXQt 2.2.0 released
The LXQt team has announced the release of LXQt 2.2.0, the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment. The update features improvements to various components, such as Wayland support, multi-screen configurations, and the most recent stable versions of compatible Wayland compositors.
April 20, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA Engineer Posts New NOVA Driver Patches - Still Far From Doing Anything Useful
Merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel were the very early boilerplate code around the NOVA driver as a new, open-source and Rust-written NVIDIA Linux kernel graphics/display driver. This successor to the Nouveau kernel driver is going to leverage the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) to make it easier to develop and maintain this open-source driver. But depending upon the GSP also means the NOVA driver will only work with RTX 20 class GPUs and newer. This driver is going to be built up gradually within the mainline Linux kernel and coming out this Easter were a new set of 16 patches for further laying the NOVA groundwork.
April 20, 2025 — Source

OpenVPN DCO Driver Queued In Net-Next Ahead Of Linux 6.16
The long-in-development OpenVPN DCO kernel driver for providing data channel offloading (DCO) to yield faster OpenVPN performance looks like it's now in a state for upstreaming with the Linux 6.16
April 20, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — April 17th, 2025

Arch Linux Is The Latest Distribution Replacing Redis With Valkey
Arch Linux is the latest Linux distribution replacing its Redis packages with the Valkey fork.
April 17, 2025 — Source

Forget Windows 11. These mad lads made Linux look like Windows XP!
You can use the Windows XP interface (as well as other Windows versions) on the Linux distribution Q4OS. Here's how you can set it up.
April 17, 2025 — Source

Framework 13 With AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series "Strix Point" Makes For A Great Linux Laptop
Today the review embargo lifts on the Framework 13 with AMD Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" SoCs: wow, what an upgrade! I've spent the past week testing out the Framework 13 with the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and it's been terrific. Framework 13's modularity continues to pay off and allows easily upgrading to the new Strix Point bearing motherboard with AMD Zen 5 CPU cores and the Radeon 890M (RDNA 3.5) integrated graphics.
April 17, 2025 — Source

GNOME 48.1 released
Jeremy Bicha has announced the release of GNOME 48.1, a maintenance update that focuses on addressing several bug fixes for the GNOME 48 series.
April 17, 2025 — Source

How to upgrade to Fedora Silverblue 42 and roll back if needed
Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote an editorial pushing readers to download Fedora Silverblue 40 instead of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Both were being released in April 2024, but Fedora Silverblue has a newer atomic architecture, which makes the operating system more resilient and provides you with tools to roll back updates safely if needed.
April 17, 2025 — Source

Intel Graphics Compiler 2.10.8 Brings More Improvements For Xe2 & Xe3
Released on Wednesday was IGC 2.10.8 as the newest update to the Intel Graphics Compiler that is used by their Compute Runtime OpenCL/Level-Zero stack on Windows and Linux as well as being used as their graphics shader compiler under their Windows driver.
April 17, 2025 — Source

Intel Media Driver 2025Q1 Advertises Experimental Support For Panther Lake
In addition to this week's updated Intel oneVPL GPU Runtime, Intel's software engineers also released their new quarterly version of the Intel Media Driver that provides Video Acceleration API (VA-API) support for integrated graphics hardware going back to Broadwell processors and through the next-gen Panther Lake processors.
April 17, 2025 — Source

KDE Gear 25.04 Delivers Many Improvements To KDE's Applications
Following the recent Plasma 6.3 desktop release, KDE Gear 25.04 is now available for shipping all of the latest and greatest KDE applications.
April 17, 2025 — Source

Libxml2 2.14.2 released
Libxml2 2.14.2 has been released, addressing several security and compatibility issues. Key updates include fixes for two CVEs, resolved build errors, and additional improvements.
April 17, 2025 — Source

LXQt 2.2 Desktop Released With Better Wayland Support
LXQt 2.2 was christened today as the newest stable update to this lightweight, open-source Qt desktop environment.
April 17, 2025 — Source

MX Linux 23.6 brings Debian freshness, without the systemd funk
Bookworm 12.10-based release is a few steps ahead of upstream
April 17, 2025 — Source

These 6 Linux apps are the secret sauce to my creative process
As a creator, I know having the right tools can make all the difference. Here are some of my favorite Linux creative apps you need to try.
April 17, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu 25.04 Now Available For Download With GNOME 48
Ubuntu 25.04 ISO images are now available for download along with the various flavors of this newest six-month, non-LTS Linux distribution update.
April 17, 2025 — Source

You can now use OCCT on Linux-based systems
OCCT is now available for Linux. This marks the culmination of three years of development, primarily focused on overhauling the software's underlying infrastructure. This expansion opens up new testing possibilities across a broader range of hardware, including gaming handhelds running SteamOS.
April 17, 2025 — Source or Watch Video

Software — Open Source — April 11th, 2025

Asahi Linux Runs into Issues with M4 Support
Due to Apple Silicon changes, the Asahi Linux project is at odds with adding support for the M4 chips.
April 11, 2025 — Source

BM z17 Open-Source Compiler Support Now Being Officially Recognized
Earlier this week IBM announced the z17 mainframes powered by Tellum I processors. But months prior we've seen IBM patches for an "arch15" target for SystemZ within the open-source compilers that we expected was z17. IBM has now confirmed such and has begun updating the open-source compilers to acknowledge this z17 compiler support.
April 11, 2025 — Source

Chaos Engineering for Microservices
Learn how to implement chaos engineering using Chaos Toolkit and Chaos Monkey for Java (Spring Boot), Node.js, Kubernetes, and Istio to enhance system resilience.
April 11, 2025 — Source

Haiku OS Continued Improving Hardware Driver Support In March
The Haiku OS open-source operating system inspired by BeOS has issued their newest monthly development report.
April 11, 2025 — Source

Intel Preps VRR Refactoring For Linux 6.16, More Xe3 Panther Lake Display Enablement
Intel graphics driver engineers today sent out their first batch of feature updates to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the next Linux 6.16 kernel cycle.
April 11, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.15 Fixes Intel Graphics Flickering Issue, Adds AMDGPU DMEM Cgroups Support
With being just one week past the Linux 6.15 merge window, a lot of fixes have been flowing into the mainline tree as is usual for the early stages of the kernel cycle. Merged overnight were a number of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) fixes that include some notable alterations for the Intel and AMD Radeon kernel graphics drivers.
April 11, 2025 — Source

OpenVPN DCO Driver For The Linux Kernel Revised A 25th Time To Boost VPN Performance
For those relying on OpenVPN for your virtual private networking (VPN) needs, one of the most exciting innovations in recent times besides transitioning to the WireGuard alternative is the OpenVPN DCO kernel driver. This "data channel offload" driver has the potential to provide significant performance advantages over the current OpenVPN performance.
April 11, 2025 — Source

PHP 8.3.20 and 8.4.6 packages for Fedora/RHEL released
Remi Collet has released 8.3.20 and 8.4.6 packages for Fedora and RHEL-based Linux distributions.
April 11, 2025 — Source

The most important experimental distro you've never heard of gets new project lead
Plus a fresh version ... nine years after its last
April 11, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu 25.04 versus Fedora Workstation 42 Performance On AMD Strix Point
With both Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42 releasing this month you may be curious how these two Linux distributions are competing for performance. Well, it's a very tight race for common Intel/AMD x86_64 hardware. In this article are some benchmarks looking at clean installs of Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora Workstation 42 on AMD Strix Point.
April 11, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — April 7th, 2025

DXVK 2.6.1 Released With More Bug Fixes & Performance Optimizations
DXVK 2.6.1 was just released as the newest update to this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 over Vulkan API implementation used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and other softwarefor enjoying older Windows games on Linux.
April 7, 2025 — Source

FFmpeg Lands AES-NI Optimized Implementation For Big Speed-Up
FFmpeg is known for carrying a lot of hand-optimized Assembly code for speeding up this widely-used multimedia library and taking advantage of AVX-512 and other modern CPU ISA capabilities. Merged yesterday was support for making use of AES-NI for those relying on Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) within FFmpeg for encrypted video streams.
April 7, 2025 — Source

Five Year Old Ubuntu Bug For NVIDIA Suspend/Resume Experience: Now Working On X11, Wayland Not Yet
For those looking toward a pleasant suspend and resume experience on Ubuntu with the default GNOME desktop, the Ubuntu 25.04 cycle is poised to allow for addressing a five-year-old Ubuntu bug report around the experience. However, for the near-term this is only expected to be in good shape for those using the GNOME X11 session with the GNOME Wayland session requiring further work to the Mutter compositor.
April 7, 2025 — Source

HPE's unnamed 1,152-core system pushes Turbostat to support 8,192 cores in Linux 6.15
That's a lot of cores.
April 7, 2025 — Source

I'm a Linux power user, and the latest Ubuntu update put a smile on my face
Canonical is preparing the release of Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) with a new kernel, the latest desktop environment, and an improved installer.
April 7, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.14.1 Released With An Initial Set Of Fixes & Hardware Quirks
For those that prefer waiting for the first point release before upgrading to a new feature release, Linux 6.14.1 was released this morning with an initial collection of fixes atop the Linux 6.14 codebase from two weeks ago.
April 7, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.1.133 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.133 is now available:
April 7, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.12.22 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.22 is now available:
April 7, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.13.10 released
Linux kernel version 6.13.10 is now available:
April 7, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.14.1 released
Linux kernel version 6.14.1 is now available:
April 7, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.6.86 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.86 is now available:
April 7, 2025 — Source

Liquorix Linux Kernel 6.14-2 released
Steven Barrett has released a new Liquorix kernel derived from Linux kernel 6.14.1. The Liquorix Linux kernel is an enthusiast Linux kernel that is optimized for low-latency computing in audiovisual production, reduced frame time variations in games, and unparalleled responsiveness in interactive systems. It is available for Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch Linux.
April 7, 2025 — Source

Top 10 FOSS apps to make your Linux experience more enjoyable
Lately, Microsoft's been making a lot of controversial moves, from removing the BYPASSNRO command (there's an official bypass for that by the way), to making Windows 11's hardware requirements stricter, causing frustration among users with older machines.
April 7, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu 25.04 Boosting AMD EPYC 9005 Performance Even Higher: ~14% Faster Than Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
At the end of March with the Ubuntu 25.04 beta release I began running Ubuntu 25.04 benchmarks on desktop hardware and finding some nice performance improvements thanks to the fresh Linux 6.14 kernel and other new software updates found in this next Ubuntu release. While those numbers were positive, the Ubuntu 25.04 beta performance I am seeing on AMD EPYC 5th Gen "Turin" servers is even more exhilarating.
April 7, 2025 — Source

Zed 0.180.3 released
Zed 0.180.3 has resolved issues related to crashes when expanding diff hunks with multiple cursors, as well as a problem where dismissing the git onboarding banner would not remain effective across sessions.
April 7, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — April 2nd, 2025

GNOME & KDE Plasma Wayland Sessions Outperforming Xfce + LXQt On Ubuntu 25.04 For Linux Gaming
Last week I posted some initial GNOME 48 and KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop gaming benchmarks on Ubuntu 25.04 beta for looking at the performance of those two leading desktop options for this upcoming Ubuntu Linux release. Both GNOME and KDE under Wayland were outperforming KDE on X11 (and GNOME on X11 wasn't even working due to bugs). Some Phoronix readers questioned though whether the Wayland advantage on GNOME/KDE was due to those desktops losing focus on X11 support or if they are just too bloated.
April 2, 2025 — Source

Intel Linux Driver Finally Dropping The Experimental Flag For Original DG1 Graphics
Intel's original DG1 discrete GPU was principally a development vehicle on the path to DG2/Alchemist. It did appear with the Iris Xe Max laptop dGPU in very few configurations but surprisingly it's taken until now where the Intel Linux graphics driver is set to remove the experimental "force_probe" flag on these pre-Alchemist discrete GPUs.
April 2, 2025 — Source

Intel TDX Is Becoming Potentially Faster, Avoiding "Slow & Buggy" Code Path On Linux
Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) for providing hardware-backed isolation and confidential computing support for virtual machines (VMs) on modern Xeon processors is about to become more reliable and potentially faster for some workloads.
April 2, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.3.4 Now Shipping With The Latest Crash Fixes
KDE Plasma 6.3.4 shipped this morning as the newest monthly point release for the Plasma 6.3 desktop.
April 2, 2025 — Source

Many KVM Updates Merged For Linux 6.15
This morning's SourceIntel TDX update reminded me that I still hadn't gotten around to digging into the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.15 kernel merge window. Here is a look at the KVM changes this cycle that continue to be particularly heavy on Intel and AMD virtualization improvements.
April 2, 2025 — Source

Qt 6.9 Released With Performance Work, Better Emoji Handling & Greater Visualizations
Qt 6.9 was just released as the newest version of this open-source, cross-platform graphics toolkit.
April 2, 2025 — Source or Watch Video

Software — Open Source — March 31st, 2025

AMD Software Advancements, RDNA4 & Ryzen 9900X3D Series Excited Linux Users In Q1
With Q1 drawing to an end, here is a look back at the most popular Linux/open-source news and Linux hardware reviews around AMD during the quarter on Phoronix. With 109 AMD news articles so far this quarter around their Linux software/hardware efforts and another 20 AMD Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark articles, they continue firing on all cylinders for pushing both their client and server wares forward outside the confines of Windows.
March 31, 2025 — Source

ArchInstall 3.0.4 released
Another update for the Arch Linux installer has been released, addressing an issue with package loading and an update to the Swedish translation.
March 31, 2025 — Source

CNCF Accepts Kubescape as an Incubating Project
The CNCF Technical Steering Committee (TOC) recently announced that it has accepted Kubescape as an incubating project. Kubescape offers security coverage for the Kubernetes environment from development to deployment. It is available as a CLI tool and a Kubernetes operator.
March 31, 2025 — Source

Dasharo Platform Driver Aims To Enhance The Experience Using This Coreboot Downstream
The consulting firm 3mdeb's Dasharo open-source firmware distribution derived from Coreboot could soon feature improved integration under Linux thanks to a pending ACPI platform driver.
March 31, 2025 — Source

Firefox 137 Release Brings VA-API Accelerated H.265 On Linux
The Mozilla Firefox 137 release binaries are now available ahead of the official release set for Tuesday.
March 31, 2025 — Source

FreeBSD On Laptops Sees New Power Management Driver, WiFi 4 / WiFi 5 Progress
Over the past number of months there has been an effort underway to improve FreeBSD laptop support with financial backing by Dell, AMD, and Framework among others. This has resulted in power management improvements, increasing the focus on WiFi driver support for FreeBSD, and related areas to make FreeBSD on laptops more appealing and relevant in 2025.
March 31, 2025 — Source

Intel-Started Cloud Hypervisor Project Adds Experimental RISC-V Support
Cloud Hypervisor began as an open-source Intel software project more than a half-decade ago with an emphasis on security and cloud deployments while leveraging the Rust programming language. With time its scope has broadened a lot as has its industry adoption.
March 31, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.15 exFAT Can Delete Files Much Faster: 4+ Minutes To 1.6 Second Optimization
For those dealing with exFAT formatted storage devices under Linux, the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel has a big optimization for yielding much faster delete performance when making use of the "discard" mount option.
March 31, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.15 Introduces SPI Offloading, Converts More Drivers To The Faux Bus
Greg Kroah-Hartman on Sunday submitted all of the "char/misc" patches for the Linux 6.15 merge window for this random catch-all area of the kernel with small drivers and other random/obscure hardware support.
March 31, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.15 Wires Up SoundWire Bulk Register Access
The in-development Linux 6.15 kernel is continuing to enhance its support for MIPI's SoundWire specification for small audio peripherals with this two-pin, low-complexity audio interface.
March 31, 2025 — Source

PostgreSQL Lands Batch Mode & Other Async I/O Improvements
Last week PostgreSQL merged support for IO_uring that can provide for "considerably faster" performance of this popular open-source database server. Over the weekend some additional improvements were merged to the asynchronous I/O "AIO" code to PostgreSQL, including introducing a new batch mode that can also provide a performance win.
March 31, 2025 — Source

Redis-Forked Valkey 8.1 Released - Turns To AVX2 For Better Performance
It's been just over one year since the Linux Foundation and partners announced Valkey as a fork of Redis. Following the release of Redis 8.0 in September for this in-memory key-value database, Valkey 8.1 is out today.
March 31, 2025 — Source

The Production-Ready Kubernetes Service Checklist
Prepare your Kubernetes cluster for production with high availability, private networking, robust security, monitoring, auto-scaling, backups, and fault tolerance.
March 31, 2025 — Source

wlroots Merges Wayland Color Management / HDR Support
The wlroots library used by the Sway compositor and other Wayland compositors has merged support for the color-management-v1 protocol that is notable for enabling High Dynamic Range (HDR) display use under Linux.
March 31, 2025 — Source

Your Linux gaming rig just got a serious boost with CachyOS's latest update
CachyOS, a relatively new Arch-based Linux distribution that is designed to be easy to use and is highly optimized, has just received its March 2025 update. This release is substantial, with the inclusion of a new bootloader with Btrfs snapshot support and better device compatibility for gamers and laptop users. If you're a Linux enthusiast and want something new to try, this definitely seems like an interesting choice.
March 31, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — March 28th, 2025

GNOME 48 & KDE Plasma 6.3 Delivering Great Wayland Desktop Experience On Ubuntu 25.04 For Linux Gaming
While there were a few graphics benchmarks in yesterday's Ubuntu 25.04 beta benchmarks, today's article is looking more at the Ubuntu 25.04 Linux gaming performance for both the GNOME 48 and KDE Plasma 6.3 desktops that default to the Wayland-based session by default while also trying out the X11 session for both of these desktops.
March 28, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.15 Better Handles PS5 Controllers, AMD Human Presence Detection Off By Default
All of the HID subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.15 merge window.
March 28, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.15 Networking Delivers Many Nice Performance Optimizations & New Hardware
The networking subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel bring multiple nice performance optimizations to enhance Linux networking speeds. The Linux 6.15 networking pull also has support for a number of new wireless and wired network chipsets.
March 28, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.15 Landing Backlight Driver For Various Apple iPhones & iPads
Back during the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle initial support for many (pre-M1) Apple devices were upstreamed including various iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch devices. That though was the very preliminary support and continuing to work their way upstream are various drivers/patches to further enhance the support. Now for the Linux 6.15 kernel is a new Apple backlight driver for controlling the backlight on various mobile Apple devices.
March 28, 2025 — Source

Linux Flips Around Its Behavior For Spectre-BHB Handling On ARM64
All of the ARM64 changes were merged this week to the Linux 6.15 kernel for enhancing the 64-bit ARM processor support.
March 28, 2025 — Source

Navigating Linux security and management in a multi-OS landscape [Q&A]
Linux's expanding use beyond servers has broadened its attack surface. Plus, its open-source nature, while great for developers, can also lead to mistakes and security holes. We spoke to Apu Pavithran, founder and CEO of Hexnode, to find out more about why Linux is being targeted and how it can be defended.
March 28, 2025 — Source

New Ubuntu Linux security bypasses require manual mitigations
Three security bypasses have been discovered in Ubuntu Linux's unprivileged user namespace restrictions, which could be enable a local attacker to exploit vulnerabilities in kernel components.
March 28, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu 25.04 'Plucky Puffin' beta released with just weeks until final ISO drops
Canonical has released the beta build of Ubuntu 25.04 'Plucky Puffin' as we get closer to the final launch date, April 17th. With just weeks to go, the beta gives you a pretty good idea of what the final release will look like. Additionally, it should be free of showstopper or installer bugs, so you can probably try it out without too many issues.
March 28, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu Provides More Insight Into Their Decision Not To "-O3" Optimize All Packages
Since last year Canonical had been investigating using -O3 compiler optimizations for their Ubuntu package builds in the name of delivering better performance for Ubuntu Linux. A few weeks back though they decided they would not use -O3 optimizations for all packages. They have now provided more engineering insight into their reasoning and the results of their investigation into -O3 compiler optimizations for more packages.
March 28, 2025 — Source

Two Years In The Making, Intel Linux Driver Enables CPS Compression For Alchemist GPUs
A two year old Intel Mesa merge request was finally merged for Mesa 25.1 today for enabling functionality on DG2/Alchemist GPUs and newer.
March 28, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — March 24th, 2025

AMD Lands LLVM Flang Fortran Runtime Support For Compiling Directly On The GPU
An AMD engineer has landed experimental support within the LLVM codebase for building Flang-RT on GPUs. Flang-RT being the run-time for LLVM's modern Fortran "Flang" compiler and in turn this effort working to allow more Fortran code to easily run on GPUs with capable LLVM back-ends.
March 24, 2025 — Source

Bcachefs Aims For "Soft Frozen" On-Disk Format With Linux 6.15 Along With New Features
Last month Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet talked of Bcachefs getting to the point of freezing its on-disk format with future on-disk format updates slated to be optional. With today's Bcachefs pull request for Linux 6.15, it's now being treated as "soft frozen" and also landing other new features for this copy-on-write file-system. Among the new features is case insensitive file/folder support contributed by Valve.
March 24, 2025 — Source

Btrfs Adding Fast/Realtime Zstd Compression & Other Performance Optimizations
LINUX STORAGEDavid Sterba of SUSE sent in all of the Btrfs file-system updates today for the now-open Linux 6.15 kernel merge window. There are some new performance optimizations, new and faster Zstd compression level options, and other changes slated to be included for this CoW file-system in Linux 6.15.
March 24, 2025 — Source

Chromium update for Fedora 40
Updated Chromium packages have been released for Fedora 40
March 24, 2025 — Source

deepin 25 Alpha is a sleek Linux distro from China with Linyaps packaging -- but can it be trusted?
deepin 25 Alpha has arrived (download here), promising an overhauled desktop experience, advanced personalization options, and improved system-level features. On the surface that sounds great, but there is a legitimate question that remains -- should users really trust an operating system developed in Communist China?
March 24, 2025 — Source

EndeavorOS Mercury Neo Available
A new release from the EndeavorOS team ships with Plasma 6.3 and other goodies.
March 24, 2025 — Source

FaunaDB shuts down but hints at open source future
Capital costs of creating document-relational serverless database take their toll
March 24, 2025 — Source

Faster Intel/AMD Crypto Performance & Initial Intel APX Enablement Slated For Linux 6.15
Among the early pull requests submitted in advance of the Linux 6.14 stable release and in turn the Linux 6.15 merge window opening were the x86 FPU updates. Notable this round are faster x86/x86_64 encryption/decryption performance for both Intel and AMD processors as well as beginning to land the kernel-side changes needed to support Intel Advanced Performance Extensions (APX).
March 24, 2025 — Source

Fedora 42 Beta Has Arrived
The Fedora Project has announced the availability of the first beta release for version 42 of the open-source distribution.
March 24, 2025 — Source

Fedora 42 beta has so many spins, it'll make your head whirl
The answer to the ultimate question of Linux, the Universe, and Everything?
March 24, 2025 — Source

Forget Windows 11 -- ReactOS, the Microsoft-free Windows operating system, just got a massive update! Download it now
Just as you can get versions of Android that are free from Google, including LineageOS and /e/OS, so there are also alternative Windows operating systems not developed by Microsoft.
March 24, 2025 — Source

GIMP 3.0.2 Released To Fix Early Bugs From GIMP 3.0
GIMP 3.0 was 7+ years in development before releasing as stable last week for this much anticipated, GTK3-ported image manipulation program update. Thankfully we're not seeing any lengthy periods of time for new bug-fix releases with today already marking the release of GIMP 3.0.2.
March 24, 2025 — Source

GNOME 48 lands with performance boosts, new fonts, better accessibility
Tweaks mean smoother operation even on low-end kit
March 24, 2025 — Source

Google Cloud Announces Kubernetes History Inspector to Visualise Cluster Logs
Google Cloud has released a new open-source tool that visualises cluster logs chronologically to simplify troubleshooting in Kubernetes environments.
March 24, 2025 — Source

Intel's AVX10.2 Patches Merged For GCC 15 To Drop 256-bit Rounding & AVX10.2-256 Options
What a week. Last week Intel published a new AVX10 whitepaper where they dropped the optional 512-bit support of AVX10.2 and confirmed future P and E cores will have AVX10.2-512 support unconditionally. A very welcome change by Intel albeit late in rushing to get patches out to change that behavior ahead of the GCC 15 stable compiler release as well as working similar changes into the LLVM Clang compiler.
March 24, 2025 — Source

Libinput 1.28 Released With Three-Finger Drag
Libinput 1.28 debuted today by Red Hat's input expert Peter Hutterer. With this updated input handling library used by both Wayland and X.Org Server environments there is now support for three-finger drag on touchpads.
March 24, 2025 — Source

LibXSLT and Webkit2GTK updates for Debian 11 LTS
Debian GNU/Linux 11 LTS has been updated with two security updates for libxslt and webkit2gtk:
March 24, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.15 CRC Code Should See Big Speed-Ups For Intel/AMD AVX-512 CPUs
While we are still awaiting the Linux 6.14 release (or a 6.14-rc8 release) with no kernel drop having occurred on Sunday, early pull requests for the Linux 6.15 kernel cycle continue flowing in. Among the early pull requests over the weekend were the CRC code updates that include some nice optimizations for those running on AVX-512 processors.
March 24, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.14 Released With Working NTSYNC Driver, AMD Ryzen AI Accelerator Support
There was a hiccup yesterday with no Linux 6.14 release or 6.14-rc8 otherwise... Linus Torvalds has a very good track record of sticking to his Sunday release regiment. Yet yesterday was quiet. Today though Linus Torvalds released the Linux 6.14 kernel as the newest stable version. Linux 6.14 is what's set to go on and power Ubuntu 25.04, Fedora 42, and other spring 2025 Linux distribution releases.
March 24, 2025 — Source

Linux Kernel 6.14 released
The final version of Linux kernel 6.14 is now available.
March 24, 2025 — Source

Liquorix Linux Kernel 6.13-6 released
Steven Barrett has released another Liquorix kernel derived from Linux kernel 6.13.8. The Liquorix Linux kernel is an enthusiast Linux kernel that is optimized for low-latency computing in audiovisual production, reduced frame time variations in games, and unparalleled responsiveness in interactive systems. It is available for Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch Linux.
March 24, 2025 — Source

New FWCTL Subsystem Submitted For Linux 6.15
Assuming no objections from Linus Torvalds, the now open Linux 6.15 merge window could introduce a brand new subsystem: fwctl.
March 24, 2025 — Source

NLTK update for Ubuntu
New NLTK packages have been released for Ubuntu Linux versions 14.04 LTS, 16.04 LTS, 18.04 LTS, and 20.04 LTS to resolve various security concerns:
March 24, 2025 — Source

Radare2 update for SLE 15
New radare2 packages have been made available for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP6 to resolve two security vulnerabilities:
March 24, 2025 — Source

Wayland Protocols 1.42 Updates Cursor Shape & Tablet Protocols
With the FreeDesktop.org GitLab infrastructure getting back up, Wayland Protocols 1.42 was released today as the newest version of this official set of protocols for Wayland compositors.
March 24, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — March 21st, 2025

AMD Announces Open-Source "GAIA" For GenAI But Currently Windows-Only
AMD on Thursday announced GAIA for "Generative AI Is Awesome" as a means of easily running local large language models (LLMs) on Ryzen AI PCs with the XDNA NPU. GAIA provides an easy software demonstration for Ryzen AI capabilities but sadly for the moment is limited to Microsoft Windows platforms.
March 21, 2025 — Source

ASUS ROG Flow Z13 Improvements For Linux, RGB Controls For The ROG Ally
A set of eleven patches being worked on for the ASUS HID and platform drivers work to enhance the support for the AMD Strix Halo powered ROG Flow Z13 (2025) laptop as well as adding RGB control support for the ROG Ally gaming handheld.
March 21, 2025 — Source

KDE neon 20250320 released
KDE neon 20250320 has been released. KDE neon is a Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu and the most recent version of the KDE Plasma desktop.
March 21, 2025 — Source

Dynamic EPP & Raw EPP Features Coming To AMD P-State Driver
The AMD P-State Linux kernel driver for CPU frequency scaling with modern Ryzen processors has been working out quite well and proving very effective over the prior ACPI CPUFreq generic driver use. Beyond recently being extended to becoming the default for EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors, AMD P-State has recently been seeing some patches for additional feature work.
March 21, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.14 Sees Last Minute Fix For A Two Year Old Regression Causing A 30% Performance Drop
Submitted today ahead of the Linux 6.14 stable release expected Sunday is a lone scheduler fix for the kernel. This patch is for reverting a change made to the Linux kernel two years ago that ended up regressing some workloads with a significant performance hit.
March 21, 2025 — Source

Linux Security Hardening Cache Randomization Was Inadvertently Using The Same Seed
Ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle a few early pull requests have already been sent in to Linus Torvalds in advance of the anticipated v6.14 release on Sunday. Among those early changes for Linux 6.15 are the SLAB allocator updates that include a fix for cache randomization with kvmalloc inadvertently being inadequate due to accidentally using the same randomization seed.
March 21, 2025 — Source

Mesa 25.0.2 released
Eric Engestrom has announced the release of Mesa 25.0.2, a bugfix update that resolves multiple issues within Mesa. The release covers multiple bug fixes, including the adjustment of log severity when enabling parameters in LinuxVirtGpu, rectifying stores following discard operations, and resetting syncobj to prevent kernel warnings.
March 21, 2025 — Source

New Intel/AMD GPU Features, Apple Touch Bar Drivers & Other Likely Changes For Linux 6.15
With the Linux 6.14 stable kernel likely debuting on Sunday, the Linux 6.15 merge window will then open for kicking off the next development cycle. There's a lot of exciting changes and new features building up ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window.
March 21, 2025 — Source

Raspberry Pi Announces rpi-image-gen To Help Craft Custom Software Images
Following a slew of hardware announcements in the past few months like the RP2350 shipping, Raspberry Pi 5 16GB, Raspberry Pi Monitor, and Raspberry Pi 500, today they have a new software announcement. Today they formally announced "rpi-image-gen" as a new tool to help customers in crafting customized software OS images.
March 21, 2025 — Source

ReactOS 0.4.15 Released For This "Open-Source Windows" OS With Tons Of Enhancements
It's been over three years since the last ReactOS open-source operating system release for this platform working on API/ABI compatibility with Microsoft Windows. Today ReactOS 0.4.15 was finally published.
March 21, 2025 — Source

Vulkan 1.4.311 Released With New Extension For BFloat16
The Vulkan 1.4.311 specification update is out today with a handful of issues resolved with various clarifications and other subtle refinements. Plus two new extensions.
March 21, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — March 17th, 2025

AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D Linux Performance
Last week AMD began shipping the Ryzen 9 9900X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D Zen 5 3D V-Cache desktop processors. We delivered Ryzen 9 9950X3D benchmarks and review for launch day but AMD sadly didn't seed any review samples of the 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X3D processor. Being curious about its performance for Linux developers, enthusiasts, and technical computing workloads, I bought the $600 USD processor on launch day for delivering some Linux benchmarks.
March 17, 2025 — Source

Big Rust Update Merged For GCC 15 - Lands The Polonius Borrow Checker
Some 145 patches for the Rust "gccrs" front-end were posted today and subsequently merged to GCC Git ahead of the upcoming GCC 15.1 stable release.
March 17, 2025 — Source

Debian 12.10 now available with latest patches rolled into ISO
Over the weekend, the Debian project announced the availability of Debian 12.10, which comes with all the latest security patches rolled into the ISO image. If you're already running Debian 12, you can just install available updates to get to Debian 12.10. The main benefit of this update is for those installing Debian on a system, with the updates included; you don't have to download them post-install.
March 17, 2025 — Source

FFmpeg Lands Vulkan Improvements With Initial FFV1 Vulkan Decoder
FFmpeg developer Lynne has landed a number of Vulkan Video improvements today into FFmpeg Git. In addition, there is now an FFV1 Vulkan-based decoder.
March 17, 2025 — Source

FreeDesktop.org GitLab Begins Its Week Long Cloud/Server Migration
It's going to be a light week for development of the Mesa graphics drivers, Wayland, various other X.Org related components, and the dozens of other open-source projects that rely on the FreeDesktop.org GitLab for facilitating merge requests, CI testing, and related infrastructure. The FreeDesktop.org server/cloud migration has begun and may last until next weekend.
March 17, 2025 — Source

GIMP 3.0 Stable Being Released As Long-Awaited Update To Adobe Photoshop Alternative
After some 13 years of writing about GIMP 3.0 development, today is finally the day: GIMP 3.0 has been tagged and is in the process of being released.
March 17, 2025 — Source

How to install the latest Linux kernel on Ubuntu: 2 ways
Did you know you can install the most recent Linux kernel on some distributions? We'll show you how it's done on Ubuntu (and why you may or may not) want to do it.
March 17, 2025 — Source

Intel XeSS SDK 2.0.1 Published With New XeSS 2 Features, Still Closed-Source
The Intel XeSS SDK 2.0.1 was published today to GitHub as their first XeSS 2.0 release being available there and their first released version since the XeSS SDK 1.3.1 update from last July. While on GitHub, the XeSS SDK remains closed-source and Windows-focused.
March 17, 2025 — Source

Linux Kernel 6.14-rc7 released
Linus Torvalds has announced the release of the seventh release candidate for Linux kernel 6.14, with the final version anticipated next weekend. The release covers a series of minor and secure patches, featuring corrections for IP block references, APK adjustments, and reverts. The updates encompass a resolution for b->written overflow, an adjustment for absent newlines in printing macro examples, and a correction for the missing .is_two_pixels_per_container. Additional modifications involve transforming blocking notification chains into raw formats, rectifying state transitions for SNK_WAIT_CAPABILITIES, and incorporating support for imagis IST3038H.
March 17, 2025 — Source

Raspberry Pi RP2350 Now Available For Purchase, Stacked Memory Variant Coming Soon
Raspberry Pi last year announced the RP2350 second-generation micro-controller that debuted within their $5 Raspberry Pi Pico 2 single board computer. Today they announced the RP2350 micro-controller is now available to purchase for your own micro-controller needs.
March 17, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu 25.04 To Enable NVIDIA Dynamic Boost By Default
The upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 Linux OS release will be enabling NVIDIA Dynamic Boost support by default when using their packaged driver support on capable laptops.
March 17, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — March 14th, 2025

.NET 9.0, LibXML2, Gvfs, and more updates for Oracle Linux
Oracle Linux has announced the release of multiple security updates, which encompass a .NET 9.0 security update, a bug fix and enhancement update for the 8.NET version, a perl-CPAN bug fix update, a libxml2 security update, a gvfs bug fix update, a libsemanage bug fix and enhancement update, an oVirt 4.5 ovirt-engine bug fix update, a gcc-toolset-13-annobin bug fix and enhancement update, a tracker-miners bug fix and enhancement update, a virt-manager bug fix update, a valgrind bug fix update, a portreserve bug fix update, a firewalld bug fix update, a traceroute bug fix update, a lvm2 bug fix update, a dnf bug fix update, a systemd bug fix update, an openldap bug fix update, a NetworkManager bug fix update, an autofs bug fix update, a tuned bug fix update, a mdadm bug fix update, a pcp bug fix update, and a kernel security update.
March 14, 2025 — Source

AdGuard brings full-system ad blocking to Linux with new standalone app
For many years now, Linux users looking to block ads have needed to piece together a mixture of browser extensions, DNS-based filtering, and network-wide tools (such as Pi-hole). While these solutions certainly help, none of them offer complete system-wide protection.
March 14, 2025 — Source

Arm Shows Off Great Performance Results For PGO & BOLT With LLVM/Clang
Arm software engineer Peter Waller has shared some insightful benchmarks of the impact of PGO, Context Sensitive PGO (CSPGO), and BOLT optimizations across various classes of Neoverse processor designs.
March 14, 2025 — Source

Firefox, krb5, OpenShift, and more updates for RHEL
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been updated with multiple security enhancements, which include updates for Firefox, krb5, and OpenShift Container Platform 4.12.74 packages, along with the release of Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces 3.19.0 and a bug fix, as well as a security update for grub2:
March 14, 2025 — Source

Free95 0.2 Alpha Released As Open-Source Windows Compatible OS
While ReactOS is widely known as the open-source operating system working on maintaining software and driver compatibility with Microsoft Windows, there's another new one in the field and it's Free95. The Free95 project is working to become an open-source, Windows-compatible operating system. Version 0.2 Alpha of Free95 was released today for testing.
March 14, 2025 — Source

GCC 15 Deprecates Support For The ESA/390 Architecture
In addition to the COBOL language front-end being merged this week for the upcoming GCC 15 compiler release, another notable change also landed this week... Deprecating ESA/390 architecture support in preparation for its eventual removal.
March 14, 2025 — Source

Glibc's Hyperbolic Functions Score Nice Speed-Ups With FMA Optimizations
The GNU C Library's tanh and other hyperbolic functions are now as much as 14~17% faster on modern Intel and AMD CPUs with the FMA instruction support for fused multiply-add operations.
March 14, 2025 — Source

Gst-Plugins-Good1.0 security update for Debian 10 ELTS
Updated Gst-Plugins-Good1.0 packages are available for Debian GNU/Linux 10 Extended LTS:
March 14, 2025 — Source

IGT GPU Tools 2.0 Released For Helping To Develop DRM Drivers
IGT GPU Tools began as a set of tools by Intel for working on their Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver but with time has been broadened by the open-source community to support non-Intel drivers/hardware. IGT GPU Tools 2.0 was released on Thursday with new enhancements for these tests and other tools incorporated into the project.
March 14, 2025 — Source

Libxslt update for Slackware
Updated libxslt packages have been released for Slackware Linux:
March 14, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel update for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
Updated Linux kernel packages are available for Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS:
March 14, 2025 — Source

Linux Kernel, Tailscale, Forgejo-Runner, and more updates for SUSE Linux
SUSE Linux has announced the release of multiple security updates, which include significant updates for the Linux Kernel, as well as moderate updates for tailscale, forgejo-runner, python313, bsdtar, ffmpeg, build, and rubygem-rack-1_6:
March 14, 2025 — Source

Linux or Landfill? End of Windows 10 Leaves PC Charities with Tough Choice
Many donateable PCs can't run Windows 11. Should non-profits still be giving them away? Should they install Linux instead?
March 14, 2025 — Source

Mesa RADV/RadeonSI Now Support RDNA4 GPUs With Radeon GPU Profiler
Landing in Mesa 25.1 today for the RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI OpenGL drivers is Radeon GPU Profiler "RGP" integration for RDNA4/GFX12 GPUs with the newly-launched Radeon RX 9070 series.
March 14, 2025 — Source

Mediatek DRM Driver Adding MT8365 "Genio 350" Support In Linux 6.15
On top of the big features for the Intel graphics driver code and new AMD hardware support coming for Linux 6.15 along with the initial NOVA driver stub, the smaller Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers have also been lining up their changes for this next kernel version. With the Mediatek DRM driver for Linux 6.15 it's set to add MT8365 SoC support, perhaps better known as the Genio 350.
March 14, 2025 — Source

PHP 8.1.32, 8.2.28, 8.3.19 and 8.4.5 packages for Fedora/RHEL released
Remi Collet has released 8.1.32, 8.2.28, 8.3.19 and 8.4.5 packages for Fedora and RHEL-based Linux distributions.
March 14, 2025 — Source

Regolith Linux makes learning a tiling window manager easy
A tiling window manager can be a thing of efficient beauty, but with them can come a steep learning curve. Regolith Linux aims to lesson that curve and ease the transition.
March 14, 2025 — Source

SUSE doubles down on AI and Multi-Linux Support to prove it's still in the game
What has more than a decade of support ahead of it cannot be dead
March 14, 2025 — Source

The 5 best rolling release Linux distributions - and why you should be using one
If you're looking for a new Linux distribution, maybe it's time you tried a rolling release distribution. Here are my top five options.
March 14, 2025 — Source

VSCodium 1.98.2.25072 released
VSCodium version 1.98.2.25072 has been released, which has been updated to VScode version 1.98.2. The documentation has been revised to correct the release links.
March 14, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — March 13th, 2025

5 Ways Docker Can Improve Security in Mobile App Development
Docker enhances mobile app security with dependency isolation, consistent environments, secure images, and proactive vulnerability scanning.
March 13, 2025 — Source

AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan 2025.Q1.3 released
AMD has announced the release of an updated open-source driver for Vulkan, featuring support for Navi48.
March 13, 2025 — Source

AMDVLK 2025.Q1.3 Brings Radeon RX 9070 Series Support
AMD today released AMDVLK 2025.Q1.3 as their official open-source Vulkan API driver for Linux systems. With this update is support for the Navi48 GPU with the recently-launched Radeon RX 9070 RDNA4 graphics cards.
March 13, 2025 — Source

Audacity 3.7.3 released
Audacity 3.7.3 is a hotfix release that resolves issues such as inaccurate outcomes when applying effects to multiple clips and the improper functioning of Truncate Silence in instances with multiple silent segments.
March 13, 2025 — Source

Bazzite DX and Bazzite GDX (Alpha) announced
Two new editions of Bazzite Linux focusing on development have been announced. Bazzite DX is an edition tailored for developers, incorporating tools such as Bluefin DX and Aurora DX. In contrast, GDX is designed specifically for game developers, featuring Godot and a range of community-built tools. The project necessitates constructive feedback and code contributions for enhancement. The images are currently in the alpha stages of development, with support anticipated in the near future. The objective is to establish a robust workstation for game development.
March 13, 2025 — Source

I installed Linux on an 8-inch mini laptop - and it's my new favorite way of computing
The eight-inch Piccolo N150 may be tiny, but its surprisingly good display and sturdy frame show it's no toy.
March 13, 2025 — Source

Intel Linux Graphics Driver Gets Patch To Help With Pixelflut Competition
A lot of Linux 6.15 intended patches by Intel for their kernel graphics driver have accumulated like enabling Xe3 "dirty rect" mode, SVM for the Xe driver, EU stall sampling, GuC power profile tuning, and more. Yesterday another drm-intel-gt-next pull request was submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window.
March 13, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 5.4.291 released
Linux kernel version 5.4.291 is now available:
March 13, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 5.10.235 released
Linux kernel version 5.10.235 is now available:
March 13, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.1.131 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.131 is now available:
March 13, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.6.83 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.83 is now available:
March 13, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.12.19 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.19 is now available:
March 13, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.13.7 released
Linux kernel version 6.13.7 is now available:
March 13, 2025 — Source

Mesa 25.1 To Enable Working Chromium VA-API Support
A new set of Gallium3D video acceleration front-end patches by AMD contractor David Rosca allow for the Google Chromium/Chrome browser code to enjoy working VA-API accelerated video decoding with the open-source Mesa drivers.
March 13, 2025 — Source

Microsoft Releases March 2025 Update To Azure Linux 3.0
Microsoft is out today with their newest monthly update to their in-house Linux distribution, Azure Linux, with all available package and security updates through this month's Patch Tuesday.
March 13, 2025 — Source

Node v20.19.0 (LTS) released
Node.js has announced a minor update, v20.19.0 Iron, which includes the backporting of require(esm) due to its significance and influence on the ecosystem. The feature now enables the loading of native ES modules via require(), a capability that was accessible in v20.x with the command line flag --experimental-require-module.
March 13, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA RTX Remix 1.0 Released With DXVK DLSS4 & Neural Radiance Cache
NVIDIA RTX Remix provides a platform for remastering classic DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 games. RTX Remix in turn depends in part on DXVK for running these old D3D8/D3D9 games atop the Vulkan API.
March 13, 2025 — Source

Proposed Patches Would Allow Using Linux Kernel's libperf From Python
A set of patches from IBM would introduce a C extension module for the Linux kernel's libperf code to allow usage from the Python programming language.
March 13, 2025 — Source

Rusticl Wins: Mesa Officially Deprecates Clover OpenCL
With today's Mesa 25.1-devel Git code, the "Clover" OpenCL Gallium3D state tracker is officially deprecated. Clover will be eventually removed with the Rust-written Rusticl OpenCL driver being modern, much more actively maintained, and all-around a better option than the aging Clover code.
March 13, 2025 — Source

Ungoogled-Chromium 134.0.6998.88-1
Google Chromium, sans integration with Google. Contribute to ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium development by creating an account on GitHub.
March 13, 2025 — Source

Zed Editor Rolls Out Native Git Integration
The Zed Editor as a modern IDE-focused text editor for programmers and developed by some of the Atom editor creators continues on quite a roll. Over the past year Zed has rolled out native Linux builds, added various AI features and also began open-sourcing its own edit prediction model. For enhancing the developer experience in more basic form, Zed has now added native Git integration.
March 13, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — March 12th, 2025

AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D Linux Benchmarks Forthcoming
Today marks the retail availability of the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D processors. At the top of the hour when the new AMD Zen 5 3D V-Cache processors went on sale, I found both the 9900X3D and 9950X3D in-stock and at MSRP pricing... Less than a half hour later, the 9950X3D is now out of stock while as of writing the 9900X3D remains in-stock at major Internet retailers at its $599 price point.
March 12, 2025 — Source

AMD's 3D V-Cache Optimizer Driver For Squeezing More Ryzen 9 9950X3D Performance
Merged for the Linux 6.13 kernel was the AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver for being able to influence the kernel's scheduling decisions on AMD processors where only a subset of CCDs have the larger 3D V-Cache. With this new driver users can communicate their cache versus frequency preference for influencing where new tasks are first placed if on the CCD with the larger L3 cache or with the higher frequency potential.
March 12, 2025 — Source

Fedora Linux 42 Beta RC 1.4 released
According to [the schedule][1], Fedora 42 Candidate Beta-1.4 is now available for testing. Please help us complete all the validation testing! For more information on release validation testing, see:
March 12, 2025 — Source

Gnome's Dash to Panel Extension Gets a Massive Update
If you're a fan of the Gnome Dash to Panel extension, you'll be thrilled to hear that a new version has been released with a dock mode.
March 12, 2025 — Source

Haiku OS Wrapping Up Its New malloc & Various Performance Optimizations
The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project is out with a new monthly progress report to highlight its latest development accomplishments.
March 12, 2025 — Source

Jonathan Riddell Stepping Down From KDE Plasma Release Management
Longtime KDE developer who has served with Plasma release management duties, KDE Neon operating system development, and former Kubuntu release manager, among other roles, announced he will be stepping down from his Plasma release management duties.
March 12, 2025 — Source

KDE's KWin Wayland & X11 Code Are Now Split, KWin_X11 To Be Maintained Until Plasma 7
Yesterday marked the milestone of KWin's kwin_x11 and kwin_wayland code being split up. The Wayland and X11 code for the KWin compositor is now separate from each other but can be co-installable for systems wanting to support both X11 and Wayland environments.
March 12, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.15 Set To Include Better Handling For Intel P Or E Core Only Mitigations
A set of patches from Intel for utilizing the CPU type for CPU matching as part of the x86 mitigation handling is likely to be part of the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel. These patches are intended for helping with CPU security mitigations on Intel Core hybrid processors where there are security vulnerabilities affecting only P cores or only E cores but not both sets of CPU cores present in the system.
March 12, 2025 — Source

LLVM 20's Great Fortran Language Support With Flang
With the newly-released LLVM 20.1 compiler stack among the many changes throughout the massive codebase is renaming the "flang-new" compiler just to "flang". This new Flang compiler front-end has matured quite well over the years to providing robust and reliable Fortran language support within the confines of the LLVM toolchain.
March 12, 2025 — Source

Mobile Backend With Docker, Kubernetes, and Microservices
Docker and Kubernetes enable scalable, resilient mobile backends with auto-scaling and monitoring. CI/CD, caching, and Istio enhance performance and security.
March 12, 2025 — Source

OpenInfra has only gone and joined the Linux Foundation
Artist formerly known as OpenStack to huddle under same umbrella as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation
March 12, 2025 — Source

OpenSSL 3.5 Alpha 1 Released With Server-Side QUIC
OpenSSL 3.5 Alpha 1 is out today as the first development milestone on the path to releasing OpenSSL 3.5.0 in April.
March 12, 2025 — Source

PHP 8.3.19 released
The PHP 8.3 series has been updated to version 8.3.19, addressing multiple issues across a range of components, including BCMath, Core, DOM, FFI, FPM, GD, LDAP, LibXML, MBString, Opcache, PDO_SQLite, Phar, PHPDBG, Reflection, Standard, Streams, Windows, and Zlib.
March 12, 2025 — Source

The Linux Foundation's latest partnership could shake up open-source ecosystems - here's why
The two biggest corporate open-source foundations are merging.
March 12, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu 25.10 Looks To Make Use Of Rust Coreutils & Other Rust System Components
Plans have been drafted to begin using more Rust-rewritten Linux system components within the Ubuntu 25.10 release due out later this year and ahead of next year's all important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release. Among the Rust components being planned for use in Ubuntu 25.10 is the Rust Coreutils "uutils" software.
March 12, 2025 — Source

Why Onyx thinks its open source solution will win enterprise search
Enterprises have troves of internal data and information that employees need to complete their tasks or answer questions for potential customers. But that doesn't mean the right information is easy to find.
March 12, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — March 11th, 2025

AMD Announces The EPYC Embedded 9005 Series
Since last year we have continued to be impressed by the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" server processors while today they are announcing the EPYC Embedded 9005 line-up. The AMD EPYC Embedded 9005 Series processors are much like the EPYC 9005 series processors but with a few differences.
March 11, 2025 — Source

AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D Delivers Excellent Performance For Linux Developers, Creators & Technical Computing
Ahead of tomorrow's availability of the Ryzen 9 9900X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPUs in retail channels, today the embargo lifts on being able to deliver Ryzen 9 9950X3D reviews and performance benchmarks. Simply put, for Linux creators, developers, enthusiasts, and others running technical computing workloads and other similar tasks on their desktop, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D with its 16 cores / 32 threads and 144MB total cache makes for an excellent desktop CPU.
March 11, 2025 — Source

COBOL Language Frontend Merged For GCC 15 Compiler
A big albeit late feature landed today for the upcoming GCC 15 compiler... The COBOL programming language front-end has been merged!
March 11, 2025 — Source

CrossOver 25.0 Announced - Built Atop Wine 10.0 For Linux & macOS
CodeWeavers that continues to be the largest patron to the development of the open-source Wine software announced today CrossOver 25.0 as the newest version of their commercial downstream
March 11, 2025 — Source

Cure Docker volume permission pains with MatchHostFsOwner
Run a container with a host directory mount, and it either leaves root-owned files behind or it runs into "permission denied" errors. Welcome to the dreadful container host filesystem owner matching problem. These issues confuse and irritate people, and they happen because apps in the container run as a different user than the host user.
March 11, 2025 — Source

EBS StorageClass with VolumeBindingMode Immediate is incompatible with pod topology pinning
We ran into a weird pod scheduling error on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Some pods, which scheduled just fine in the past, now stay in Pending with the following event:
March 11, 2025 — Source

Fresh Wine-flavored version of Mono released
First new version in about five years, but it's who did it that matters more
March 11, 2025 — Source

How to Deploy Karpenter on AWS Kubernetes With kOps
Karpenter is no longer officially supported by kOps. This blog walks you through the step-by-step process of deploying Karpenter on a kOps-managed AWS Kubernetes cluster.
March 11, 2025 — Source

IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 192 released
IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 192 has been released and comes with a significant kernel update to Linux 6.12, incorporating enhanced speed for compression and decompression with the DELFATE algorithm, along with various minor bug and security fixes. The kernel update transitions the IPFire kernel to Linux 6.12, enabling Intel and AMD CPUs that support VAES and AVX-512 to achieve a 162% increase in AES-GCM encryption and decryption speed, thereby enhancing IPsec throughput. Optimizing memory alignment has enhanced TCP performance by as much as 40% through the use of smaller structures.
March 11, 2025 — Source

Kdenlive 24.12.3 released
Kdenlive 24.12.3, the final maintenance release for the 24.12 cycle, has been released and addresses audio playback issues, addresses crashes associated with single item deletion, and rectifies clip pasting problems.
March 11, 2025 — Source

Linux Kernel Patches Posted For The ESWIN EIC7700 SoC + SiFive HiFive Premier P550
Patches were posted to the Linux Kernel Mailing List this morning for wiring up the ESWIN EIC7700 RISC-V SoC support and the most notable board using this SoC so far, the SiFive HiFive Premier P550.
March 11, 2025 — Source

Nouveau On NVIDIA Turing GPUs & Newer Will Now Prefer NVK+Zink For OpenGL
As a sign of the times for both the NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver within Mesa and the generic Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan code, with next quarter's Mesa 25.1 release when using a NVIDIA Turing GPU or newer with the Nouveau driver stack it will now default to using Zink atop NVK for OpenGL rather than the existing NVC0 Gallium3D driver.
March 11, 2025 — Source

Servo Makes Improvements To Its Demo Browser & Embedding API
The Servo open-source web engine is out with its February 2025 status update to highlight work on the engine itself as well as its demo browser and embed API capabilities for using Servo by other applications.
March 11, 2025 — Source

Sparky 2025.03 released
SparkyLinux 2025.03 has been released and marks the first update to the Sparky semi-rolling ISO images for the year 2025. The update encompasses package enhancements from Debian and Sparky testing repositories, the introduction of new Linux kernel versions, and revisions to the repositories. There are several issues to address, including the installation process through Calamares, the inability to install the temporary UKUI desktop, and modifications within the KDE Plasma environment.
March 11, 2025 — Source

The best Linux laptops you can buy: Expert tested
Linux has gained popularity in recent years as casual computer users look for open-source alternatives to Windows and macOS. We tested models from Lenovo, Dell, and more.
March 11, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu 22.04 support for Fullstaq Ruby is here
Fullstaq Ruby distributes server-optimized Ruby binaries. Install the latest Ruby versions with APT/YUM instead of compiling. Easily keep Ruby security patched via auto-tiny version updates. Combat memory bloat (save as much as 50%) with memory allocator improvements.
March 11, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — March 10th, 2025

AMD EPYC 9845 Makes For A Persuasive Upgrade With Performance & Energy Efficiency
With the new AMD EPYC 9005 processors there are SKUs up to 500 Watt with the likes of the EPYC 9965 flagship at 192 cores for Turin Dense cores or 128 Turin classic cores with the EPYC 9755. But for those looking at upgrading from an existing EPYC 9004 series server and bound by the motherboard BIOS support and/or cooling/power capacity, 400 Watts is a sweet spot.
March 10, 2025 — Source

ASUS PRIME X670E-PRO WIFI & AMD BC-250 Sensor Monitoring With Linux 6.15
The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates are building up ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window opening up later this month. Here is a look at a few of the HWMON changes worth mentioning to be found in this next version of the Linux kernel.
March 10, 2025 — Source

Audacity 3.7.2 released
Audacity 3.7.2 is a patch version that addresses various bugs, including crashes when applying effects to multiple tracks, crashes from the Mixer window, and the reinstatement of the "Residue" option in noise reduction. It also allows modules to persist when patch releases are published, opens effect settings immediately when adding a real-time effect, and supports separate real-time effect instances when duplicating tracks. Other enhancements include better cloud saving stability, fixed range selection outside the clip's edge, repaired AUSoundIsolation, fixed black stripes, and introduced UUID instance support.
March 10, 2025 — Source

Box64 0.3.4 Released: Faster & Steam Now Runs With Box32 On ARM64
Box64 0.3.4 is out today as the newest version of this open-source Linux x86_64 user-space emulator that runs on ARM64 as well as RISC-V 64-bit and LoongArch 64-bit systems.
March 10, 2025 — Source

DRM User-Space API For Apple Silicon Graphics Posted For Review
While the Asahi AGX Gallium3D and Honeykrisp Vulkan drivers continue to be developed within mainline Mesa for supporting OpenGL and Vulkan with Apple Silicon M1/M2 SoCs, the necessary Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver has yet to be upstreamed. But hitting the mailing list today is a patch getting the user-space API (UAPI) with more eyes on as the precursor to the actual kernel driver that is currently held up by waiting on Rust kernel abstractions to be upstreamed.
March 10, 2025 — Source

Fedora 43 Looking At RPM 6.0, JPEG-XL Wallpapers & Other Early Change Proposals
Fedora 42 isn't even releasing until next month but a number of early change proposals have been filed for the upcoming Fedora 43 development cycle that will be released this autumn.
March 10, 2025 — Source

Google Will Enable Android Phones With Ability To Run Debian Linux Soon
Hidden away among the hullabaloo of Google's March Pixel feature drop lies a feature many enthusiasts and developers have asked for years—the Linux Terminal app. This Debian-based Linux environment is now available for Pixel phones with the latest stable update. This means users can load a portable desktop distro on their smartphones—can you believe this is happening right now?
March 10, 2025 — Source

Garuda Linux "Broadwing" (250308) released
Garuda Linux "Broadwing" (250308) has been released with a series of updates, featuring Garuda Rani, a new application aimed at optimizing and improving the Garuda Linux experience. Rani consolidates the capabilities of widely used Garuda applications, offering a centralized platform for critical system management and customization activities. Garuda Mokka, a new edition showcasing a Catppuccin-themed KDE Plasma experience, exemplifies the company's dedication to providing a variety of visually striking desktop environments.
March 10, 2025 — Source

Intel Preps Xe3's "Dirty Rect" Feature For Linux 6.15
Along with other exciting Intel kernel graphics driver updates submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window, another batch of drm-intel-next code was sent out today to DRM-Next. This pull request is mostly around bug fixing and other low-level work but it does provide a new "dirty rect" feature being introduced with next-gen Intel Xe3 graphics.
March 10, 2025 — Source

Linux's ARM Apple Support Now Has Another Code Reviewer
In hopefully helping Asahi Linux reduce their downstream patch burden and helping to enhance the overall flow of new Apple Silicon related code into the mainline Linux kernel, another developer has agreed to serve as an official code reviewer over the ARM Apple bits within the Linux kernel.
March 10, 2025 — Source

Strap in, get ready for more Rust drivers in Linux kernel
Likening memory safety bugs to smallpox may not soothe sensitive C coders
March 10, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — March 9th, 2025

ALGOL 68 Compiler Front-End Not Being Merged Into GCC At This Point
ALGOL 68 is an imperative programming language that's more than a half-century old and went on to inspire and influence other programming languages. It has its place in programming language history but a recently published compiler front-end for ALGOL 68 has been decided for now at least not to be upstreamed into the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).
March 9, 2025 — Source

AMD Preparing "High Precision" Mode For Upcoming Instinct MI350X (GFX950)
On Friday AMD sent out another batch of AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver feature patches destined for the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle. One notable feature in this late pull request is introducing a new "high precision" mode to be found with the GFX950 target, which is believed to be the upcoming Instinct MI350X series.
March 9, 2025 — Source

Intel NPU Firmware Files Upstreamed To linux-firmware.git
For two years now the Intel IVPU accelerator driver has been part of the mainline kernel for supporting the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that's part of the Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" CPUs and newer. Only this week though was the firmware for the Intel NPUs now upstreamed to the linux-firmware.git repository.
March 9, 2025 — Source

Intel Preps Linux For "Platform Temperature Control" With Lunar Lake & Panther Lake SoCs
Intel's new Platform Temperature Control (PTC) feature is a hardware-based solution to manage skin and/or board temperatures of a device. Platform Temperature Control will adjust the SoC power/performance if the temperature thresholds are exceeded, which are programmed by the device manufacturer. But new Linux patches posted allow controlling the Intel Platform Temperature Control feature found with new Core Ultra Lunar Lake laptops and upcoming Panther Lake hardware.
March 9, 2025 — Source" target="new" class="RM1">Source

Linux kernel 6.6.82 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.82 is now available:
March 9, 2025 — Source

More Apple Silicon Updates For Linux 6.15 Help M1/M2 Plus iPad / iPod / iPhone
Already queued ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window opening later this month are DeviceTree support for Apple's T2 SoCs as well as other DeviceTree additions set to be mainlined. A third round of DeviceTree patches were sent out on Sunday morning to the Linux kernel mailing list for the upcoming v6.15 cycle.
March 9, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — March 8th, 2025

GTK On Android & macOS Seeing Improvements
In addition to Friday's very exciting GNOME 48 release candidate with some last minute features, there have also been some other GNOME-related changes this week to call out.
March 8, 2025 — Source

KDE This Week Took Care Of "A Very Large Number Of Bugs"
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with the newest issue of This Week in Plasma to highlight all of the interesting KDE Plasma improvements merged for the week.
March 8, 2025 — Source

Mesa's Venus Driver Adds Vulkan Ray-Tracing Support For VMs
Mesa's Venus driver that allows for 3D graphics acceleration within virtual machines is now able to make use of the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions when using Mesa 25.1-devel along with updated Venus Protocol and Virglrenderer code.
March 8, 2025 — Source

Rust Coreutils 0.0.30 Enhances GNU Compatibility, Uutils To Port More Common Unix Tools
The uutils project has released Rust Coreutils 0.0.30 as the newest version of this GNU Coreutils rewrite within the Rust programming language. Uutils developers will also be targeting more common Unix tools to port over to Rust too.
March 8, 2025 — Source

Ungoogled-Chromium 134.0.6998.35-1 released
Ungoogled-Chromium, a browser based on Chromium 134.0.6998.35 that eliminates reliance on Google online services while retaining the default Chromium experience and includes privacy, control, and transparency enhancements, has been released.
March 8, 2025 — Source

Wine Releases Framework Mono 6.14 In Taking Over The Mono Project
Last year Microsoft donated the Mono Project to Wine for its stewardship under the WineHQ umbrella. Today marks the Framework Mono 6.14 release as the first major Mono release in five years and the first under the WineHQ organization.
March 8, 2025 — Source

Wine-Staging 10.3 Adds Patch For A 15 Year Old Bug
Wine-Staging 10.3 Adds Patch For A 15 Year Old Bug
March 8, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — February 28th, 2025

/e/OS 2.8 released
/e/OS 2.8 is an open-source mobile operating system that integrates a curated selection of applications to establish a privacy-focused internal system for smartphones. The release notes detail enhancements to Account Manager, App Lounge, LineageOS 21, browser, Maps, and CMF Phone 1 firmware.
February 28, 2025 — Source

5 Must-Have Linux Apps to Supercharge Your Daily Workflows (Open Source)
Open source software forms the backbone of the Linux ecosystem, offering unmatched flexibility, customization, and a community-driven approach to innovation. This overview by TechHut highlights five indispensable open source applications that can significantly enhance your productivity, simplify workflows, and elevate your overall Linux experience. Whether you're a developer, designer, or casual user, these tools cater to a wide range of needs while staying true to the principles of open source development.
February 28, 2025 — Source

AMD Engineer Talks Up Vulkan/SPIR-V As Part Of Their MLIR-Based Unified AI Software Play
An AMD engineer presented earlier this month at the Vulkanised 2025 conference in Cambridge (UK) around the work they are pursuing for AI using the MLIR intermediate representation, IREE, and the role that Vulkan/SPIR-V can play for AI acceleration across AMD's wares as well as other hardware.
February 28, 2025 — Source or Watch Video

AMD Prepares Linux Driver Support For Image Signal Processor With New Laptops
Patches were posted today for the Linux kernel implementing new drivers for web camera image signal processing (ISP) for supporting new, unspecified AMD Ryzen laptops.
February 28, 2025 — Source

AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series Officially Announced
The embargo is over! We finally can share details on the exciting Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards powered by RDNA4 that will be available from Internet retailers next week.
February 28, 2025 — Source

FreeDesktop.org Devises New Hosting Plan For GitLab Infrastructure
X.ORGOne month ago FreeDesktop.org/X.Org experienced a new cloud crisis with Equinix Metal shutting down and losing access to all the FreeDesktop.org cloud/hosting resources at the end of April. FreeDesktop.org GitLab powers not only the X.Org projects but also Mesa, Wayland, and countless other Linux desktop open-source projects. Fortunately, it looks like they will have a new solution in time.
February 28, 2025 — Source

GCC 15.1 Compiler Nears Release As Bugs Whittled Away
Current GNU Compiler Collection release manager Richard Biener of SUSE provided an update concerning the upcoming GCC 15 stable compiler release.
February 28, 2025 — Source

NetworkManager 1.52 Brings IPVLAN Interface Support, Ethtool FEC Mode
NetworkManager 1.52 is out today as the newest version of this widely-used system network service and network configuration tool suite for Linux systems.
February 28, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA Vulkan Beta Driver Updated For Blackwell & New Extensions
NVIDIA engineers closed out February by releasing the NVIDIA 570.123.01 Vulkan beta driver for Linux and on the Windows side was the NVIDIA 572.63 driver release.
February 28, 2025 — Source

RADV Driver Expands Use Of Performance-Helping DCC Fast Clears On RDNA3 GPUs
Just ahead of the AMD RDNA4 GPUs launching, the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver has expanded a performance optimization technique for existing RDNA3 graphics processors.
February 28, 2025 — Source

Seal Security is launching a new solution to automate fixing Linux vulnerabilities.
Seal Security, a web-based security platform that provides advanced threat protection and incident response capabilities for individuals, businesses, and organizations, is set to launch Seal OS.
February 28, 2025 — Source

There Will Not Be Official ROCm Support For The Radeon RX 9070 Series On Launch Day
AMD has been investing a lot into the ROCm compute stack to make it a more formidable contender against the NVIDIA CUDA software ecosystem. From better documentation and improved application/API coverage to expanding their range of supported AMD GPUs, there's been a lot going on. So with this morning's much anticipated Radeon RX 9070 series launch announcement ahead of product availability next week, you are probably wondering about Radeon RX 9000 series support for ROCm too... Here's what I know so far.
February 28, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — February 18th, 2025

AIDA64 drops Windows 95, 98, and Me, adds Radeon RX 9000 series support
If you have a PC with Windows 95 or Windows 98, bad news: AIDA64 can no longer work on it. Finalwire has released a new version of the app, and it dropped support for Microsoft's operating systems, which were released in the last millennium.
February 18, 2025 — Source

AMD Continues Preparing openSIL Concept For Phoenix & Turin Processors
One of the AMD software projects we are very bullish on for the future is openSIL for opening up more of the CPU silicon initialization code for what will eventually replace AGESA across all client and server processors that is aiming for production readiness with Zen 6. In turn, AMD openSIL should allow easier/better Coreboot support. One of the development milestone release targets did slip but they remain working on preparing AMD openSIL releases for Phoenix client and Turin server hardware.
February 18, 2025 — Source

Bluestar Linux is a gorgeous MacOS-like take on KDE Plasma that's easy to use
Honestly, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Bluestar Linux.
February 18, 2025 — Source

GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin
Our first look at the default desktop for Fedora 42 and Ubuntu 'Plucky Puffin'
February 18, 2025 — Source

How to set up 2FA for Linux desktop logins for added security
If you want to add an extra layer of security to your Linux desktop operating system, it can be done in just a couple of minutes.
February 18, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.3.1 released
KDE Plasma 6.3.1 has been released, addressing several minor issues to improve the overall desktop experience. These fixes include resolving problems with non-KDE applications crashing, updating the collation for Updatemodel, and enhancing Dr Konqi's Sentry functionality. The update also addresses issues related to color pickers, keyboard activation, datetime testing, weather, and wallpapers.
February 18, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.3.1 Released With A Few Dozen Fixes For The Week
For those that typically wait for the first point release before moving to a new software version, KDE Plasma 6.3.1 is out today with a few dozen fixes for the week since the Plasma 6.3 debut.
February 18, 2025 — Source

Latest AVX-512 Optimization For FFmpeg Shows Wild Improvement On AMD Ryzen
Merged today for the widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library was yet another AVX-512 optimized code path... Compared to the pure C code, the AVX2 code path was 10.98x faster while this new AVX-512 code path clocks in at 18x the performance of the common C code.
February 18, 2025 — Source

Libxml2 2.12.10 released
Nick Wellnhofer has announced the release of Libxml2 2.12.10, which is expected to be the final release of the 2.12 branch. This update includes security fixes, regression corrections, bug fixes, and enhancements in portability, such as sanitizer version checks and compatibility with package version files.
February 18, 2025 — Source

Linux Kernel 6.12.15 released
Linux kernel 6.12.15 has been released to address an issue with XFS.
February 18, 2025 — Source

Liquorix Linux Kernel 6.12-20 released
Steven Barrett has released a new Liquorix kernel derived from Linux kernel 6.12.15. The Liquorix Linux kernel is an enthusiast Linux kernel that is optimized for low-latency computing in audiovisual production, reduced frame time variations in games, and unparalleled responsiveness in interactive systems. It is available for Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch Linux.
February 18, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080/5090 Performance With Neat Video 6 On Linux
Last week NeatLab released Neat Video 6 as the newest version of their video engine to reduce noise and enhance video quality that can be used with the likes of DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut, and Premiere Pro software. Neat Video 6 features a faster render engine, optimized CPU + GPU performance, enhanced memory management, and other improvements. Neat Video 6 continues to support Linux natively when it comes to DaVinci Resolve usage as well as various OFX hosts like Natron / Flame / Mistika / Fusion Studio / Nuke.
February 18, 2025 — Source

OCCT Now Available on Linux, Steam and Steam Deck
OCCT, a premier software for PC stability and performance testing, is now available on Linux, compatible with Steam Deck, and will soon be available on Steam. This release marks a notable achievement for the community, serving the needs of overclocking enthusiasts, hardware aficionados, gamers, and IT professionals overseeing Linux-based servers. OCCT Linux provides straightforward installation, robust features such as CPU and GPU stress tests, and is ideally suited for server environments.
February 18, 2025 — Source

openSUSE Spin Achieves 100% Bit-Identical Packages For Reproducible Builds
There is an openSUSE project called Reproducible-openSUSE "RBOS" working on a proof-of-concept for constructing openSUSE in a bit-identical manner as part of the broad Reproducible Builds effort to be able to reproduce builds bit-for-bit against what is being compiled by the distribution vendor or other software distribution. The openSUSE RBOS has achieved 100% bit-identical packages as a major milestone.
February 18, 2025 — Source

PostgreSQL Lands Self-Join Elimination Optimization
More than seven years in the making, merged yesterday for PostgreSQL is a self-join elimination "SJE" feature as a performance optimization for some queries.
February 18, 2025 — Source

Qubes OS 4.2.4 released
Qubes OS 4.2.4 has been released and represents a stable release that brings together security patches, bug fixes, and updates from the prior stable version. The installation method provided is both secure and convenient, utilising a current ISO. The update encompasses all security enhancements, bug resolutions, and an improved Fedora template. Additional information can be found on the downloads page.
February 18, 2025 — Source

Right now, there is no right or wrong SASE answer
Adoption of SASE, or secure access service edge, is accelerating -- especially, according to IDC, at organizations of over 1,000 employees, while it's estimated the global SASE market will grow from last year's $1.83 billion to over $17 billion by 2033.
February 18, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu Linux LTS Releases May Offer Additional Intel Graphics Driver Updates
Ubuntu developers at Canonical are looking at including more Intel graphics driver packages as part of the hardware enablement "HWE" stacks shipped as part of Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) point releases. This would provide more comprehensive coverage of newer Intel driver components with future Ubuntu LTS point releases to benefit both the integrated and discrete graphics.
February 18, 2025 — Source

Wasmer 6.0 Wires Up Support For Multiple Heterogeneous Backends
For those interested in WebAssembly for the "run anywhere" prospects and container-like secure execution, Wasmer remains one of the leading WASM runtime options. Wasmer 6.0 Alpha 1 is out today as the latest to further along this quest.
February 18, 2025 — Source

Who needs Windows 11? FreeXP is a modern version of Microsoft's greatest OS, powered by Debian Linux
I appreciate calling Windows XP "Microsoft's greatest OS" will elicit snorts of derision from a good number of you. That honor probably belongs to Windows 7, or maybe even Windows 10 (once Microsoft ironed out the many problems that plagued it from the start). But certainly, Windows XP was a classic, and a huge step up from the operating systems that preceded it.
February 18, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — February 17th, 2025

CodeWeavers Hiring More Developers To Work On Wine & Valve's Proton
The friends at CodeWeavers have relayed work that they are looking to hire multiple Wine developers to join their paid team working on upstream Wine as well as their CrossOver products, Valve's Proton downstream for Steam Play, and related Wine-based tech.
February 17, 2025 — Source

Flowblade 2.18.1 released
A new version of the Flowblade video editor has been released, addressing an issue with the Credit Scroll generator in the Flatpak package.
February 17, 2025 — Source

How to solve the dreaded Blue Screen of Death on Windows PCs
A blue screen signals a massive system crash. Windows collects more data than you think. With a special tool, you can display the most important information about a blue screen and eliminate the cause.
February 17, 2025 — Source

Intel PyTorch Extension 2.6 Brings More Xeon 6 Optimizations
Intel software engineers overnight released the newest version of the Intel Extension for PyTorch. The v2.6 release brings new optimizations for current-generation Xeon 6 processors as well as new large language model (LLM) performance optimizations.
February 17, 2025 — Source

ISD 0.5 Released For Interactive systemd Management
A few weeks ago I wrote about ISD as a new open-source project for interactively managing systemd that aims to be more user intuitive especially for those that aren't veteran Linux server administrators. ISD has continued evolving and out today is ISD v0.5 with the latest enhancements for better managing systemd.
February 17, 2025 — Source

KVM-Powered MatterV 0.7 Can Run Unmodified VMware VMs
MatterV 0.7 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source virtual machine management platform built atop KVM. MatterV aims to make it easy to manage VMs across different environments while with today's v0.7 release adds the ability to run unmodified VMware virtual machines atop KVM.
February 17, 2025 — Source or Watch Video

Limine 9.0 Bootloader Drops EXT4 File-System Support
Limine 9.0 is out today as the newest major release for this open-source modern multi-protocol bootloader and boot manager. Limine also boasts its own Limine Boot Protocol in addition to the native Linux support and chainloading/multiboot capabilities.
February 17, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.12.14 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.14 is now available:
February 17, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.13.3 released
Linux kernel version 6.13.3 is now available:
February 17, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.6.78 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.78 is now available:
February 17, 2025 — Source

MariaDB 11.7.2 and MariaDB 11.8.1 released
The MariaDB Foundation has announced the release of both MariaDB 11.7.2 and MariaDB 11.8.1.
February 17, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Through GeForce RTX 5080/5090 GPU Compute Performance
Complementing the recent Linux GPU benchmarks of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 and GeForce RTX 5090 looking at both the Linux / Steam Play gaming performance as well as GPU compute and other areas, in today's testing is a wide multi-generation look seeing how the NVIDIA GeForce performance has evolved going back to the GeForce GTX 980 Maxwell GPUs up through the newest GeForce RTX 5080/5090 graphics cards.
February 17, 2025 — Source

Popular Linux distro for WSL is almost here, and you can help test it out TODAY
The promised release of an official Fedora image for the Windows Subsystem for Linux is getting closer, and you can help out on the test day.
February 17, 2025 — Source

RADV Lands Initial DCC Support For AMD GFX12 / RDNA4 GPUs
Last month when the state of the open-source RADV Vulkan driver for RDNA4 GPUs was outlined, it was noted that cooperative matrix support was missing along with DCC support and Vulkan Video for these upcoming Radeon RX 90x0 GPUs. Vulkan cooperative matrix support ended up being merged earlier this month while hitting Mesa Git today is the DCC support that is important for RDNA4 performance.
February 17, 2025 — Source

Wayland Protocols 1.41 Released With Color Management Support
Wayland Protocols 1.41 is shipping today with the color management protocol added for enabling high dynamic range (HDR) support on the Wayland-powered Linux desktop.
February 17, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — February 14th, 2025

"AM" 9.4.4 released
The "AM" 9.4.4 release introduces two new functionalities: the option to hide, which prevents the CLI from seeing, listing, updating, and managing selected applications, and the unhide option to reverse the hide action. This is beneficial for users managing multiple fixed version applications and controlling updates. The command "am hide $APP1 $APP2 $APP3" renames the remove script to remove.old, thereby designating the app as a "system" or "independent" application.
February 14, 2025 — Source

An 'unfortunate incident' hits latest Ubuntu 24.04 point release
The Noble Numbat has been besieged with delays
February 14, 2025 — Source

Asahi Linux lead resigns from Mac-based distro after tumultuous kernel debate
Hector Martin cites burnout, and Rust for Linux oppostion, in resigning.
February 14, 2025 — Source

Chimera Linux 20250214 update launches with new apk-tools, Kernel 6.13, and official PowerPC support
Just in time for Valentine's Day, the much-anticipated 20250214 update for Chimera Linux is here! This version introduces an improved package manager, a more modern kernel, and broadened hardware compatibility.
February 14, 2025 — Source

Dynamic Triple Buffering Merged For GNOME 48
As quite a Valentine's Day treat, the long-in-development dynamic triple buffering support for GNOME's Mutter compositor was just merged ahead of next month's GNOME 48 desktop release!
February 14, 2025 — Source

Evolve Core 1.7 released
Evolve Core 1.7, an advanced GTK Theme Manager designed to enhance the customization of the GNOME desktop experience, has been released. It is compatible with GTK 4 themes and provides sophisticated color editing options. The updates consist of an enhanced themes tab for improved stability, refined terminal output, the introduction of a new runInBash wrapper, various bug fixes, the addition of a new AT+ themes section, access to the GNOME Extensions Store, enhancements to widgets, and a newly designed launch preview page.
February 14, 2025 — Source

Fwupd 2.0.6 Adds Support For HPE Gen10/Gen10+ Servers
Fwupd 2.0.6 is out today as the newest update to this widely-used open-source solution for system and peripheral device firmware updating under Linux.
February 14, 2025 — Source

GNOME Software May Eventually Drop RPM Support In Favor Of Flatpaks
Stemming from the ongoing discussion around the issues raised with Fedora's Flatpak package of OBS Studio and how Flatpaks should be prioritized within the GNOME Software app center/store, the future of RPM support within GNOME Software raised.
February 14, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.15 To Ensure PlayStation 5 Controllers Use The Correct Driver
A change queued up by an Amazon engineer ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle will ensure that PlayStation 5 controllers on Linux load with the correctly desired driver.
February 14, 2025 — Source

PHP 8.3.17 and 8.4.4 packages for Fedora/RHEL released
Remi Collet has released PHP 8.3.17 and 8.4.4 packages for Fedora and RHEL-based Linux distributions.
February 14, 2025 — Source

Show Your Love For Linux Hardware Coverage This Valentine's Day
If you wish to show your appreciation for all of the Linux hardware reviews, Linux benchmarking, and open-source news provided on Phoronix each and every day, you can join Phoronix Premium this Valentine's Day weekend at a discounted rate.
February 14, 2025 — Source

Streamlining Compliance with Revenera's New Copyright Management Feature
We've moved on from the age-old argument on whether Open Source Software is needed for software development. As we understand, 70-80% of all software produced comprises of Open Source Components. These components often come with specific licensing requirements, one of which is the need to provide proper copyright attribution to the original authors. This ensures that the creators of the open source software receive recognition for their work, fostering a culture of respect and appreciation within the developer community.
February 14, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu Making Progress On Replacing initramfs-tools With Dracut
As a follow-up to the news from last October of Ubuntu considering Dracut to replace initramfs-tools for initrd generation, that work remains ongoing with some improvements since having been prepared for the upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 release but it remains overall an active affair.
February 14, 2025 — Source

Valkey 8.1-rc1 Delivers Fresh Performance Improvements
Valkey as the open-source in-memory store forked from Redis is preparing for its next feature release.
February 14, 2025 — Source

Vulkan 1.4.308 Brings NVIDIA's Provisional Present Metering Extension
Vulkan 1.4.308 was quietly released last week and besides a few fixes what makes it interesting is the provisional VK_NV_present_metering extension.
February 14, 2025 — Source

VSCodium 1.97.2.25045 released
A new version of VSCodium, an open-source alternative to Visual Studio Code (VSCode), without Microsoft branding and telemetry features. The latest version, 1.97.2.25045, is now available for download, including all updates from the most recent VSCode release.
February 14, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — February 10th, 2025

4MLinux 48.0 Beta released
A new beta version of the lightweight 4MLinux is now available for testing.
February 10, 2025 — Source

Formerly Known As YQPkg, Myrlyn Package Manager GUI Adds Repository Configuration
You may recall the YQPkg package management tool announced last year that's been talked up by openSUSE developers as a Qt-based package manager GUI and alternative to YaST. It's now known as Myrlyn and has added repository configuration as its newest feature.
February 10, 2025 — Source

GIMP 3.0 RC3 Released For A Final Round Of Testing
GIMP 3.0 RC3 is out today as what is hopefully the last release candidate before the long-awaited stable release of GIMP 3.0 as this long in development free software alternative to the likes of Adobe Photoshop.
February 10, 2025 — Source

IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 192 is available for testing
IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 192 is now available for testing, introducing a new kernel based on Linux 6.12, collectd 5, enhanced compression and decompression for the DELFATE algorithm, along with various minor bug and security fixes. The kernel release presents notable enhancements, including accelerated AES-GCM encryption and decryption for Intel and AMD CPUs equipped with VAES and AVX-512, memory alignment optimization that can boost TCP performance by up to 40%, support for TCP fraglist GRO, and scheduling enhancements for improved responsiveness to load spikes.
February 10, 2025 — Source

Microsoft Continues Enhancing Its Azure Linux 3.0 Distribution With February Update
Microsoft engineers released Azure Linux 3.0.20250206 overnight as the newest monthly update to this in-house Microsoft Linux distribution that is used within their Azure cloud infrastructure and a variety of other purposes at the Redmond company.
February 10, 2025 — Source

Netrunner 25 Shockworm is a gorgeous KDE Plasma Linux distro and a great Windows 11 alternative
The creators of Netrunner have just released a new iteration of their Debian-based Linux distribution, Netrunner 25 "Shockworm." This update offers enhanced security patches, a fresh desktop background, and an interface that's smoother than ever.
February 10, 2025 — Source

New Proposal To Raise The Linux Kernel's Default Timer Frequency To 1000Hz
A patch sent out on Sunday by Google engineer Qais Yousef is proposing to raise the Linux kernel's default timer frequency from 250Hz to 1000Hz.
February 10, 2025 — Source

Python 3.14 Lands A New Interpreter With 3~30% Faster Python Code
Merged last week for Python 3.14 is a new tail-call intepreter that aims to offer significantly better performance with around 10% faster performance in PyPerformance or around a 40% speed-up in Python-heavy benchmarks. This tail-call interpeter can even outperform the current Python JIT compiler but for maximum performance benefits Python should be built with Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO).
February 10, 2025 — Source

RADV Vulkan Video Adds Low Latency Encoding Support
Adding to the Vulkan Video support for Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver is honoring of the low latency encoding options.
February 10, 2025 — Source

Union Hopes To Address KDE's Fragmented Ways Of Styling Apps
KDE/Qt apps can be styled many different ways with Qt widgets, SVG-based styling, Qt Quick, and other routes for styling of applications. That fragmentation of different ways to styling KDE apps can probe problematic for UI designs and lead to a less cohesive user experience. KDE developer Arjen Hiemstra is hoping to change that with the Union project.
February 10, 2025 — Source

Ventoy 1.1.01 released
Ventoy 1.1.01 has been released and optimizes the VTOY_LINUX_REMOUNT implementation for all Linux distributions while deprecating the VTOY_LINUX_REMOUNT option.
February 10, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — February 7th, 2025

AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan 2025.Q1.1 released
AMD has released an updated open-source driver for Vulkan, introducing new features such as an update to the Khronos Vulkan Headers, performance enhancements for yquake2, and resolutions for the black border issue in the Gnome window.
February 7, 2025 — Source

AMDVLK 2025.Q1.1 Brings New Performance Tuning & Fixes
AMDVLK 2025.Q1.1 is out this morning as the first update of the year to this official AMD open-source Vulkan driver for Linux systems.
February 7, 2025 — Source

Apache NetBeans IDE 25-rc2 released
The second release candidate for Apache NetBeans IDE 25 has been released for testing with several updates, including ensuring that Gradle init respects the configured Java Runtime, preventing release candidates from interfering with the Maven index, addressing infinite loops in Fruchterman-ReingoldLayout, and increasing Maven indexer query limits.
February 7, 2025 — Source

Asahi Linux Lead Developer Hector Martin Steps Down As Upstream Apple Silicon Maintainer
Following arguments on the Linux kernel mailing list the past few days over some Linux kernel maintainers being against the notion of Rust code in the mainline Linux kernel and trying to avoid it and very passionate views over the Linux kernel development process, Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin has removed himself from being an upstream maintainer of the ARM Apple code.
February 7, 2025 — Source

Bcachefs Preps More Fixes For Linux 6.14, Continues Tracking Down Other Bugs
With the Linux 6.14 kernel Bcachefs has its last big planned on-disk format upgrade before removing the "experimental" tag on this copy-on-write file-system. Well, that's the hope at least. In addition to some early fixes last week, some additional Bcachefs fixes are now pending for merging to the mainline kernel while continuing to track down some other bugs.
February 7, 2025 — Source

GCC 15 Compiler Showing Off Nice Performance Improvements On AMD Zen 5
With the GCC 15 compiler having progressed to its final stage of development prior to the GCC 15.1 stable release in the likely March~April time frame, I've begun testing the updated GNU Compiler Collection on some test systems. Overall GCC 15 is looking nice and on AMD Zen 5 "znver5" in particular seeing some solid gains over GCC 14. Here are some initial performance benchmarks of the GCC 15 compiler.
February 7, 2025 — Source

GNOME's LocalSearch Metadata Extractor Ditches GStreamer For FFmpeg
While the GNOME project has long been closely tied to the GStreamer multimedia framework, GNOME's LocalSearch has decided to abandon its GStreamer use in favor of using FFmpeg/libav directly.
February 7, 2025 — Source

Godot 4.4 Beta 3 released
The third beta version of Godot 4.4 has been released. The Godot developers are in the process of preparing a release candidate and invites users who have not yet participated in the beta releases to take part.
February 7, 2025 — Source

IO_uring Zero-Copy Receive Support Ready For Linux 6.15 Networking
It's looking like IO_uring zero-copy receive support should be ready for the Linux 6.15 kernel cycle this spring.
February 7, 2025 — Source

Liquorix Linux Kernel 6.12-16 released
Steven Barrett has released another Liquorix kernel derived from Linux kernel 6.12.12. The Liquorix Linux kernel is an enthusiast Linux kernel that is optimized for low-latency computing in audiovisual production, reduced frame time variations in games, and unparalleled responsiveness in interactive systems. It is available for Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch Linux.
February 7, 2025 — Source

'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama
Open source project chief hits out at 'social media brigading'
February 7, 2025 — Source

MinGW-Glib2, Galera, Podman, MariaDB, Keepalived, Buildah, Bzip2 updates for AlmaLinux
AlmaLinux has been updated with various security enhancements, which include mingw-glib2, galera, mariadb, podman, mariadb:10.11, keepalived, buildah, and bzip2:
February 7, 2025 — Source

Minimal Linux OS runs in a 6MB PDF document in Chrome — LinuxPDF leverages RISC-V emulator
DoomPDF dev returns with a new GitHub project.
February 7, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA Publishes RTX Neural Texture Compression "RTXNTC" Beta
NVIDIA on Thursday published their first public beta of their RTX Neural Texture Compression "RTX NTC" software development kit.
February 7, 2025 — Source

Pebble founder already has open-sourced PebbleOS running on new hardware
It comes less than two weeks after Google open-sourced PebbleOS.
February 7, 2025 — Source

Podman and Trivy updates for SUSE
SUSE Linux has received two security updates: SUSE-SU-2025:0382-1, a critical upgrade for podman, and SUSE-SU-2025:0056-1, a moderate update for trivy:
February 7, 2025 — Source

Serpent OS Working Toward Second Alpha, More Immutable OS Features
Despite Serpent OS development said to be slowing down to a lack of funding, they are hoping for the best and aiming to push forward with this original, from-scratch Linux distribution.
February 7, 2025 — Source

Software giant Red Hat gives owner IBM lift to shed its stodgy identity
At IBM's Investor Day event in New York City this week, the first the company has held since 2021, a word executives stressed was "software."
February 7, 2025 — Source

U.S. Senate's Proposed Bill: 20-Year Prison Terms for Using Chinese AI Models
Imagine this: you're scrolling through your favorite AI repository, excited to test out a new model that promises new capabilities. It's open source, widely discussed, and seems like a fantastic option. But what if downloading that model could land you in prison for 20 years or leave you facing a $1 million fine?
February 7, 2025 — Source

VSCodium 1.97.0.25037 released
A new version of VSCodium, a version of VSCode that excludes Microsoft branding and telemetry features, has been released. The latest update encompasses updates, fixes, refactoring, continuous integration, audio playback improvements, enhancements, patches, version repository usage, new extension endpoints, and the activation of reh-web.
February 7, 2025 — Source

Vulkan Cooperative Matrix Merged For RDNA4 GPUs With RADV, DCC Support Inches Closer
Last week when RADV lead developer Samuel Pitoiset with Valve was commenting on the AMD RDNA4 state with the Mesa RADV driver it was noted that Vulkan cooperative matrix support, Vulkan Video encode/decode, and DCC support were still missing. But in the past week one of the items is now crossed off the list and another is continuing to see new patch activity.
February 7, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — February 5th, 2025

AMD Announces Open-Source "Schola" Library For Reinforcement Learning
AMD announced today the release of Schola 1.0 as an open-source reinforcement learning library that is being made available under an MIT license and as part of their GPUOpen software collection for helping game developers.
February 5th, 2025 — Source

AMD Broadcast TLB Invalidation Patches For Linux Updated, Intel RAR Eyed Next
One of the set of patches for the Linux kernel that we have been looking forward to but that wasn't wrapped up in time for the recent Linux v6.14 merge window was the work enabling use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction on Zen 3 CPUs and newer for broadcast TLB invalidation. This can lead to a nice performance bump in some workloads while the eighth iteration of those patches were posted overnight.
February 5th, 2025 — Source

Bisecting The Linux 6.14 Performance Regression With System76 Thelio + AMD Threadripper
Yesterday I showcased Linux 6.14 Git performance worse than Linux 6.13 and 6.12 in a number of multi-threaded workloads. Due to that initial discover being on the lone AMD EPYC Turin 2P server that is always busy running through new benchmarks for future content as well as I am being persistently short on time and constantly under pressure due to the state of the web/ad industry, I didn't expect to get around to digging deeper into the problem in the near-term.
February 5th, 2025 — Source

CISA orders agencies to patch Linux kernel bug exploited in attacks
​CISA has ordered federal agencies to secure their systems within three weeks against a high-severity Linux kernel flaw actively exploited in attacks.
February 5th, 2025 — Source

cURL 8.12 Released With Its Rust Hyper Backend Removed
Back in December was word that cURL would be dropping its "Hyper" Rust HTTP back-end due to little demand and lack of developer interest for that experimental code. The cURL 8.12 release is out today with Hyper stripped out.
February 5th, 2025 — Source

Firefox-ESR security update for Debian 12
A security update for Firefox has been issued for Debian GNU/Linux 12 (Bookworm) to resolve several security vulnerabilities that may allow for the execution of arbitrary code:
February 5th, 2025 — Source

GNOME Mutter 48 Beta Released With HDR Bits, Gdctl Utility
The GNOME Mutter 48 compositor beta is now available for testing as part of this week's GNOME 48 beta milestone.
February 5th, 2025 — Source

Intel Is Reportedly Preparing New Battlemage Graphics Cards, New Device IDs Appear In Linux Graphics Driver Code
Intel has added three more PCI IDs to the Mesa 3D graphics driver code that suggests more Battlemage discrete GPU solutions are coming soon.
February 5th, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.14 Features Include The AMDXDNA Ryzen AI Driver, NTSYNC, Uncached Buffered I/O & Much More
Now that the Linux 6.14 merge window wrapped up this past weekend with the release of Linux 6.14-rc1, here is a recap of all the great new features, hardware enablement, and other improvements to find with this kernel.
February 5th, 2025 — Source

Linux Foundation Announces The SEAPATH 1.0 Hypervisor
The Linux Foundation by way of their LF Energy initiative announced today the release of SEAPATH 1.0, a security-hardened real-time hypervisor.
February 5th, 2025 — Source

MariaDB 11.4.5, 10.11.11, 10.6.21 and 10.5.28 released
The MariaDB Foundation has announced the release of the latest stable versions in its long-term series: MariaDB 11.4.5, 10.11.11, 10.6.21, and 10.5.28, all of which will be maintained for five years.
February 5th, 2025 — Source

New Linux Patches Yield Up To 3.3x Faster AES-CTR Performance On AMD Zen 5 CPUs
Google engineer Eric Biggers is known for some of his great crypto performance optimization patches to benefit the Linux kernel and his most recent patch series is yielding some very tantalizing results for AMD Zen 5 processors whether it be the Ryzen 9000 series, Ryzen AI 300 series, or EPYC 9005 server processors.
February 5th, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA Engineer Talks Up sched_ext Linux Scheduler Possibilities At FOSDEM
Merged last year for the Linux 6.12 kernel was sched_ext for allowing extensible scheduler possibilities by allowing schedulers to be implemented as eBPF code and dynamically loaded into the kernel. This allows for rapidly developing new schedulers as well as exploring other new possibilities around more intelligent kernel scheduling decisions.
February 5th, 2025 — Source

OpenShift, Libsoup, OVN, Camel, OpenStack, Kernel updates for RHEL
Red Hat has announced the release of multiple security updates, which include Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh Containers for version 2.5.8, as well as updates for libsoup and various versions of OVN ranging from 22.09 to 24.09:
February 5th, 2025 — Source

Red Hat Developing "F-UKI" As Their Newest Open-Source Project
Red Hat engineer Anirban Sinha presented at FOSDEM 2025 last weekend in Brussels on F-UKI, a new project being worked on at Red Hat as part of the confidential computing push for loading guest firmware within a Unified Kernel Image (UKI) for confidential VMs.
February 5th, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu Linux on WSL gets massive upgrade with new tar-based install that makes Microsoft Store optional
If you are a Linux fan that is forced to use Microsoft Windows for some reason, you know how valuable Windows Subsystem for Linux is. If you aren't familiar, WSL allows you to run a Linux environment from within Windows -- no virtual machine needed. It's pretty wonderful.
February 5th, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — February 3rd, 2025

Alpine Linux In An Infrastructure Crisis With Equinix Metal Sunsetting
Last week I wrote about the crisis plaguing X.Org / FreeDesktop.org with losing out on their cloud/server infrastructure due to losing out on their free server resources provided by Equinix at the end of April. It's not only FreeDesktop.org and all those hosted projects now rushing to find hosting alternatives and sponsorships to cover new costs, but it turns out the Alpine Linux project is also in a similar position.
February 3rd, 2025 — Source

Apple makes Swift Build open source; Swift Playgrounds slightly renamed
Over the weekend, Apple announced that it is making Swift Build open source. This is the build engine used by both Xcode and for the company's internal projects.
February 3rd, 2025 — Source

Ardour 8.11 released
Paul Davis has announced the release of a hotfix release of Ardour, addresses two significant issues:
February 3rd, 2025 — Source

Cloud Hypervisor 44 Released With New Performance Improvements
Cloud Hypervisor 44 is now available as the newest version of this security and cloud minded Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) that operates atop Linux's KVM and the Microsoft MSHV Hypervisor.
February 3rd, 2025 — Source

Cyber security implications of DeepSeek's open-source AI model
Experts discuss the cyber security ramifications following the shock release of DeepSeek's open-source AI model
February 3rd, 2025 — Source

Data Centres Can Cut Energy Use By Up To 30% With Just About 30 Lines of Code, Research Shows
New research has found that data centres can reduce their energy usage by up to 30% simply by altering around 30 lines of code in the Linux kernel's network stack.
February 3rd, 2025 — Source

Faux Bus Proposed For The Linux Kernel To Better Deal With Simple Devices
Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman is proposing "Faux Bus" as a new "fake" bus solution for simple devices.
February 3rd, 2025 — Source

Open Licensing Promotes Culture and Learning. That's Why EFF Is Upgrading its Creative Commons Licenses.
At EFF, we're big fans of the Creative Commons project, which makes copyright work in empowering ways for people who want to share their work widely. EFF uses Creative Commons licenses on nearly all of our public communications. To highlight the importance of open licensing as a tool for building a shared culture, we are upgrading the license on our website to the latest version, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.
February 3rd, 2025 — Source

OpenAI Goes After DeepSeek with Free o3-mini Model and Deep Research
ChatGPT gets more powerful and adds new features.
February 3rd, 2025 — Source

OpenAI launches 'deep research' AI agent for ChatGPT
Your very own research assistant on ChatGPT.
February 3rd, 2025 — Source

OpenAI o3-mini versus DeepSeek R1: AI Coding Comparison
Choosing the right AI language model can feel like trying to pick the perfect tool from an overflowing toolbox—each option has its strengths, but which one truly fits your needs? If you've found yourself debating between OpenAI's o3-mini versus DeepSeek R1, you're not alone. These two models have been making waves for their impressive capabilities, but their differences can make the decision tricky. Whether you're tackling complex coding challenges, analyzing intricate datasets, or simply looking for a reliable AI partner, understanding how these models stack up is key to making an informed choice.
February 3rd, 2025 — Source

OpenAI unveils deep research agent for ChatGPT
Takes a bit more time to spout a bit less nonsense
February 3rd, 2025 — Source

OpenAI Unveils Deep Research, An Advanced AI Model Designed To Tackle Complex Tasks Autonomously
The AI industry is getting more intense as companies aggressively focus on bringing forward cutting-edge technology and making the next breakthrough. While OpenAI has established itself firmly in the field and has extensively expanded its services, DeepSeek has been getting considerable attention lately for its cost-effective model. The China-based startup has even surpassed ChatGPT in the Apple App Store charts.
February 3rd, 2025 — Source

OpenAI's Altman says 'no plans' to sue China's DeepSeek
OpenAI chief Sam Altman said Monday the US company has "no plans" to sue Chinese startup DeepSeek, which rattled Silicon Valley with its powerful and apparently cheaply developed chatbot.
February 3rd, 2025 — Source

OpenAI's 'Deep Research' Gives Students a Whole New Way to Cheat on Papers
OpenAI's new Deep Research for ChatGPT is made to create research papers, though Google Gemini 2.0 has a very similar feature.
February 3rd, 2025 — Source

Run DeepSeek R1 Locally: Unlock AI Power Without Sacrificing Privacy
DeepSeek R1 is an innovative AI model celebrated for its remarkable reasoning and creative capabilities. While many users access it through its official online platform, growing concerns about data privacy have prompted a shift toward running the model locally. By setting up DeepSeek R1 on your own hardware, you can maintain full control over your data while using the model's full potential. This guide by Futurepedia provides a detailed, step-by-step approach to help you get started and setup locally in just 3 minutes. As well as covering essential tools, hardware requirements, and practical applications.
February 3rd, 2025 — Source

Senator Hawley Proposes Jail Time for People Who Download DeepSeek
According to the language of the proposed bill, people who download AI models from China could face up to 20 years in jail, a million dollar fine, or both.
February 3rd, 2025 — Source

'Tiny' Linux 6.14-rc1 released: What's new in 500,000 lines of modified code
Even a small kernel update brings significant changes. Here's what's improved.
February 3rd, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 24th, 2025

Apache NetBeans IDE 25-rc1 released
The first release candidate for Apache NetBeans IDE 25 has been released for testing, featuring various enhancements aimed at optimizing the development workflow. Improvements encompass Gradle, Maven, Ant, Java, Groovy, PHP, VSCode, Web, Web.jsf, OCI Cloud Assets, JS CDT Debugger, CSS, JS, and UI.
January 24th, 2025 — Source

ChimeraOS 2025-01-24 (7a488b9) released
Another pre-release of ChimeraOS is now available for testing, reverting the previous kernel update and adding additional gamepad support.
January 24th, 2025 — Source

Don't want your Kubernetes Windows nodes hijacked? Patch this hole now
SYSTEM-level command injection via API parameter *chef's kiss*
January 24th, 2025 — Source

Fedora Preparing For A Data Center Move For More Power & Space For Possible RISC-V
It's not only AI start-ups running into space and power capacity bottlenecks but the Fedora Project has been pushing the limits of its main data center and is preparing for a move to a new data center to allow for more physical space and power capacity. In turn one item mentioned is allowing space for possible RISC-V build systems for Fedora.
January 24th, 2025 — Source

GNOME 48.alpha released
GNOME 48.alpha, the initial unstable release in the 48 series, is now available for testing. The beta version is planned for February.
January 24th, 2025 — Source or Source

GNOME Showtime Video Player Won't Be Ready Until GNOME 49
While there are many exciting new features in the GNOME 48 Alpha as well as a new app with Decibels becoming the official audio player, there isn't a new official video player for this desktop release.
January 24th, 2025 — Source

KDE neon 20250123 released
KDE neon 20250123 has been released. KDE neon is a Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu and the most recent version of the KDE Plasma desktop.
January 24th, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.14 Adds Support For Blaize BLZP1600, SpacemiT K1 & Snapdragon 8 Elite SoCs
The four SoC pull requests were sent out today for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window. These pull requests are principally about various ARM SoC and platform hardware additions/changes but also an increasing number of RISC-V SoC activity too.
January 24th, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.14 Delivering Better Read Performance For CIFS
The Common Internet File System (CIFS) as an implementation of the SMB protocol for commonly sharing files with Windows systems will enjoy better read performance with the Linux 6.14 kernel.
January 24th, 2025 — Source

Linux rolls out the welcome mat for Microsoft's Copilot key
But what the heck should it do?
January 24th, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Linux GPU Compute Performance Benchmarks
While there have been a lot of GeForce RTX 5090 Windows gaming benchmarks since the review embargo lift yesterday, for those more fascinated by this high-end Blackwell desktop graphics card for its GPU compute potential on Linux, this article is for you. Up today are my very initial GPU compute benchmarks for the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition on Linux with NVIDIA graphics card comparisons across the prior RTX 20, RTX, 30, and RTX 40 series too.
January 24th, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA Maxwell, Pascal & Volta Support Looks Like It Will Soon Move To A Legacy Driver
Now that NVIDIA is rolling out the "Blackwell" GPU driver support, it looks like the NVIDIA Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta generations will soon be moving to a legacy driver branch.
January 24th, 2025 — Source

Several Linux DRM Drivers Orphaned Due To Developer Health
Several of the upstream Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers have become orphaned due to the unfortunately declining health of their lone driver maintainer.
January 24th, 2025 — Source

Vulkan 1.4.306 Published With Two More Extensions
Vulkan 1.4.306 was published this morning as the newest routine specification update to this graphics/compute API.
January 24th, 2025 — Source

WINE 10 is still not an emulator, but Windows apps won't know the difference
New double-digit vintage goes well with all sorts of things
January 24th, 2025 — Source

XFS Code For Linux 6.14 Improves Realtime Device Support
In addition to the Bcachefs features and new Btrfs code for Linux 6.14, the XFS file-system changes were merged on Thursday for this next version of the Linux kernel.
January 24th, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 22nd, 2025

AMD Announces The AMDGPU Composition Stack "ACS" For Advanced Linux Desktop Features
An unexpected surprise today are AMD Linux software engineers announcing a new project a bit further outside the scope of their open-source graphics drivers... The AMDGPU Composition Stack "ACS" is for delivering new advanced features atop Wayland for bettering the Linux desktop display capabilities.
January 22nd, 2025 — Source

AMD Radeon On Linux 6.13 + Mesa 25.0-devel versus NVIDIA R565 Linux Graphics/Gaming Performance
Ahead of the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series graphics "Blackwell" and the AMD Radeon RX 9070 series "RDNA4" later in the quarter, I figured it would be worthwhile having a dedicated article looking at the latest upstream Linux graphics/gaming performance for current generation NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 and AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards.
January 22nd, 2025 — Source

AMD Releases Orochi 3.0 For HIP & CUDA API Switching At Run-Time
Back in April 2022 was the announcement by AMD's GPUOpen team of Orochi as a library for HIP/CUDA API run-time switching. Making use of Orochi allows for dynamically targeting either AMD HIP or NVIDIA CUDA at run-time to ease the distribution/usage of apps wanting to target both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs from the same software build. Today Orochi 3.0 was released.
January 22nd, 2025 — Source

Apache HTTP Server 2.4.63-rc1 released
The release candidate for Apache HTTPD webserver 2.4.63 has been made available, featuring a number of updates. These tasks involve updating the redirect-carefully example BrowserMatch configuration to align with more recent client versions, addressing potential crashes on error paths, extending timeouts for ACME server verification and certificate issuance, and adjusting the log level from error to debug when Stapling is enabled but a certificate lacks an OCSP responder URL.
January 22nd, 2025 — Source

Arch Linux Installer Adds Wayfire As A Desktop Option, Btrfs Improvements
Archinstall 3.0.2 was just tagged as the newest version of this quick and easy, text-based installer for the Arch Linux operating system.
January 22nd, 2025 — Source

Free Software Foundation Marking 40 Years Old With A New Logo
In October it will mark 40 years since the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded by Richard Stallman. In marking forty years of supporting the free software movement, they have been running a logo contest to memorialize the milestone. Today that new logo was unveiled.
January 22nd, 2025 — Source

Grafana security update for AlmaLinux 8
You are receiving an AlmaLinux Security update email because you subscribed to receive errata notifications from AlmaLinux.
January 22nd, 2025 — Source

Implementing Zero Trust Security in Kubernetes
Adopting these strategies will enable organizations to enhance their Kubernetes security posture and better defend against evolving cyber threats.
January 22nd, 2025 — Source

Important Changes To Intel TDX Coming With Linux 6.14
Important code restructuring to the Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) code is landing for the Linux 6.14 kernel to make it more robust moving forward and preparing for future features around this confidential computing / trusted execution environment (TEE) functionality built into the newest Xeon processors.
January 22nd, 2025 — Source

Intel Calls For More Modular PC Designs, Easier Component Replacement/Upgrades
In an Intel blog post today they outlined their desire for a more modular PC design to enhance repairability and reduce e-waste. It's very much along similar lines of the Framework Computer upgradeable and easily serviceable laptops. With some luck hopefully we will be seeing more modular PC designs moving forward.
January 22nd, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.14 Working To Make It Less Painful Debugging Early Boot Issues
Linux kernel developers are working to make it easier to debug early boot issues such as Kexec failures as currently dealing with such situations can be a frustrating and time consuming headache for figuring out the problems prior to the kernel being fully brought online.
January 22nd, 2025 — Source

Linux's KUnit Will Now Default To Using Hardware Acceleration For Faster Testing
Surprisingly a change not made years ago, the Linux Kernel Unit Testing "KUnit" framework with the Linux 6.14 kernel is set to use hardware acceleration by default for faster testing where available.
January 22nd, 2025 — Source

LLVM Lands Initial Support For IBM SystemZ "arch15" Target: IBM z17 / Telum II
Merged this week into the LLVM compiler codebase is initial support for "arch15" within the SystemZ back-end. Arch15 likely correlates to the IBM z17 mainframes with Telum II processors.
January 22nd, 2025 — Source

Qt 6.9 Toolkit Beta 2 Now Available For Testing
The second of three planned betas for the Qt 6.9 cross-platform UI toolkit is now available for testing ahead of the planned stable release in March.
January 22nd, 2025 — Source

Steam for Windows, Mac, Android & Linux 2025
Download Steam, the most popular digital distribution PC gaming platform.
January 22nd, 2025 — Source

This lightweight Linux distro is the easiest way to revive your old computer. How it works
If you want to breathe life back into a slow or aging computer, Linux Lite 7.0 is a lightweight (and easy to install) distribution I highly recommend.
January 22nd, 2025 — Source

Ventoy 1.1.00 released
Ventoy 1.1.00 has been released, which includes Shim updates, eweOS ISO support, and bug fixes.
January 22nd, 2025 — Source

Very Promising Linux Patch Optimizes TLB Flushes During Page Reclamation
Google engineer Vinay Banakar sent out a patch this week for the Linux kernel's memory management code to optimize TLB flushes during page reclaim and are showing very promising results.
January 22nd, 2025 — Source

Wine 10.0 brings Arm Windows apps to Linux, still is not an emulator
Wine compatibility layer is the heart of many Windows app translation projects.
January 22nd, 2025 — Source or Source

Software — Open Source — January 20th, 2025

AMD Seeking Feedback Around What Radeon GPUs You Would Like Supported By ROCm
An engineer from AMD by way of their Nod.ai acquisition is seeking feedback from the community around what other Radeon graphics cards you would like to see supported by the ROCm support on Linux. This community wishlist extends to ROCm Windows support as well but at least there the HIP Rutime/SDK on Windows already supports more consumer GPUs than Linux.
January 20th, 2025 — Source

Bcachefs Sends In "The Last Big On Disk Format Upgrade" For Linux 6.14
Following the Bcachefs pull requests being rejected during the Linux 6.13 cycle by the kernel's Code of Conduct committee, the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is kicking off with a big pull request so that the upstream kernel can get back into sync with the latest development code for this cycle. This pull also contains the last anticipated major on-disk format upgrade prior to the removal of the "experimental" flag for this copy-on-write file-system.
January 20th, 2025 — Source

Busybox, Libreoffice, Tryton-Server, Rsync updates for Debian
Debian GNU/Linux has undergone multiple security updates, encompassing busybox, libreoffice, and tryton-server for Debian 11 LTS, libreoffice for Debian 12, and a rsync regression update for Debian 8/9/10 ELTS.
January 20th, 2025 — Source

Intel FFmpeg Cartwheel 2024Q4 Adds Battlemage GPU Support
Intel software engineers overnight published their new quarterly release of the Intel FFmpeg Cartwheel, the collection of the company's patches against this open-source multimedia library for enhancing the Intel GPU acceleration support while the patches work their way for upstream FFmpeg.
January 20th, 2025 — Source

Kernel and .NET updates for Oracle Linux
Oracle Linux has been updated with multiple security enhancements, featuring a kernel bug fix for the unbreakable Enterprise kernel, as well as security updates for .NET 9.0 and .NET 8.0:
January 20th, 2025 — Source

Kernel and Chromium updates for SUSE
SUSE Linux has released several security updates, including Kernel updates, as well as a security update for chromium:
January 20th, 2025 — Source

Kernel and Python updates for Ubuntu
Ubuntu Linux has received updates focused on security, addressing vulnerabilities related to Linux Kernel (Xilinx ZynqMP) and Python:
January 20th, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.14 Adding "STATX_DIO_READ_ALIGN" To Address A Performance Pitfall
Among the VFS pull requests sent out this weekend in advance of the Linux 6.14 merge window formally opening were the VFS direct I/O (DIO) updates that introduce a new STATX_DIO_READ_ALIGN field for addressing a possible performance pitfall.
January 20th, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.14 To Allow VirtualBox Guest Support On ARM64 VMs
The Linux 6.14 kernel will enable the VirtualBox guest drivers to be built for ARM64 Linux virtual machines (VMs).
January 20th, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.13 released
So nothing horrible or unexpected happened last week, so I've tagged and pushed out the final 6.13 release.
January 20th, 2025 — Source

Linux Mint 22.1 Xia arrives fashionably late
Both the Ubuntu and Debian-based editions get Cinnamon 6.4 and other goodies
January 20th, 2025 — Source

Many Scheduler Improvements Ready To Better Enhance The Linux 6.14 Kernel
Ingo Molnar sent out the big batch of scheduler enhancements bright and early today for helping kick off the start of the Linux 6.14 merge window.
January 20th, 2025 — Source

More Rust Code Is Coming For Linux 6.14 Along With Hitting Another "Major Milestone"
For the Linux 6.13 cycle the Rust code was hitting a "tipping point" with more Rust kernel drivers expected soon. For Linux 6.14 there is indeed a lot more Rust code being primed for this next kernel version.
January 20th, 2025 — Source

OBS Studio 31.0.1 released
OBS Studio 31.0.1 has been released, featuring a range of hotfix changes and new functionalities. These encompass resolving crashes on macOS attributed to hand gesture reactions, addressing malformed scene collection files, and tackling issues related to PipeWire screen sharing. The update has resolved a potential deadlock and freeze on macOS when exiting OBS, as well as addressed an issue related to screensaver inhibition on Linux.
January 20th, 2025 — NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Arrives For Linux Testing
Earlier this month at CES was the announcement of the GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" series. Among the first of these consumer Blackwell GPUs is the GeForce RTX 5090 flagship graphics card that is set to retail for $1999 USD. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founder's Edition graphics card arrived at Phoronix a few days ago to begin Linux testing.
January 20th, 2025 — Source

Open-Source Qualcomm Adreno Vulkan Driver Lands Ray Query Support
The "TURNIP" open-source Vulkan API driver within Mesa for supporting Qualcomm Adreno graphics is now able to expose accelerated ray query support for ray-tracing with newer Adreno GPUs.
January 20th, 2025 — Source

PHP 8.4.3 and 8.3.16 for Debian 11 LTS and 12
Ondřej Surý has released PHP 8.4.3 and 8.3.16 packages for both Debian GNU/Linux 11 (Bullseye) LTS and 12 (Bookworm).
January 20th, 2025 — Source

PoDoFo update for Ubuntu
A PoDoFo security update is available for Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS, 16.04 LTS, 18.04 LTS, 20.04 LTS, and 22.04 LTS:
January 20th, 2025 — Source

RADV Vulkan Driver Support Being Worked On For The GPU Found In The Sony PS5 & BC-250
Open-source developers are working on allowing the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver to support the "Cyan Skillfish" graphics processor IP found within the Sony PlayStation 5 APU as well as the AMD BC-250 mining cards.
January 20th, 2025 — Source

Tiff, Redis, Poco, and more updates for Debian
Debian GNU/Linux has received several security updates, including tiff, redis, libtar, and hplip updates for Debian ELTS as well as tiff, redis, poco, 389-ds-base, and libebml for Debian 11 LTS:
January 20th, 2025 — Source

Windows versus Linux gaming performance shows why AMD is better than Nvidia... mostly
Recently, we conducted our performance overview of an in-place upgrade from Windows 11 23H2 to 24H2 with some scenarios showing interesting outcomes.
January 20th, 2025 — Source

Wine 10.0 Expected This Week For Improving Windows Software On Linux
After six release candidates going back to early December, it looks like Wine 10.0 stable will be ready to ship this week. This is largely as expected with the annual Wine stable releases tending to come around mid-to-late January. Here's a look at what's ahead for this stable release for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms.
January 20th, 2025 — Source

Software — Utilities — January 20th, 2025

BackUp Maker Pro review: File backup made easy and efficient
If you're looking for file backup with pro options and more security than Windows File History, this program delivers.
January 20th, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 17th, 2025

10 Linux apps I install on every new machine (and why you should, too)
If you're wondering which apps take priority on your new Linux machine, these 10 will help you get the most out of the OS.
January 17th, 2025 — Source

5 lightweight Linux distributions that will bring your old PC back to life
If you have an aging computer and want to repurpose it, these lightweight Linux distributions will serve you for years to come.
January 17th, 2025 — Source

AMDXDNA Submitted For Linux 6.14 With Kernel Accelerator/Graphics Driver Updates
LINUX KERNELDue to Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) lead maintainer David Airlie of Red Hat going on holidays the next two weeks, he's preemptively submitted the DRM/accelerator feature pull request ahead of the Linux 6.14 merge window officially opening.
January 17th, 2025 — Source

Deepin 25 released
A preview version of Deepin Linux 25 has been released for testing. The core features include the Solid operating system, which sets core directories as read-only mounts to prevent unauthorized modifications and utilizes differential update technology to reduce download times and data usage. The desktop environment has undergone comprehensive optimization, including QML restructuring of the Control Center and Notification Center, enhancing the user experience and providing a more intuitive graphical interface.
January 17th, 2025 — Source

Fedora 42 Boot Splash Screen Looks To Workaround GPU Drivers Taking Too Long To Load
FEDORALinux kernel graphics drivers have been growing too much in size that they are taking too long to load at boot time for quickly lighting up the display to present the nice Plymouth boot splash experience. This has led to situations of the Plymouth boot splash screen falling back to its simple text-based interface after timing out.
January 17th, 2025 — Source

GNU Coreutils 9.6 Released With Changes For POSIX 2024, More AVX2 & AVX-512 Use
GNU Coreutils 9.6 released today as the updated version of these core utilities common to Linux systems and elsewhere.
January 17th, 2025 — Source

Godot 4.4 Beta 1 released
Godot 4.4 beta 1 has been released, indicating the commencement of the feature freeze for version 4.4. The timeline for release is contingent upon the efficiency of addressing bug fixes and the identification of new bugs during the beta phase. Users are invited to conduct testing and report any bugs to facilitate an efficient beta phase and prompt release.
January 17th, 2025 — Source

In Case You Wondered, RADV Doesn't Work On AMD CDNA Instinct Accelerators
Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team landed some changes on Thursday to the open-source RADV driver within Mesa around GPU checks for the hardware supported by this popular AMD Vulkan driver on Linux systems.
January 17th, 2025 — Source

KDE neon 20250116 released
KDE neon 20250116 has been released. KDE neon is a Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu and the most recent version of the KDE Plasma desktop.
January 17th, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.14 To Add Support For SpacemiT's "Energy Efficient AI" RISC-V CPUs
RISC-VThe upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel is poised to introduce initial support for SpacemiT platforms, the Chinese computing chip company developing "next-generation RISC-V high-performance CPUs." For this next Linux kernel release the SpaceMiT Key Stone K1 octa-core RISC-V AI CPU with SpacemiT X60 cores will see support.
January 17th, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.1.125 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.125 is now available:
January 17th, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.12.10 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.10 is now available:
January 17th, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.6.72 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.72 is now available:
January 17th, 2025 — Source

Linux Mint 22.1 "Xia" released!
The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 22.1 "Xia".
January 17th, 2025 — Source

Many Exciting Features & New Hardware Support Expected For Linux 6.14
LINUX KERNELLinux 6.13 is bringing many exciting features for its stable debut expected this Sunday. But following that it's onward to the Linux 6.14 kernel merge window for which it will be yet another very exciting round from completing the NTSYNC driver to adding new hardware support and much more. Here is a preview of some of the changes expected to be submitted for the Linux 6.14 cycle.
January 17th, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA Linux x64 (AMD64/EM64T) Display Driver 550.144.03 released
NVIDIA has announced the release of an updated Linux x64 (AMD64/EM64T) 550.144.03 display driver, which includes bug fixes and enhancements.
January 17th, 2025 — Source

PHP 8.3.16 and 8.4.3 packages for Fedora/RHEL released
Remi Collet has released PHP
January 17th, 2025 — Source

Pip and GIMP updates for Gentoo
Gentoo Linux has been updated with security enhancements, including GLSA 202501-03 addressing arbitrary configuration injection and GLSA 202501-02 which resolves multiple vulnerabilities in GIMP:
January 17th, 2025 — Source

RadeonSI UVD/VCE Video Acceleration Improvements Merged For Mesa 25.0
At the start of the new year I talked about patches improving AMD Radeon video encode/decode for older GPUs. That work to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's UVD and VCE support has now been merged ahead of the Mesa 25.0 code branching coming up in just over one week.
January 17th, 2025 — Source

Vulkan 1.4.305 Published With Three New Extensions
Vulkan 1.4.305 has been published as the newest version of the Vulkan API specification for high performance graphics and compute.
January 17th, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 13th, 2025

A happy Linus Torvalds is offering to build a guitar pedal for one lucky Linux dev
Linus Torvalds, the Linux boss-man, often draws eyes due to his interesting and often very expressive takes whether it is regarding hardware or software.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

A Microsoft-Contributed Change To Linux 6.13 Is Causing A Last Minute Ruckus
A change to the Linux 6.13 kernel contributed by a Microsoft engineer ended up changing Linux x86_64 code without proper authorization and in turn causing troubles for users and now set to be disabled ahead of the Linux 6.13 stable release expected next Sunday.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

Alibaba Engineers Work To Address Suspend/Resume Bugs With The AMD Graphics Driver
Alibaba engineers have recently been working through some AMD Linux kernel graphics driver bugs uncovered during suspend-and-resume testing with AMD graphics cards.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

AMD Broadcast TLB Invalidation Linux Patches Reworked In 4th Spin
A nice Christmas surprise for 2024 was Meta engineer Rik van Riel posting Linux kernel patches for making use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction found since Zen 3 processors for broadcast TLB invalidation.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

DXVK 2.5.3 Brings More Fixes For Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 On Vulkan
Philip Rebohle working for Valve has just released DXVK 2.5.3 as the newest update to this Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 implementation over the Vulkan API that is used for enjoying older Windows games on Linux.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

DXVK 2.5.3 released
DXVK Version 2.5.3 has been released, featuring updates for Windows that enable the exclusive full-screen mode. The feature resolves concerns related to variable refresh rate displays, enhances performance, and improves HDR capabilities. Recent updates include the resolution of a regression that was causing rendering issues in D3D8 and D3D9 games, the correction of invalid shader code generation for uncommon texture operations in D3D11, and the mitigation of potential problems related to NaN tessellation factors in D3D11 hull shaders.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

GCC 15 Compiler Enters Its Final Stage Of Development
Richard Biener of SUSE announced today that the GCC 15 compiler has entered its stage four of development, which is the last stage focused only on regression fixes and documentation updates.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

GNOME Shell 48 Alpha Introduces Screen Time / Health Breaks, Mutter 48 Alpha Out Too
The "48.alpha" releases of GNOME Shell and Mutter were tagged on Sunday for this week's release of the GNOME 48 Alpha in leading up to the GNOME 48.0 stable release in mid-March.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

How to create system restore points on Linux with Timeshift - and why you should
Concerned about something going wrong with your Linux system? If so, Timeshift can help return things to a working state should something go awry.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

Hyprland Wayland Compositor Lands HDR / Color Management Support
Hyprland is now the latest Wayland compositor supporting the color management protocols and allowing High Dynamic Range (HDR) color support with capable displays.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

Intel Battlemage Showing Off Nice OpenCL Gains With Newest Open-Source Compute Stack
Last month with the launch of Intel Battlemage with the Arc B580 graphics card, there was fairly nice open-source GPU compute performance but with some outliers... Today it's a pleasure to report that with the newest open-source GPU compute stack as of this past week, there are some nice Xe2 / Battlemage improvements for enhancing the performance of some OpenCL workloads and also correcting the performance of some workloads that were in poor standing on launch day.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

Intel Gigabit Ethernet Driver To Speed-Up With AF_XDP Zero-Copy For Linux 6.14
Queued up into the networking subsystem's "net-next" branch last week ahead of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is AF_XDP zero-copy support for the common Intel Gigabit Ethernet "IGB" driver. With this the AF_XDP performance improvements can be quite dramatic in leveraging this zero-copy path.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

Linux Attack Vector Controls Updated To More Easily Controlling CPU Security Mitigations
Last year an AMD engineer proposed the notion of "Attack Vector Controls" for the Linux kernel to re-think how the CPU security mitigation handling is done and making it easier for system administrators/users to toggle the mitigations they are concerned about or not.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

Linux Foundation Announces Initiative to Support Chromium Ecosystem
The open-source Chromium architecture is the backbone of many internet browsers, including Google's Chrome. Google, Microsoft, and others have expressed support for the initiative.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

Microsoft pulls a Windows as it breaks Linux on Intel CPUs and angers AMD in the process
Earlier today, we reported about a happy and content Linus Torvalds, who is offering to make a guitar pedal for one of the lucky Linux devs out there since he is pleased with how things have been this holiday season and the progress with the Linux kernel version 6.13.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

Oracle OLED Wants To Help Improve The Debugability Of The Linux Kernel
Oracle today announced the Oracle Linux Enhanced Diagnostics (OLED) as their newest project that aims to enhance the debugability of the Linux kernel.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

Say goodbye to Windows 11 and switch to MX Linux 23.5 for a faster PC
Tired of the constant updates, bloat, and resource demands of Windows 11? Aren't we all? MX Linux could be the perfect solution to your woes, and thanks to its lightweight nature -- especially compared to Windows -- it could make your PC run even faster!
January 13th, 2025 — Source

This new Linux handheld PC could be a tinkerer's dream come true
Currently in development, the Debian-powered Mecha Comet could be a Linux phone, drone controller, or interface for your car. If you dream it, you can make it.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

This portable, lightweight Linux distro has an old-school feel
If you need a lightning-fast, portable Linux distribution to run on aging hardware or spin up a quick server, 4MLinux is a great option.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

Software — Utilities — January 13th, 2025

VLC celebrates 6 billion downloads with new AI subtitles feature
The world-renowned video player app will use open-source AI models that can run locally on the device.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

ZenTimings 1.35
A free, simple and lightweight app for monitoring memory timings on Ryzen platform.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

Software — Windows Os — January 13th, 2025

How To Remove A Microsoft Account From Windows 11
Despite Apple's popularity, Windows remains the most popular operating system for desktop PCs, with a market share of over 70%, according to most estimates. There is also an abundance of lightweight Windows laptops in the market that rival the MacBook Air. This is largely thanks to the platform being available for installation on a wide range of devices, including custom-built PCs, laptops, 2-in-1 convertibles, and everything in between.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

How to shut your PC down at a specific time on Windows 11 and 10
Here are seven ways to turn off your computer automatically.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

Microsoft to force new Outlook app in Windows 10 with no way to block it
Designed to replace the current Mail and Calendar apps, the new Outlook can only be removed after it's been installed.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

Windows 10 PCs will be forced to install the new Outlook app in February
There's no way to block the forced installation, but at least you'll be able to uninstall it afterwards.
January 13th, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 10th, 2025

12 Years After Haswell, Intel Open-Source Graphics Developers Still Make Occasional Fix
The Intel Haswell CPUs were originally introduced back in 2013 and great for the time. Under Microsoft Windows the driver support has long been obsolete but under Linux with Intel's open-source driver support there is still even the occasional fix all these years later. Coming up for the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle in 2025 is a fix to benefit Haswell and similarly aged Intel platforms with integrated graphics.
January 10th, 2025 — Source

A new initiative will fund and support open-source Chromium projects
The Linux Foundation will manage the new Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers initiative.
January 10th, 2025 — Source

Auto-Cpufreq 2.5.0 released
A new version of Auto-Cpufreq, an automatic CPU speed and power optimizer for Linux, has been released and features support for EPB settings, includes bug fixes, enhancements for Fedora 41 (TuneD), an improved TuneD detection mechanism, systemd service management, and addresses permission errors for various commands.
January 10th, 2025 — Source

Blumenkrantz Boosts Zink Performance By 150% For Everspace, Possibly Helping Other Games
Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics driver team who is known for his work on the Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation has made another mighty round of improvements for helping the gaming performance.
January 10th, 2025 — Source

Budgie 10.10 Scheduled for Q1 2025 with a Surprising Desktop Update
If Budgie is your desktop environment of choice, 2025 is going to be a great year for you.
January 10th, 2025 — Source

Building a Sample Kubernetes Operator on Minikube: A Step-by-Step Guide
Build a Kubernetes Operator on Minikube to manage custom resources, automate tasks, and extend functionality using the Operator SDK.
January 10th, 2025 — Source

Chromium and WebkitGTK2 updates for Debian
Debian GNU/Linux has been updated with two security patches: A chromium update for Debian 12 (Bookworm) and a webkit2gtk update for Debian 11 (Bullseye) LTS
January 10th, 2025 — Source

Experimental Linux Address Space Isolation "ASI" v2 Patches: I/O Throughput Lower By 70%
Google engineers and others have been talking about Address Space Isolation "ASI" for the Linux kernel to better deal with speculative execution attacks and other CPU vulnerabilities. Last summer there were some new "request for comments" patches working on Linux Address Space Isolation and today a second iteration of those RFC patches were published.
January 10th, 2025 — Source

Free-software warriors celebrate landmark case that enforced GNU LGPL
On the Fritz: German router maker AVM lets device rights case end after coughing up source code
January 10th, 2025 — Source

Git 2.48 Released With Initial Support For The Meson Build System
Git 2.48 is out today as the newest feature update to this leading distributed version control system.
January 10th, 2025 — Source

Google, Microsoft, and others team up for Chromium browser alliance under Linux Foundation
"Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers"
January 10th, 2025 — Source or Source

KDE neon 20250109 released
KDE neon 20250109 has been released. KDE neon is a Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu and the most recent version of the KDE Plasma desktop.
January 10th, 2025 — Source

Lenovo Discovers Situation Of Linux Dropping PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSDs To Gen 1 Speeds
A change made to the Linux kernel in June 2023 has led to a situation where PCIe Gen5 NVMe solid state drives could potentially drop down to Gen1 speeds... Lenovo engineers spotted this issue and bisected the problem along with coming up with a solution.
January 10th, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.6.71 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.71 is now available:
January 10th, 2025 — Source

More Intel Xeon Clearwater Forest Enablement Merged For Linux 6.13
Squeezing into the mainline Linux 6.13 kernel code today as part of the latest batch of "fixes" are two additional enablement bits for the upcoming high-density Intel Xeon Clearwater Forest server processors.
January 10th, 2025 — Source

Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Alpha 5 released
System76 has announced the release of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Alpha 5. The release features an early version of the COSMIC Media Player, User Settings, and critical updates to Alt+Tab, variable refresh rates, and additional enhancements. The COSMIC Media Player has been designated as the default media player, and the team is currently developing a COSMIC-native codec installation application to succeed sessioninstaller.
January 10th, 2025 — Source

Proton worldwide outage caused by Kubernetes migration, software change
Swiss tech company Proton, which provides privacy-focused online services, says that a Thursday worldwide outage was caused by an ongoing infrastructure migration to Kubernetes and a software change that triggered an initial load spike.
January 10th, 2025 — Source

Pulseaudio-Qt 1.7.0 released
Nicolas Fella has announced the release of Pulseaudio-Qt 1.7.0, a Qt wrapper for libpulse utilized by plasma-pa and kdeconnect-kde. The release incorporates enhanced functionality and addresses bug fixes, while discontinuing support for Qt5. Changelogs detail the removal of Qt5 support, updates to compiler settings, and the addition of module support.
January 10th, 2025 — Source

Python, Thunderbird, xfpt, Kernel, Go Networking updates for Ubuntu
Ubuntu Linux has received a series of security updates, addressing vulnerabilities in Python, Thunderbird, xfpt, the Linux kernel (Azure), and Go Networking.
January 10th, 2025 — Source

Servo Browser Engine Adds Dark Mode, Some XPath Support
The Servo open-source web browser layout engine project has published their newest monthly recap to highlight the progress they made during December 2024. They ended the year on a high note with getting dark mode support working and other features wired up -- including enough to now be able to read Discord messages but not yet enough to actually post messages on Discord.
January 10th, 2025 — Source

Thanks to Nvidia, there's a new generation of PCs coming, and they'll be running Linux
OK, maybe you wouldn't pay three grand for a Project DIGITS PC. But what about a $1,000 Blackwell PC from Acer, Asus, or Lenovo?
January 10th, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu Considers Taking It Easier On Software Updates Over Weekends
Ubuntu developers are looking at extending their policy of not releasing stable release updates (SRUs) around the weekend as well as not phasing them up to 100% during those weekend times either.
January 10th, 2025 — Source

Ubuntu Linux arrives on HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V development board
The RISC-V development ecosystem is expanding with the introduction of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on the HiFive Premier P550, a collaboration between SiFive, ESWIN Computing, and Canonical. This integration brings the power of Linux to developers using the HiFive Premier P550, offering a seamless development experience within the RISC-V ecosystem.
January 10th, 2025 — Source

VKD3D-Proton 2.14.1 Brings A Few Fixes For Direct3D 12 On Vulkan
Hans-Kristian Arntzen with Valve has just released VKD3D-Proton 2.14.1 as this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan implementation.
January 10th, 2025 — Source or Source

Wine 10.0-rc5 Brings Another 31 Bug Fixes
Wine 10.0 is working its way toward a stable release likely in the next week or two, but today there is Wine 10.0-rc5 with the latest round of fixes.
January 10th, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 9th, 2025

10 Linux apps I install on every new machine (and why you should, too)
If you're wondering which apps take priority on your new Linux machine, these 10 will help you get the most out of the OS.
January 9th, 2025 — Source

AMD Secure TSC Support Might Finally Be Ready For Landing In The Linux Kernel
Going back to January 2023 were patches for enabling Secure TSC support for use by SEV-SNP guests with AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" and newer processors... Two years later and after sixteen rounds of revising the Linux kernel patches, it looks like the AMD Secure TSC support is finally ready for landing in the mainline Linux kernel.
January 9th, 2025 — Source

COSMIC Alpha 5 Desktop Brings COSMIC Media Player As Default, VRR Updates
Building off the COSMIC Alpha 4 release from early December, COSMIC Alpha 5 is now available as the newest stepping stone toward the first stable release of this Rust-based open-source desktop developed by System76 for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.
January 9th, 2025 — Source

End of Firefox? Google joined by Linux, Microsoft and more to make Chrome, Edge better
The Linux Foundation, alongside Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Opera, have announced today the formation of the new Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers. As the name suggests, this group has been formed for the support of open-source Chromium browsers so that they can continue to receive the necessary resources, be it financially, or in some other form.
January 9th, 2025 — Source

GNOME Mutter Merges Support For Wayland Timing & Queuing Protocols
After being in development the past year, merged today to Mutter Git ahead of GNOME 48 is support for the Wayland timing and queueing protocols.
January 9th, 2025 — Source

Google & Linux Foundation Launch "Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers" Fund
Google and the Linux Foundation today announced the creation of the "Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers" fund to help provide funding to open-source developers working on Chromium-based open-source projects.
January 9th, 2025 — Source

Haiku Beta 5 / In tests it's (Fire)foxier / It pleases us well
Simply the best FOSS desktop OS there is, outside of the Windows and Unix families
January 9th, 2025 — Source

Intel Compute Runtime 24.52.32224.5 Brings More Battlemage Optimizations
The Intel Compute Runtime 24.52.32224.5 release was made earlier today as the newest update to this open-source Linux and Windows compute stack for Intel graphics hardware for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero implementations.
January 9th, 2025 — Source

Intel PMT Telemetry Now Available For Battlemage Graphics Cards
The Intel PMT open-source software support has now been updated for Platform Monitoring Technology Telemetry with the new Battlemage discrete graphics cards.
January 9th, 2025 — Source

KDE Frameworks 6.10 released
KDE Frameworks 6.10.0 has been released and consists of a series of monthly releases that deliver a diverse range of essential functionalities through mature, peer-reviewed, and thoroughly tested libraries, all accompanied by favorable licensing terms. The release encompasses a range of new features, including Baloo, Breeze Icons, Extra CMake Modules, ECMAddAndroidApk, EMGenerateHeaders, GridDelegate, KConfig, Docs(DESIGN), KDeclarative, KDocTools, KKuiAddons, Kirigami, KNewStuff, KQuickCharts, KSVG, KTextEditor, KWallet, KXMLGUI, Network Manager Qt, Prison, QtMultimedia dependency, and QQC2 Desktop Style.
January 9th, 2025 — Source

KDE Gear 24.12.1 released
KDE Gear 24.12.1 has been released and encompasses more than 180 programs, numerous libraries, and various feature plugins. This update incorporates bug fixes for Kasts, Konversation, and Telly-Skout, facilitating more seamless program description updates.
January 9th, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.3 Beta released
KDE Plasma 6.3 Beta has been released, featuring the migration of snap-kcm and Spectacle from KDE Gear to enhance integration with KWin. Districts have the option to select their preferred version, with Qt 6.8 being recommended for updates following the release.
January 9th, 2025 — Source or Source

KDE Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.16 Brings Power/Performance versus Color Accuracy Preference
KDE developers today released Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.16 as the newest feature update to this set of non-standard Wayland protocols used by the Plasma desktop.
January 9th, 2025 — Source

Linux Foundation Announces the Launch of Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the launch of Supporters of Chromium-Based Bowsers. This initiative aims to fund open development and enhance projects within the Chromium ecosystem, ensuring broad support and sustainability for open source contributions that will drive technological advancement.
January 9th, 2025 — Source or Source or Source

Linux kernel 5.10.233 released
Linux kernel version 5.10.233 is now available:
January 9th, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 5.15.176 released
Linux kernel version 5.15.176 is now available:
January 9th, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 5.4.289 released
Linux kernel version 5.4.289 is now available:
January 9th, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.1.124 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.124 is now available:
January 9th, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.12.9 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.9 is now available:
January 9th, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.6.70 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.70 is now available:
January 9th, 2025 — Source

Liquorix Linux Kernel 6.12-11 released
Steven Barrett has released a new Liquorix kernel derived from Linux kernel 6.12.9. The Liquorix Linux kernel is an enthusiast Linux kernel that is optimized for low latency computing in audiovisual production, reduced frame time variations in games, and unparalleled responsiveness in interactive systems. It is available for Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch Linux.
January 9th, 2025 — Source

LLVM Clang Lands Targeting Support For The SiFive P550 RISC-V Performance Core
Upstreamed to LLVM/Clang overnight is now targeting support for the SiFive P550 RISC-V core with the "-mcpu=sifive-p550" option.
January 9th, 2025 — Source

Microsoft's Azure Linux Introduces New AMD Graphics Driver Options
Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution known as Azure Linux is out with its 3.0.20250102 update today. One of the interesting changes in this release is adding new AMD driver package repositories for allowing Azure Linux users to fetch the latest official AMDGPU driver packages or alternatively the newest "preview" driver packages.
January 9th, 2025 — Source

Mold 2.36 Linker Brings More Optimizations & Compatibility Improvements
Rui Ueyama released Mold 2.36 as the newest update to this open-source linker that aims to deliver maximum performance at all costs.
January 9th, 2025 — Source

OpenAI Shuts Down Developer Who Made AI-Powered Gun Turret
The DIY robot used ChatGPT's Realtime API to respond to commands to aim and fire a rifle.
January 9th, 2025 — Source

Raspberry Pi 5 16GB Model Launches For $120 USD
One of the leading rare complaints over the Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer (and the more recently launched Raspberry Pi 500) is that it tops out at just 8GB of system memory... 8GB was enough years ago and still is if planning to use the Raspberry Pi for lightweight desktop and embedded scenarios and other situations where you don't need too much RAM for the four ARM cores, but for those wanting more, today the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB is being introduced.
January 9th, 2025 — Source

Tails 6.11 out now with more protection against partitioning errors that can wipe data
The Tails team has just announced the latest version of their ultra-private Linux-based operating system, Tails 6.11. Each point release typically brings with it a new feature or two, and this time is no different. With this update, you get better detection of partition errors, which can help you save your persistent data before it's too late.
January 9th, 2025 — Source or Source

Software — Open Source — January 8th, 2025

AMD Linux GPU Driver Preps OEM i2c Bus Support Used For RGB Control & More
A set of patches posted this week for the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver is beginning to expose additional i2c buses that are used by some OEM/AIB partners for implementing RGB lighting controls and other extra functionality with Radeon graphics cards.
January 8th, 2025 — Source

Alpine 3.18.11, 3.19.6, 3.20.5 and 3.21.2 released
Alpine Linux versions 3.18.11, 3.19.6, 3.20.5, and 3.21.2 have been released, incorporating a regression fix for CA certificates.
January 8th, 2025 — Source

FEX 2501 Brings JIT Performance Improvements, Changes Needed For Denuvo Support
FEX 2501 is now available as the newest feature release to this open-source emulator that allows running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 Linux hosts.
January 8th, 2025 — Source

Intel Preps Nice NPU Driver Improvements For Linux 6.14
For those with an Intel Core Ultra system bearing the company's Neural Processing Unit (NPU), some nice driver enhancements are on the way for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle.
January 8th, 2025 — Source

Intel's Clang Code Begins Landing For OpenMP Offloading To SPIR-V For GPU Execution
Intel software engineers have been working on allowing OpenMP offloading to their Intel GPUs by way of targeting generic SPIR-V, the common intermediate representation used across Vulkan / OpenGL / OpenCL drivers. The initial patches to that work have now landed in upstream LLVM/Clang 20 for OpenMP offloading to SPIR-V.
January 8th, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.3 To Offer Better Night Light Mode On HDR Displays
KDE KWin developer Xaver Hugl is out with a new blog post on his quest of providing optimal High Dynamic Range (HDR) display experience with the KDE desktop. The latest focus by Xaver has been on fixing the "night light" mode support under KDE Plasma on HDR displays.
January 8th, 2025 — Source

Linux 6.14 Preps UHBR For Intel Panther Lake, Lower Alchemist GPU Power Use With Whitelisted CPUs
Intel software engineers this week sent out two pull requests landing more of their final kernel graphics driver feature changes destined for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel.
January 8th, 2025 — Source

Nvidia Project Digits: A Linux-powered desktop for AI developers
The most powerful desktop of all time will be arriving soon - and it will be running Linux.
January 8th, 2025 — Source

Open3D v0.19 Brings Cross-Platform GPU Support Via SYCL
Open3D v0.19 is out as the newest feature release to this open-source library for 3D data processing in C++ and Python. Open3D provides various 3D data structures, processing algorithms, 3D visualizations, physically based GPU rendering, and machine learning integration with the likes of PyTorch and TensorFlow to offer powerful 3D data processing capabilities.
January 8th, 2025 — Source

OpenAI's Sam Altman sued by sister, alleging years of sexual abuse
Sam Altman, along with his parents and brothers, vehemently deny the claims by Ann Altman.
January 8th, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 7th, 2025

AMD's GPUOpen HIP RT 2.5 Released With Fixes, GFX1200 RDNA4 Support
AMD's GPUOpen team today released HIP RT 2.5 as the newest version of this ray-tracing library for HIP. This library in turn is used by the likes of the Blender 3D modeling software for ray-tracing acceleration on Radeon GPUs.
January 7th, 2025 — Source

Brotli, Javapackages-Tools, Libvirt, and more updates for Oracle Linux
Oracle Linux has issued multiple security updates, which encompass bug fixes and enhancements for a range of packages, including brotli, javapackages-tools, libvirt, podman, microcode_ctl, python-requests, 389-ds:1.4, idm:DL1, go-toolset:ol8, virt:ol, virt-devel:rhel, sos, sysstat, sos, and postgresql:
January 7th, 2025 — Source

Budgie 10.10 Desktop Releasing This Quarter As Wayland-Only
For fans of the Budgie desktop environment that got its start out of the Solus Linux distribution, the Budgie 10.10 release expected later this quarter will be their first release that is Wayland-only.
January 7th, 2025 — Source

Cross-Vendor Mesh Shading Being Worked On For OpenGL
While it's very rare in recent times for a new OpenGL extension -- especially one that is exciting -- given the continued great adoption of the modern Vulkan API, in 2025 we are looking at an interesting addition to OpenGL with cross-vendor mesh shading via a proposed GL_EXT_mesh_shader implementation.
January 7th, 2025 — Source

CXL Block Device "CBD" Looking Very Promising For The Linux Kernel In 2025
Originally proposed for the Linux kernel nearly one year ago was CBD as the CXL Block Device. Now up to its third revision, the Linux CBD patches are calming down and the performance gains are looking quite nice.
January 7th, 2025 — Source

Device Memory "DMEM" Cgroup Support Ready For Linux 6.14 To Allow Limiting GPU vRAM
A pull request submitted this week to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle is introducing the notion of device memory "DMEM" to cgroup with the main intended use being to restrict device memory usage based on the cgroup hierarchy such as for graphics cards with their dedicated vRAM.
January 7th, 2025 — Source

Firefox 134 Offers Improvements for Linux Version
Fans of Linux and Firefox rejoice, as there's a new version available that includes some handy updates.
January 7th, 2025 — Source

GCC Goes For "libc Diversity" With Picolibc Support
Keith Packard is known for his X.Org/X11 work over the course of many years but alongside other software projects he also maintains Picolibc as a C library designed for embedded 32-bit and 64-bit systems. Recently he sent out a patch for adding Picolibc support to the GCC compiler.
January 7th, 2025 — Source

HipScript Allows NVIDIA CUDA & AMD HIP Code To Run Within Web Browsers
HipScript is a new open-source project that allows for compiling and running AMD HIP and NVIDIA CUDA code within web browsers by leveraging WebAssembly and WebGPU.
January 7th, 2025 — Source

How to set up a print server on your home network with Linux
If you have multiple computers that need to print to one printer on your home network, you can use Linux as a reliable print server.
January 7th, 2025 — Source

In time for the upcoming release of Mesa 25.0, Mesa's Lavapipe software Vulkan API implementation is now the latest driver exposing Vulkan 1.4 support.
OpenZFS 2.3 continues working its way toward release with Monday having brought the fifth and potentially final release candidate.
January 7th, 2025 — Source

Mesa's Lavapipe Driver Now Exposes Vulkan 1.4
In time for the upcoming release of Mesa 25.0, Mesa's Lavapipe software Vulkan API implementation is now the latest driver exposing Vulkan 1.4 support.
January 7th, 2025 — Source

Salt, Ceph, Linux Kernel updates for Ubuntu
Ubuntu Linux has received updates addressing multiple security vulnerabilities, including those related to Salt, Ceph, and Linux Kernel:
January 7th, 2025 — Source

Serpent OS Arrives with a New Alpha Release
After months of silence, Ikey Doherty has released a new alpha for his Serpent OS.
January 7th, 2025 — Source

Sam Altman says OpenAI can confidently build AGI as the ChatGPT maker shifts focus to superintelligence: "I kinda miss doing AI research back when we didn't know how"
OpenAI CEO says the ChatGPT maker can build AGI and is shifting its focus to superintelligence "in the true sense of the word."
January 7th, 2025 — Source

Sam Altman takes a swipe at OpenAI board members who fired him
Recently, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, had an interview where he revealed some interesting details about the present and future of ChatGPT's parent company. During the interview, he confirmed that he is not very good at choosing prices for their AI-powered chatbot paid plans, which later led to a Pro tier that, even at $200, makes OpenAI lose money.
January 7th, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 6th, 2025

Alpine 3.18.10, 3.19.5 and 3.20.4 released
Alpine Linux 3.18.10, 3.19.5, and 3.20.4 have been released to address a variety of security vulnerabilities.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

Alpine 3.21.1 released
We are pleased to announce the release of Alpine Linux 3.21.1, a maintenance release of the 3.21 series. This release includes various bug fixes and security updates. It also introduces a U-Boot release tarball for riscv64 and StarFive VisionFive2 boards.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

AMD Announces Ryzen 9 9950X3D & Ryzen AI Max, Previews AMD RDNA 4 Graphics
AMD's CES 2025 keynote was used to announce a slew of new products. They are just announcements today without any immediate availability or any hardware reviews to publish, but a look ahead for what is on the horizon for AMD in the consumer space in 2025.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

An easier way to read Linux manual pages
Linux man pages are a great way to get help with commands. However, these pages can be intimidating for inexperienced users. Here's how to simplify them.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

Automating Kubernetes Workload Rightsizing With StormForge
StormForge automates Kubernetes workload rightsizing using machine learning to optimize resource utilization and performance.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

Device Mapper Atomic Write Support Patches Posted
Along with other recent Linux kernel patches around atomic write support, a set of Device Mapper (DM) patches were posted today for implementing said functionality.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

DisplayPort 2.1b Arriving This Spring With DP80LL Cables
In addition to the HDMI Forum announcing the HDMI 2.2 specification for release in the first half of this year, VESA also took to CES 2025 to announce their forthcoming DisplayPort 2.1b standard.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

Dpdk and Sysstat updates for SUSE
SUSE Linux has received two security updates: important for dpdk and moderate for sysstat
January 6th, 2025 — Source

Firefox 134 Available With Experimental HTML "autocorrect" Attribute
Mozilla has published the Firefox 134.0 release binaries today ahead of their official release tomorrow. This first Firefox update of 2025 brings a few new features to Linux users and those on other platforms.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

HDMI 2.2 Announced With 96 Gbps Bandwidth - Still With Restricted Licensing
The HDMI Forum used CES for today announcing the HDMI 2.2 specification that will be available to HDMI 2.x adopters in the first half of the calendar year.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

HiSilicon HIBMC DP Support For Linux 6.14, Additional AMDXDNA Fixes Queued
Maxime Ripard of Red Hat today sent out the first set of "drm-misc-next" patches of 2025 for queuing into DRM-Next until the Linux 6.14 merge window opens in the coming weeks.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

Intel Announces Core Ultra 200H / Core Ultra 200HX Series
Intel used the start of CES 2025 for announcing the newest Arrow Lake processors for the Core Ultra 200H and Core Utra 200HX mobile processors.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

Intel Touch Host Controller Drivers Nearing The Mainline Linux Kernel
For the past several months Intel Linux software engineers have been working on Intel Touch Host Controller drivers as an IP block on the PCH for handling touchscreen, touchpad, and related touch input devices. On Sunday the fourth iteration of these driver patches were sent out as these new Intel open-source drivers near the mainline Linux kernel.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

KDE Plasma 5.27.12 released
KDE Plasma 5.27.12, a bug fix release for the KDE Plasma 5 series, has been released. The update incorporates a resolution for the default theme set to Breeze, an enhancement for battery charge state monitoring, and addresses crashes related to weather and DWD functionalities.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

Linux-powered handheld computer connects to Raspberry Pi HATs, snap-on modules
The Mecha Comet is made for hackers and makers.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

NVIDIA Working On "-flto-partition=locality" GCC Option To Boost Performance For Some CPU Workloads
NVIDIA compiler engineers have spent the past several months working on a proposed GCC option -flto-partition=locality for having the compiler optimize the code layout for locality between callees and callers as part of the link-time optimization (LTO) process. For some workloads NVIDIA is finding this -flto-partition=locality compiler option being of significant help for bettering the CPU performance.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

Open source alternative to x86 and Arm could take off in 2025
The prolific x86 and Arm architectures might soon have another contender to deal with.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

Qualcomm Bringing Snapdragon X Series To Mini PCs For As Little As ~$600 USD
Following last year's launch of Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 powered laptops, Qualcomm is using CES 2025 this week in Las Vegas for promoting the Snapdragon X Series for mini desktop form factor PCs. But the Linux support and performance out of these forthcoming Snapdragon X Platform mini PCs remain to be seen.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

Revolutionize Stream Processing With Data Fabric
An open-source distributed event-streaming platform like Apache Kafka supports data fabric by handling real-time data streaming across various systems.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

RHSA-2025:0039: Important: bind and bind-dyndb-ldap security update
An update for bind and bind-dyndb-ldap is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Extended Lifecycle Support - EXTENSION.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

Samba 4.21.3 released
Samba 4.21.3 has been released and is the most recent stable release that has been released in the Samba 4.21 release series. Additional replication loops against Azure Active Directory, compound rename from Mac clients failing with NT_STATUS_INTERNAL_ERROR, vfs crossrename issues, memory leaks, fixing heap-user-after-free with association groups, segment fault in vfs_btrfs, and event failure race avoidance are some of the changes that have been implemented since version 4.21.2.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

This Linux distro could let your old laptop 'shine on' after Windows 10's sunset
If you're facing the end of support for your operating system and don't want to have to shell out the money for a new one, there's yet another Linux distribution that I'd recommend you consider.
January 6th, 2025 — Source

Tinyproxy, HWE, Raspberry Pi updates for Ubuntu
Ubuntu Linux has received updates that address security vulnerabilities in Tinyproxy, HWE, and Raspberry Pi
January 6th, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 3rd, 2025

Canonical Experimented With Rebuilding Its Ubuntu 25.04 Packages Under LLVM/Clang
#2693
January 3rd, 2025 — Source

GNU C Library glibc 2.41 Release Coming Soon With Many New Features
The GNU C Library "glibc" 2.41 release should be out around the very end of January or start of February. With glibc 2.41 there are many new features coming to this widely-used libc implementation by Linux systems and elsewhere.
January 3rd, 2025 — Source

KDE Internet of Things "Kiot" Started To Provide Nice Home Assistant Integration
Longtime KDE developer David Edmundson has recently been cleaning up some scripts he's been using personally for a few years to enhance the integration between the KDE desktop and Home Assistant for open-source home automation. This work has evolved into the KDE Internet of Things "Kiot" and is currently in a pre-alpha state for enhancing the support between KDE and home automation controls.
January 3rd, 2025 — Source

KDE neon 20250102 released
KDE neon 20250102 has been released. KDE neon is a Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu and the most recent version of the KDE Plasma desktop.
January 3rd, 2025 — Source

How to Disable IPv6 on Linux
If network troubleshooting leads you to believe there's an issue with IPv6, you may need to shut down that protocol on your Linux machines.
January 3rd, 2025 — Source or Watch Video

How To Use SCP (Secure Copy) With SSH Key Authentication
Here's how to use the secure copy command, in conjunction with ssh key authentication, for an even more secure means of copying files to your remote Linux servers.
January 3rd, 2025 — Source

Intel Battlemage, Raspberry Pi 500 & Linux 6.13 Excited Linux Users In December
While there was the year-end holidays, daily activity on Phoronix doesn't let up and over the course of December there were 256 original news articles around Linux/open-source on the site along with 24 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Here's a look back at what excited Phoronix readers the most as we closed out 2024.
January 3rd, 2025 — Source

IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 191 is available for testing
IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 191 is now available for testing, featuring a range of package updates to ensure your firewall remains current and IPFire continues to represent a modern Linux operating system. The update encompasses minor bug fixes and foundational work for more significant changes. The IPFire development team values your feedback and input. Modifications encompass the removal of the Feodo Tracker Aggressive and Feodo IP lists, rectification of bug issues in open connection lists, enhancement of the French translation for firewall options, and resolution of a backup issue.
January 3rd, 2025 — Source

Kubernetes in the Cloud: A Guide to Observability
Kubernetes Observability: Use metrics, logs, and traces to understand your system, solve problems faster, and improve performance.
January 3rd, 2025 — Source

LibreOffice 25.2 RC1 Brings Many Open-Source Office Suite Improvements
LibreOffice 25.2 Release Candidate 1 is out for testing today ahead of the stable release of this free software office suite around the start of February.
January 3rd, 2025 — Source

New Linux Patches Enhance AMD Radeon Video Encode/Decode For Older GPUs
Since Raven/Picasso APUs and Navi GPUs there is Video Core Next (VCN) as the modern unified video encode/decode block for Radeon graphics. But for those with older Radeon GPUs where there are the Unified Video Decode (UVD) and Video Coding Engine (VCE) blocks, a set of Mesa patches is looking to enhance the video acceleration support on Linux systems.
January 3rd, 2025 — Source

systemd Saw A Record Number Of Commits In 2025
While systemd has been around for a decade and a half, it's showing no signs of slowing down for driving new innovations to Linux for this system and service manager.
January 3rd, 2025 — Source

This morning the first test rebuild results of the "Plucky Puffin" for Ubuntu 25.04 were shared on the mailing list... While typically not interesting to outsiders, one interesting bit is that as a "bonus" they rebuilt the main components of Ubuntu 25.04 packages with the LLVM Clang compiler compared to the usual GCC compiler.
#2693
January 3rd, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 2nd, 2025

5 lightweight Linux distributions with very low system requirements
If you have an aging computer and want to give it new life, there are plenty of lightweight Linux distributions that will serve you for years to come.
January 2nd, 2025 — Source

ACD Power/Performance Feature Being Worked On For The GPU Within The Snapdragon X1
For the Qualcomm Adreno X1-85 GPU found within the Snapdragon X1 series of laptop chips, an Adaptive Clock Distribution "ACD" feature is currently being wired up to the open-source MSM kernel driver to help with power and performance.
January 2nd, 2025 — Source

AMD Zen 5 Captivated Linux Reader Interest In 2025
With 2024 in the books, here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles for 2024. In addition to the three thousand original Linux/open-source news articles last year, there was 191 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles written by myself. AMD Zen 5 on Linux easily dominated the list of most popular articles for the year along with ZLUDA and several of the Intel Arrow Lake and Granite Rapids articles plus the Framework 16 laptop.
January 2nd, 2025 — Source

Fedora Stakeholders Talk Of Forking Intel's Compute Runtime To Maintain Older Hardware

With the Intel Graphics Compiler having dropped Ice Lake and older support and in turn the Intel Compute Runtime dropping Ice Lake and older to just focus on newer Intel graphics hardware support, Fedora packagers and other stakeholders have been grappling with how to handle the situation. For Fedora 42 there's been a proposal for updating to the newer Intel Compute Runtime code for benefiting the more recent Intel graphics hardware while in recent days there's been talk of forking the legacy code.
With the Intel Graphics Compiler having dropped Ice Lake and older support and in turn the Intel Compute Runtime dropping Ice Lake and older to just focus on newer Intel graphics hardware support, Fedora packagers and other stakeholders have been grappling with how to handle the situation. For Fedora 42 there's been a proposal for updating to the newer Intel Compute Runtime code for benefiting the more recent Intel graphics hardware while in recent days there's been talk of forking the legacy code.
January 2nd, 2025 — Source

Kubernetes Deployments With DMZ Clusters: An Essential Guide
A DMZ cluster in Kubernetes secures public services from internal workloads, enhancing scalability, reducing attack surface, and ensuring controlled access.
January 2nd, 2025 — Source

Lenovo Gaming Series WMI Drivers Updated For Enabling Extra Functionality Under Linux
Last month I wrote about a Lenovo Legion Linux driver being posted for enabling more power/performance settings under Linux. Following a significant rework, a second iteration of those patches have now been posted with just being referred to as the Lenovo "Gaming Series" WMI drivers without the Legion reference.
January 2nd, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.1.123 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.123 is now available:
January 2nd, 2025 — Source

Linux kernel 6.12.8 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.8 is now available:
January 2nd, 2025 — Source

Linux Kernel 6.6.69 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.69 is now available:
January 2nd, 2025 — Source

Linux Patches Updated For Experimental Arm Morello That Combines Arm + CHERI ISA
Arm today sent out their third iteration of their Linux kernel patches for adding Arm Morello platform support to the kernel: an experimental extension of Armv8.2-A paired with the CHERI v7 ISA.
January 2nd, 2025 — Source

Linux Prepares AMD "SRSO_USER_KERNEL_NO" Support For Zen 5 CPUs
Queued up this week via the tip/tip.git's "x86/bugs" Git branch for the Linux kernel is AMD "SRSO_USER_KERNEL_NO" support as a new SRSO/Inception mitigation handling seemingly for Zen 5 processors and beyond.
January 2nd, 2025 — Source

Linux "steelseries" Driver Being Extended For The SteelSeries Arctis 9 Wireless Headset
Within the mainline Linux kernel has been the open-source SteelSeries HID driver while newly posted patches are tacking on support for the SteelSeries Arctis 9 wireless gaming headset.
January 2nd, 2025 — Source

Troubleshooting Kubernetes Pod Crashes: Common Causes and Effective Solutions
Let's face it: Kubernetes pod crashes can be confusing. This article explores the common causes and effective solutions to debug Kubernetes pod crashes.
January 2nd, 2025 — Source

Winetricks 20250102 released
Winetricks 20250102 has been released. Winetricks is a user-friendly tool that automatically solves Wine issues, installs missing DLLs, and adjusts Wine settings for supported games/apps.
January 2nd, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — January 1st, 2025

Arch Linux 2025.01.01 released
A new Arch Linux installation image based on Linux kernel 6.12.7 has been released. Arch Linux is a lightweight distribution designed for expert users who want the most up-to-date packages. The installation image, which includes the most important Linux tools, also serves as a recovery or emergency image. The installation image now includes a guided installer.
January 1st, 2025 — Source

CI/CD Pipelines for Kubernetes Using GitLab CI
Modern software development demands rapid deployment cycles, scalability, and resilience. Kubernetes has emerged as the go-to orchestration platform, enabling scalable containerized application management. When combined with GitLab CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes deployments become automated, repeatable, and reliable.
January 1st, 2025 — Source

GCC Patches Posted For Half-Century Old ALGOL 68 Programming Language
Mere hours into 2025 and some news I didn't expect to be writing about... An Oracle engineer has posted a set of patches implementing an ALGOL 68 programming language front-end for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). These are work-in-progress patches for the half century old niche programming language.
January 1st, 2025 — Source

LibXML2 Updates for Fedora 40
New libxml2 packages have been made available for Fedora Linux 40 to resolve a XML external entity (XXE) vulnerability:
January 1st, 2025 — Source

Linux "hid-universal-pidff" Driver Proposed For Fixing More Quirky Devices
The hid-pidff driver exists within the Linux kernel for enabling force feedback "FF" support on various USB HID PID (Physical Interface Device) compliant devices. With a new set of patches posted yesterday, that hid-pidff driver is extended to "hid-universal-pidff" for supporting more functionality on quirky devices.
January 1st, 2025 — Source

New year, new OS: Nobara 41 Linux is a powerful Windows 11 alternative
Starting a new year often comes with the urge to make a change, and if you're tired of the quirks and constraints of Windows 11, Nobara 41 Linux might be exactly what you need in 2025. It's a Linux distribution that builds on Fedora 41, tailored to provide a smoother, more accessible experience for everyday users, gamers, and even creative professionals. Unlike Microsoft's Windows 11, which forces users to meet strict hardware requirements, Nobara is refreshingly lightweight and adaptable.
January 1st, 2025 — Source

Nobara Linux 41 released
GloriousEggroll has announced the release of Nobara Linux 41 based on Fedora Linux 41.
January 1st, 2025 — Source

RISC-V Made Nice Software Progress In 2024 While Interesting Hardware Still Rare
RISC-V on the software front made very nice progress over the past year with a lot of Linux kernel and toolchain improvements, new targets being enabled, and new instructions being supported along with other additions for improving the overall RISC-V software ecosystem. When it comes to hardware though most of the readily available RISC-V systems are painstakingly slow and the more performant/featureful options are much harder to come by.
January 1st, 2025 — Source

The Most Popular Linux & Open-Source News Of 2025
During the course of 2024 there were 3,021 original news articles written on Phoronix around Linux and open-source topics... Fresh content each and every day, 99% of which was written by your's truly. It was quite an eventful year with a lot of excitement in kernel space, hardware vendors continuing to ramp up timely new hardware support, the never-ending drive for maximum performance optimizations, the continued Rust-ification of the open-source world, and much more. Here is a look back at the most popular news on Phoronix over the past year.
January 1st, 2025 — Source

X.Org Server Development Hit A Decade High For The Number Of Commits In 2025
To much surprise, the X.Org Server Git tree saw the most commits in 2024 going all the way back to 2014... While there were many more commits than in years prior, it's not a sign of resurgence for the X.Org Server with Wayland continuing to become the dominant force on the Linux desktop.
January 1st, 2025 — Source

Zlib-ng 2.2.3 Rings In The New Year With ~17.8% Faster Inflate For AVX2
Zlib-ng 2.2.3 is out as the "next gen" Zlib replacement led by Hans Kristian Rosbach that retains a Zlib-compatible API while also offering a modernized API, modern C11 syntax, support for more CPU intrinsics, and other leading-edge features compared to upstream Zlib.
January 1st, 2025 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 31st, 2024

AMD INVLPGB Linux Patches Updated For Broadcast TLB Invalidation
Right before Christmas Mesa engineer Rik van Riel posted Linux kernel patches to make use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction for broadcast TLB invalidation. INVLPGB is present in AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors since Zen 3 and early data showed by Rik indicated nice improvement. A third iteration of those patches have already been posted as this AMD INLVPGB usage works its way to the mainline kernel.
December 31st, 2024 — Source

KubeVirt Implementation: Who Needs It and Why?
KubeVirt lets Kubernetes manage VMs with containers, streamlining infrastructure. It supports legacy apps, cuts costs, enhances flexibility, and is easy to deploy.
December 31st, 2024 — Source

Debian 13 Trixie Installer Alpha 1 released
Cyril Brulebois has announced the release of the initial alpha version of the Debian 13 Trixie Installer. This version features significant updates for hardware support, introduces a new user-setup screen, and includes various bug fixes for partitioning components.
December 31st, 2024 — Source

Debian Installer Trixie Alpha 1 Brings RISC-V & Drops i386 Installer
In working toward the Debian 13 "Trixie" stable release in 2025, as a lovely New Year's Eve surprise today is the first alpha release of the Debian Installer for Trixie.
December 31st, 2024 — Source

Fastnetmon and Debootstrap updates for Debian
Debian GNU/Linux has received two updates: ELA-1284-1 fastnetmon security update for Debian 10 (Buster) ELTS and DLA 4005-1 debootstrap bugfix update for Debian 11 (Bullseye) LTS
December 31st, 2024 — Source

Govulncheck-VulnDB, Assimp-Devel, libQt6Pdf6, grpc, Poppler updates for SUSE
SUSE Linux has been updated with several security enhancements, featuring moderate fixes for govulncheck-vulndb, assimp-devel, libQt6Pdf6, grpc, and poppler:
December 31st, 2024 — Source

FreeBSD Collaborating With AMD, NetBSD 10.0 Release & Other BSD Highlights Of 2024
While predominantly covering Linux-related news and Linux benchmarking at Phoronix, the BSDs hold a special spot. Here's a look back at some of the most exciting BSD milestones and FreeBSD / NetBSD / OpenBSD / DragonFlyBSD project news of 2024.
December 31st, 2024 — Source

Mesa Saw Fewer Patches This Year But Valve's Contributions Took The Top Spot
While the Mesa 3D graphics drivers saw many new features and improvements land in 2024, on a Git commit basis it's actually at a several year low in terms of new commits. Here are the numbers as well as a look at the most active contributors to Mesa, including a Valve open-source graphics driver developer now taking the top spot.
December 31st, 2024 — Source

Microsoft Continued With Many Linux & Open-Source Announcements In 2024
This year was another interesting year for Microsoft with continuing to make more of their software projects open-source, adding more Unix/Linux-like features to Windows, continuing to advance Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), keeping up with maintenance on their Azure Linux distribution, and other unexpected open-source/Linux surprises.
December 31st, 2024 — Source

PHP 8.3.16 RC1 released
The release candidate for PHP 8.3.16 has been released, featuring a range of fixes and enhancements. This includes resolutions for fundamental issues, such as the misoptimization of ZEND_MATCH_ERROR, the handling of zend_array_try_init() with destructor, the incorrect reproduction of constructor property promotion in AST->string, observer segmentation fault when functions are loaded with dl(), and a trampoline crash occurring on error.
December 31st, 2024 — Source

PHP 8.4.3 RC1 released
The release candidate for PHP 8.4.3 has been released, featuring numerous fixes and enhancements. The updates encompass corrections for BcMath, Core, DOM, FFI, Fileinfo, FPM, GD, Gettext, Iconv, LDAP, LibXML, MBString, Opcache, PgSql, Phar, SimpleXML, Sockets, SPL, Streams, and XML.
December 31st, 2024 — Source

Samsung Galaxy S20 & S9 With Exynos 9810 Support Coming To Linux 6.14
The Samsung ARM device updates are in the process of being queued up to the SoC tree ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window in January.
December 31st, 2024 — Source

Wayland's Wild 2024 With Better KDE Plasma Support, NVIDIA Maturity & More Desktops
It was a mighty fine year for the Wayland ecosystem on the Linux desktop with KDE Plasma 6 having brought much more polished Wayland support and now at parity to its X11 session, the NVIDIA driver stack seeing much better Wayland support with its latest drivers, LXQt and Xfce and others working more on Wayland support, and the continued climb of various innovative Wayland compositors.
December 31st, 2024 — Source

ZLUDA v4 Released For Initial CUDA Support On Non-NVIDIA GPUs
One of the unexpected twists this year was after several years of AMD quietly funding the ZLUDA developer for enabling unmodified CUDA applications to run on AMD GPUs at near-native performance, the ZLUDA atop AMD HIP code was made available and open-source following the end of the AMD contract.
December 31st, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 30th, 2024

AMD's GPUOpen Vulkan Memory Allocator Now Supports Vulkan 1.4
AMD's GPUOpen team managed to squeeze in a new Vulkan Memory Allocator release into 2024. As a reminder this is a easy to use/integrate Vulkan memory allocation library for both Windows and Linux systems with hopes of making memory allocation and resource creation more easier like with Direct3D 11 and OpenGL.
December 30th, 2024 — Source

Cloudflare Makes Open-Source h3i For HTTP/3 Testing & Debugging
Cloudflare is ending 2024 by announcing a new open-source project: h3i for low-level HTTP/3 testing and debugging.
December 30th, 2024 — Source

Deadline Scheduling Policy Being Experimented With For Linux Graphics Drivers
Tvrtko Ursulin with Igalia sent out a "request for comments" patch series today working on a deadline scheduling policy for the DRM scheduler that is used across different Direct Rendering Manager kernel graphics drivers.
December 30th, 2024 — Source

Kubernetes Ephemeral Containers: Enhancing Security and Streamlining Troubleshooting in Production Clusters
Ephemeral containers in Kubernetes offer secure, short-lived debugging without disturbing primary workloads, then vanish — reducing risk and overhead.
December 30th, 2024 — Source

If you're ready for something different, I recommend this Linux distro to newbies and experts alike
OpenMandriva is a sensible operating system that's not based on the top four most popular Linux distros, but just as easy to use.
December 30th, 2024 — Source

Intel's Linux Performance Optimizations Continue Paying Off For AMD EPYC
As part of my end-of-year benchmarking and various historical comparisons, over the holidays I was curious to take a look at how the mature AMD EPYC 9004 "Genoa" performance has evolved over the past two years under Linux. Going off benchmarks I ran back at the end of 2022 on the same AMD Titanite EPYC reference server platform for two EPYC 9654 Genoa processors, I repeated the same tests using the newest releases of Intel Clear Linux and Ubuntu Linux for seeing how the performance has evolved.
December 30th, 2024 — Source

Mesa's Terrific Year With Better Vulkan Ray-Tracing, NVK Progress & Same-Day Vulkan 1.4
The open-source Mesa 3D graphics driver had a rather great year with a number of performance optimizations landing, on-time support for Intel Lunar Lake and Battlemage Xe2 graphics, early AMD RDNA4 support, multiple drivers having same-day Vulkan 1.4 support, the continued progress of the open-source NVIDIA NVK Vulkan driver, and much more thanks to the contributions of Intel, AMD, Valve, and other organizations -- even Microsoft's continued merge requests!
December 30th, 2024 — Source

QuickEMU 4.9.7 released
QuickEMU 4.9.7 has been released, featuring multiple enhancements aimed at improving the system's functionality. The modifications encompass the elimination of unused dependencies, the updating of flake.lock, enhancements to quickget custom configurations, the upgrade of DeterminateSystems/nix-installer-action, and the removal of redundant code.
December 30th, 2024 — Source

RadeonSI Driver Now Uses ACO By Default For Pre-RDNA GPUs
As a very interesting end-of-year change for Mesa 25.0, AMD is now using the ACO compiler by default for pre-GFX10 (before RDNA / Navi) GPUs with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.
December 30th, 2024 — Source

The 4 most Windows-like Linux distros to try because change is hard
If you're still using Windows 10, you know the end is nigh. If you want to keep your machine running smoothly and feeling familiar, check out these Linux distros.
December 30th, 2024 — Source

The latest MX Linux turns Xfce into a desktop anyone can use
If you're looking for a Linux distribution with a user-friendly desktop that's also very highly customizable, MX Linux presents the Xfce desktop in a way that anyone can use and grow with over time.
December 30th, 2024 — Source

There's a New Open Source Terminal App in Town
Ghostty is a new Linux terminal app that's fast, feature-rich, and offers a platform-native GUI while remaining cross-platform.
December 30th, 2024 — Source

Updated Serpent OS Alpha Brings Few Fixes To This Original Linux Distribution
Last week Ikey Doherty's Serpent OS Linux distribution debuted in alpha form while kicking off the new week is updated install media to provide a few fixes for this original from-scratch Linux distribution.
December 30th, 2024 — Source

xxHash 0.8.3 Brings Runtime Vector Extension Handling For x86/x86_64
Meta's Yann Collet of Zstd fame is rounding out 2024 by releasing xxHash 0.8.3 as the newest update to this extremely fast non-cryptographic hash algorithm. The xxHash fast hash algorithm pushes for RAM speed limits and with the v0.8.3 update brings more enhancements.
December 30th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 29th, 2024

Apple DWI Backlight Linux Driver Updated For Various iPhones, iPods & iPads
While Linux 6.13 is introducing basic support for various Apple iPads and iPhones using A-series SoCs, the support is just that: basic. Various feature limitations remain for those dreaming over the prospects of running Linux on older Apple mobile devices.
December 29th, 2024 — Source

Faster USB Performance For xHCI DbC Coming With Linux 6.14 Plus A 10 Year Old Bug Fixed
Thanks to work from Intel engineers, the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle will feature faster USB xHCI DbC performance for debug performance and a few other missing xHCI bits being addressed. Plus there is a fix for a rare 10 year old USB bug report.
December 29th, 2024 — Source

Fish Shell Outlines Their Successes & Challenges Going From C++ To Rust
Earlier this month the Fish Shell 4.0 went into beta with the C++ code ported to Rust. Now with most of the Fish Shell code transitioned to Rust, the project put out a blog post this weekend outlining the successes and challenges they have encountered in porting their large C++ codebase to Rust.
December 29th, 2024 — Source

KDE neon 20241229 released
KDE neon 20241229 has been released. KDE neon is a Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu and the most recent version of the KDE Plasma desktop. KDE neon is our installable Linux with continuous integration and deployment.
December 29th, 2024 — Source

Kdenlive Preparing For An Exciting 2025 With Background Removal Tool & More
The KDE app Kdenlive that is a very popular and featureful open-source video editor is preparing for an exciting 2025.
December 29th, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.13-rc5 To See Fix For Intel TDX CoCo VMs Potentially Leaking Decrypted Memory
The x86 fixes pull request was sent out this morning ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc5 kernel being released later today. Both x86 fixes this week pertain to Intel bits: a self-test issue on upcoming Intel FRED (Flexible Return and Event Delivery) systems and also an issue of Intel TDX confidential computing VM guests potentially leaking decrypted memory within the unrecoverable error handling.
December 29th, 2024 — Source

Ubuntu's Great Year From 24.04 LTS To Focusing More On Performance Optimizations
From my independent monitoring, Ubuntu Linux had a pretty great year. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS shipped and has been well received across enterprises, Canonical engineers have been focusing more on performance optimizations for Ubuntu, and there has been other interesting changes like their new commitment to always ship the latest upstream Linux kernel version as of Ubuntu release time. Plus they have continued with various GNOME desktop improvements, Ubuntu on servers continues with steady traction, and all-around was a pretty exciting year for the Ubuntu camp.
December 29th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 27th, 2024

AMD Continued Ramping Up Their Linux & Open-Source Investments In 2024
AMD's new products this year have not only been supported well on the server side with their new EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors but also on the consumer side with the Ryzen AI 300 series laptop and Ryzen 9000 series desktop Zen 5 processors. AMD provided timely Zen 5 support across the stack as well as pursuing new AMD P-State driver optimizations, getting out the AMDXDNA Ryzen AI accelerator driver, and a lot of other new open-source Linux code for new hardware features, prepping for upcoming hardware like RDNA4 graphics, and pursuing optimizations for existing hardware.
December 27th, 2024 — Source

Bottles Software For Easily Running Windows Games/Apps On Linux To Leverage Rust
Bottles as the open-source manager for Wine to more easily run Windows games and applications on Linux has been pursuing the "Bottles Next" initiative as a rewrite to this software. The Bottles developers have decided they will be leveraging the Rust programming language as well as the libcosmic UI toolkit as part of this rewrite.
December 27th, 2024 — Source

CentOS Stream 10 versus AlmaLinux 10 Beta versus RHEL 10 Beta Performance Benchmarks
CentOS Stream 10 as the upstream to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 is largely similar to what's found in the RHEL 10.0 beta but one of the key differences is being powered by Linux 6.12 LTS rather than Linux 6.11 as currently used by the AlmaLinux/RHEL 10 beta. Here is how the performance of CentOS Stream 10 is looking in comparison on the same hardware.
December 27th, 2024 — Source

GNOME Added Many New Features This Year Amid Foundation Woes
The GNOME desktop environment had a vibrant 2024 with landing many new features, continuing to refine its (X)Wayland integration, apps like Ptyxis as a modern terminal taking off, and more. From the software side 2024 was great for GNOME while over on the GNOME Foundation side they had to deal with coping from running a recent deficit and also their executive director departing after less than one year.
December 27th, 2024 — Source

KDE neon 20241226 released
KDE neon 20241226 has been released. KDE neon is a Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu and the most recent version of the KDE Plasma desktop.
December 27th, 2024 — Source

Linux kernel 6.1.122 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.122 is now available:
December 27th, 2024 — Source

Linux kernel 6.6.68 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.68 is now available:
December 27th, 2024 — Source

Linux kernel 6.12.7 released
Linux kernel version 6.12.7 is now available:
December 27th, 2024 — Source

Linux's Preempt Lazy Support Coming To POWER CPUs
Linux 6.13 is introducing a new Lazy Preemption mode with the "PREEMPT_LAZY" option. The lazy preemption mode is similar to full preemption but is less eager to preempt normal (SCHED_NORMAL) tasks. The goal is on reducing lock holder preemption and obtaining some of the performance gains found under the voluntary preemption mode
December 27th, 2024 — Source

OneXPlayer Linux Driver Being Brought To Parity With Windows Driver For These Handhelds
OneXPlayer maintains a line of handheld gaming consoles following in the success of the likes of Valve's Steam Deck, Lenovo Legion Go, and ASUS ROG Ally. These OneXPlayer devices ship with Microsoft Windows by default but the Linux support has been improving.
December 27th, 2024 — Source

Performance Improvements To Google's Binder Queued Ahead Of Linux 6.14
A patch-set working on faster page installations for Google's Binder that is used by Android is on the way for Linux 6.14.
December 27th, 2024 — Source

The iPhone's Dynamic Island won't be going away anytime soon
When Apple launched the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max in 2022, it also introduced a new feature called the Dynamic Island. Some had expected Apple to go with the hole-punch camera design, but the company had other ideas. If you hoped Dynamic Island would disappear and be replaced with an under-display camera, think again.
December 27th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 28th, 2024

A "Safe C++" Being Explored Using The New ClangIR
An interesting "request for comments" proposal I have been meaning to write about since last month is in-development work developing "Safe C++" as an extension to the LLVM Clang compiler and making use of the new, in-development ClangIR.
December 28th, 2024 — Source

Amavisd-New and Gstreamer updates for Debian
Debian GNU/Linux Extended LTS has been updated with two security patches: ELA-1280-1 for amavisd-new and ELA-1281-1 for gstreamer1.0
December 28th, 2024 — Source

CloudNativePG 1.25.0 and 1.24.2 released
CloudNativePG has announced the release of versions 1.25.0 and 1.24.2, which bring new features aimed at streamlining PostgreSQL operations and enhancing data durability management. This encompasses declarative database management, logical replication management, and optimized data durability. The release introduces the CloudNativePG Interface (CNPG-I), enabling users to enhance CloudNativePG with external plugins for tailored customization. The Barman Cloud Plugin illustrates the capabilities of CNPG-I, highlighting the ability to develop backup and recovery plugins independently from the operator's source code.
December 28th, 2024 — Source

Fedora's Captivating 2024 With Many New Features & Leading Innovations
The Fedora Linux distribution had another great year with the successful releases of Fedora 40 and Fedora 41 that were both rather polished and largely on-time -- something that couldn't be said frequently of Fedora releases long ago. Fedora Linux has continued pushing leading edge innovations into their distribution thanks to the sponsorship and upstream contributions of Red Hat engineers. 2024 was a rather successful year for this high grade Linux distribution.
December 28th, 2024 — Source

FFmpeg Lands Improved Support For Flash Video "FLV" With Multi-Track Audio/Video
It wasn't on my bingo card for end of year 2024 but the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library has seen a new round of improvements to the Flash Video (FLV) support.
December 28th, 2024 — Source

FSF Encouraging Pressure Campaign On Microsoft For 2025
Now that the holidays are passing and you hopefully got your new 802.11n WiFi adapter or USB microphone or other free software endorsed gifts, on Friday the Free Software Foundation put out a new blog post entitled "Keep putting pressure on Microsoft." There they encourage free software patrons to keep up a pressure campaign against Microsoft:
December 28th, 2024 — Source

GE-Proton9-22 Released
GloriousEggroll has announced the release of GE-Proton9-22, featuring updates to several components. This version includes upstream updates, the disabling of nvapi for Assassin's Creed Syndicate, as well as updates for Simulakros, Simulakros Demo, and Xalia for games 0.4.5. The update encompasses improvements for Identity V, Ghostrunner 2, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Bus Simulator 21 Next Stop, Hell Yeah!, Crysis, Crysis (17300), Crysis (17300), and From Dust. The update encompasses improvements for Ghostrunner 2, Identity V, Ys I and II Chronicles+, Kao the Kangaroo, and Fallout New Vegas.
December 28th, 2024 — Source

Liquorix Linux Kernel 6.12-8 released
Steven Barrett has released a new Liquorix kernel based on Linux kernel 6.12.7. The Liquorix Linux kernel is an enthusiast Linux kernel that is optimized for low latency computing in audiovisual production, reduced frame time variations in games, and unparalleled responsiveness in interactive systems. It is available for Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch Linux.
December 28th, 2024 — Source

NVIDIA Made Great Strides With Their Open-Source Kernel Code & Wayland Support In 2024
NVIDIAThis year NVIDIA's official Linux graphics driver enjoyed much more robust Wayland support, their open-source kernel modules have matured greatly and are now being used by default, and their proprietary Vulkan and OpenGL drivers remain in good standing for performant Linux gaming and workstation graphics. NVIDIA's Linux driver stack had a rather great year.
December 28th, 2024 — Source

SemiKong is the world's first open-source semiconductor-focused LLM — it claims to bring new chips to market 30% faster
SemiKong, a new LLM trained by Aitomatic and its partners in the "AI Alliance", is the world's first large language model specifically crafted to serve the semiconductor industry's needs. SemiKong seeks to become part of the workflows of semiconductor design companies and act as a digital expert in the field, contributing to getting new chips out the door significantly faster.
December 28th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 26th, 2024

AMD Ryzen PCs May See More Power Savings Out-Of-The-Box With Linux 6.14
AMD Ryzen systems with the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel may see increased power savings out-of-the-box due to an AMD P-State driver change queued up as part of the new power management code for this next version of the Linux kernel.
December 26th, 2024 — Source

GCC ASCII Art Visualizations, Timely Znver5 & Other Compiler Highlights Of 2024
Both GCC and LLVM/Clang made great strides in 2024 in rounding up their latest C and C++ support, enabling new hardware targets, and a variety of other features. Plus other open-source compilers targeting different features / languages, device types, and more also advanced a lot this calendar year. For those excited about turning code into binaries, here's a look back at the most popular compiler articles on Phoronix.
December 26th, 2024 — Source

Hash-Based Integrity Checking Proposed For Linux To Help With Reproducible Builds
An interesting request for comments (RFC) patch series was posted on Christmas for introducing hash-based integrity checking to help with the reproducible builds initiative around the Linux kernel.
December 26th, 2024 — Source

Intel Linux Performance Optimizations & Intel's Other Open-Source Wins From 2024
In addition to the exciting hardware launches this year particularly around Xeon 6 Granite Rapids, Lunar Lake processors, and the new low-cost Battlemage graphics cards, what remains particularly exciting and consistent are all of Intel's great investments around open-source and Linux. Over 2024 there were many exciting performance optimizations, new Linux kernel features, GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler toolchain improvements, and countless other enhancements made throughout the open-source ecosystem by Intel engineers.
December 26th, 2024 — Source

KDE Enjoyed A Stellar 2024 With The Debut Of The Plasma 6 Desktop
The KDE desktop progress made over the course of 2024 was particularly stand-out thanks to the Plasma 6.0 debut near the beginning of the year and then Plasma 6.1 and 6.2 further stabilizing and polishing this open-source desktop. It was a very fine year for the KDE desktop.
December 26th, 2024 — Source

Pre-Content fanotify / fanotify Hierarchical Storage Management Expected For Linux 6.14
Queued up by way of linux-fs.git's "for_next" Git branch is the fanotify HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) implementation via the pre-content fanotify patch series.
December 26th, 2024 — Source

Reiser5 Would Be Turning Five Years Old But Remains Dead
It was on New Year's Eve 2019 that Edward Shishkin announced the Reiser5 file-system as an evolution of the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system code. While next week would mark five years of Reiser5, the Reiser4/Reiser5 file-system still appears effectively dead and hasn't been touched in quite a while.
December 26th, 2024 — Source

The Performance Benefits Of Linux 6.12 LTS Over Linux 6.6 LTS
Linux 6.12 was recently promoted to being this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel with it being the last major kernel release of 2024. For those enterprise Linux users, hyperscalers, and others typically jumping from one annual LTS kernel to the next, in this holiday article are some benchmarks looking at the performance benefits of Linux 6.12 LTS compared to Linux 6.6 LTS while testing on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation.
December 26th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 25th, 2024

4MLinux 47.0 brings new features and updates for Christmas
It's Christmas Day, and for Linux enthusiasts, there's an extra gift under the tree. You see, the lightweight 4MLinux has officially hit its stable release with version 47.0 (download it here).
December 25th, 2024 — Source or Source

"AM" 9.4.1 released
"AM" application manager for AppImage 9.4.1 is now available, allowing users to customize and change the database by exporting variables. The variables include APPSDB, APPSDBLIST, APPIMAGES_LIST, AMCATALOGUEMARKDOWNS, AMCATALOGUEICONS, and AMSYNC.
December 25th, 2024 — Source

CachyOS Had A Really Great Year Advancing This Performance-Optimized Arch Linux Platform
The CachyOS Linux distribution has really been on fire this year delivering impressive new features and performance optimizations for this Arch Linux derived OS.
December 25th, 2024 — Source

How to install and use Microsoft's PowerShell on Linux (and why you should)
If you're a fan of Windows PowerShell and you're using Windows 10, you'll be glad to know you can install and use that powerful command line tool on Linux.
December 25th, 2024 — Source

Intel Mesa Code Lands Big Patch Series For Treating Convergent Values As SIMD8
A patch series six months in the making and consisting of 24 patches by longtime Intel Linux graphics engineer Ian Romanick was merged on Christmas Eve for Mesa 25.0.
December 25th, 2024 — Source

Linux RNDIS Removal Branch Updated For Disabling Microsoft RNDIS Protocol Drivers
There's activity again around potentially disabling and then ultimately removing the RNDIS Linux kernel code for those drivers complying with the Microsoft Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) protocol specification. RNDIS was used atop USB for virtual Ethernet but has proven insecure and problematic.
December 25th, 2024 — Source

New Intel Mesa Driver Patches Implement AV1 Decode For Vulkan Video
While there has been Vulkan Video support within Intel's open-source "ANV" driver since early 2023 and extended over time to handle H.265/HEVC decode, H.264 and H.265 encode, and more, the AV1 decode support has lagged behind until now.
December 25th, 2024 — Source

PHP 8.4.2, 8.3.15, 8.2.27 for Debian 11 LTS and 12
Ondřej Surý has released PHP 8.4.2, 8.3.15, and 8.2.27 packages for both Debian GNU/Linux 11 (Bullseye) LTS and 12 (Bookworm).
December 25th, 2024 — Source

Popper and Vhostmd updates for SUSE
SUSE Linux has been updated with security updates for poppler and vhostmd:
December 25th, 2024 — Source

Ruby 3.4 Programming Language Brings "it", Better Performance For YJIT
Ruby 3.4 is out today as yet another annual major feature release for this programming language known for its major updates on Christmas Day.
December 25th, 2024 — Source

systemd Highlights For 2024 From Run0 To Varlink To Advancing systemd-homed
Systemd had another busy year working on many new features from run0 as a sudo alternative to making systemd-homed more robust, increasing Varlink use, systemd-boot continuing to gain more traction, and more.
December 25th, 2024 — Source

What will 2025 bring for Linux PCs?
What's next for Linux in all its facets in the coming year? We'll tell you!
December 25th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 20th, 2024

9to5Mac Daily: December 20, 2024 -- Apple Watch Ultra 3 rumors, more
Apple wants you to start 2025 off strong with new Apple Watch Activity Challenge. Here are all the airlines that support the new AirTags feature in iOS 18.2. Apple Watch Ultra 3: Three new features are coming next year.
December 20th, 2024 — Source

Arch Linux Based CachyOS Takes The Lead On Intel Arrow Lake
Following the recent Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Windows 11 versus Ubuntu Linux benchmarks I wanted to expand the testing to look at how well other Linux distributions as well were performing on this new 24-core Arrow Lake desktop processor. To much surprise Intel's own Clear Linux distribution didn't take the top spot this round but as a surprising upset the Arch Linux based CachyOS distribution outperformed Clear Linux, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, and Fedora Workstation on this flagship Arrow Lake processor.
December 20th, 2024 — Source

OpenMoonRay 1.7 Brings More NVIDIA GPU Acceleration, Additional Features
In early 2023 DreamWorks open-sourced their MoonRay renderer as OpenMoonRay. Since then they have continued advancing this award-winning production MCRT renderer. Before closing out 2024 they have now released OpenMoonRay 1.7.
December 20th, 2024 — Source

DPDK and Linux Kernel updates for Ubuntu
Ubuntu Linux has been updated with two security vulnerabilities: [USN-7178-1] DPDK vulnerability and [LSN-0108-1] Linux kernel vulnerability
December 20th, 2024 — Source

DXVK 2.5.2 Brings Fixes & Optimizations For Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 Atop Vulkan
DXVK 2.5.2 is out today as the newest point release to this open-source software implementing the Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 APIs atop Vulkan for powering Windows games on Valve's Steam Play (Proton) as well as being used by other software and some games directly.
December 20th, 2024 — Source

DXVK 2.5.2 released
DXVK 2.5.2 has been released and introduced bug fixes and improvements, including an implementation of D3D9 shader validation interfaces, fixed behavior when D3D9 applications use incorrect texture types, and optimized behavior of disabled clip planes for D3D9 games. Additionally, it resolved issues that were leading to Wine test failures for D3D8 and D3D9. Additional enhancements consist of rectifying the absence of lava in Borderlands 2, Codename Panzers Phase One/Two, and expanding application profiles for various mod tools.
December 20th, 2024 — Source

Godot 4.4 Dev 7 released
The seventh development snapshot of Godot 4.4 has been released for testing and represents the final development build of the year, incorporating critical bug fixes and introducing new features.
December 20th, 2024 — Source

How Cobra Kai Does (and Doesn't) Tie Into Karate Kid: Legends
Plus, it's good news for Dune: Prophecy's future.
December 20th, 2024 — Source

KDE neon 20241219 released
KDE neon 20241219 has been released. KDE neon is a Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu and the most recent version of the KDE Plasma desktop.
December 20th, 2024 — Source

Liquorix versus Linux 6.12 Upstream Kernel Performance Across Many Workloads
A Phoronix Premium subscriber a while back requested some fresh benchmarks of how the Liquorix downstream of the Linux kernel is comparing against the latest upstream kernel... Here are some benchmarks looking at the Liquorix flavor of the Linux kernel compared to upstream Linux 6.12.
December 20th, 2024 — Source

Miniature sensor that detects toxic gas shows promising results in the lab
A team of scientists at UNSW Sydney have developed a highly sensitive miniature sensor that is able to detect low levels of the toxic gas nitrogen dioxide (NO2). The tiny, flexible sensor can detect the harmful gas in real-time without requiring an external energy source.
December 20th, 2024 — Source

OpenAI 2024 event: How to watch new ChatGPT product reveals and demos
OpenAI is in the holiday spirit, it seems. The ChatGPT series of reveals, called "12 Days of OpenAI," will be streamed live at 10 a.m. PT each weekday through December 20. So far, we've seen the launch of ChatGPT Pro, OpenAI's $200 per month subscription plan; the full version of its "reasoning" o1 model; the highly anticipated public releasee of its text-to-video generator Sora; the rollout of Canvas; ChatGPT in Apple Intelligence; ChatGPT's real-time video capabilities; and the ability to call ChatGPT via a 1-800 number.
December 20th, 2024 — Source or Watch Video

OpenSUSE Announces New "YQPkg" Package Management Tool
The openSUSE project announced today YQPkg as a new package management tool for openSUSE Linux distributions.
December 20th, 2024 — Source

PHP 8.2.27, 8.3.15 and 8.4.2 packages for Fedora/RHEL released
Remi Collet has released PHP 8.2.27, 8.3.15 and 8.4.2 packages for Fedora and RHEL-based Linux distributions.
December 20th, 2024 — Source

Proxmox Datacenter Manager Alpha 1 released
Proxmox has released the first alpha release of their Datacenter Manager, intended to offer a centralized overview of individual nodes and clusters, facilitating fundamental management tasks such as the migration of virtual guests without the need for cluster network requirements. The project has been comprehensively developed using the Rust programming language, encompassing the backend API server, CLI tools, and a new frontend constructed with the latest widget toolkit. The alpha version is designed to collect feedback, evaluate core features, and engage with users and prospective developers.
December 20th, 2024 — Source

Ryzen AI NPU6 Support Added To AMDXDNA Driver For Linux 6.14 Debut
The latest round of drm-misc-next material was sent out yesterday to DRM-Next in advance of the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window.
December 20th, 2024 — Source

Tailscale, Govulncheck-vulndb, Avahi, Docker, Python, LibMozJS updates for SUSE
SUSE Linux has been updated with several security enhancements, including tailscale-1.78.3-2.1, govulncheck-vulndb-0.0.20241213T205935-1.1, avahi, docker-27.4.1_ce-12.1, python310-xhtml2pdf-0.2.16-2.1, and libmozjs-128-0-128.5.1-3.1:
December 20th, 2024 — Source

Want to save your old computer? Try these 6 Linux distros
Here's how to save money, reduce e-waste, and extend the life of your old hardware at the same time.
December 20th, 2024 — Source

Wayland Protocols 1.39 Released With Data Control & Workspace Additions
Jonas Ådahl of Red Hat just released Wayland Protocols 1.39 as the latest set of updates to this de facto repository for Wayland protocols.
December 20th, 2024 — Source

Weighted Interleave Auto-Tuning Being Worked On For Linux
Joshua Hahn has posted the latest "request for comments" draft working on weightedd interleave auto-tuning for the linux kernel in order to better enhance the performance characteristics of primarily Linux servers with multiple memory nodes.
December 20th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 16th, 2024

Better Linux Support For The Samsung Galaxy Book Laptops With New Driver Coming
For those interested in using Linux on the Samsung Galaxy Book line of laptops that ship with Microsoft Windows out-of-the-box, a new "samsung-galaxybook" driver is being worked on for supporting additional laptop functionality not currently found with these laptops under Linux.
December 16th, 2024 — Source

Blaize BLZP1600 SoC Support Coming To Linux 6.14 For AI Edge Processing
The upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is set to introduce support for the Blaize BLZP1600 SoC series that is powering various PCIe add-in-card and M.2 adapters for local AI edge processing.
December 16th, 2024 — Source

Enhancing Security in Kubernetes: A Comparative Analysis of Cosign and Connaisseur
Boost Kubernetes security with Cosign's image signing and Connaisseur's strict verification. Learn how these tools protect your containers from unauthorized access.
December 16th, 2024 — Source

Git 2.48-rc0 Released With git-fsck Warning Over "Curiously Formatted" Ref Contents
Git maintainer Junio Hamano today announced Git 2.48-rc0 as the first test release toward the Git 2.48 distributed version control system release.
December 16th, 2024 — Source

I converted this Windows 11 Mini PC into a Linux workstation - and didn't regret it
The Herk Orion is a capable Ryzen-powered Mini PC in its own right, but ditching Windows for a Linux OS has opened up a whole new level of performance.
December 16th, 2024 — Source

How to run a Windows app on Linux with Wine
With Windows 10 end of life looming, can you make Linux your go-to operating system and still run your favorite Windows apps? Wine has you covered.
December 16th, 2024 — Source

Jumbo Data Packet Transmission & RACK-TLP Coming To Linux 6.14 Network Stack
Queued up this past week within the Linux kernel's networking subsystem for the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle is transmission handling for jumbo data packets as well as RACK-TLP support for managing packet loss and re-transmission. This is work toward supporting larger network transmission windows and higher data throughput.
December 16th, 2024 — Source

Last Minute AMD GFX12 Changes For RadeonSI Driver Enable ACO For RDNA4
Ahead of AMD's approaching RDNA4 next-generation graphics card launch, today a set of last minute improvements to the AMD GFX12 graphics IP were merged to Mesa 25.0 for the open-source Linux graphics driver support.
December 16th, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.13-rc3 fixes expensive CPUID handling on Sapphire Rapids CPUs — an issue resulting in Skylake CPUs being 4X faster for CPUID-related updates
This is arguably one of the most bizarre issues to crop up to date in the Linux kernel.
December 16th, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.14 Looks To Support AMD's Zen 5 RMPREAD Instruction & Segmented RMP Mode
For further enhancing the AMD EPYC virtualization experience on Linux, the upcoming Linux 6.14 looks like it will support Zen 5's new RMPREAD instruction and segmented RMP mode as part of Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP).
December 16th, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.14 To Introduce New DRM Boot Logger For Kernel Messages
Sent out today was the latest drm-misc-next pull request of various Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) changes queuing up ahead of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle. Most exciting this week is the DRM boot logger being queued for landing to better present kernel messages.
December 16th, 2024 — Source

Linux kernel 6.13-rc3 released
Earlier this week it felt to me like things might have already started to quiet down in prep for the holidays, but doing the statistics on rc3 that doesn't actually seem to be the case - this looks very regular both in number of commits and in diff size. In fact, the diff is a bit on the larger side, but that is admittedly almost entirely due to the revert of a unicode change that then makes the diff large due to a generated data file.
December 16th, 2024 — Source

Manjaro 24.2.1 Yonada released
Since we released Xahea in October 2024 we worked hard to get the next release of Manjaro out there. We call it Yonada.
December 16th, 2024 — Source

Master OneNote Templates: The Secret to Effortless Organization
Have you ever found yourself staring at a blank page, unsure of how to organize your thoughts or where to even begin? Whether you're juggling work projects, managing school assignments, or simply trying to keep track of daily tasks, the struggle to stay organized can feel overwhelming. That's where OneNote templates come in. Think of them as your personal shortcut to structure and clarity—a way to save time, reduce stress, and focus on what really matters. If you've ever wished for a tool to make your note-taking more efficient and visually appealing, you're in the right place.
December 16th, 2024 — Source

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Beta Performance Looks Great - Initial RHEL 9 versus RHEL 10 Benchmarks On AMD EPYC Turin
With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 now in public beta this month, I have begun testing out the RHEL 10 beta on a few systems in the lab. In this first look at RHEL 10 performance is seeing how well the RHEL 10 beta is performing relative to RHEL 9.5 stable on an AMD EPYC server.
December 16th, 2024 — Source

Why PorteuX Linux 1.8 is a faster and lighter alternative to Microsoft's bloated Windows 11
The lightweight Linux distribution PorteuX has launched version 1.8, delivering huge updates across multiple desktop environments and a modern alternative to Windows 11. The release introduces the newly released Xfce 4.20, a sleek and efficient desktop environment, alongside updates to Cinnamon 6.4.2, GNOME 47.2, KDE 6.2.4, and LXQt 2.1.0, offering users a customizable and resource-friendly experience without the performance trade-offs often associated with Windows 11.
December 16th, 2024 — Source

Xfce 4.20 released
Xfce 4.20 represents the most recent release of the Xfce desktop environment, developed over a span of two years. The primary objective was to prepare the codebase for Wayland, enabling the majority of components to operate on Wayland windowing while maintaining support for X11 windowing. This was accomplished by abstracting any X11/Wayland windowing-specific calls and utilising Wayland/Wlroots protocols. A new library, "libxfce4windowing," was introduced during this process.
December 16th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 13th, 2024

4 top personal finance apps for Linux that run on MacOS and Windows, too
Looking for a money app to get your finances in order for 2025? Here's why I recommend these open-source options.
December 13th, 2024 — Source

Arduino Ditches MbedOS for ZephyrOS -- Here's What It Means for Developers
Arduino has announced the beta release of its cores integrated with ZephyrOS, signaling a significant evolution in its embedded development framework. This transition replaces the now-deprecated MbedOS with ZephyrOS, an open-source real-time operating system (RTOS) designed for low-power, resource-constrained devices. By adopting ZephyrOS, Arduino aims to enhance its platform with advanced features such as real-time scheduling and multitasking, while maintaining its hallmark simplicity and accessibility.
December 13th, 2024 — Source

Best Open Source CRM Software for 2025
Discover the best open-source CRM software options to enhance customer relationships for your business.
December 13th, 2024 — Source

CentOS Stream 10 released
CentOS Stream 10 has been released, featuring updates such as Linux kernel 6.12, Python 3.12, Go 1.23, Rust 1.82, Valkey 7.2, and GNOME 47.
December 13th, 2024 — Source

Master Remote Connections Like a Pro with xPipe : Open Source
Managing remote connections can often feel like juggling too many balls at once—servers, virtual machines, desktops, and countless protocols all demanding your attention. The struggle to keep everything organized and accessible is a challenge that IT professionals and home lab enthusiasts alike know all too well. But what if there was a way to simplify it all? A tool that could bring order to the chaos and give you back the time and energy you've been spending on tedious connection management?
December 13th, 2024 — Source

OpenAI Outage Disrupts Siri's New ChatGPT Integration on iOS 18.2
On Wednesday, December 11, OpenAI experienced a significant outage that temporarily brought all its services to a halt. The outage, which disrupted access to tools like ChatGPT, Sora, and OpenAI's API, coincided with the release of iOS 18.2, which introduced ChatGPT integration with Siri.
December 13th, 2024 — Source

OpenAI announces a ChatGPT organizing system called Projects
A mid-tier tool for the middle of "12 Days of OpenAI."
December 13th, 2024 — Source

OpenZFS 2.3-rc4 Released With Linux 6.12 LTS Support
Following the OpenZFS 2.2.7 stable point release earlier this week that brought Linux 6.12 LTS kernel compatibility along with various fixes, OpenZFS 2.3-rc4 is out today as the latest step toward the big OpenZFS 2.3 feature release.
December 13th, 2024 — Source

'Tis the season to test the RHEL and AlmaLinux 10 betas
And the kernel team's patience?
December 13th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 10th, 2024

Avahi and Jinja2 updates for Debian
Debian GNU/Linux has received updates such as the Avahi security update and the Jinja2 regression update:
December 10th, 2024 — Source

Demystifying Kubernetes in 5 Minutes
Take a few minutes to learn about Kubernetes: a powerful container orchestration platform that simplifies the management of applications.
December 10th, 2024 — Source

IBM Deprecating Linux Drivers For CXL Coherent Accelerators & CAPI Flash
IBM engineers announced they are deprecating the upstream CXL and CXLFLASH Linux kernel drivers with plans to then remove the drivers from the mainline kernel the following cycle. Before getting too worked up when seeing the "cxl: Deprecate driver" patch, this is about the Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) that predates the Compute Express Link.
December 10th, 2024 — Source

Kernel, Radare2, Nanopb, qt6-webengine, Pam updates for SUSE
SUSE Linux has been updated with several security enhancements, including significant updates for the Linux Kernel, radare2, nanopb, qt6-webengine, and pam:
December 10th, 2024 — Source

Linux Mint dethrones MX Linux as the most popular distro on DistroWatch
Linux Mint has reclaimed its position as the top-ranked Linux distribution on DistroWatch, dethroning MX Linux. The latest page hit rankings, which reflect the popularity of distributions among DistroWatch users, place Linux Mint in first place with 2,412 hits per day. MX Linux, previously the reigning champ, now sits in second with 2,280 hits.
December 10th, 2024 — Source

New Linux Patch Establishes "CONFIG_X86_64_NATIVE" For -march=native Kernel Builds
Last week I wrote about Linux patches cleaning up x86 32-bit kernel builds for x86_64 CPUs. The new iteration of those patches were sent out today, including the addition of a patch adding the CONFIG_X86_64_NATIVE Kconfig tunable for enabling "-march=native" kernel builds to cater your optimized kernel compilation for the CPU on which you are building the kernel.
December 10th, 2024 — Source

NVIDIA Releases EGL-Wayland 1.1.17
NVIDIA published EGL-Wayland 1.1.17 on Monday as the newest update to this Wayland EGL external platform library to provide client-side Wayland support to EGL atop the EGLDevice and EGLStream extensions.
December 10th, 2024 — Source

Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports written by AI
Python security developer-in-residence decries use of bots that 'cannot understand code'
December 10th, 2024 — Source

Optimizing Linux MD Bitmap Code Yields 89% Throughput Boost For Quad SSDs
A promising patch for the Linux kernel is optimizing the locking contention and scattered address space for the MD bitmap code to improve both the storage throughput and latency.
December 10th, 2024 — Source

Ruby, .NET, PostgreSQL, and more updates for Oracle Linux
Oracle Linux has been updated with multiple security enhancements, which include updates for ruby:3.1, redis:7, .NET 9.0 bugfixes, and security updates for postgresql:15, postgresql:16, and postgresql:13, along with a bugfix update for kexec-tools and osinfo-db:
December 10th, 2024 — Source

Perf Support For 2,048 CPU Cores Is Becoming Not Enough - Patches Bump Kernel Limit
LINUX KERNELCurrently the Linux kernel's "perf" performance monitoring subsystem has a limit on 2,048 CPU cores for its CPU map that is set by the MAX_NR_CPUS value. But that's becoming not enough in today's high core count era that patches are looking to raise it to a 4,096 CPU core limit by default.
December 10th, 2024 — Source

Ptyxis Becomes Ubuntu's Recommended Replacement To GNOME Terminal
While the Ubuntu desktop has been offered the newer GNOME Console as an alternative to GNOME Terminal, there's been a recent fondness around Ptyxis and apparently is becoming the recommended replacement to GNOME Terminal for the Ubuntu camp.
December 10th, 2024 — Source

Servo Browser Engine Landed More Performance Optimizations In November
The Servo browser engine project is out with their latest monthly status update to outline improvements made to this Rust-based open-source engine.
December 10th, 2024 — Source

System76 just took everything that was good in Pop!_OS and made it even better
Pop!_OS Alpha 4 has arrived and it's going to be a brilliant Linux desktop.
December 10th, 2024 — Source

systemd 257 Debuts With systemd-keyutil & systemd-sbsign Tools, Other Improvements
Coincidentally coming one day after the GNU Shepherd 1.0 service manager release, the systemd 257 release is now shipping as the newest feature release for this widely-used service manager / init system to Linux systems. Systemd 257 brings a number of new features and improvements for powering late 2024 and early 2025 Linux distributions.
December 10th, 2024 — Source

Tinyproxy, WebKitGTK, oFono, Linux kernel (Intel IoTG), RabbitMQ Server updates for Ubuntu
Ubuntu Linux has been updated with several vulnerabilities, including Tinyproxy, WebKitGTK, oFono, Linux kernel (Intel IoTG), and RabbitMQ Server:
December 10th, 2024 — Source

Updated Dasharo Firmware Pulls In Raptor Lake Instability Fix, Other Enhancements
For those wanting to run Coreboot or Coreboot-derived firmware on a modern desktop motherboard with good performance and features, the main contender currently is 3mdeb's Dasharo downstream that can be flashed on the MSI PRO Z790-P/Z790-P motherboards for using with Intel Core Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors. Firmware consulting firm 3mdeb today published a new Dasharo firmware update for the MSI PRO Z790-P WIFI motherboard.
December 10th, 2024 — Source

What will the year 2025 bring for Linux PCs?
What's next for Linux in all its facets in the coming year? We'll tell you!
December 10th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 6th, 2024

4 top personal finance apps for Linux that run on MacOS and Windows, too
Looking for a money app to get your finances in order for 2025? Here's why I recommend these open-source options.
December 6th, 2024 — Source

AMD P-State Driver Improvements Getting Ready For Linux 6.14
While Linux 6.13-rc1 was only released this past Sunday and there is around two months to go until the start of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle, AMD P-State driver improvements are already beginning to collect for this next kernel cycle.
December 6th, 2024 — Source

Archcraft is a solid, super fast distro for anyone ready to move beyond beginner Linux
I spent a week with the distribution and found it to be a lot of fun to use. Here's what to know about it before you dive in.
December 6th, 2024 — Source

Box64 v0.3.2 Emulator Adds Box32 Option, Introduces Native Flags & More
Box64 v0.3.2 is out today as the newest feature release to this Linux user-space emulator for allowing x86_64 binaries to run on ARM64 (AArch64) Linux devices. Box64 is one of the leading ways for allowing x86_64 games and Steam to be able to run on ARM 64-bit Linux devices.
December 6th, 2024 — Source

Broadcom BCM2712 MOPLET Graphics For Linux 6.14, Other Early drm-misc-next Code
While the Linux v6.13 merge window has been over for less than one week, already the first pull requests of new feature code are being submitted to DRM-Next for queuing the display/graphics driver changes ahead of the Linux 6.14 merge window in two months.
December 6th, 2024 — Source

Fedora 42 Eyes Replacing SDL2 With sdl2-compat To Leverage SDL3
The SDL2 library is widely used by cross-platform games and other software. Fedora 42 is eyeing the possibility of replacing SDL2 with the sdl2-compat code so that by way of this compatibility layer the newer SDL3 version will ultimately be used instead.
December 6th, 2024 — Source

Fwupd 2.0.3 Delivers Latest Firmware Updating Capabilities For Linux Systems
Fwupd 2.0 debuted back in October while out today is Fwupd 2.0.3 as the newest incremental update to this open-source solution for updating system and device firmware under Linux.
December 6th, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.13 Features: AutoFDO+Propeller Optimizations, Many AMD Additions & SDUC + NVMe 2.1 Support
With the Linux 6.13 merge window having ended this past weekend, here's the Phoronix overview of all the interesting feature additions, new hardware support, and other kernel changes coming for Linux 6.13.
December 6th, 2024 — Source

Linux Preps For Kunpeng ARM Server SoC With High Bandwidth Memory
New Linux patches from Huawei engineers are preparing new driver support for controlling High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) with the ARM-based Kunpeng high performance SoC.
December 6th, 2024 — Source

MGLRU Sees New Performance Optimizations For Linux
It's been a while since there have been any new advancements or performance optimizations to talk about for Multi-Gen LRU (MGLRU) that was upstreamed to the Linux kernel two years ago as a very exciting kernel innovation. But that's changing now with some fresh performance optimizations being worked on for the MGLRU code.
December 6th, 2024 — Source

openSUSE Leap Micro 6.1 Brings Nice Improvements To This Lightweight Linux OS
openSUSE Leap Micro 6.1 is now available as the newest version of this lightweight Linux operating system built for containerized environments and virtualized workloads.
December 6th, 2024 — Source

The next LTS Linux kernel is no surprise but it is packed with goodies
Linux 6.12 brings real-time support, a new extensible scheduler, and QR error codes.
December 6th, 2024 — Source

Wine 10.0-rc1 Released With Updated VKD3D, Initial Bluetooth Driver
The first release candidate of Wine 10.0 is out today that also now marks the feature freeze ahead of this stable release expected to be out around mid-January.
December 6th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 2nd, 2024

5 Linux commands for locating system slowdowns fast
If you've ever experienced a system slowdown on Linux, it could be hardware-related. Here are five commands to help you find the problem to get back up to speed fast.
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

Advance Discontinuation Notice of openSUSE Leap 15.5
Marcus Meissner has announced that openSUSE Leap 15.5 will reach its end of life on December 31st, 2024.
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

AMD Per-Core Energy Counter Support Slated For Linux 6.14
While the Linux 6.13 merge window just closed yesterday in landing all of the new features and functionality for that first kernel version of 2025, already for the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle to follow a feature was queued up early this morning in a TIP branch: AMD per-core energy counter support.
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

BootKitty UEFI malware exploits LogoFAIL to infect Linux systems
The recently uncovered 'Bootkitty' Linux UEFI bootkit exploits the LogoFAIL flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-40238, to target computers running on vulnerable firmware.
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

Imagination Lands Big PowerVR Compiler Update In Mesa 25.0
Merged over the US holiday weekend was a big update to the Imagination PowerVR Vulkan driver code for Mesa 25.0... 71 patches in fact making up this merge request.
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger Retires
While Intel has been under much financial difficulties and as they pursue their build out of new fabs to better compete with TSMC, to much surprise Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has retired effective today.
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

Linux kernel 6.13-rc1 released
So two weeks have passed, the merge window is over, and -rc1 is pushed out.
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

Linux Kernel Patch Fixes Minutes-Long Boot Times on AMD "Zen 1" and "Zen 2" Processors
A significant fix has been submitted to the Linux kernel 6.13-rc1 that addresses prolonged boot times affecting older AMD processors, specifically targeting "Zen 1" and "Zen 2" architectures. The issue, which has been present for approximately 18 months, could cause boot delays ranging from several seconds to multiple minutes in extreme cases. The problem was discovered by a Nokia engineer who reported inconsistent boot delays across multiple AMD EPYC servers.
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

Linux Kernel updates for SUSE
SUSE Linux has released several Linux kernel security updates:
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

Llamafile 0.8.17 Brings New Web UI For This Easy-To-Distribute AI LLM Framework
Llamafile 0.8.17 debuted this weekend as the newest version of this Mozilla research project for making it easy to distribute and run AI large language models (LLMs) within a single file. As implied by its name, Llamafile leverages Llama.cpp along with other open-source software into one consistent framework for helping to make single-file LLM executables a reality.
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

Mir 2.19 Released With Atomic KMS Platform Support, New Wayland Protocols
Mir 2.19 is out today as the newest version of this Ubuntu/Canonical project making it easier for other desktops/environments to embrace Wayland support. This set of libraries for building Wayland-based shells has added a few new features with today's update.
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

NVK, RADV, & Other Mesa Drivers Ready With Launch Day Vulkan 1.4 Support
Years ago when new OpenGL spec releases would occur, it could take months or years for the open-source Mesa drivers to catch-up in supporting the latest versions... Thankfully in the Vulkan space it continues to prove to be a very different story. As we've seen with prior Vulkan specs, today's Vulkan 1.4 spec release is greeted by same-day Mesa patches.
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

Open source system detects new varieties of cyberattacks
Cyberattacks have become a major risk for companies and other organizations. To prevent data theft, sabotage and extortion, many companies and government agencies are turning in response to Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems, which use detection rules, also known as signatures, to identify cyberattacks.
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

OpenAI denies it is building ad biz model into its platform
Chief financial officer admits 'we're open to exploring other revenue streams in the future'
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

PostgreSQL and Ansible updates for Ubuntu
Ubuntu Linux has received security updates for PostgreSQL vulnerabilities and Ansible regression:
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

Python and SimpleSAMLphp updates for Debian
Debian GNU/Linux has received security updates for Python and SimpleSAMLphp:
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

Qt 6.8.1 Toolkit Released With 550+ Bug Fixes
Building off the early October release of Qt 6.8 LTS, Qt 6.8.1 is out today with more than 550 fixes collected over the past two months.
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

Raspberry Pi Password Not Working? Here's What You Can Do
The Raspberry Pi is indeed versatile as it is powerful. And if you are a tech hobbyist, it would be a missed opportunity not to try out its many capabilities in different areas of your home. So to make the most out of your Pi while expanding your skills, you're probably working with more than one board at the same time.
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

Steam Survey Results For November 2024: Linux Gaming Marketshare Slightly Higher
During October the Steam Linux marketshare crawled back up to 2.0% while overnight Valve published the Steam Survey results for November 2024.
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

Thunderbird, Gimp, ACS, and more updates for RHEL
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has undergone multiple security updates, encompassing Thunderbird, gimp, ACS 4.4 enhancement, python-tornado, libreswan, Kube Descheduler Operator, and postgresql:
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

Vulkan 1.4 Released With More Extensions Mandated, Better 8K Rendering
As a lovely early Christmas present, The Khronos Group used SIGGRAPH Asia today for announcing the Vulkan 1.4 specification release.
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

Vulkan Video Now Enabled By Default For Radeon VCN2/VCN3 Hardware On Linux
An exciting merge today for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver with next quarter's Mesa 25.0 is enabling Vulkan Video API support by default for AMD graphics having VCN 2.x and VCN 3.x hardware.
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

Waiting for Microsoft Windows 12 is a mistake when you can upgrade to Linux today
The tech world is full of rumors about Windows 12, the supposed savior of Microsoft's operating system lineup. The company has been tight-lipped about details, but leaks suggest it's aiming to be a more cloud-focused, AI-driven operating system. That all sounds fancy, but here's the truth -- waiting for Windows 12 might not be the smart play. If you're tired of the bloat, the constant updates, and the never-ending resource demands, there's an alternative you can embrace today: Linux.
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

Xfce 4.20 Pre2 released
Xfce 4.20 pre2 has been released, encompassing all core components of Xfce. The pre-release has undergone refinement and enhancement, and early adopters are encouraged to participate in testing prior to the final release on December 15. The tarballs required for the build process are available for download.
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

XWayland Lands Support For xdg-system-bell
Olivier Fourdan has merged support for using the xdg-system-bell protocol by XWayland for dealing with "system bell" functionality for Wayland compositors supporting this newer protocol for ringing the system bell or otherwise implementing a visual indicator that a system bell type event may have been triggered.
December 2nd, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — December 1st, 2024

Apple M4, More AMD Zen 5 Benchmarks & Linux Kernel Drama From November
November was filled with interesting Linux benchmarks ranging from the Apple M4 testing kicking off to ongoing AMD Zen 5 benchmarks both for desktops and servers, a lot of exciting upstream kernel activity (and some drama...), and more. Even with the end of year holidays around, there remains new and original content on Phoronix each and every day. During November there were 250 original news articles on Phoronix along with another 14 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured-length benchmark articles.
December 1st, 2024 — Source

Linux AMD patch fixes glacial boot times for some Zen 1 and 2 computers — time saved ranges from seconds to multiple minutes
Fix arrives today, and gets backported to older releases.
December 1st, 2024 — Source

Linux Fixes Issue Where Applying AMD Zen1/Zen2 Microcode Updates Could Slow Boot Times
Submitted today for the Linux kernel ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc1 release as part of the "x86/urgent" material is a fix for aging Zen 1 and Zen 2 processors where for the past year and a half they could potentially find very slow boot times.
December 1st, 2024 — Source

NVIDIA's New Linux Patches For GPU Direct RDMA For Device-Private Pages
NVIDIA engineer Yonatan Maman posted a set of "request for comments" patches this Sunday to implement GPU Direct RDMA "P2P DMA" for device private pages. This is the latest in the effort by multiple vendors to allow more efficient data sharing between GPUs/accelerators and other devices like network adapters.
December 1st, 2024 — Source

Turbostat Utility Lands New Features With Linux 6.13
The turbostat utility that lives within the Linux kernel source tree for reporting CPU frequency/idle statistics and other metrics is gaining some new capabilities as part of the Linux 6.13 cycle.
December 1st, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 30th, 2024

Distributed Tracing Tool Jaeger Releases Version 2 with OpenTelemetry at the Core
Version 2 of Jaeger, a leading open-source distributed tracing platform, has been released. This release contains a significant architectural transformation, as it brings Jaeger and its components into the OpenTelemetry framework.
November 30th, 2024 — Source

KDE Ends November With More KWin Fixes & Other Polishing Ahead Of Plasma 6.3
KDE developers have wrapped up a busy November with many fixes and other refinements landing this last week of the month.
November 30th, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.13 Hits A "Tipping Point" With More Rust Drivers Expected Soon
In addition to the USB updates and big staging flush merged yesterday for the Linux 6.13 kernel merge window, the "char/misc" pull was also honored for that catch-all of various kernel changes. With the char/misc pull there are some notable additions for those wanting to write kernel drivers within the Rust programming language.
November 30th, 2024 — Source

Resources System Monitoring App For GNOME Now Displays NPU Usage
As an alternative to the GNOME System Monitor application for system monitoring, Resources has been in development as a currently unofficial, GNOME-aligned resource/hardware monitoring application written in the Rust programming language. Resources v1.7 was released on Friday and now has the ability to monitor NPU usage and other enhancements.
November 30th, 2024 — Source

Rust Hypervisor Firmware v0.5 Supports For More CPUs & Improves EFI Support
The Rust Hypervisor Firmware is a project out of the Cloud Hypervisor umbrella for developing open-source, Rust-based firmware that can be launched from any environment able to load ELF binaries and run them via the PVH booting standard. Rust Hypervisor Firmware v0.5 is out this weekend with the newest capabilities.
November 30th, 2024 — Source

Wayland Color Management Protocol Might Finally Be Close To Merging
In what could be a wonderful holiday for the Linux desktop, it looks like the Wayland color management protocol might finally be close to merging after four years in discussion.
November 30th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 29th, 2024

AMD BIOS Tuning Guide Impact For Boosting AI/ML Performance On EPYC 9005 Series
Following the release last month of the EPYC 9005 series processors, AMD published a BIOS and Workload Tuning Guide of straight-forward settings recommendations for those running new EPYC Turin servers to optimize the performance of different workloads like databases and Java to HPC and AI/ML software.
November 29th, 2024 — Source

Apache NetBeans 24-rc5 released
Apache NetBeans 24-rc5 has been released with enhancements to manage diagnostics with position -1 during the error/warning index process, as well as improvements to the speed of publishing diagnostics during project scans.
November 29th, 2024 — Source

Arch Linux installer now slightly less masochistic
'BTW I use Arch' runway greased, plus clarification around package licensing
November 29th, 2024 — Source

FFmpeg Git Continues Landing A Number Of Vulkan Video Enhancements
A number of Vulkan Video enhancements landed this week in FFmpeg Git thanks to open-source developer Lynne that has been advancing the Vulkan Video encode/decode capabilities in this widely-used multimedia library.
November 29th, 2024 — Source

Improved USB4 Debugging Support With Linux 6.13
Along with the staging changes, Greg Kroah-Hartman this morning also sent out the USB/Thunderbolt changes for the nearly-over Linux 6.13 merge window.
November 29th, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.13 Staging Clears Out 107k Lines Of Code From Old & Unmaintained Drivers
Greg Kroah-Hartman is out today with all of the pull requests for Linux 6.13 of the areas of the kernel he oversees. Most notable with the updates on the staging side are clearing out several drivers seeing no real code activity and no apparent users of the mainline Linux kernel... As such the staging pull lightens the kernel by around 107k lines of code.
November 29th, 2024 — Source

Proving Linux is not a safe sanctuary, ESET finds first Linux-targeting UEFI bootkit malware
Linux-based operating systems have long been heralded as being inherently more secure than Windows. Whether or not this is true is open to debate, as is the impact of user numbers on making an OS a target for malware writers.
November 29th, 2024 — Source

Proxmox Backup Server 3.3 Launched
Proxmox has officially launched version 3.3 of its open-source Proxmox Backup Server, a software package designed for enterprise-level backup and restoration of VMs, containers, and physical servers. The latest release builds on its robust features, such as incremental backups, deduplication, Zstandard compression, and authenticated encryption, offering new tools and enhancements to improve usability and efficiency.
November 29th, 2024 — Source or Source

UBports' Ubuntu Touch OTA-7 Atop Ubuntu 20.04 Released
The UBports community today released Ubuntu Touch OTA-7 as the latest version of the smartphone/tablet Linux platform currently running off an Ubuntu 20.04 base.
November 29th, 2024 — Source

Upcoming Fedora Linux Test Week for Kernel 6.12
The Fedora kernel team is in the process of finalizing Linux kernel 6.12, which will be made available in Fedora Linux shortly. A test week to test out the new kernel is scheduled from December 1st to 8th, 2024.
November 29th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 27th, 2024

AMD Begins Work Upstreaming More Versal 2 SoC Support For Linux
Back in April AMD announced the Versal Gen 2 Adaptive SoCs for AI-driven embedded systems. In preparing for Versal2 evaluation kits expected around the middle of the year and production silicon by the end of 2025, AMD software engineers have begun ramping up their open-source and upstream-focused Linux driver support.
November 27th, 2024 — Source

Corsair Vengeance Airflow Memory Cooling For DDR5 Server RAM
For those building your own server around the new Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" or AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" platforms and using DDR5-6000/DDR5-6400 memory (or the interesting MRDIMM-8000 memory with Xeon 6 P), one of the factors you need to be much more mindful about than in the past is that at least the initial generation of DDR5-6000+ memory is running much hotter than prior server memory.
November 27th, 2024 — Source

First-ever UEFI bootkit for Linux in the works, experts say
Bootkitty doesn't bite... yet
November 27th, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.13 SoundWire Preps DisCo 2.0 Support
The SoundWire subsystem updates were sent out today for the Linux 6.13 kernel. This cycle brings new AMD driver support as well as supporting the MIPI DisCo 2.0 specification.
November 27th, 2024 — Source

LoongArch Wires Up Real-Time Kernel Support & Lazy Preemption
Merged for the Linux 6.12 kernel was the long-awaited real-time "PREEMPT_RT" kernel support and allowing it to be enabled across x86/x86_64, ARM64, and RISC-V CPU architectures. With the Linux 6.13 kernel, LoongArch is joining the RT party.
November 27th, 2024 — Source

Microsoft Makes An Interesting Improvement To Kernel Modules With Linux 6.13
Sent out on Tuesday was the modules pull request for Linux 6.13 that have some low-level improvements but it noted that the biggest kernel modules highlight wasn't in that pull request itself but had been added by way of the memory management pull. This was a change by a Microsoft engineer around caching of kernel modules into huge pages.
November 27th, 2024 — Source

MIPS P8700 RISC-V CPU Support Posted For LLVM Compiler
MIPS has begun working on the open-source compiler toolchain support for their P8700 RISC-V based processors. Initial patches posted today bring-up the MIPS P8700 RISC-V support for the LLVM compiler stack.
November 27th, 2024 — Source

Raspberry Pi Launches The Compute Module 5 For $45 USD
Days after announcing the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W for $7, Raspberry Pi today announced the Compute Module 5 at the $45 price point.
November 27th, 2024 — Source

RISC-V Changes For Linux 6.13 Deliver Pointer Masking In User-Space
Most notable for RISC-V this cycle is bringing user-space pointer masking support. RISC-V user-space pointer masking is for memory tagging like Arm's Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) and Intel Linear Address Masking (LAM). The pointer masking makes use of ignored bits of the effective address on RISC-V platforms and can help with memory safety for user-space applications.
November 27th, 2024 — Source

Phoronix Premium Cyber Week Sale To Better Enjoy Our Linux Hardware Reviews & News
While the end of year holidays are fast approaching, my commitment to Linux hardware and open-source software remains and there still is a lot of interesting content to come this year still -- each and every day, without change for roughly a decade. Unfortunately though due to the (sad) state of the ad industry, many major companies focusing on the likes of Facebook/Meta ads, and the frequent use of ad-blockers by Linux/FLOSS readers make ongoing operations increasingly difficult.
November 27th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 25th, 2024

5 ways to get the best Linux support, no matter your skill level
Where do you turn if you're new to Linux or looking for a solution to a problem? Here are your options.
November 25th, 2024 — Source

Deepseek-R1-Lite Open Source LLM Fully Tested
Have you ever found yourself wrestling with a coding problem that just wouldn't budge or staring at a complex equation, wishing for a bit of extra brainpower? If so, you're not alone. Whether you're a developer, researcher, or someone who simply loves solving intricate puzzles, the struggle to find tools that are both powerful and accessible is all too familiar.
November 25th, 2024 — Source

FUSE Enhancements Submitted For Linux 6.13
The FUSE feature enhancements were submitted today for the Linux 6.13 kernel as part of improving the file-system in user-space capabilities.
November 25th, 2024 — Source

Fwupd 2.0.2 Allows Updating Firmware On Many More Devices
Richard Hughes of Red Hat has released Fwupd 2.0.2 as the newest update to this open-source firmware updating solution for Linux systems.
November 25th, 2024 — Source

GCC 15 Ends Support For Altera Nios II Embedded Processors
The GCC 15 code compiler that is releasing as stable in the early months of 2025 has removed all support for the Altera Nios II CPU target.
November 25th, 2024 — Source

Large Folio Patches For EXT4 Show Some Nice Performance Gains
Huawei engineer Zhang Yi posted a set of nine patches today for enabling large folio support for regular files with the EXT4 file-system. These patches enable large folios for EXT4 on regular files except when using FSVERITY, FSCRYPT, or the journaled data mode. Long story short, these large folio patches can deliver some nice performance gains for both reads and writes.
November 25th, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.13 KVM Eliminates An "Awful Idea", Many x86_64 Improvements
The KVM changes were merged yesterday for Linux 6.13 in further enhancing the open-source virtualization stack.
November 25th, 2024 — Source

New AMD Zen 5 Perf Events Going Into Linux 6.13
Sent out last night for the ongoing Linux 6.13 merge window were all of the perf tool changes for the wonderful "perf" subsystem for performance profiling and the like. In addition to adding the HWMON PMU to "perf stat", leader sampling for inherited task events, and various other tooling improvements, there are also vendor event updates. Most notable with the updated CPU vendor events are new AMD Zen 5 processor events.
November 25th, 2024 — Source

Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W Launches For $7
Complementing the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 that launched this summer, the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W was announced today for $7 as the wireless-enabled variant of this small microcontroller board.
November 25th, 2024 — Source

RHEL 9.5 debuts alongside AlmaLinux, Rocky, and Oracle updates
Plus, soon you'll be able to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a supported option under WSL
November 25th, 2024 — Source

Samba 4.21.2 released
Samba 4.21.2 represents the most recent stable version within the Samba 4.21 release series. This update resolves issues including smbd not verifying sharemode with OVERWRITE dispositions, a panic occurring in close_directory, winexe compatibility with Samba 4.21, protocol errors, NetrGetLogonCapabilities QueryLevel 2, gss_accept_sec_context, winbindd invoking process_set_title, and enhancements to CTDB.
November 25th, 2024 — Source

SilverStone XE360-SP5 & XE04-SP5 For Cooling AMD EPYC 9004/9005 4U Servers
With my recent AMD EPYC 9005 1P 4U server build using a Supermicro H13SSL-N motherboard, SilverStone kindly sent over their two Socket SP5 cooling options for AMD EPYC processors: the XE04-SP5 4U-compatible heatsink fan and then the XE360-SP5 AIO liquid cooler with a triple 120mm fan radiator to allow effectively cooling up to the new 400~500 Watt EPYC Turin processors.
November 25th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 24th, 2024

AMDXDNA Driver For Ryzen AI Now Ready To Appear In The Linux Kernel
The AMDXDNA kernel driver for Linux systems that was made open-source in January for supporting the Ryzen AI NPU on laptop SoCs going back to the Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" series is now one step away from appearing in the mainline Linux kernel in the near future.
November 24th, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.13 Will Report The Number Of Hung Tasks Since Boot
Following all of the MM patches earlier this week sent in by Andrew Morton, on Sunday morning he sent out all of the non-MM patches that he manages for the Linux kernel. Notable for Linux 6.13 with this pull request is presenting the hung task counter as well as finishing off the folio conversion in the NILFS2 code.
November 24th, 2024 — Source

Linux Security Roundup for Week 48, 2024Here is a roundup of last week's Linux security updates for AlmaLinux, Debian GNU/Linux, Fedora Linux, Gentoo Linux, Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Rocky Linux, Slackware Linux, SUSE Linux, and Ubuntu Linux.
#2693
November 24th, 2024 — Source

Linux update adds support for 128 terabyte SD cards— SDUC and UHS-II SD cards are now supported
High-capacity and high-speed SD and microSD cards will receive improved Linux support on the latest 6.11 kernel update.
November 24th, 2024 — Source

Virtual CPUFreq Driver Coming With Linux 6.13 For Better Power/Performance Within VMs
Earlier this week was the main power management updates for Linux 6.13 that included switching AMD EPYC Turin to using the amd_pstate driver on supported systems. Sent out this weekend was another set of power management updates that also includes a notable addition: the virtual CPUFreq driver.
November 24th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 23rd, 2024

9elements Takes Over Intel 1st Gen Xeon Scalable "Skylake" Support Within Coreboot
For those still running a 1st Generation Xeon Scalable "Skylake" era server, support for it within the open-source Coreboot firmware may continue to improve all these years later thanks to firmware consulting firm 9elements.
November 23rd, 2024 — Source

IBM Power11 CPUs Launching In 2025 - Linux 6.13 Preps KVM Nested Guests For Power11
IBM isn't formally releasing Power11 processors until next year, but their software engineers continue being quite busy preparing the Linux kernel and other open-source software for Power11. The newest on the kernel side is enabling support for KVM nested guests on IBM Power11 platforms.
November 23rd, 2024 — Source

Microsoft Continues "Demikernel" Development LibOS For Kernel-Bypass I/O
A Microsoft Research project that was quietly announced a few years ago to some fanfare but not hearing much about since has been Demikernel as their library OS architecture for kernel-bypass I/O. A Phoronix reader brought up Demikernel this week and while it hasn't been talked about much in recent years it does remain under active development with the most recent commits as of hours ago.
November 23rd, 2024 — Source or Watch Video

KDE Plasma 6.3 Sees More Feature Work, One More Crash Fix For KWin
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his traditional weekly development recap that highlights all of the interesting work taking place within the KDE desktop space.
November 23rd, 2024 — Source

Wine 9.22 Enables Wayland Driver By Default
Notable with Wine 9.22 ahead of the all important Wine 10.0 milestone is the Wayland driver being enabled in the default configuration! Wine 9.22 and the upcoming Wine 10.0 stable will enable the native Wayland driver support out-of-the-box for default builds. This is great news and for allowing more Windows games/apps to integrate nicely with the modern Wayland-based Linux desktops rather than continuing to go through XWayland.
November 23rd, 2024 — Source

Wine Staging 9.22 released
Wine Staging 9.22 has been released, serving as a testing area for winehq.org, and includes bug fixes and features that have not yet been integrated into the development branch.
November 23rd, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 21st, 2024

'Alarming' security bugs lay low in Linux's needrestart utility for 10 years
Update now: Qualys says flaws give root to local users, 'easily exploitable', default in Ubuntu Server
November 21st, 2024 — Source

Jim Zemlin, 'head janitor of open source,' marks 20 years at Linux Foundation
In a world where modest leadership is often an oxymoron, Jim Zemlin's two-decade tenure as executive director remains helpful, hopeful, and humble.
November 21st, 2024 — Source

Khronos Announces Slang Initiative From Open-Source NVIDIA Code
On top of an exciting Vulkan spec update out today, The Khronos Group has announced the Slang Initiative based on NVIDIA's open-source Slang compiler code.
November 21st, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.13 EDAC Preps For Panther Lake H & Missing Support For Old Kabylake S CPUs
The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem updates landed this week for the ongoing Linux 6.13 kernel merge window.
November 21st, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.13 SoC Updates Land With Initial Support For Many Older Apple Devices
The four pull requests adding various SoC and board/platform support have now been merged for the Linux 6.13 kernel. This includes support for many older Apple iPad/iPhones, supporting another SoC with a combination of RISC-V and ARM cores, and a wide variety of other mostly ARM hardware support.
November 21st, 2024 — Source

Mesa 24.3 Released With Many Open-Source Vulkan Driver Improvements
Mesa 24.3 has managed to make it out today, one week ahead of the previous release plans due to the lack of any major blocker bugs appearing. Mesa 24.3 has a lot of new feature work on the contained open-source Vulkan drivers as well as evolutionary improvements to their OpenGL drivers and other user-space 3D driver code.
November 21st, 2024 — Source

OBS Studio 31.0.0 Release Candidate 1 released
OBS Studio 31.0.0 Release Candidate 1 has been launched, resolving multiple issues identified in Beta 1-3. The issues identified encompass the non-appearance of a YouTube dock when switching profiles, a deadlock occurring with configured NVIDIA Audio Filters, a crash resulting from multitrack output failures, macOS crashes linked to audio device disconnections, Windows crashes during D3D12 game captures, intermittent connection errors, Decklink Input/Output complications, modifications to the Auto Configuration Wizard, scripts for reloading, and the removal of legacy QSV code.
November 21st, 2024 — Source

PHP 8.1.31, 8.2.26 and 8.3.14 packages for Fedora/RHEL released
Remi Collet has released PHP version 8.1.31, 8.2.26 and 8.3.14 packages for Fedora and RHEL-based Linux distributions.
November 21st, 2024 — Source

ReiserFS Has Been Deleted From The Linux Kernel
Linus Torvalds just merged the change to the Linux 6.13 kernel that goes ahead and deletes the ReiserFS file-system from the source tree. Removing ReiserFS from the Linux tree lightens the kernel by 32.8k lines of code.
November 21st, 2024 — Source

Researchers unearth two previously unknown Linux backdoors
ESET researchers have identified multiple samples of two previously unknown Linux backdoors: WolfsBane and FireWood.
November 21st, 2024 — Source

vkd3d 1.14 released
The vkd3d team has announced the release of version 1.14 of their Direct3D to Vulkan translation library, featuring enhancements including support for binary effects disassembler, Metal Shading Language output, and various bug fixes.
November 21st, 2024 — Source

VKD3D 1.14 Released With Initial Metal Shading Language Output
Ahead of the upcoming freeze for Wine 10.0, VKD3D 1.14 is now available for this prominent Wine component that allows Direct3D 12 to be implemented over the Vulkan API for enhancing Windows games/apps running on Linux and other platforms.
November 21st, 2024 — Source

Vulkan 1.3.302 Published With AV1 Encode & NVIDIA Display Stereo Extensions
Vulkan 1.3.302 was published this morning with a handful of new extensions, including AV1 encode support for Vulkan Video.
November 21st, 2024 — Source

Zrythm 1.0 Released For Powerful Open-Source Digital Audio Workstation
Zrythm 1.0 released today as a big milestone for this open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software that caters from professional users down to beginners.
November 21st, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 18th, 2024

10 lessons I've learned from the open-source community that aren't about tech
You might think the only lessons to learn from the open-source environment are technical, but you'd be mistaken.
November 18th, 2024 — Source

AlmaLinux 9.5 released
Benny Vasquez has announced the release of AlmaLinux 9.5, which enhances performance, development tools, and security through updated module streams, compilers, system performance monitoring, visualisation, and data collection, alongside security improvements centred on cryptography and SELinux policies.
November 18th, 2024 — Source

Btrfs With Linux 6.13 Delivers Performance Improvements & Other Features
Along with the early Bcachefs pull request for Linux 6.13, SUSE engineer David Sterba submitted all of the Btrfs file-system feature updates in an early pull request for this next kernel version. Btrfs is seeing new performance optimizations and other enhancements for Linux 6.13.
November 18th, 2024 — Source

Dell Unveils New AI-Powered Infrastructure at SC24 Conference
Dell unveils AI infrastructure, liquid-cooled servers, and services at SC24, driving enterprise AI acceleration and innovation.
November 18th, 2024 — Source

DXVK 2.5.1 released
Philip Rebohle has announced the release of version 2.5.1 of the DXVK DirectX to Vulkan translation layer. This update addresses significant regressions in anisotropic filtering, dxvk-native, and clang issues, as well as crashes in the GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition when HDR is enabled, impacting Unreal Engine 4 games in D3D11 mode.
November 18th, 2024 — Source

DXVK 2.5.1 Released To Fix A Major Regression & Other Bugs
DXVK 2.5 released one week ago with better video memory management handling, various Direct3D additions, and more. DXVK 2.5.1 is out today to fix a "major regression" as well as a few other bugs.
November 18th, 2024 — Source

FreeBSD 14.2 Beta 3 Released - FreeBSD Now Publishing OCI Container Images
The third weekly beta release of FreeBSD 14.2 is now available for testing ahead of the planned stable release in early December. Besides a few fixes notable to FreeBSD 14.2-BETA3 is that they are now putting out OCI container images among their release media.
November 18th, 2024 — Source

GCC 15 Compiler Development Shifts From Features To Bug Fixing
GCC 15 feature development is now officially over with entering stage three development to focus on fixing compiler bugs.
November 18th, 2024 — Source

GCC 15 feature development is now officially over with entering stage three development to focus on fixing compiler bugs.
The ARM64 (AArch64) architecture changes have been submitted for the now-open Linux 6.13 merge window.
November 18th, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.13 Rolling Out NVMe 2.1 Support & NVMe Rotational Media
All of the block subsystem changes were sent out today for the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel, including a prominent set of NVMe additions.
November 18th, 2024 — Source

Linux kernel 6.11.9 released
Linux kernel version 6.11.9 is now available:
November 18th, 2024 — Source

LLVM Clang 20 Merges Intel Diamond Rapids Support With "-march=diamondrapids"
Following AMX-FP8 support, AMX-AVX512, and other new Intel CPU ISA features being added to the LLVM Clang 20 compiler codebase, the Intel Diamond Rapids target is now upstreamed for allowing "-march=diamondrapids" targeting for these next-generation Xeon processors.
November 18th, 2024 — Source

My Linux predictions for 2025: It's going to be a good year
What's coming for the open-source operating system and why.
November 18th, 2024 — Source

New AMD ERAPS Feature Yields Additional Performance Gains On Zen 5
At the beginning of November I wrote about AMD Linux engineers posting Linux patches enabling a new "ERAPS" feature for Zen 5. ERAPS wasn't talked about by AMD at the Zen 5 launches of the Ryzen 9000 / Ryzen AI 300 series or with the more recent EPYC 9005 "Turin" launch but when enabled, the Enhanced Return Address Prediction Security feature can help deliver some additional gains on new AMD Zen 5 systems by allowing some existing software security mitigations to be avoided. Here are some preliminary comparison benchmarks showing the benefit in affected workloads for using ERAPS on Linux with AMD Zen 5.
November 18th, 2024 — Source

OpenAI execs mused over Cerebras acquisition in 2017 — to mitigate predicted Nvidia supply woes
But the deal was shelved.
November 18th, 2024 — Source

Raspberry Pi OS Now Defaults To 512MB Swap, Updates Labwc Compositor
With last month's Raspberry Pi OS update they now default to Wayland on all Raspberry Pi models alongside various other operating system improvements. Out today is the latest iteration of the Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS with software updates and other changes.
November 18th, 2024 — Source

Real-time Linux leads kernel v6.12's list of new features
This major kernel release adds enhanced support for various hardware platforms and new devices. Even Linus Torvalds contributed some code.
November 18th, 2024 — Source

Twenty is building an open source alternative to Salesforce
If a software product is successful enough, you'll probably be able to find a company building an open source alternative. And yet, nobody has created a modern open source CRM product that can be considered as a serious competitor to Salesforce.
November 18th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 17th, 2024

Archinstall 3.0 Overhauls The Text-Based Arch Linux Installer
Archinstall is the convenient text/CLI-based installer for Arch Linux that allows getting the Linux distribution easily installed in a matter of minutes. Released today is Archinstall 3.0 that overhauls the Arch Linux installer with now using the curses library for rendering of the text interface.
November 17th, 2024 — Source

KDE neon 20241117 released
KDE neon 20241117 has been released. KDE neon is a Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu and the most recent version of the KDE Plasma desktop.
November 17th, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.13 Adding "slab_strict_numa" SLAB Option For Helping ARM Performance
As part of the SLAB (SLUB) allocator updates pending for the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle is a new "slab_strict_numa" option that is reported to further help ARM Linux performance such as for Ampere Computing servers.
November 17th, 2024 — Source

Linux Fixes Hosts Randomly Rebooting During Virtualization With Ryzen 7000/8000 CPUs
Ahead of the Linux 6.12 kernel release expected today there is a last minute "x86/urgent" pull request. Notable with this last minute x86 urgent fixes for Linux 6.12 -- and also to be back-ported to prior kernel versions -- is working around an issue with AMD Ryzen Zen 4 client processors such as the Ryzen 7000/8000 series processors when making use of virtualization that could lead to the host randomly being rebooted.
November 17th, 2024 — Source

Meta Releases NotebookLlama: Open-Source PDF to Podcast Toolkit
Meta has released NotebookLlama, an open-source toolkit designed to convert PDF documents into podcasts, providing developers with a structured, accessible PDF-to-audio workflow. As an open-source alternative to Google's NotebookLM, NotebookLlama guides users through a four-step process that converts PDF text into audio content, without needing prior experience with large language models (LLMs) or audio processing.
November 17th, 2024 — Source

OpenAI's Operator AI: The Future of Autonomous Assistance Deep Dive
In a bold move set to redefine the artificial intelligence landscape, OpenAI is gearing up to launch its new AI agent, "Operator," in 2025. This innovative agent is engineered to autonomously manage a diverse array of tasks, from intricate coding projects to comprehensive travel planning. The initial release, slated for January, will take the form of a research preview, providing API access to developers.
November 17th, 2024 — Source

Rust Coreutils 0.0.28 Delivers Better Performance & Increased Compatibility
Rust Coreutils 0.0.28 "uutils" has been released for this implementation of the GNU Coreutils utilities within the Rust programming language for better memory safety and greater robustness. With the Rust Coreutils 0.0.28 there is increased GNU compatibility as well as better performance.
November 17th, 2024 — Source

Ryzen 7000 / 8000 random reboot virtualization issues fixed in last-minute Linux 6.12 patch
Fix was pushed just in time.
November 17th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 16th, 2024

digiKam 8.5.0 released
DigiKam 8.5.0, a new version of the open-source digital photo manager, has been launched following five months of maintenance and bug fixes. More than 160 issues have been resolved, and the program's graphical interface now supports 61 distinct languages. Users can adjust localisations in the Settings/Configure Languages dialogue and contribute to translations by following the translation instructions.
November 16th, 2024 — Source

GCC 15 Moves C Default Language Version To C23
The GCC 15 compiler on Friday switched its default C language version from the GNU dialect of C17 to the current C23 standard.
November 16th, 2024 — Source

Google Engineer Proposes "Page Detective" As New Kernel Debugging Tool
Google software engineer Pasha Tatashin has proposed Page Detective as a new kernel debugging tool that is able to provide greater insight around the usage and mapping of physical memory pages.
November 16th, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.13 Introducing New Rust File Abstractions
Alongside the VFS pull requests on Friday for case insensitive Tmpfs support and atomic writes for EXT4 and XFS, Christian Brauner also submitted a pull request for introducing some new file abstractions for the Rust programming language within the Linux kernel.
November 16th, 2024 — Source

KDE Developers Spent The Week Fixing Bugs & Polishing
While Plasma 6.3 feature development is continuing, KDE developers this week spent more time fixing bugs and polishing up existing code for ensuring a solid foundation to this open-source desktop.
November 16th, 2024 — Source

Rustls 0.23.17 Brings More Performance Improvements
Rustls 0.23.17 is out today as the newest version of this modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language and a great alternative to the likes of OpenSSL.
November 16th, 2024 — Source

TUXEDO Computers Relicenses Some Of Their Drivers To GPLv2
Following the proposed patches this week to adjust the Linux kernel's module loader to treat the TUXEDO Computers drivers as proprietary due to being GPLv3 licensed rather than GPLv2 to jive with the rest of the upstream kernel code, some of the TUXEDO drivers have now been re-licensed.
November 16th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 15th, 2024

AMD Releases ZenDNN 5.0 For Deep Neural Network Library Optimized For Zen 5 EPYC
AMD ZenDNN 5.0 was rolled out this morning as the newest version of this deep neural network library that is compatible with Intel's oneDNN APIs and infrastructure. ZenDNN 5.0 is now optimized for AMD Zen 5 processors such as the EPYC 9005 series. ZenDNN 5.0 also ships performance enhancements for generative large language models (LLMs) with its PyTorch plug-in.
November 15th, 2024 — Source

Elon Musk adds Microsoft as defendant in his lawsuit against OpenAI
The amended lawsuit claims that xAI has been harmed by OpenAI's deal with Microsoft.
November 15th, 2024 — Source

Elon Musk targets Microsoft in amended OpenAI lawsuit
The updated complaint accuses OpenAI and Microsoft's partnership of 'actively trying to eliminate competitors.'
November 15th, 2024 — Source

Fedora versus Ubuntu: Are You Considering a New Distro?
Fedora and Ubuntu are both outstanding Linux distributions, each taking a different path to the same goal. But what are their differences and similarities, and which is right for you?
November 15th, 2024 — Source

GCC 15 Adds Option For Arm Guarded Control Stack "GCS" Code Generation
GCC 15 feature development is soon wrapping up to focus on bug fixing before releasing GCC 15.1 as stable in the early months of 2025. One of the latest features to make it in the compiler codebase is code generation support around Arm Guarded Control Stack (GCS) functionality.
November 15th, 2024 — Source

GNOME Mutter Switches To High Priority KMS Thread To Avoid Crashes
The GNOME Mutter compositor has switched its KMS thread priority from a real-time value over to high priority to workaround a situation where the GNOME Shell / Mutter could crash or see its process killed.
November 15th, 2024 — Source

Google Posts Patches Further Speeding Up Linux Async Device Suspend & Resume
Google engineer Saravana Kannan has posted a set of patches to better optimize async device suspend and resume handling within the Linux kernel. With these patches there are "significant improvements" to async device suspend/resume with testing being done on a Google Pixel 6 smartphone but other devices stand to benefit too.
November 15th, 2024 — Source

How do you get an AI model to confess what's inside?
OpenAI has introduced a new method for AI image generation called Simplified Continuous Time Consistency Models (SCM), which significantly enhances the speed and efficiency of creating high-quality images. This innovative method significantly enhances the speed and efficiency of creating high-quality images, promising to reshape real-time applications across various industries. The potential impact spans multiple fields, particularly those that depend on instant image processing and dynamic visual content creation.
November 15th, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.12 Preps For Release With Real-Time, Sched_Ext, Stable Xe2 & Raspberry Pi 5
The Linux 6.12 kernel is expected to be released this coming Sunday, 17 November, barring any last minute issues that would force the stable kernel to be diverted to the following Sunday. Linux 6.12 is delivering many exciting new features and beyond that it's all the more exciting with it expected to be this year's Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel version.
November 15th, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.13 To Expand Atomic Write Support To EXT4 & XFS
Prominent Linux developer Christian Brauner with Microsoft has begun sending out various pull requests of VFS feature changes for the imminent Linux 6.13 merge window. One of the interesting early pull requests is the VFS untorn writes series with getting atomic writes support enabled for the EXT4 and XFS file-system.
November 15th, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.13 Very Exciting With New Feature Code For AMD EPYC Zen 5, Intel Panther Lake
While Linux 6.12 should be out this weekend with its many exciting features, following that will mark the start of the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle with what will be the first stable kernel release of 2025... Already there is a lot of exciting feature work expected to land during the Linux 6.13 merge window.
November 15th, 2024 — Source

Linux Patches Add Support For New "Phone Link" Hotkey On Latest ThinkPads
Patches posted on Thursday for the Linux kernel add support for the newest hotkey being found on Lenovo ThinkPad laptops... The "Phone Link" hotkey for launching the Microsoft Phone Link software for linking your Android/iOS smartphone to your laptop. This hotkey can be adapted for similar purposes on Linux.
November 15th, 2024 — Source

LXQt packs Wayland punch with 2.1 release
The lightest mainstream Linux desktop joins the tiny handful that support X.org replacement
November 15th, 2024 — Source

Microsoft Added to Elon Musk's Amended Antitrust Case Against OpenAI
Elon Musk has amended his lawsuit against OpenAI to add Microsoft and others as defendants, alleging anti-competitive conduct.
November 15th, 2024 — Source

Musk also wants to fight Microsoft in legal grudge match with OpenAI
House of GPT says suit is 'baseless and overreaching'
November 15th, 2024 — Source

NetApp Expands Collaboration with Red Hat to Enhance Application Development and Management
NetApp has strengthened its collaboration with Red Hat to deliver new solutions that enhance enterprise application development and management within virtual environments. By integrating NetApp's intelligent data infrastructure with Red Hat OpenShift, customers gain greater flexibility to manage their virtualized environments seamlessly on-premises and across hybrid multicloud configurations.
November 15th, 2024 — Source

OpenAI accused of trying to profit off AI model inspection in court
How do you get an AI model to confess what's inside?
November 15th, 2024 — Source

OpenAI's undefined revenue streams fumbled a $30 billion investment but later saw a $500 billion kickback with "a clear focus of converting to a for-profit entity"
In 2023, SoftBank skipped a $30 billion investment in OpenAI because it lacked clear and well-established revenue streams.
November 15th, 2024 — Source

SDL3 Improves Steam Controller Support, Now Enabled By Default
A number of Steam Controller improvements have been merged for SDL, this widely-used hardware/software abstraction layer that is common to cross platform games. Among the latest Steam Controller improvements in SDL are enabling the support by default.
November 15th, 2024 — Source

Tmpfs Adding Case Insensitive Support For Wine / Steam Play & Flatpaks
In addition to the EXT4 and XFS atomic write support, another interesting pull request sent in today by Microsoft's Christian Brauner is adding case-insensitive file/folder support for the Tmpfs file-system to benefit use-cases like Wine / Steam Play compatibility layers and sandboxing/container facilities like Flatpak.
November 15th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 12th, 2024

Akamai App Platform reduces the complexity associated with managing Kubernetes clusters
Akamai announced the Akamai App Platform, a ready-to-run solution that makes it easy to deploy, manage, and scale highly distributed applications.
November 12th, 2024 — Source

AMD's Ninth Iteration Of Their XDNA Linux Driver Posted For Ryzen AI
Yesterday brought the eighth and ninth iteration of the AMD XDNA Linux kernel driver posted for review for enabling the Ryzen AI branded NPUs found in their recent SoCs.
November 12th, 2024 — Source

Early Benchmarks: AMD EPYC 9005 Performance & Power Efficiency To Lead Further With Linux 6.13
One of the many changes to look forward to with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle is the AMD P-State driver to be used by default with the new EPYC 9005 series processors. While AMD Ryzen CPUs for a while now have been defaulting to the modern AMD P-State driver that makes use of ACPI CPPC platform support for allowing better power efficiency, AMD EPYC CPUs have kept to using the generic ACPI CPUFreq frequency scaling driver.
November 12th, 2024 — Source

GCC 15 Lands New Optimization For AMD Zen 4 & Zen 5 CPUs
Merged today for the upcoming GCC 15 stable release is a new "X86_TUNE_AVX512_TWO_EPILOGUES" tuning optimization that is enabled by default for AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 processors.
November 12th, 2024 — Source

GNOME Mutter Lands Improved GPU Selection Logic For Laptops
Merged today to GNOME's Mutter compositor is improved logic for selecting the graphics processor to treat as the primary one within multi-GPU laptops.
November 12th, 2024 — Source

Intel Idle Support For Granite Rapids D Going Into Linux 6.13
The "intel_idle" driver provides CPU idle time management for Intel processors on Linux for helping to put the processor into low-power states in conjunction with the MWAIT instruction. With the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel, the Granite Rapids D support for the Intel Idle driver is set to be merged.
November 12th, 2024 — Source

Intel Releases New CPU Microcode For Two New Security Advisories
It's the second Tuesday of the month and this Patch Tuesday brings new CPU microcode for mitigating the latest Intel processor security vulnerabilities and updates to some previously disclosed issues.
November 12th, 2024 — Source

Mesa 25.0 Clover OpenCL Drops Support For NIR Drivers
As part of the transition to eventually drop the long dormant Clover OpenCL state tracker from Mesa's Gallium3D codebase in favor of the modern OpenCL Rusticl Rust-written driver, Mesa 25.0 has ended Clover support for NIR-based drivers.
November 12th, 2024 — Source

PeaZip 10.1.0 released
PeaZip 10.1.0 has been released, featuring enhancements including fixes, compression presets, improved navigation, and icons and themes with alpha transparency. It additionally supports scrypt KDF to enhance resistance against password guessing and raise memory cost.
November 12th, 2024 — Source

Red Hat & Intel Developing "Climatik" For Power Capping AI In The Data Center
Red Hat in cooperation with Intel, Bloomberg and IBM has been developing the Climatik open-source project as a means of power capping AI use within the data center for better energy efficiency and sustainability.
November 12th, 2024 — Source

Red Hat Acquiring Neural Magic To Bolster Open-Source AI Offerings
Red Hat announced today they have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Neural Magic, an AI software company behind the likes of DeepSparse and nm-vllm.
November 12th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 10th, 2024

"AM" 9.1 released
A new version of the AM application manager has been released, now featuring support for Toolpacks.
November 10th, 2024 — Source

Arch Linux Powered CachyOS Pulls In THP Shrinker & AMD Cache Optimizer
The Arch Linux based CachyOS Linux distribution has issued its November 2024 media refresh. Notable this time are pulling a few performance-related patches into its kernel build.
November 10th, 2024 — Source

Debcow Optimizing Debian Packages For Copy-On-Write File-Systems
Debcow is an experimental implementation of deploying Debian packages on copy-on-write file-systems like Btrfs and Bcachefs. Debcow adapts DPKG to use reflinks for installing packages. With reflinking to the file contents from the Debian package archives rather than copying of files, it can lead to a dramatic speed-up of installing Debian packages: as much as 6x faster on CoW file-systems.
November 10th, 2024 — Source

How to run a local Linux web server running in a Windows 11 window
Windows Subsystem for Linux lets run an Apache web server on your Windows PC
November 10th, 2024 — Source

KDE neon 20241110 released
KDE neon 20241110 has been released. KDE neon is a Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu and the most recent version of the KDE Plasma desktop. KDE neon is our installable Linux with continuous integration and deployment.
November 10th, 2024 — Source

Linux Optimization Patches Significantly Speed-Up Debuggers Using /proc/kcore
A set of Linux kernel patches posted on Friday by Meta/Facebook provide for sizable performance optimizations for applications leveraging /proc/kcore such as for debuggers.
November 10th, 2024 — Source

Linux Support For Apple's Latest Magic Trackpad USB-C Model
A patch is pending for enabling support for the USB-C model of Apple's latest Magic Trackpad input device under Linux.
November 10th, 2024 — Source

Niri 0.1.10 Scrollable-Tiling Wayland Compositor Brings Many Improvements
If this weekend's release of Hyprland 0.45 doesn't suit your fancy, Niri is also out this weekend with a new feature release. Niri is the scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor for an interesting Linux desktop experience.
November 10th, 2024 — Source

Open source projects draw equity-free funding from corporates, startups, and even VCs
A dearth of funding for vital open source technologies is leading to a swath of support from startups, unicorns, corporations, and even venture capital firms.
November 10th, 2024 — Source

Wine-Staging 9.21 Fixes Some Old Game Crashes & Hangs Due To DirectMusic
Building off Friday's release of Wine 9.21, Wine-Staging 9.21 is available as this experimental blend of Wine that carries extra patches for testing/evaluation to enhance the ability for Windows games and apps to run on Linux.
November 10th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 9th, 2024

ChatGPT blocked over 250,000 requests to generate fake images of presidential candidates
The US Presidential elections are finally over. After months of tug-of-war between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Trump emerged victorious and was elected as the 47th President of the United States of America. However, users did try to generate fake images of presidential candidates using ChatGPT, to which the AI platform replied strongly.
November 9th, 2024 — Source

ChatGPT rejected 250,000 election deepfake requests
OpenAI reveals the results of its strategy for 2024 US presidential elections.
November 9th, 2024 — Source

Debian GNU/Linux 12.8 released
Debian GNU/Linux 12.8 represents the eighth update to the stable distribution of Debian 12, focusing on resolving security vulnerabilities and significant issues. This point release does not represent a new version of Debian 12; rather, it updates certain packages, enabling users to upgrade to the latest versions through an updated Debian mirror.
November 9th, 2024 — Source

How To Use ChatGPT To Create A PowerPoint Presentation
Admit it — you're probably not a fan of making PowerPoint presentations. The process can be tedious and time-consuming, and putting together multiple slides can easily feel repetitive after some time. There's also not much difference between creating a deck using information you already have versus starting one from scratch. Even with existing information, you'll typically still need to trim it down to make it effective and easy to follow.
November 9th, 2024 — Source

Hyprland 0.45 Compositor Smooths Round Edges, Window Snapping For Floating Windows
Hyprland 0.45 released today as the newest version of this Wayland compositor focused on being an independent, very customizable, and dynamic tiling compositor.
November 9th, 2024 — Source

KDE's Info Center Now Shows Multi-GPU Information, Plasma 6.3 Bringing UI Refinements
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly development recap of all the interesting Plasma desktop changes to have landed over the past week.
November 9th, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.13 Bringing DRM Panic Support To NVIDIA GPUs
Friday saw a final round of "drm-misc-next" feature updates ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel merge window. The DRM Panic code continues to be enhanced for improving this "Blue Screen of Death" like experience on the Linux desktop.
November 9th, 2024 — Source

Microsoft Azure Linux 3.0 Update Pushes Additions For Intel, AMD & Arm
Microsoft overnight released the newest version of their Azure Linux 3.0 in-house Linux distribution that is used by a variety of internal services at the company as well as external customers.
November 9th, 2024 — Source

New Patches Aim To Optimize Context Switching With Two Improvements
A set of Friday night patches provide for some exciting context switching optimizations to the Linux kernel.
November 9th, 2024 — Source

NVIDIA Outlines Current Wayland Limitations & Upcoming Driver Features
Longtime NVIDIA Linux engineer Aaron Plattner shared a status update on Friday around the current feature parity difference between the NVIDIA driver stack on X11 and under (X)Wayland.
November 9th, 2024 — Source

OpenAI Has, For Now, Escaped Copyright Lawsuit Filed Against It Regarding Its Use Of News Articles Without Consent To Train ChatGPT
OpenAI has been in the news since its inception of ChatGPT and has been actively evolving its technology, developing new models, and working aggressively to bring AGI forward. While the company's progression is widely praised, it had to face some legal pressure for misusing articles from news outlets to train its large language models. However, the artificial intelligence giant has been able to dodge the lawsuit for now as a federal judge in New York has dismissed the case.
November 9th, 2024 — Source

SparkyLinux 2024.11 released
Sparky Linux 2024.11 has been released, featuring package updates from both Debian and Sparky repositories. The package comprises Linux kernel 6.11.5, Midori web browser 11.4.2, Thunderbird 128.4.0esr, LibreOffice 24.8.2, VLC 3.0.21, and Exaile 4.1.3.
November 9th, 2024 — Source

TypeScript 5.7 RC released
TypeScript 5.7 is now available for download through npm. The release candidate includes several improvements, including checking for never-initialized variables, path rewriting for relative paths, and a new compiler option called --rewriteRelativeImportExtensions. TypeScript has been able to catch issues when a variable has not yet been initialized in all prior branches, but it now reports errors when variables have never been initialized at all.
November 9th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 8th, 2024

The latest release from Steam has some pretty cool tricks up its sleeve.
Valve has release a new version of the popular Steam gaming app for all supported platforms (including Linux) that not only fixes several bugs but also adds improvements for gaming natively on Linux.
November 8th, 2024 — Source

AMX-AVX512 Support Merged For LLVM Clang 20 Compiler
As the latest on the compiler enablement front for Intel's next-gen Xeon "Diamond Rapids" processors, LLVM Git has merged support for the AMX-AVX512 instructions for next spring's Clang 20 compiler release.
November 8th, 2024 — Source

Intel Spots A 3888.9% Performance Improvement In The Linux Kernel From One Line Of Code
Intel's Linux kernel test robot has reported a 3888.9% performance improvement in the mainline Linux kernel as of this past week.
November 8th, 2024 — Source

Fedora KDE Desktop Spin Promoted To Same Tier As GNOME-Based Fedora Workstation
Earlier this year was a Fedora change proposal seeking to make KDE Plasma the default over GNOME for Fedora 42. A compromise of sorts has now been settled on with the Fedora Desktop Spin being promoted to an "Edition" status that will put it on the same level as the GNOME-based Fedora Workstation Edition.
November 8th, 2024 — Source

Google Axion CPU With GCE C4A versus AWS Graviton4 Performance
I delivered launch-day benchmarks looking at the Google Axion CPU performance with the C4A instances compared to other Google Cloud instance types powered by Ampere Altra and Intel Xeon. In this article is a look at how the Google Axion processor performance compares to the competing Amazon/AWS Graviton4 processor.
November 8th, 2024 — Source

Govulncheck-vulndb, QEmu, Ruby3.3-Rubygem-Actionmailer, Chromedriver, Python, Libheif, Chromium updates for SUSE
SUSE Linux has been updated with several security enhancements, including moderate updates for govulncheck-vulndb, qemu, ruby3.3-rubygem-actionmailer, chromedriver, python312, libheif, python311, and chromium:
November 8th, 2024 — Source

Grafana, Thunderbird, mod_http2, and more updates for Rocky Linux
Rocky Linux has undergone multiple security updates, encompassing grafana, thunderbird, mod_http2, firefox, buildah, edk2, openexr, libtiff, microcode_ctl, kernel, kernel-rt, resource-agents, freerdp, bpftrace, ghostscript, bcc, llvm-toolset:rhel8, python3.11-urllib3, container-tools:rhel8, and thunderbird:
November 8th, 2024 — Source

KDE Frameworks 6.8 released
KDE has announced the release of Frameworks 6.8.0, which comprises 72 addon libraries for Qt. These libraries provide a diverse array of essential functionalities, characterized by their maturity, peer-reviewed quality, and thorough testing, all under favorable licensing conditions.
November 8th, 2024 — Source

Linux Fix Pending For Annoying Intel Lunar Lake Laptop Problems
A patch is working its way to the mainline Linux kernel for addressing an annoyance affecting new Intel Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" laptops.
November 8th, 2024 — Source

Linux kernel 4.19.323 released
Linux kernel version 4.19.323 is now available:
November 8th, 2024 — Source

Linux kernel 5.4.285 released
Linux kernel version 5.4.285 is now available:
November 8th, 2024 — Source

Linux kernel 5.10.229 released
Linux kernel version 5.10.229 is now available:
November 8th, 2024 — Source

Linux kernel 5.15.171 released
Linux kernel version 5.15.171 is now available:
November 8th, 2024 — Source

Linux kernel 6.1.116 released
Linux kernel version 6.1.116 is now available:
November 8th, 2024 — Source

Linux kernel 6.6.60 released
Linux kernel version 6.6.60 is now available:
November 8th, 2024 — Source

Linux kernel 6.11.7 released
Linux kernel version 6.11.7 is now available:
November 8th, 2024 — Source

Mesa 24.3 Code Branched, Mesa 25.0 Enters Development
Mesa 24.3 is going to be a big quarterly feature release with many Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver improvements, better Apple Silicon OpenGL and Vulkan driver support, numerous performance optimizations, enhanced Rusticl OpenCL capabilities, Vulkan FIFO support on Wayland, initial Intel Xe3 enablement for Panther Lake, the NVIDIA NVK driver is increasingly more capable, removal of the OpenMAX API, Gfxstream was merged, robust Lunar Lake and Battlemage Xe2 support, refinements to the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver code, and many other improvements as detailed across dozens of articles on Phoronix.
November 8th, 2024 — Source

OpenZFS 2.3-rc3 Adds JSON Output For Commonly Used Commands
OpenZFS 2.3 continues working its way toward release as a big step forward for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems.
November 8th, 2024 — Source

oVirt 4.5, Libproxy, Spirv-Tools, and more updates for Oracle Linux
Oracle Linux has announced the release of multiple updates, which include bug fixes for oVirt 4.5, libproxy, spirv-tools, vulkan-headers, vulkan-loader, vulkan-tools, gvfs, iproute, python-idna, edk2, libtiff, bzip2, go-toolset:ol8, container-tools:ol8, python3.11, openldap, rhel-system-roles, gcc-toolset-13-annobin, glib2, grub2, virt:ol, chrony, gcc-toolset-13-gcc, cups, and squid:4:
November 8th, 2024 — Source

PHP 8.2.26RC1 and 8.3.14RC1 for Fedora/RHEL released
Remi Collet has released PHP 8.2.26RC1 and 8.3.14RC1 packages for Fedora and RHEL-based Linux distributions.
November 8th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 7th, 2024

Advanced Video Data Extraction with Bumpups AI -- Quick Guide
Imagine trying to sift through hours of video footage, searching for that one crucial moment or piece of information. It's a daunting task, right? Many of us have been there, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of video content and the limitations of existing tools to efficiently analyze it.
November 7th, 2024 — Source

Agentic AI is the Next Big Deal -- Here's All You Need to Know
Just as business leaders accept that generative AI should be taken seriously, a new sheriff is taking the business world by storm. It is called Agentic AI.
November 7th, 2024 — Source

"AM" 9.0.2 released
The recent updates, versions 9.0.1 and 9.0.2 of "AM," have introduced new features that allow users to disable or enable notifications during app updates. The available options are --disable-notifications and --enable-notifications. The updated features provide users with the ability to enable or disable notifications during application updates. Furthermore, the new feature enables the application of an icon theme right after installation, eliminating the necessity for patching the .desktop file.
November 7th, 2024 — Source

Apple wants to build its own AI servers -- but will Foxconn help?
Apple is diving deeper into the world of artificial intelligence, and it has big plans. The tech giant wants to build its own powerful AI servers, and it's hoping to work with Foxconn, its long-time manufacturing partner. But there's a catch: Foxconn is already super busy.
November 7th, 2024 — Source

Apple's new AirPlay options for macOS add a little more privacy
The macOS Sequoia 15.2 Beta update changes AirPlay, so you don't have to share your entire screen with the TV.
November 7th, 2024 — Source

ChatGPT has a new domain, and it's even shorter!
Do you remember when Google bought the domain ai.com to lead to Gemini? Well, it seems that Google isn't the only company buying simple URLs for its AI chatbot. OpenAI just picked up a new domain for ChatGPT, and it's even shorter than chat.openai.com. You can now access ChatGPT by using chat.com.
November 7th, 2024 — Source

ChatGPT has officially replaced Google Search for me - here's why
If you want to get answers to questions easily and quickly, ChatGPT Search may be for you.
November 7th, 2024 — Source

Cybersecurity professionals pessimistic about AI
A new report reveals that 54 percent of cybersecurity professionals believe cybercriminals will benefit more from AI than the security industry.
November 7th, 2024 — Source

Ex OpenAI Employee Finally Tells Us Why He Left
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) represents a frontier in technological innovation, with the potential to transform industries and reshape societies. However, its development is fraught with significant challenges, particularly in the realms of safety and ethics. The recent departure of Miles Brundage, a prominent researcher formerly with OpenAI, has brought these concerns into sharp focus. His exit underscores a critical question facing the AI industry: Are we truly prepared to manage AGI safely and responsibly?
November 7th, 2024 — Source

Grab Employs LLMs for Conversational Data Discovery with GPT-4, Glean and Slack
Grab responded to the challenges of finding valuable datasets among 200k+ tables by enhancing Hubble, the data discovery tool, with new capabilities leveraging GenAI technologies. The company reduced the data discovery process by incorporating LLMs to generate dataset documentation and created a Slack bot to bring effective data discovery to data consumers.
November 7th, 2024 — Source

Haiku Enjoyed A Busy October Implementing More Features
The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS has remained very active implementing more features and fixes as we approach the end of 2024.
November 7th, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.13 To Allow Controlling Zero RPM Feature For Radeon RX 7000 Series GPUs
Sent out yesterday was an AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver pull request with the last few feature additions and patches slated for the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel merge window. Alongside other AMD kernel graphics driver updates, the new driver code with Radeon RX 7000 series RDNA3 graphics cards will finally allow controlling the zero RPM fan feature under Linux.
November 7th, 2024 — Source

Mesa 24.3 Merges Vulkan FIFO Support On Wayland
Yet another feature merging into Mesa 24.3 with the code branching (feature freeze) yet to take place is Vulkan FIFO presentation mode support under Wayland.
November 7th, 2024 — Source

Microsoft announces Azure Linux 3.0 for AKS preview
Microsoft has just announced the availability of Azure Linux 3.0 for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), which is now available as a preview on AKS version 1.31. Azure Linux 3.0 was made generally available a few months ago on GitHub; you can see the full release notes here.
November 7th, 2024 — Source

Microsoft Is Turbocharging Notepad And Paint With New Generative AI Tools
When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) tools, companies are leaving no stone unturned. Even Notepad, the humble little text editor in Windows, is getting a generative AI upgrade. Same goes for Paint, and if you're a Windows Insider in the Canary or Dev channel, you can begin testing the nifty new features right away in Windows 11 (with a caveat -- more on that in a moment).
November 7th, 2024 — Source

NVIDIA GH200 Grace CPU versus AMD EPYC 9005 Turin CPU Performance
With the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" testing over the past month since launch I have looked at how well the new EPYC Turin CPUs compete against Intel Xeon, how Turin Dense dominates in performance and power efficiency to AmpereOne at 192 cores, and the generational uplift from EPYC Genoa to Turin at the same core counts, among other Turin performance benchmark tests.
November 7th, 2024 — Source

OpenAI Acquires Chat.com Domain to Boost ChatGPT Accessibility
OpenAI has made headlines with its acquisition of the prominent domain Chat.com, now redirecting all traffic to its AI chatbot, ChatGPT.
November 7th, 2024 — Source

OpenCL Headers & SDK Updated For OpenCL 3.0.17
Near the end of October OpenCL 3.0.17 was released as the newest maintenance update to this low-level compute API for cross-vendor GPUs and other accelerators. The OpenCL Headers and SDK have now been updated for the new revision.
November 7th, 2024 — Source

The best AI search engines of 2024: Google, Perplexity, and more
Artificial intelligence can optimize your search experience, and getting started is both free and easy.
November 7th, 2024 — Source

This SAP industry center uses artificial intelligence to streamline manufacturing
When Hurricane Helene damaged western North Carolina in September, filling medical facilities with people who couldn't be cared for at home, Jim Polk, a tech executive at Exela Pharmaceutical Sciences in Lenoir, North Carolina, got a call from the Atrium Health hospital group in flooded Asheville. Could his company make intravenous saline bags for the expected crush of patients?
November 7th, 2024 — Source

Unique memristor design with analog switching shows promise for high-efficiency neuromorphic computing
The growing use of artificial intelligence (AI)-based models is placing greater demands on the electronics industry, as many of these models require significant storage space and computational power. Engineers worldwide have thus been trying to develop neuromorphic computing systems that could help meet these demands, many of which are based on memristors.
November 7th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 5th, 2024

Apache NetBeans IDE 24-rc2 released
The second release candidate for Apache NetBeans IDE 24 introduces several enhancements, including support for source archives containing multiple modules, improved robustness of the "Goto Type Dialog," the disabling of JDK 23 line-doc comments, the creation of a secret rotation CronJob, and an upgraded UI warning color for FlatLaf light.
November 5th, 2024 — Source

GIMP 3.0 RC1 Released For Testing
The long elusive GIMP 3.0 image editor that is a free software alternative to Adobe Photoshop has finally reached the release candidate phase of development.
November 5th, 2024 — Source

KDE Plasma 6.2.3 released
KDE Plasma 6.2.3 serves as a bugfix update for Plasma 6.2. The update encompasses two weeks of new translations and fixes contributed by KDE members, addressing issues such as PIN entry behavior, KWin settings, and bug #495242 in KDE GTK Config.
November 5th, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.13 To Drop Fieldbus Just Five Years After Being Merged
Merged back in 2019 was the Fieldbus subsystem as a set of network protocols for real-time distributed control of automated industrial systems. But now five years later, Fieldbus is being removed from the mainline Linux kernel since the code hasn't been maintained.
November 5th, 2024 — Source

Linux 6.13 To Enhance Logic For Trusting Built-In Thunderbolt Controllers
Due to the possibility of DMA attacks from connected Thunderbolt devices, Linux and other platforms have built up safeguards over the years and different security levels for Thunderbolt to better protect systems having this high speed interface exposing PCIe. With the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel, the logic of the kernel is being enhanced to better detect and trust built-in Thunderbolt controllers.
November 5th, 2024 — Source

LXQt 2.1 Released With New Wayland Session Component
LXQt 2.1 is now available as the latest feature release to this Qt-based lightweight desktop environment. Most significant with LXQt 2.1 is the introduction of the lxqt-wayland-session component.
November 5th, 2024 — Source

Open-Source PowerVR Driver Being Extended For The Imagination BXS-4-64 MC1 GPU
Upstreamed at the start of the year was the Imagination PowerVR open-source DRM kernel driver for newer Imagination Rogue GPUs. That upstream kernel driver is now being extended to cover the Imagination BXS-4-64 MC1 GPU.
November 5th, 2024 — Source

OpenAI Appoints Former Meta Hardware Chief to Lead Robotics Division
OpenAI has appointed Caitlin Kalinowski, Meta's former head of hardware for augmented reality (AR), to lead its robotics and consumer hardware initiatives.
November 5th, 2024 — Source

OpenAI Initiates Talks to Transform Non-Profit Structure Into For-Profit Entity
OpenAI is reportedly discussing potential changes to shift its $157 billion non-profit structure to a for-profit model with the California attorney general's office.
November 5th, 2024 — Source

OpenAI's Predicted Outputs feature can speed up GPT-4o model output by up to 5x
Latency is a significant issue for most LLM-related use cases. For scenarios like code suggestions and modifying long documents, latency can really affect the overall user experience. Imagine a user wanting to rewrite the last paragraph of a 2-page document. It would be better if the rewritten document appeared instantly since the change involves only a single paragraph. However, current LLM APIs require the entire document to be regenerated, causing significant latency for users.
November 5th, 2024 — Source

PHP 8.3.14RC1 released
The release candidate for PHP 8.3.14 incorporates a range of bug fixes across multiple components, including CLI, COM, core, date, DBA, DOM, EXIF, FFI, Filter, FPM, GD, MBstring, Opcache, OpenSSL, PDO_ODBC, Phar, PHPDBG, Reflection, Session, SOAP, Sockets, SPL, and additional areas.
November 5th, 2024 — Source

PHP 8.4.0RC4 released
The fourth release candidate of PHP 8.4 has addressed multiple bugs across various components, including BcMath, Core, Date, DOM, FPM, GD, GMP, Opcache, OpenSSL, PDO, PDO_ODBC, Reflection, Session, SPL, and SysVShm.
November 5th, 2024 — Source

Power Determinism Mode Still Proves Beneficial For AMD EPYC 9005 Performance
Typically in my launch-day Linux reviews of new AMD EPYC processors I try to include results both of the performance determinism (default) and power determinism modes available with these server processors since opting in to the power determinism mode can allow for additional performance uplift at the cost of slightly higher power costs.
November 5th, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 3rd, 2024

AMD Heterogeneous CPU Design Topology Patches Coming For Linux 6.13The latest patches from AMD Linux engineers for working on x86 heterogeneous design identification were queued last week for introduction in the Linux 6.13 kernel.
#2693
November 3rd, 2024 — Source

Apple Silicon OpenGL/Vulkan Drivers Updated This Week For Mesa 24.3
Alyssa Rosenzweig has pushed the latest Apple Silicon OpenGL "AGX Gallium3D" and Vulkan "Honeykrisp" code from the Asahi Linux development repository into the Mesa Git codebase ahead of this quarter's Mesa 24.3 release.
November 3rd, 2024 — Source

Ibnss_slurm, Java-23-OpenJDK, Govulncheck-Vulndb, Docker-Stable, Java-17-OpenJDK updates for SUSE
SUSE Linux has received multiple security upgrades, including libnss_slurm, java-23-openjdk, govulncheck-vulndb, docker-stable, and java-17-openjdk.
November 3rd, 2024 — Source

KDE neon 20241103 released
KDE neon 20241103 has been released. KDE neon is a Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu and the most recent version of the KDE Plasma desktop.
November 3rd, 2024 — Source

Linux Mint Cinnamon desktop to integrate Night Light for improved eye comfort
The popular Cinnamon desktop environment is taking steps to integrate Night Light, a feature that has become essential for many computer users. Night Light reduces the amount of blue light emitted from your monitor, gradually warming up screen colors as evening approaches. The aim is to lessen eyestrain and encourage better sleep by signaling to your body that it's time to wind down.
November 3rd, 2024 — Source

Linux Mint Working On Night Light For Cinnamon, Collaborating With Framework Computer
The Linux Mint crew is out with their newest monthly status update that outlines the activities of this desktop Linux distribution over the course of October.
November 3rd, 2024 — Source

Linux Security Roundup for Week 45, 2024
Here is a roundup of last week's Linux security updates for AlmaLinux, Debian GNU/Linux, Fedora Linux, Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Slackware Linux, SUSE Linux, and Ubuntu Linux.
November 3rd, 2024 — Source

Linus Torvalds kicked the Russians out of Linux, now they're creating a sovereign Linux community in Russia — Ministry of Digital Development steps in
Kneejerk announcement or a serious plan, time will tell.
November 3rd, 2024 — Source

Nice Performance Gains With SVT-AV1 2.3 Encoding On The System76 Thelio Astra
With this week's release of SVT-AV1 2.3 for open-source AV1 encoding citing significant performance improvements for running on ARM, I was eager to see how well this AV1 encoder would be performing on the new System76 Thelio Astra ARM developer desktop powered by Ampere Altra. Here are some benchmarks showing those big speed-ups for ARM-based AV1 encoding.
November 3rd, 2024 — Source

OpenSSL and Perl updates for Debian
Debian GNU/Linux has received security upgrades, including an OpenSSL regression fix and Perl security update:
November 3rd, 2024 — Source

Python-Single-Version update for Fedora 40
A security update for python-single-version has been released for Fedora 40:
November 3rd, 2024 — Source

Rust-Based Redox OS Gets RISC-V Working, Also Now Booting On The Raspberry Pi 4
The Redox OS open-source Rust-based operating system project is out with their newest monthly development update.
November 3rd, 2024 — Source

Snapdragon X1 Elite CPUFreq Support Revised In Latest Linux Patches
While the mainline Linux kernel has begun seeing initial support for various Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops, various feature limitations are outstanding before these Qualcomm-powered laptops really become usable for daily use. For instance, just a few days ago the audio firmware was finally upstreamed to make setting up X1 Elite laptops easier. Another important feature as an example is CPUFreq driver support for CPU frequency scaling to ensure optimal performance and power efficiency.
November 3rd, 2024 — Source

Valve Engineer's AMD Linux RADV Vulkan driver fix boosted an FSR2 demo sample app by 228% on RDNA 2 GPUs
Dev apparently reworked less than a dozen lines of code for this uplift.
November 3rd, 2024 — Source or Source

Software — Open Source — November 2nd, 2024

Cloudflare's Pingora 0.4 Rust Framework Released With Experimental Windows Support
Cloudflare's Pingora Rust framework that was written as a replacement to Nginx and made publicly open-source earlier this year with a focus on building fast and reliable networked systems is out with its newest feature release.
November 2nd, 2024 — Source

Fedora Linux 40-20241101 Updated ISOs released
The Fedora Respins SIG has just released new Fedora Linux 40 live ISO images, packed with all the newest updates.
November 2nd, 2024 — Source

Frustrated with Windows 11? The stunning Nitrux Linux 3.7.1 is the OS you deserve
If you're ready to break free from the familiar but uninspiring confines of Windows 11, it's time to consider a different approach. Many of us stick with Microsoft's OS because it's what we know, not because it's the best option out there, but imagine an operating system that prioritizes speed, simplicity, and style, all while keeping your workflow seamless and frustration-free.
November 2nd, 2024 — Source

Intel Lands VVC VA-API Hardware Decoding Into FFmpeg
Intel has integrated VVC VA-API hardware accelerated decoding support into the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library.
November 2nd, 2024 — Source

KDE Will Nicely Notify You When Apps Are Being Killed Due To Out-Of-Memory
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary of interesting KDE changes in closing out October.
November 2nd, 2024 — Source

OBS Studio 31.0.0 Beta 3 released
OBS Studio 31.0.0 Beta 3 has been released, which fixes a number of problems. These include a regression that stopped the AUTHORS file from loading on Linux, issues with encoders not loading properly, crashes during shutdown, Frontend API events failing to dispatch at application launch, changes to the behavior of menu items, memory leaks in the PipeWire plugin, crashes during scene collection imports, SSL certificate issues, missing icons in themes, and the removal of legacy YouTube chat.
November 2nd, 2024 — Source

Vulkan 1.3.301 Released With New Extension For HDR Vivid
Vulkan 1.3.301 was published on Friday with the lone new extension this release being a rare contribution from Huawei adding HDR Vivid support with VK_HUAWEI_hdr_vivid.
November 2nd, 2024 — Source

Xfce 4.20 Pre1 Pre-Release Published For Testing
Xfce 4.20 Pre1 is the first tagged milestone in working toward the big Xfce 4.20 desktop release. This also marks the feature freeze and string freeze for Xfce 4.20.
November 2nd, 2024 — Source

Software — Open Source — November 1st, 2024

Academy Software Foundation Releases OpenVDB 12.0 Under New License
The Academy Software Foundation that is made up of many different vendors released OpenVDB 12.0 as the newest major release to this sparse volume data structure library and tooling that is an Academy Award winning library started by DreamWorks Animation.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

An awful lot of FOSS should thank the Academy
ASWF is the open source foundation run by the folks who give out Oscars, and you've probably seen the results
November 1st, 2024 — Source

Anthropic's Claude makes it to PCs
Move over, ChatGPT, you're not the only chatbot to invade the PC space! Just a few months after OpenAI released its desktop application, another California-based AI company followed suit. Anthropic launched the official Claude desktop app. It's available for Windows and Mac.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

Arch Linux 2024.11.01 released
A new Arch Linux installation image based on Linux kernel 6.11.5 has been released. Arch Linux is a lightweight distribution designed for expert users who want the most up-to-date packages. The installation image, which includes the most important Linux tools, also serves as a recovery or emergency image. The installation image now includes a guided installer.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

Bcachefs Reining In Bugs: Test Dashboard Failures Drop By 40% Over Last Month
As part of the latest Bcachefs fixes pull request, lead developer Kent Overstreet has provided an update on the bug situation for this advanced copy-on-write open-source file-system.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

ChatGPT-5 won't be coming this year — OpenAI CEO reveals company is focusing on existing models
Outgoing iterations of ChatGPT are still getting full support, as OpenAI works on GPT-5 for next year.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

Chinese Researchers Adapt Meta's AI Model for Military Use
Researchers in China affiliated with the People's Liberation Army (PLA) have reportedly repurposed Meta's open-source Llama model to create an AI tool intended for military use.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

Chinese researchers build military AI using Meta's open-source Llama model — ChatBIT allegedly performs at around 90% of the performance of OpenAI GPT-4 LLM
The PLA militarizes Meta's open-source Llama AI model.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

Fedora 41 Released with New Features
If you're a Fedora fan or just looking for a Linux distribution to help you migrate from Windows, Fedora 41 might be just the ticket.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

GCC 15 to keep Itanium support for now, after all
Now, can someone come up with an emulator for the things, please?
November 1st, 2024 — Source

GE-Proton9-18 released
GE-Proton9-18 has been released with a hotfix addressing the missing proton script Python UUID import.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

Google Chrome/Chromium Lands linux_drm_syncobj_v1 For Wayland Explicit Sync
The Google Chrome/Chromium web browser code has merged support for linux_drm_syncobj_v1 as the modern Wayland protocol for explicit buffer synchronization.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

How to make open source software more secure
Earlier this year, a Microsoft developer realized that someone had inserted a backdoor into the code of open source utility XZ Utils, which is used in virtually all Linux operating systems.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

Intel Arrow Lake, AMD EPYC Turin & Linux Kernel Drama Made For An Interesting October
October is now in the books after writing 247 original news articles and another 24 Linux hardware reviews / featured multi-page benchmark articles. From the launches of Intel Arrow Lake and AMD EPYC 9005 to other interesting new hardware, the Russian Linux kernel drama, Linux 6.12 developments and early Linux 6.13 patches queuing in "-next" branches, October was an interesting month both for hardware and open-source software.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

Miriway 24.10 Compositor Adds systemd Integration, DE-Specific Configurations
Miriway 24.10 was released on Halloween as the newest version of this Mir-based Wayland compositor. Miriway is developed by Canonical/Ubuntu developers as a compositor for other desktops like Xfce, MATE, LXQt and others as a way to ease their migration path to Wayland.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

Monitoring Kubernetes Service Topology Changes in Real Time
Stateful, distributed, containerized applications require real-time monitoring of cluster changes. Learn how EndpointSlices API provides a scalable solution.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

New Intel Diamond Rapids Patch For GCC Confirms AVX10.2-512, APX & Other ISA Features
Intel software engineers have been very busy recently with upstreaming various elements of support into the Linux kernel, open-source compilers and more for the next-generation Xeon Diamond Rapids processors.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

Open Source Bites Back as China's Military Makes Full Use of Meta's Llama 2 AI Model
China's People's Liberation Army is using Llama 13B for military applications. That's against the acceptable use policy, but there's no way to put the AI back in the bottle.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

OpenAI's new 'Google killer' feature is Sam Altman's favorite since ChatGPT shipped: "It has probably doubled my usage over the past few weeks"
OpenAI recently launched ChatGPT search to compete with Google by providing fast, clear, and direct answers to queries featuring relevant web sources.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

PHP 8.4.0RC3, 8.3.13, and 8.2.25 packages for Debian 11 LTS and 12
Ondřej Surý has released PHP 8.4.0RC3, 8.3.13, and 8.2.25 packages for both Debian GNU/Linux 11 (Bullseye) LTS and 12 (Bookworm).
November 1st, 2024 — Source

Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Alpha 3 released
The third alpha version of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS, which includes the new COSMIC desktop environment, has been released for testing.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

Ubuntu 25.04 Plucky Puffin is open for development
Paride Legovini has announced that Ubuntu Linux 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) is now available for development. It includes updates to perl 5.40 and haskell/ghc 9.6.6, as well as a default value of -O3 for dpkg-buildflags. Auto-sync is enabled, although delays may occur owing to a high volume of builds and autopkgtests.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

Ubuntu Hoping To Remove Qt 5 Before Ubuntu 26.04 LTS
Ubuntu developer Simon Quigley laid out the plans for hoping Ubuntu packages will move from Qt 5 to Qt 6 so that by the time of the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle in early 2026 that the older version of this graphical toolkit can be removed.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

Ubuntu's Great Mainline Kernel PPA Hasn't Been Working Since Mid-September
One of the very convenient features for Ubuntu Linux users who want to run the very newest upstream kernel releases or simply test a new kernel build for verifying bug fixes or functionality has been the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

Valve Engineer Fixes Massive Performance Issue For RADV Driver With AMD FSR2 Sample
With the upcoming Mesa 24.3 release there is a huge improvement coming for those using the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver with the AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 sample app.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

Wine 10.0 Release Plans Aim For Mid-January Release
Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard has laid out plans for releasing Wine 10.0 around mid-January as the annual stable release for this open-source software to run Windows applications and games on Linux and other platforms.
November 1st, 2024 — Source

Open Source Software — Resources

Swift is now open source!
Swift is a general-purpose programming language that's approachable for newcomers and powerful for experts.
Provides Information — Source